Warren Rochelle's Blog, page 11
June 25, 2020
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain't Stop
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan CainMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I took the Myers-Briggs test years ago and found I was an INFJ: Introvert Intuitive Feeling Judging, on the high end on the I. This wasn't surprising. I was a school librarian for 11 years and a college teacher for 23 years, and I am a writer. I expected to find support for the I in this well-written, well-researched, and very readable and informative book and I did. I enjoy solitude, often prefer to express myself in writing, am told I am a good listener, and so on.
But I found even more compelling was how Cain described the experiences of introverted children growing jp in a "world that can't stop talking.," a world in which extroversion is the cultural ideal. I saw myself in the quiet, bookish child who learned early on how to make himself disappear in crowds. I understand in a profound way another reason why I felt different growing up. I understand in a way I hadn't before the disconnect between myself and my father. I saw myself in the mirror Cain held up to our society, our culture.
Highly recommended, especially to those who work with children and for those who supervise a staff or a faculty or another large group--and perhaps to anyone who wants to better know and understand his or her or themself, regardless of whether they are an introvert or extrovert
View all my reviews
January 25, 2020
A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Yes, another dystopian near future American tale, but Song stands out. Pinsker is also a singer/songwriter who has toured “behind three albums on various independent labels” (back cover) and she uses this rich knowledge to maximum effect here.
In The Before, Luce Cannon "was on her way to becoming a star." Then, it happened: a series of terrorist attacks, and deadly viruses, and the government has passed, and is now enforcing with a vengeance, laws prohibiting large public gatherings. The country become quiet and fearful, and many retreat in various virtual spaces, such as Hoodspace (entered when wearing a high-tech hoodie). Restaurants provide single-cell settings, as do buses and trains. Music isn’t lost completely: companies like StageHoloLive (SHL) appear and artists perform in virtual pace. But the interplay between audience and performer is lost and the SHL performers are cleaned up. Luce finds herself performing in “illegal concerts to a small but passionate community, always evading the law.” Performance becomes resistance.
Enter Rosemary Laws, working for SuperWally World, and spending her days in Hoodspace helping customers get everything online. Then, a new job, “discovering amazing musicians and bringing their concerts to everyone to everyone via [SHL]’s virtual reality.” This proves to be not enough for her, too.
Luce is queer, so is Rosemary. But this is not that kind of love story, but is about queer found family. One of her bands is all-queer and queer artists, all outlaws, seem to find her. Her birth family, Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, have rejected her.
Rosemary finds herself attracted to another performer she meets, Joni, and she begins her awakening—heart, body and conscience. Working for SHL just might be compromising her soul.
Well written, richly detailed world-building, a cri de coeur about the value and necessity of music, the arts, and gay—and a warning about the recurring tension between security and freedom.
View all my reviews
A Song for a New Day by Sarah PinskerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Yes, another dystopian near future American tale, but Song stands out. Pinsker is also a singer/songwriter who has toured “behind three albums on various independent labels” (back cover) and she uses this rich knowledge to maximum effect here.
In The Before, Luce Cannon "was on her way to becoming a star." Then, it happened: a series of terrorist attacks, and deadly viruses, and the government has passed, and is now enforcing with a vengeance, laws prohibiting large public gatherings. The country become quiet and fearful, and many retreat in various virtual spaces, such as Hoodspace (entered when wearing a high-tech hoodie). Restaurants provide single-cell settings, as do buses and trains. Music isn’t lost completely: companies like StageHoloLive (SHL) appear and artists perform in virtual pace. But the interplay between audience and performer is lost and the SHL performers are cleaned up. Luce finds herself performing in “illegal concerts to a small but passionate community, always evading the law.” Performance becomes resistance.
Enter Rosemary Laws, working for SuperWally World, and spending her days in Hoodspace helping customers get everything online. Then, a new job, “discovering amazing musicians and bringing their concerts to everyone to everyone via [SHL]’s virtual reality.” This proves to be not enough for her, too.
Luce is queer, so is Rosemary. But this is not that kind of love story, but is about queer found family. One of her bands is all-queer and queer artists, all outlaws, seem to find her. Her birth family, Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, have rejected her.
Rosemary finds herself attracted to another performer she meets, Joni, and she begins her awakening—heart, body and conscience. Working for SHL just might be compromising her soul.
Well written, richly detailed world-building, a cri de coeur about the value and necessity of music, the arts, and gay—and a warning about the recurring tension between security and freedom.
View all my reviews
January 20, 2020
Resurgence, by C.J. Cherryh
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
Resurgence by C.J. Cherryh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Tea, strong and sweet.
According to SF Site, "The Foreigner series is about as good as it gets--so finely and densely wrought you may end up dreaming of sable-skinned giants with gold eyes and the silver spun delicacy of interstellar politics."
Indeed.
Some might complain of pacing being too slow. But, once you get used to it, the slow pacing fits: the fine negotiations, the chess games of politics, the point/counterpoint conversations of tea and dinners in the Red Train as Ilsidi, the aiji-dowager and grandmother of Tabini-aijii, has plans on how to "solve the simmering hostilities in the south of the atevi continent" (cover). Bren, human diplomat, and the paidhi-aijii, has been invited along--to help, to counsel, to prevent war? Back, the son of Tabini also is negotiating--growing up--his human friends, his staff, his father and his mother.
It works very well indeed.
More tea, please.
View all my reviews
Resurgence by C.J. CherryhMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Tea, strong and sweet.
According to SF Site, "The Foreigner series is about as good as it gets--so finely and densely wrought you may end up dreaming of sable-skinned giants with gold eyes and the silver spun delicacy of interstellar politics."
Indeed.
Some might complain of pacing being too slow. But, once you get used to it, the slow pacing fits: the fine negotiations, the chess games of politics, the point/counterpoint conversations of tea and dinners in the Red Train as Ilsidi, the aiji-dowager and grandmother of Tabini-aijii, has plans on how to "solve the simmering hostilities in the south of the atevi continent" (cover). Bren, human diplomat, and the paidhi-aijii, has been invited along--to help, to counsel, to prevent war? Back, the son of Tabini also is negotiating--growing up--his human friends, his staff, his father and his mother.
It works very well indeed.
More tea, please.
View all my reviews
January 1, 2020
The Mining Road, by Leanne O'Sullivan
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
The Mining Road by Leanne O'Sullivan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My first book read in 2020, a book of poems by an Irish poet, given to me some years ago by a Irish professor visiting UMW to talk about the possibilities of a new exchange program--with Cork, I believe. And I forgot I had it, until today, cleaning up.
Her poems are beautiful. Some, as the title suggests, " finds inspiration in the disused copper mines that haunt the rugged terrain around Allihies, near Leanne's home at Beara, in West Cork. Like remnants of a lost world, the mines' ruined towers, shafts, man-engines and dressing floors, evoke an elemental landscape in which men and women laboured above as well as underground, and even mined in caverns below sea level" (back cover). Some are love poems, to her husband, a child, and some elegies, a lost pet, an older relative.
One heartbreaking one, "Safe House," is set in the time of the Irish War for Independence, Irish soldiers took refuge from the British in a safe house "where there was a family, and a child upstairs/listening. They told him what to say if anyone/Ever asked. Say they were not there." During the night, the boy wakes and goes to the room where the soldiers' things are, and he finds a gun, and "Then he felt nothing. His blood crept slowly/and dark along the floorboards ..." It is the boy who was never there. To protect the soldiers and how the boy died, his death becomes a secret: "Tell them there was never a child./Say they were never there./There was never a home ..."
This poem haunts me.
Recommended.
View all my reviews
The Mining Road by Leanne O'SullivanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
My first book read in 2020, a book of poems by an Irish poet, given to me some years ago by a Irish professor visiting UMW to talk about the possibilities of a new exchange program--with Cork, I believe. And I forgot I had it, until today, cleaning up.
Her poems are beautiful. Some, as the title suggests, " finds inspiration in the disused copper mines that haunt the rugged terrain around Allihies, near Leanne's home at Beara, in West Cork. Like remnants of a lost world, the mines' ruined towers, shafts, man-engines and dressing floors, evoke an elemental landscape in which men and women laboured above as well as underground, and even mined in caverns below sea level" (back cover). Some are love poems, to her husband, a child, and some elegies, a lost pet, an older relative.
One heartbreaking one, "Safe House," is set in the time of the Irish War for Independence, Irish soldiers took refuge from the British in a safe house "where there was a family, and a child upstairs/listening. They told him what to say if anyone/Ever asked. Say they were not there." During the night, the boy wakes and goes to the room where the soldiers' things are, and he finds a gun, and "Then he felt nothing. His blood crept slowly/and dark along the floorboards ..." It is the boy who was never there. To protect the soldiers and how the boy died, his death becomes a secret: "Tell them there was never a child./Say they were never there./There was never a home ..."
This poem haunts me.
Recommended.
View all my reviews
December 28, 2019
Updated Review of The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I love The Dispossessed; it is one of my all-time favorites. I reread the novel this time because I will be teaching it next week in my English 378 (Science Fiction Lit) class next week. The novel is as amazing and as beautiful as it was the first time I read it--and how many years ago that was, I can't remember. Shevek is one of my heroes.
It is one of the novels I reread regularly, usually at least once a year. I teach it as a utopian novel, and as a thought-experiment. What might a society without laws, without a government, and one meant to teach and instill equality and community, be like? How might it function? How does one preserve and protect the rights and freedoms and initiative of the individual and that of the community? How does such a society survive against the all-too-human drive for order and control?
Can Shevek, the Einstein of his people, of his age, achieve his quest, both public and private? He seeks two Grails. The first, the persona, his right to pursue his life's work as a physicist, and to find a community of equals, fellow scientists like himself? This community is essential for him to proceed, to achieve his life work of a theory that can change everything. The second, the public, to preserve his society as it was intended, and to end its isolation. Can Shevek, a man from Anarres, where this anarchist society was founded 170 years ago, achieve his double quest on Urras, the mother world, rich and bountiful, a utopia to many, yet a world of competing nation states, of archists?
Today, the novel seems just as timely, if not more so, then when it was published in 1974, 43 years ago.
***
Make that 45 years ago. Re-reading again as I will be teaching The Dispossessed in the spring in a Feminist SF course. Just as timely, and as beautiful, and I am always drawn to dry, dusty Anarres, its people, and its ongoing effort at a civilization based on community, collaboration, and equality.
View all my reviews
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le GuinMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I love The Dispossessed; it is one of my all-time favorites. I reread the novel this time because I will be teaching it next week in my English 378 (Science Fiction Lit) class next week. The novel is as amazing and as beautiful as it was the first time I read it--and how many years ago that was, I can't remember. Shevek is one of my heroes.
It is one of the novels I reread regularly, usually at least once a year. I teach it as a utopian novel, and as a thought-experiment. What might a society without laws, without a government, and one meant to teach and instill equality and community, be like? How might it function? How does one preserve and protect the rights and freedoms and initiative of the individual and that of the community? How does such a society survive against the all-too-human drive for order and control?
Can Shevek, the Einstein of his people, of his age, achieve his quest, both public and private? He seeks two Grails. The first, the persona, his right to pursue his life's work as a physicist, and to find a community of equals, fellow scientists like himself? This community is essential for him to proceed, to achieve his life work of a theory that can change everything. The second, the public, to preserve his society as it was intended, and to end its isolation. Can Shevek, a man from Anarres, where this anarchist society was founded 170 years ago, achieve his double quest on Urras, the mother world, rich and bountiful, a utopia to many, yet a world of competing nation states, of archists?
Today, the novel seems just as timely, if not more so, then when it was published in 1974, 43 years ago.
***
Make that 45 years ago. Re-reading again as I will be teaching The Dispossessed in the spring in a Feminist SF course. Just as timely, and as beautiful, and I am always drawn to dry, dusty Anarres, its people, and its ongoing effort at a civilization based on community, collaboration, and equality.
View all my reviews
December 7, 2019
The Library Book, by Susan Orlean
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
On the back cover:
"On the morning of April 29, 1986, a disastrous fire broke out in the Los Angeles Public Library. By the time it was extinguished, the fire had destroyed or damaged more than a million books. Over thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone intentionally set fire to the library-and, if so, who?"
Susan Orlean, "award-winning New Yorker reporter," in this amazing work of investigative journalism, tries to find out. But this book is more than the story of the her investigation, it is the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, and libraries in history, and the US, and of librarians and how libraries "remain (and must remain) an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country." This is also a love story--of Orlean's love love and passion for libraries books and knowledge, and the many ways to find knowledge--and, as a I read, my own love and passion for libraries and books and knowledge. And, I think, for so many of the readers of this book.
Highly recommended: for readers, for book lovers, for library lovers, for those of us who still mourn the loss of the Library of Alexandria.
View all my reviews
The Library Book by Susan OrleanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
On the back cover:
"On the morning of April 29, 1986, a disastrous fire broke out in the Los Angeles Public Library. By the time it was extinguished, the fire had destroyed or damaged more than a million books. Over thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone intentionally set fire to the library-and, if so, who?"
Susan Orlean, "award-winning New Yorker reporter," in this amazing work of investigative journalism, tries to find out. But this book is more than the story of the her investigation, it is the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, and libraries in history, and the US, and of librarians and how libraries "remain (and must remain) an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country." This is also a love story--of Orlean's love love and passion for libraries books and knowledge, and the many ways to find knowledge--and, as a I read, my own love and passion for libraries and books and knowledge. And, I think, for so many of the readers of this book.
Highly recommended: for readers, for book lovers, for library lovers, for those of us who still mourn the loss of the Library of Alexandria.
View all my reviews
November 18, 2019
The Ceres Solution, by Bob Shaw
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
The Ceres Solution by Bob Shaw
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A book I have read and reread several times over the years and each time, i find it as beautiful as before: human civilizations spread across a hundred light years, and most of these humans with lifespans of around 600 or so years. Except for the humans of Earth, and except for the humans of Mollan. Earth: three score and ten, and Mollan, about 5000 years. What did we do wrong? Why us? The discovery of what happened, and the consequences, told in the stories of Gretana, a Mollanian observer, and Denny, a sick and wheelchair-bound Terran*, and Lorrest, a Mollanian determined to do what is right, and Vekrynn, who has been collecting data on Earth for centuries. History will be changed when these people encounter each other.
*Terran: for the non-SF minded, a term used for humans of Earth, from Terra, based on the Latin word for Earth.
View all my reviews
The Ceres Solution by Bob ShawMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
A book I have read and reread several times over the years and each time, i find it as beautiful as before: human civilizations spread across a hundred light years, and most of these humans with lifespans of around 600 or so years. Except for the humans of Earth, and except for the humans of Mollan. Earth: three score and ten, and Mollan, about 5000 years. What did we do wrong? Why us? The discovery of what happened, and the consequences, told in the stories of Gretana, a Mollanian observer, and Denny, a sick and wheelchair-bound Terran*, and Lorrest, a Mollanian determined to do what is right, and Vekrynn, who has been collecting data on Earth for centuries. History will be changed when these people encounter each other.
*Terran: for the non-SF minded, a term used for humans of Earth, from Terra, based on the Latin word for Earth.
View all my reviews
November 10, 2019
a/o by Laura Bylenok
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
a/0 by Laura Bylenok
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A long prose poem, dark fantasy, science/science fictional echoes, "the alchemy of metaphor." A vertebra disappears, a tooth is reappears, bones at the wrist are suddenly old. A phone rings at in an odd phone booth, answered, instructions given and fallen, under a grey and snowy sky... "Through the magical confabulations of language, Laura Bylenok unconceals our infinite mutability and our gorgeously human capacity for kinetic empathy" (backc0ver).
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
a/0 by Laura BylenokMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
A long prose poem, dark fantasy, science/science fictional echoes, "the alchemy of metaphor." A vertebra disappears, a tooth is reappears, bones at the wrist are suddenly old. A phone rings at in an odd phone booth, answered, instructions given and fallen, under a grey and snowy sky... "Through the magical confabulations of language, Laura Bylenok unconceals our infinite mutability and our gorgeously human capacity for kinetic empathy" (backc0ver).
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
November 9, 2019
Warp, by Laura Bylenok
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
Warp by Laura Bylenok
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Warp, winner of the 2015T.S. Eliot Prize, an extraordinary collection, "a extended meditation" on the word warp, yes, that only begins to describe the poetry here: beautiful, raw, elegant, dark and light, tangible, raw, and quite wonderful, cerebral, and so ver present. To quote the front cover: "Bylenok writes important poems grounded in physicality, finding the divine in the ordinary."
View all my reviews
Warp by Laura BylenokMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Warp, winner of the 2015T.S. Eliot Prize, an extraordinary collection, "a extended meditation" on the word warp, yes, that only begins to describe the poetry here: beautiful, raw, elegant, dark and light, tangible, raw, and quite wonderful, cerebral, and so ver present. To quote the front cover: "Bylenok writes important poems grounded in physicality, finding the divine in the ordinary."
View all my reviews
He Final Collection
Claude Before Time and Space: Poems by Claudia EmersonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Claude Before Space and Time is Claudia Emerson's final complete collection, in which, as the jacket says, she "quietly but fiercely explores the themes of mortality and time." These poems are heartbreakingly beautiful, and unsparing. I found it impossible to read these and not be aware they were written in her last months. The juxtaposition of such poems as "On Leaving the Body to Science," and "Birth Narrative" reminds me of not just the cycle of life and the inevitability of death, but the connections between death and birth, a connection made here in story, in narrative, in poetry. I am also reminded me of how Claudia and I met in graduate school at UNC Greensboro, and the gift of finding each other at the University of Mary Washington, and the last message she sent me, a month before she died.
She left too soon.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
