Back later with Day 4 of Christmas recommendations but do read Jenny D.'s wonderful story "The Other Amazon" over at Clarkesworld. For YA book lovers, here's a taste you will enjoy:
Summerland showed a close acquaintance with the D'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants , a book I renewed from the library every single week of third grade because I couldn't bear the idea of not having it in my possession. I loved everything about that book: the strange words, funny as well as ominous (Niflheim!); the rainbow bridge to Asgard (what can I say, I was an eight-year-old with a pair of X chromosomes and it is not surprising that I liked rainbows); the wolf Fenris (I spent many hours trying to figure out how and why Fenris also made an appearance in the Chronicles of Narnia, it was a fact no less mind-bending than the way that the characters in Madeleine L'Engle's books about the Austin family had somehow actually read her Wrinkle in Time series).
And for bibliophiles everywhere, how can you resist this:
Online shopping finds its psychic home in the hours after midnight when you can't sleep and you're bouncing off the walls just desperate for something good to read. Not that you're not surrounded by books already, but it's like looking in the fridge when you're hungry late at night: you could perfectly well eat that strawberry yogurt (it's not even past its sell-by date!) or the grilled chicken breast left over from dinner but somehow all you can think about is the local sushi place which closed hours ago. Of course there is a certain masochistic fulfillment to sitting there at the computer and placing an Amazon order with money you don't have, it's a lot like smoking too many cigarettes or using a blunt pair of scissors to cut your bangs too short in the bathroom mirror, they are all activities whose allure swells with every hour past midnight.
The whole story is fabulous and I really really loved it.
Also, check out the report on Tim O'Brien's recent visit to Kenyon College. O'Brien is one of my favorite writers and I learned a lot about how to write my flying book from the format he used for The Things They Carried. Here is the kind of thing that blows me away about O'Brien:
O'Brien said that as a fiction writer, he strives to document "the kind of atrocity that happens every minute or two.� He discussed a short story in which a blind old man, who had been giving the American soldiers showers, was hit in the eye with a carton of milk. He gave "a speech-giver's guarantee� that we would all see something in our lives "that will make you gape with wonder.� He said he wrote this story because it's something he doesn't fully understand.
"Nobody said a word. Myself included… my silence that day and many days like it in Vietnam is at the heart of The Things They Carried. There are times in life when it's lethal to your conscience, lethal to your dreams, to be fearful of embarrassment. You do what your conscience tells you to do, without fear of blushing.�
Also see Clive Barker scripting a YA thriller around Edgar Allen Poe. ("The film will revolve around a group of teenagers who attempt to uncover what happened during the last two weeks of Poe's life. They inadvertently trigger a curse that unlocks Poe's nightmares from which they must escape.") Could be good, could be utter schlock. Wait and see....
And Cecil talks to Newsarama about the Minx Line and lots of folks comment there and after a boatload of commenting over at Comics Worth Reading it seem that finally - FINALLY - the comics folks are willing to take a "wait and see" attitude. Let's hope they aren't too vicious when Cecil's GN comes out.
Oh and JoAnna also hates Gilmore Girls now and points readers to an excellent post by Bob Greenburger on the subject.
Don't you just hate it when bad things happen to good television? Poor Lauren Graham - somebody start a petition to set that woman free!!!
