So I'm heading home tomorrow but I have a connection right now and thought I would post a few thoughts on recent/current reads. For those who wonder about the writing, it has gone quite well out here with the AK flying memoir now well underway and moving near effortlessly forward. (I am sure it will bog down soon enough as all books do, but getting over the initial hump was so miraculous that I feel like I'm soaring with ease at this point.) I also put together a soundtrack for the YA urban fantasy...I haven't been able to work on it as the other work has taken precedence, but I did think this was one way to at least be a wee bit constructive without out getting off track from the memoir. A nice offshoot of this music project was that while listening to a Beth Hart cd I suddenly had an idea for a ghost that fits damn near perfectly in the plot and will add another whole element of poignancy to the story.

So yea - and I'll work on revising that outline and perhaps get into a rhythm of one book vs the other next week after the memoir's first 50 pages go off to the agent.

Meanwhile, at Finding Wonderland they are joyous over all things Jane Austen to which I must add the wonderful Veronica Bennett historical novel Cassandra's Sister. I just finished reviewing this one and it will be in my September column which has a bit of a "Impress the shit out of your English teacher" type theme. (This is one of those columns that suddenly demanded to be written after several books appeared on my doorstep that fit together so well.) You may recall Bennett for the fabulous Angelmonster, a novel about Mary Shelley. She has done a great job of making Jane come alive in her new book and showing the many ways in which her life overlapped with her fiction. Most highly recommended and perfect as a first step towards getting readers interested in Austen.

Also, Gwenda writes about three new books that I'm quite interested in. Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys is hopefully waiting for me at home right now and from Gwenda's report it sounds perfect for me. Also, she writes about Kelley Eskridge's collection, Dangerous Spaces which I am right now this minute writing about for the August issue of Bookslut. What a really interesting collection! Kelley really messes around with gender in her stories (as Gwenda explains) and also pushes at genres - refuting what you might expect from, say, a sword fighting story. My favorite though is "Strings" about a world where music is permitted but only under the tightest of controls. To me it seemed very realistic as we struggle with parental controls and conflicts over lyrics. Music is a powerful form of self expression but without that self, well, what is it then? Gorgeous, deeply thought out stuff.

For no reason that I can ascertain, I decided to check at amazon and see if Andrea Barrett's long worked on book about a tb colony was due anytime soon and there it is! The Air We Breathe is due out in early October. Barrett is one of my favorite authors and I'm puzzled as to why this title isn't being hyped a bit more. She did win the NBA for her collection Ship Fever and followed that up with the equally well done Servants of the Map plus the great Arctic book, Voyage of the Narwhal. She does historical fiction so remarkably well. I'm really looking forward to this one.

I am halfway through Emma Bull's Territory and it is really something special. Yes, it is a western (Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, the whole Tombstone gang is here) but boy, there are some very interesting things going on in this book. Who is Jesse Fox and what is the gift that plagues him and has driven his sister very nearly insane? Will Mildred Benjamin get to the bottom of the mystery developing in Tombstone or merely be a pawn (as she has been thus far) and Lung...who the hell is Lung?

Oh it's good and if you like westerns in an open-minded kind of way then you will adore it. (Not necessary to like them to enjoy the book at all, but for fans in particular who saw Star Trek as "Wagontrain in space" this will be candy.) (And yes, I see westerns very nearly everywhere I look!)

I have also finished a review of Diana Wynne Jones' The Game which I think will be the last book in my August column ("escapist reading"), as it is fairly bursting at the seams at this point. The Game ended up being part of a trio of YA books I've read recently on myths and mythology and I dearly wish it had been longer. She creates a whole other world within our own and teases with stories about Troy and Sissyphus and other grand myths but as it is a novella, the story must run fast and furious. Big fun and will be well received by both boys and girls; perhaps she will return to this fascinating family again in the future and give us a longer visit.

(And now I am totally committed to getting my son and I knee deep in myths in the near future. My cousin and I have been talking the last few days about how we learned very nearly nothing about myths in school and neither one of us can figure out why. It seems like perfect stuff for the under 10 crowd in particular. I'm looking forward to getting into all this with him.)

I have also committed myself to giving Interfictions my full attention - I was so happy with Christopher Barzak's haunted house story that I put the book aside and started writing my own work again and left the collection very neglected. Thus far I've read about half dozen more stories and I continue to enjoy the book immensely. I do see a fine thread connecting them all - an acceptance of the odd or strange (a woman living in the post office after she unsuccessfully mails herself to an old boyfriend, a lake coming to life at the touch of a dying man, a controlled wife breaking free - literally - of the psychological bonds that have trapped her and on and on.) I also wish that every collection, like this one, included a paragraph or two at the end by the author providing insight into the story itself. "Black Feather" by K. Tempest Bradford was rather affecting on its own but when Bradford added that she feels she is an interstitial person (not fitting in any one gender or world) it really gave me pause.

I did not know you could call yourself an American if you had not seen Rocky, Raging Bull, Toy Story, American Grafitti, Raiders of the Lost Ark and oh well - really! How is it possible that one person could have a list of unseen films like this one????? (Blade Runner - how can you not have seen Blade Runner?!)

I'll be back tomorrow wtih a far more substantive post about all things Alaska and flying. I have written chapters now not only about myself and how the hell I got from FL to AK but also a friend who flew into the side of a mountain chasing wovles and a pilot I knew who flew into a moutain that he didn't know was there (really). I embark tonight on the Dead Body Contract and what it has really meant to me in the longterm. One thing I have learned in the few days of near obsessive writing is that really I am not the point of this book - that I am not special, as they say. What makes my experience read-worthy (I suppose) is that the job and environment were special - extraordinary. But even then it would all disappear if I did not remember it, did not try to write it down.

I've been reading Tim O'Brien again, in case it wasn't obvious.

Don't forget Monday is the first Monday in July - I'll be posting on a Wicked Cool Overlooked Book; let me know if you will too.