The best books I read in 2013

So here's something you probably don't know about me: I'm really terrible at making "best of" lists. I always forget things, even when it's something I've had on the brain for months, and I'm so hideously indecisive that it can take me a week to decide what to list. Fortunately when it comes to books, I use Goodreads, so all the books I read this year are organized into a neat list, divided by genre and rating. Where would people like me be without electronic organizational devices?

1. A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files

This book is the first in a trilogy, all of which I read this year (in extremely rapid succession, i.e. "oh my god it can't end like that! I have to read the next book RIGHT NOW even though it's one in the morning and I have class in six hours!") so it's kind of difficult to decide which book to put on this list. Do I put the first book, which is missing several of the key characters but also sets up everyone's emotional arcs? Do I put the second, where the bulk of the plot solidifies? Or do I put the third one, where you get the emotional catharsis that the first two books demand? I eventually put down the first, not because it's necessarily the best (although to be completely honest, I'm not sure I have the emotional distance to quantify "best") but because when I read it, I really had no idea what I was getting into. About five hours after I started, I finished reading whilst lying prone on my bed in tears and yelping at friends over instant messenger: "THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING! I'M SO UPSET! WHY ARE THE CHARACTERS DOING THIS TO ME!"

The Hexslingers trilogy is immense and tangled and complicated, so I won't spoil the details for you, except to say that it's about an alternate universe Wild West where magic is used, and what happens when a magician ("hex") raises powers better left along. It's also populated with beautifully diverse, emotionally devastating characters (almost all of whom are not straight- seriously I can count the heterosexuals in this series on one hand) and story arcs about identity and faith and love and recovering from betrayal and learning to stand on your own. It's about being a hero even when no one would ever have expected it of you, whether because of your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, or simply who you are. In a lot of ways, it's about growing up, and by the time I finished book three (bawling all the way) I felt like I'd grown up with the characters, even though it took me all of two weeks to get through the three books.

Hexslingers Omnibus (all three books plus three post-trilogy short stories): Amazon | Chizinepub.com

2. The Red Tree by Caitlin Kiernan

Sometimes I get a little worn down by reading mainstream fantasy/sf/horror because after awhile the parade of identitical, safely heterosexual couplings all blends into the same vague, bland oeuvre. That's probably a big reason I enjoyed Hexslingers so much, and it's definitely a reason I enjoyed The Red Tree. The book is a sort of Lovecraft pastiche set in rural Rhode Island, which leaves any number of questions floating at the end- what was real and what wasn't? Who, or what, was behind it all? What happened to Sarah Crowe? (The reason I mentioned mainstream SFF earlier is because this book is relatively mainstream- that is, it's published by Roc and I bought it at Chapters- and both the main characters are queer women. As is the author, I believe. Solidarity!) It's a very spooky read, and that's exactly why I like it. I'd also recommend Kiernan's The Drowning Girl, which has a similar eerie tone and cast of intriguing characters, but a happier (ish) ending- as happy as you can get with horror, anyway.

The Red Tree: Amazon

3. The Witch Sea by Sarah Diemer

Sarah Diemer is an author who deserves to be breaking the NY Times bestseller list and getting her books optioned into movies. Unfortunately she's not, mostly because she self-publishes in the name of having her books more accessible to the people who need them. The Witch Sea (which is really more of a novella than a novel) is a gorgeous, haunting romance between a young woman who's been tasked with keeping a gaggle of sea monsters prisoner and one of the monsters who wants to free them both. I won't say much more, besides the fact that Diemer packs more of a punch into 708 Kindle pages than most can in a hardcover book of the same pagecount.

The Witch Sea: Amazon, where is costs exactly zero dollars.

4. Her Majesty's Will - David Blixt

Lord you guys, this book was SO MUCH FUN. As a history geek, as a Shakespeare nerd, as someone who loves to speculate about the love lives of various historical figures, this book was pure candy to me. Will Shakespeare, an unfulfilled schoolteacher in Lancashire, stumbles across cross-dressing spy Kit Marlowe on the road one day and decides that this is as good an excuse as any to flee to London and try to ply his trade . . . in spycraft. Hijinks, most assuredly, ensue. The dialogue is well-crafted and period-appropriate, the banter is ticklishly funny, references to Shakespeare's life abound for anyone interested in playing spot-the-cameo (hi Robert Greene!) and the relationship between Will and Kit (often speculated upon, never confirmed by any historians. That I know of) is a rocking good time. Also: crossdressing. Did you know Kit Marlowe made a very pretty girl? Well now you do.

Her Majesty's Will: Amazon

5. The Steel Seraglio by Mike, Linda, and Louise Carey

Chizine Publishing (the company that also published Hexslingers, above) is rapidly becoming one of my favourite indie publishers. They're a horror/sff company running out of Toronto, and they pride themselves on releasing the kinds of titles you couldn't find anywhere else. Hexslingers is one example (gay magic cowboys save the world!) and The Steel Seraglio is another (rogue harem saves a city using matriarchy!)

In Bessa (a fictional city set in what will one day become the Middle East) a coup takes place, as a religious fundamentalist slaughters the sultan and his entire family. The sultan's seraglio (harem) of three hundred and sixty-five women escapes into the desert, and from there have to decide how to survive from this point forward. I won't spoil what happens next, but suffice to say the premise expands to cover ideas of history, myth, and fiction, the idea of family- how it can be created from nothing- self-sufficency, and memory. I don't want to compare it too much to Hexslingers, because they're tonally very different, but a lot of the themes- about outsiders surviving and thriving and building their own community and selves- are similar. Maybe it's a Chizine thing. Or maybe I just got fantastically lucky with the books I read this year, and stuff with the themes I wanted to read about fell right into my lap.

The Steel Seraglio: Amazon | Chizinepub.com

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and have a fantastic New Year. I have an announcement coming up in the next few days that I hope you guys will enjoy hearing; in the meantime, I hope you're all enjoying the season.

Why I won't be watching Bitten, as a devoted fan of the books it's based on

A thing you should probably know about me is that I am a huge, huge fan of Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series. I read the first book, Bitten, when I was fourteen and finished the series with Thirteen last year at the age of twenty-one. I grew up with these characters- in some cases, quite literally. I know some of them probably better than I know members of my extended family, and the books have helped me through some really tough times. So when Bell Media announced that they were making a TV show based on the first book in the series, saying I was thrilled is a bit of an understatement.

Then they announced the casting. One of the main characters, Jeremy Danvers, is being played by this guy:

Now I've never seen this actor in anything before; I have no feelings on him as a person. But in this case, I am gravely disappointed by his casting, and the racism shown by the showrunners in their choice of him to play a character textually described as Asian-American.

You could argue (I mean you shouldn't, but you could) that since Jeremy's backstory and heritage aren't explicitly referred to in Bitten, then the production team simply didn't know that he was not white. I might be inclined to agree- I don't want to believe that the production team intentionally whitewashed a character, after all- but the excuse doesn't hold water. SPACE, the channel producing and running the show, also posted this image to their Facebook page. It's a family tree of the character who appear in Bitten- including Jeremy. This information could only be discovered by reading the novels and novellas in which his parentage, race, and appearance is described in-depth. If they cared enough to do that extra reading and find out what everyone looked like and who their ancestors were, there's no excuse for not offering the role to a talented actor of Asian descent rather than erasing this important part of Jeremy's character.

It's not like issues of representation in the media haven't been at the forefront for the past few years; there's a whole website, Racebending.com, dedicated to raising awareness of these issues. And the long and the short of it is, the industry is incredibly rough on actors of colour. You don't need to take my word for it- check out the local movie listings. How many movies playing at your local multiplex star non-white actors in leading roles? And why, when so few roles are offered to nonwhite actors, would Bell Media make the decision to take another potential role and give it to a white actor?

So I'm not watching Bitten. I'm pretty sad about it, to be honest; I was so excited when the series was first announced. But I can't in good conscience support racist casting practices like this. I love the books as much as I always did, but for me, the cons of watching the show simply outweigh the pros. Casting practices like these may proliferate in the entertainment industry, but I don't need to support them. Sorry, SPACE and Bell Media; you've lost yourself a viewer.

The discussion fallacy

Whenever something controversial passes through the media cycle, there are inevitably a variety of responses. Some people are outraged; some people are outraged by the outrage; some people really don't care either way; some people want to examine how the media cycle is manufacturing the outrage in the first place. (Those people are generally sociologists.) And then there's another group: the ones who think that the outrage is fodder for a roundtable debate. I'm sure you've heard it at some point: "I'm glad this happened, actually, because there's a really interesting discussion to be had."

And, well. No there isn't.

Should controversial things be discussed? Yes, absolutely. But the thing about "discussion" is that is generally implies that there are "shades of grey" to be found in the issue being discussed. Depending on what the issue is, maybe there is. But when the issue in question involves violating peoples' human rights- or giving money to people campaigning for the violation of human rights- then no, I don't think there is a discussion to be had. 

Ender's Game comes out this weekend. For those who haven't been following the coverage of Ender and the man who wrote it, the author- Orson Scott Card- has a long history of not just opposing same-sex marriage, but advocating for government overthrow if same-sex marriage was passed at a federal level. He's called gay people victims of child molestation and sexual dysfunction. (He's also a racist.) So in general, he's a pretty foul human being. He's also listed as a producer on the movie. That means that a percentage of the revenue generated by the film will be going into his pocket- and presumably, donated to the National Organization for Marriage, of which he was a member until recently. There isn't any discussion to be had about whether or not supporting the movie supports Card because it's a bald fact. He gets money if the movie does well. Your ticket purchases support him. There aren't any "shades of grey" here.

Now there've been a few other issues raised by people who want to support the film. Some people have said that they want to support the movie because it has prominent female characters. (Note: prominent straight female characters.) Others say, well, what about other authors who hold intolerant views and still have adaptations of their work brought to the big screen? What about SHAKESPEARE? To which I say: Shakespeare has been dead for six hundred years. The man is not recieving any kind of monetary compensation for new productions of The Merchant of Venice. (Although as far as repairing the text goes, it would be pretty hilarious if the big-screen adaptation of Ender's Game featured Ender in a loving, romantic

Apparently the movie also added a romantic subplot.
But they don't support heterosexism or anything!

relationship with another boy. Just to see the look on Card's face.) Absolutely the question of mounting productions of literature that propogate harmful racist/homophobic/sexist isn't clear-cut; but it's not comparable to the Ender issue, because Orson Scott Card is very much alive, well, and spewing vitriol. And if your issue with the boycott is that the representation of female characters is more important than Card's bigotry- well, that's your decision to make. But don't pretend that the harm done by supporting the movie is abstract. You can see the author-cum-producer's views for yourself.

(The studio has also announced their support for LGBT people, and offered to hold a benefit on the night of the movie's release. That's nice of them, but since they're still paying OSC, I'm not really sure how that rectifies the main issue here: that Card is still getting money from the movie, which then may very well be paid towards homophobic organizations like NOM.)

Here comes the sun, and I say it's all right

I don't read dystopian fiction.

I realize this is a pretty broad statement, especially considering that the market- especially the young adult market- is absolutely saturated with dystopias right now. For instance:

"IN A WORLD WHERE [x] IS OUTLAWED, OUR [straight/white/non-disabled/cisgendered] HEROINE DARES TO BREAK THE RULES!" - half the YA section of my local bookstore

There are two reasons I'm not a dystopia reader. First, it's BORING. Not that I begrudge you if you do enjoy dystopias- and I know people who do, and who have very valid reasons for doing so- but there's only so any retreads of Anthem I can take before my eyes roll out of my head and go bumping across the floor. (Also, has anyone else noticed the distinctly Ayn Randian slant a lot of dystopias have taken these days? Where our hero is the only one smart and special enough to realize that the world is messed up? This isn't just me, is it?)

But disliking/not being interested in various aspects of the genre isn't unique to dystopia; it's the same reason I don't read hard sci-fi, or literary fiction, or romance novels. There's one very particular thing about dystopia

that keeps me from reading/enjoying it, and while it might say shallow when I say it out loud, it's very true.

Dystopias are sad.

Moreover, dystopias are cynical.

Look, I get that a lot of people see sad, depressing, nihlistic works of art as inherently holding more meaning and value, and they can . . . well, they can think that. I don't agree. But that's not why I avoid dystopian fiction. The reason I avoid dystopian fiction is very simple: I'm sad enough already. I don't need my fiction making it worse.

I have OCD. Depending on the season (all through fall and winter) I also have depression. Depression convinces me that life isn't worth living and that I shouldn't bother to get out of bed in the morning. OCD tells me that I'm an awful person who should just kill herself right now to spare everyone else the trouble. I take medication for both these conditions; they help. But there is an ever-present danger of something tripping me up and sending me down a self-loathing spiral that can last for MONTHS. I have been down those spirals before. They are not fun. They are, frankly, something I'd like to avoid when all possible. And you know what has the potential to set them off? Reading or watching something that happens to push just the right buttons at just the wrong times, especially buttons that say things like "the world sucks!" or "nothing is ever going to get better!" It's like the opposite of taking anti-depressants. I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. And the other side of that coin is- well, my life as someone who deals with mental illness is not always an easy one. I'm not trying to perpetuate the idea that people with mental illnesses live in a state of constant despair, because it's not true, but what IS true is that we face challenges that neurotypical people simply don't, including a sometimes-skewed image of what the world is. This makes up enough of my day-to-day existence that I don't need to see it reflected in fiction.

The Toast has been doing a series of posts called "femmeslash friday" (highly recommended, by the way) and today's post is on Sansa and Brienne in Game of Thrones. GoT is (arguably) not a dystopia, but the writer of the article, E.M. Freeburg, neatly summed up a lot of what I'm trying to articulate here:

“If I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept magic and dragons, then you are overestimating my restraint if you expect me not to smuggle happy ladies along with them. Fantasy breeds fantasy, and if we’re building worlds than I’m going to build myself into them . . . Cynicism and skepticism and an assumption of the worst-case scenario for people like myself is for every other waking moment of my life, thanks.” (x)

Freeburg is writing about popular depictions of queer women, which is a dicussion for another post, but it's also extremely applicable to all groups who live in a society that treats them like crap. I've had enough of endless reminders that I shouldn't expect anything better. Society tells me that. My own brain tells me that. I don't need it on my fiction, too.

(P.S. if you attempt to insinuate that I- or people like me- are just don't understand art for not enjoying sad books, you're kind of an ass. Actually, strike the "kind of." You are an ass.)

An ode to my new favourite person in the world

I moved into a co-op complex at the start of September, which is essentially my first time living in an apartment with roommates. There are positives and negatives to this. Positive: I now have a kitchen that I share with two people as opposed to ten! Negative: one of my roommates introduced herself to me by describing her room as "r*tarded." (Me: *rictus grin*) Another negative: I woke up this morning to find my roommates already gone and a note on the toilet that said "don't flush, broken."

Now, there is one (1) toilet in our apartment. There are three people living here. Obviously, this is not a livable state of affairs. So I took a plunger to the toilet, because I am a mature responsible adult who does mature responsible adult things like cleaning out the toilet. Unfortunately, my toilet plunger skills are underdeveloped, so my attempts weren't cutting it. Time to call in the big guns.

*Handel's Messiah plays*

I have never actually seen a toilet repairman before. The toilets at my parents' house have a remarkable track record of not breaking (though they did once have to call a plumber after I clogged the sink by cutting my Barbies' hair over it) so I didn't actually have a definitive idea of what toilet repairmen actually DID. As it turned out, the guy who showed up to fix my toilet- I didn't get his name, so we'll just call him Awesome- brought both a plunger of his own and some kind of high-tech toilet de-clogger called a "snake." When his plunger proved as ineffective as mine had been, he inserted the snake into the toilet bowl and twisted it until the toilet was successfully unclogged. I won't burden you with the gory details, but suffice to say, I'm pretty sure someone in my apartment has been eating at Taco Bell. (Sorry, Taco Bell.)

I feel like the most important lesson of this experience is that toilet repairmen are gods among men. No, I'm serious: how long would you last without a functioning toilet? You wouldn't, would you? No, you would camp out at whatever local business had public washrooms until someone came along and made your bathroom usable again. If the world did not have toilet repairmen, WE WOULD ALL DIE. Do we really need ad executives? Do we need members of Parliament? (Apparently not, if you live in the States.) The answer, my friends, is that we do not truly need either of those things. What we need is more toilet repairmen. I'd start training to be one myself, if I weren't destined to be an unemployed arts graduate.

70135 / 50000 words. 140% done!

So, that happened.

Finishing a novel- or rather, a first draft, because this is nowhere NEAR ready to be read by anyone who isn't editing it- is a weird process. After a certain point, I think I was just hurling myself forward with my teeth gritted, detemined to FINISH THE DAMN THING ALREADY. It's a good motivator, if nothing else; I was logging up to five thousand words a day towards the end there because I'd reach my daily goal and think "well, I'm only five hundred words away from the NEXT thousand" and just keep plugging ahead.

And again: this book is not even remotely close to being readable. I'm not sure how long the editing process will take; probably longer than it would otherwise, because I'm in the ensemble/crew of my university's fall production of Richard III, so I have four and a half-hour rehearsals every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in addition to three other classes. By the time I stagger home at night, I'm generally too wiped to do anything but fall into bed and scroll tumblr with my eyes glazed over. I have a writer's group meeting on Sunday; I'll be looking for potential editing partners there, and after that, I'll probably be doing schoolwork during the week and editing on weekends. I don't have any deadlines on this book except the ones I set for myself, so I have time.

What I really feel about this project- more than anything else at the moment- is a drive to keep going. After frantically writing for so long, not having any immediate work to do on it feels incredibly strange. I'll probably feel like this until I send it out to a beta reader and get it back; on the bright side, this is certainly good preparation for waiting on agents and editors.

Where do we go from here?

50140 / 50000 words. 100% done!

The good news: good god y'all, I wrote fifty thousand words!

The also-good but slightly more complicated news: that doesn't mean I'm done.

Fifty thousand words is the minimum generally given to people who want to write a novel- that's why it's the stated goal for NaNoWriMo. But it's not like you just hit the 50k mark and toss your pen in the air crying "TOUCHDOWN!" I've written by wordcount before, and what I inevitably discovered is that writing rarely fits into pre-ordered wordcounts like that. This one I'm working on right now is going to be- by my estimate- another ten thousand words at least, in order to resolve the main conflict and wrap up all the subplots. The challenge going forward is going to be writing in order to fit the plot rather than meet my goal for today. With the fifty thousand baseline reached, I no longer need to be concentrating on making sure the book is long enough, and instead the focus will be making sure that everything is being wrapped up properly. Up to this point, I've been measuring my daily goal by word increments; one thousand words is the minimum, and then if I go over that, that's a bonus. Obviously, since the wordcount is no longer my primary goal, that's not going to be the benchmark for a day's accomplishments anymore. And even when I do finish this draft, it's just that- a draft. There's  long, hard road of editing waiting ahead of me.

But you know what? I still wrote fifty thousand words.

Bottoms up!