Christine Amsden

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to hear Yann Martel, author of “Life of Pi,” speak at the Kansas City Public Library. The book was one of the reasons that I have been so grateful for my book club, because once a month, I break free from my genre comfort zone and find joy in literary, non-fiction, or other works that I would not have chosen on my own. No, I don’t love everything I read, but books like “Life of Pi” make it all worth the effort.

I come from a speculative fiction tradition. The authors from whom I have learned my craft were almost entirely science fiction and fantasy authors. Since this is what I write, it makes sense, but listening to Yann Martel helped me to solidify something that I’ve been toying with for some time — the idea that we need to learn from one another.

But let me rewind just a bit. Lately, I have been reading a lot of books outside of science fiction and fantasy. In fact, in the past six months, I have read only about half a dozen speculative fiction novels. (For the record, I read several books a week.) I have been filling my time with mystery, suspense, mainstream, and romance, plus the odd non-fiction or literary piece that has so far been entirely at the prompting of my book club.

I learned the rules of science fiction and fantasy by heart, but it quickly became clear to me that other genres don’t necesssarily follow our rules. The romance genre, for example, love to withhold tidbits of personal information that the point of view characters know, bringing it out only when the author feels it is the most poingnant. At first, I thought my displeasure with this tactic was due to the fact that I’d learned differently, but even after reading dozens of books and coming to accept it (not the same thing as liking it), I still feel that the stories would improve without this tactic.

Not that the science fiction and fantasy genre is pristene. Afte r reading in these other genres, I feel that we could learn a great deal about how to fashion a satisfying suspense or mystery from those writers, or about how to make love interests meaningful rather than token by considering romance authors.

Fast forward to Yann Martel’s talk last week: For those of you who are unaware, there is something of a rift between literary and genre writers. Please, don’t ask me to take sides, because for pure group survival if nothing else, I’d have to take up arms with my fellow genre writers, but I don’t want there to be a fight. The basic thrust of the conflict is that literary writers sometimes accuse genre writers of being frivolous and genre writers sometimes accuse literary writers of being unjustified snobs. As with almost any conflict, there are truths behind both points of view.

Listening to Yann Martel speak reminded me that there is something of a paradigm shift between the literary world and the genre world. It’s hard to describe, but I think it has a lot to do with the purpose behind the written word. In the literary camp, books are inherently meaningful, serve a purpose, and add something to the growing body of literature that shapes and defines our world. In the genre camp, books serve no greater purpose than to tell a good story.

Yes, I’m sure you see what I’ve seen for a long time — they can do both. But there’s still the question of which comes first: the story or the meaning?  This is the paradigm gulf that separates thetwo worlds. And it’s ok. There is a need for all kinds of written works to suit the needs of a diverse populace.

For the record, Yann Martel did not strike me as being a snob of any kind, justified or not. He expertly fielded a question about about reading for enjoyment vs. reading for meaning in a way that made it clear he understood that it didn’t have to be one way or the other, though at some point you can’t escape the tragedy of certain topics.

No, what all this is really coming down to is me — There was a question asked about the meaning of the island in “Life of Pi” that made me realize how deeply engrained my personal biases are. “What’s up with the living island?” Probably, if I were more literary-minded, I would have asked the question myself, but to be perfectly honest with you, it didn’t even phase me. The whole story was fantastic, just like so many stories I’ve loved since I was a child, and the island was just one more fantastic element. Even reaching the blatantly allegorical conclusion didn’t make me stop to reconsider my first impression. But what he was trying to accomplish with that island (which doesn’t mean that I have to agree since I am allowed to take whatever meaning I will from a book), was a leap of faith. He was stretching our credulity with each successive event in his parallel of religion. (By the way, I also had a subtly different take on this aspect — I saw the ending not as religion vs. no religion, but rather as the idea that it’s possible to believe more than one thing at the exact same time, just as the main character had followed Christianity, Islam, and Buddism…in other words, I didn’t choose my favorite of the two stories; I believed both.). Yet as a long-time readre and lover of fantasy, I have been trained to accept just about anything in a book. This doesn’t mean I would do so in the real world, but in books, I’m pretty gullible. I don’t accept the real world as my starting point.

It’s always interesting to have our assumptions thrown in our faces. The older I get, the more I realize that there are a lot of things I don’t question, I just take them for granted.

For example, I’ve always taken for granted that my primary purpose in telling a story is to entertain and hopefully my books do that, but each one has subtle meaning that, coming from a speculative fiction background, I have religated to the background.

Perhaps it is normal for an author, but I’ve always wanted my books to push the envelope in some way. I don’t want them to just be enjoyed, I want them to be remembered. This can be done in any style or genre, as I have loved and remembered a great many books, but somehow I want to find that thing that sets what I do apart.

On the way home, my friend asked how I wanted my own writing to be different, for I had just complained that so many stories are echoes of what has come before. Thinking about what I had just heard, my best answer was that I wanted my stories to represent a true blending of genres — the best of each — to tell a more complete and less linear story.

Laster, I came up with a more complete answer. Yes, I want to learn from other genres and incorporate all of that learning into a truly cross-genre effort that captivates the minds and imaginations of various readers. (Though I know I will anger just as mny readres of each genr, so don’t think I’m after universal popularity.) There’s something more that I want to do, though, and it’s going to take me quite a bit of time to explore the idea — I want to break free of unconscious bias; to take nothing for granted. When someone gives me a rule, I want to ask why and if they can’t give me a good enough reason, I want to feel free to break it.

I realized that I had not posted a review here in some time. I’m still reading! I have simply become involved in an on-line reading community called Good Reads (www.goodreads.com) and have been posting my reviews there. I love the site and if you get a chance, you should join and look me up! I’m there as both an author and a reader.

When I have time, I will copy my reviews here.

I’ll admit it — I wasn’t in a big hurry to pick up this novel despite all the hype. I’m not a huge fan of vampires, although I recently enjoyed Jim Butcher’s novels and his depiction of vampires. So when my book club decided to make this its October pick, I thought, “What the heck?”

At first, I found it relatively engaging. The writing style is competent and the story makes you feel like you’re in high school again.

But the book soon had me questioning what the hype is all about. I have to assume someone paid the right people a lot of money, because the story is uninteresting, the characters unlikable, and the romance was disgusting.  Much of the middle of the book is given over to a dialog-based info dump in which the main character, Bella, asks her new boyfriend a hundred questions and he gives her answers straight from the author’s notes.

Bella herself, a girl who is supposed to be smart, is unbelievably stupid at times. She has no sense of mortality, which is possibly realistic for a teenager, but annoying as heck to read.

And then there’s the romance. Between a young girl and a monster who is attracted to her because he wants to eat her. I enjoy romance in my stories, and I even have a secret soft spot for men with a dark side, but I’ve always liked my men with a pulse. The repeated references to how cold Edward was just made me feel the chill and his almost psychotic display of how easily he could kill her made my skin crawl.

I have no plans to read any of the other books in this series.

A while back I reported on “Storm Front” and “Fool Moon” by Jim Butcher. I have since read all but the most recent installment of The Dresden Files, “Small Favors,” which is currently on my nightstand.

The first two books are good, but somewhere around book four, the series takes off. I started picking up the next book as soon as I finished the one before. The story line and characters get even better as the series progresses, and Jim Butcher introduces several captivating arcs that go from book to book (although each book manages to come to a conclusion).

I no longer feel I can compare these books to the television series that first inspird me to read them. The books are much better and the series lacked a great deal of potential.

Oh, and aside from action and drama, I must also mention the sense of humor in the books. This, too, gets steadily better as the series progresses. I often laugh out loud as I read them. It’s hard to find good comic relief.

So read these. Besides that they’re good, Jim Butcher is a fellow Kansas City area author. :=)

I can’t believe I have to write another farewell to a favorite author. This one has me so choked up. Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series, died yesterday after struggling with cardiac amyloidosis, which he first announced to the public a year and a half ago. He was 58.

The Wheel of Time took the epic fantasy adventure to a whole new level. Though clearly inspired by great authors like Tolkien, The Wheel of Time was unique in its richness and complexity. It’s hard to believe that a single man could hold the complex details of an entire world in his head at one time. Every country, every political system, every culture, and every character was distinct and came alive. More so than any other book or series of books I have read, these characters lived in my head as I read and even after I put the book down.

Admittedly, I have only read 9 of the current 11 books. This is primarily because each new book took so long to come out that I forgot important details of the previous books. My plan was to wait until the last book, A Memory of Light, came out and read from book 1to the end, back to back.

I’ll never get that chance now.

I’m not saddened by this because I won’t get to read the ending. I understand Jordan kept extensive notes (he’d have to) and I’m sure someone will take up the task of bringing the story to a conclusion. Us readers will get our ending, albeit without Jordan’s distinct voice.

No, I am saddened by the loss of a man who did not get a chance to complete his great work before the end. There will always be a piece of him missing from the world.

My prayers and well wishes go out to the family of James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (Robert Jordan is a pen name.)

One of my all-time favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle, died last night at the age of 88.

A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first science fiction books I ever read…and reread. It was inspirational to me, both as a young reader and as a young writer. The main character, Meg, reminded me a lot of myself as a teenager. She was a good person, a strong person, but unsure of herself.

Madeleine L’Engle is one of the reasons that I began writing science fiction and fantasy stories as a young teen. I didn’t borrow her ideas, I just read her stories and fell in love with the possibilities inherent in other-worldly fiction. I first read her books in sixth grade, the same year I began to fill notebooks with scattered ideas and ramblings.

If I could inspire one person with my writing the way Madeleine L’Engle inspired me, then it will have all been worth it. She will be missed.

I decided to read the Roswell High series after I started to watch and fall in love with the TV series based on those books. (I’ll have more to say about the TV series later.) If you’ve watched the show, then I can tell you that while the book and the show start out almost exactly the same way, they soon take very, very different paths.

The show is better. But the books are good, if you’re willing to overlook a few glaring plausibility problems. Bear in mind that they are geared towards senior high school readers.

The premise is that the Roswell crash back in 1947 really happened and that six aliens escaped the crash and blended in with human society — one adult and five maturing embryos in pods. The pod children hatch in the 1980’s and look to be about 6 years old. Two are adopted into a loving home and one is shuffled around the foster care system. (The other two don’t come into the story in the first book.)

They don’t know anything about who they are or why they’re there, but they have special powers that they try to keep under wraps for fear of getting caught. They don’t tell anyone, not even their parents.

Then one day, a human girl named Liz is shot in the stomach and one of the aliens, present at the time, makes the life-changing decision to save her life. He had been secretly in love with her for years, so he could not let her die.

What follows is part love story, part adventure, and part mystery as the aliens and their new human friends uncover the truth about who they are and where they came from. There are ten books in all, each one following directly on the heels of the previous book. They are quick reads — I finished the series in less than a week.

I thought I’d take a break from Harry Potter posts to let you know I have been reading other things. :=)

One of the things I’ve been reading this summer is a series called The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. It’s kind of a cross between CSI and Harry Potter. :=)

All right, all right, I’ve got a one track mind. I do enjoy fantasy, though, and this series is, so far, very entertaining. It stars a professional wizard for hire, Harry Dresden, whose biggest client is the Special Investigations Department at the Chicago PD. They try to solve all the weird cases, and Harry tries to help them whenever demons, wer-wolves, vampires, or other supernatural beings might be involved.

The books are action-packed page turners. It was easy to see why the Scifi channel chose to make this into a TV series. it has a lot of television potential. Of course, it’s also no surprise that the Scifi channel canceled the show after one season. They wouldn’t know a good show if it jumped up and bit them on the…er…nose. Too bad USA wasn’t the one to discover this series.

Anyway, the books have their problems. Jim Butcher has a tendency to over describe things and even to describe the same thing multiple times. Especially as you get into the sequels, there is some skimming potential as he redescribes his car, his office, his apartment, and Murphy, the detective in Special Investigations he works with. He also likes to pause, from time to time, in the middle of an exciting action sequence to recap us on the danger.

But if you can handle a couple of quirks in his writing choices, the stories are very good. If you can get the one season’s worth of shows on the Scfi channel, it’s worth watching, too.

If you have not read the seventh and final volume in the Harry Potter series, please do not read any further. I will reveal crucial plot points and the ending of this novel. You have been warned!

Well, I promised it over a week ago but here it is today: my thoughts on the last book in the series.

Basically, I loved it. My husband read the novel out loud to me and we finished by dinnertime Sunday. This action-packed final volume kept us turning pages late into the night.

The single best thing about the story — the humanizing of Dumbledore. Wow. I knew she was working on that in books 5 and 6 but she really drove it home in the last book, even though he was dead. I always felt that one of the series’ themes is that people are neither black nor white. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses, even our iconic heroes. Very well done!

I loved every action sequence, especially the last battle. I loved the emotional journey we took with Harry throughout the book as he was, once again, torn apart from the wizarding world….this time more completely than ever before. I never guessed that Voldemort would succeed in capturing the ministry but it was exactly what the book needed to up the stakes. Then, with our hero on the run, we could fully appreciate the wonder as he returned to Hogwarts — a fugitive, yes, but also the symbol of hope for all those who hated Voldemort.

I loved Harry’s journey from his aunt and uncle’s house. I was touched by Dudley’s change of heart and hope that he becomes an even better person later in life, though that was outside the scope of this story.

I cried when Hedwig died, and especially when Harry blew up the side car with Hedwig’s body inside.

The ministry falling got a gasp from me. It really set the tone of the book.

The escapade at the ministry was pure Harry Potter — from saving Mad Eye’s magical eye to saving a corridor full of supposed Mud Bloods. If we didn’t remember, he’s still our hero!

The camping sequence drove home what a difficult task this was all going to be. Harry lost his home and had to subsist off of what they could scrounge from the forest floor. Some people have claimed that this section was slow but I disagree. It was only slow by comparison to the action-packed chapter surrounding it. The stakes in the camping scenes were just as high as any of the others — but they were emotional rather than adrenaline-filled life and death. Having always been drawn to characters and character stories (especially in my own writing) I found myself getting into the boredom, the hunger, the desperation, and the loneliness. My heart even leaped when they ran into Ted Tonks and Dean Thomas — their first link to the bigger world in ages.

I flew threw Christmas, poor Lovegood’s predicament, and an escape from the Malfoys to the second death that really affected me — Dobby. The innocent are the ones who often suffer the most. Poor Dobby.

Then there’s escape from Gringott’s on the back of a dragon followed immediately by our last visit to Hogwarts. I continued to cheer as familiar face after familiar face came to fight alongside Harry. This wasn’t just his fight anymore — the entire wizarding world was ready to stand up and say “We’ve had enough!”

Then, of course, there is Harry’s march to his death. I have rarely read anything as powerful. Even though I believed, even then, that Rowling had a way out planned for Harry, the scene was no less powerful. Harry believed he was going to his death, and that’s what mattered.

After Harry’s escape from death, we had a few tense moments as Narcissa chose to help Harry, and then it was one long cheer! Neville — Pow! Molly — Splat! And then Harry takes off his cloak and the dance to Voldemort’s death begins.

The Epilogue is my biggest complaint about the book. I know Rowling has answered a lot of questions in follow-up interviews after the fact, but the book itself is still incomplete without a few additional details. The Epilogue could have been summed up with the words, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Well, I sort of suspected that was the case but it really trivializes the impact that the events in such an emotionally powerful book had on the character’s lives long term. In one interview, Rowling suggested that she was trying to be poetic, but I’m afraid that, however good the books are, they are not written by a poet or even a good wordsmith. The writing is just good enough that it doesn’t get in the way of the story, to be perfectly honest. Meanwhile, I wanted a real conclusion.

My other nitpick about the book is that many of the deaths had little impact on me. The one that I most wanted to feel was Fred’s. I mean, he was the comic relief, Ron’s brother, half of a set of twins that were as good as one character throughout. Yet his death, with earned barely more than a paragraph, never managed to hit that emotional chord.

Similarly, Lupin and Tonks should have made me feel worse but their death felt like an add-on. We never even saw it firsthand. In fact, in an interview, Rowling says that they were not slated to die in the outline. Well, they don’t feel dead to me now.

The last thing I want to talk about is Snape, and he is one of the reasons it took me so long to post this review. I needed some time tot think about him and now that I’m down to the end of this post I think I would like to dedicate a separate post to his character.

I’ve just finished the last book in the Harry Potter saga and it was, in a word, amazing. From page one this book grabs you by the heart and does not let go. There was sadness, fear, hope, loss, and almost desperate moments of hilarity that came as a welcome relief. At points I cried and at others I cheered right out loud.

This isn’t a kid’s book anymore. Harry has grown up and so has the story. Rowling has taken her gloves off and she means business. This book is a departure from all the others — even the darker fifth and sixth books. The wizarding world is in a desperate state and Harry faces challenges beyond any he has faced before.

I will have my spoiler-filled appraisal of the book up later this week, but for those of you who still have not read the book I wanted to say: Hurry up! Make sure you have a box of Kleenex and a full night to stay up reading because you won’t want to put this down.