Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 6
February 23, 2025
Shelf-Life #2: The Art of Michael Whelan
“Books are a uniquely portable magic,” Stephen King wrote. When I was just a youngster, my mom would tell me that books can take you anywhere. Isaac Asimov talked about books being a form of telepathy, a kind of direct communication between the mind of the writer and the mind of the reader. Books can also serve as waypoints to places you can’t possibly imagine. The Art of Michael Whelan is one such waypoint for me.
With the exception of Piers Anthony, I didn’t read a whole lot of science fiction until I was in college, and I didn’t start to broaden my reading of science fiction until my junior and senior years of college. Money was hard to come by in college, and yet, on rare occasions, I would splurge for a book, despite money being tight. One such occasion came in late 1993 or early 1994 when I first saw The Art of Michael Whelan in a bookstore and decided that I had to have it. The book had a cover price of $60 which was more than double the price I’d ever paid for a book before. But I recognized Michael Whelan’s art from the covers of books I’d read, like Piers Anthony’s On a Pale Horse.
To fans of science fiction, Michael Whelan’s name is synonymous with beautiful, stark, alluring pieces of art, most of which appear on the cover of countless books and magazine covers. Cover art was always an afterthought to me—someone who grew up on the adage never to judge a book by its cover—until I encountered the art of Michael Whelan. Michael’s art made me pay attention and demonstrated how a story could create such amazing imagery outside of my own imagination.
I managed to find the $60 plus tax for the beautiful tabletop edition of The Art of Michael Whelan. When I returned to my apartment, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. It was, after all, the first art book I’d ever owned, and while there was text in the book, it wasn’t like the books I was used to reading. Ultimately, I found it to be a wonderful break from my studies in the days before the Internet. If I needed a break or distraction from the con-law paper I was writing, I’d pull out The Art of Michael Whelan, sit on the couch, and flip slowly through the pages. The images transported me into Michael’s imagination and for a time, I forgot about my con-law paper. When I was done flipping through the pages, I was ready to get back to work, feeling refreshed.
In high school, I had three years of art history, but nothing made me appreciate art for the pure beauty and joy of it more than Michael’s book. I began to see that great art could tell a story just as well as a novel and I began to seek out more of it. Not long after, I managed to get hold of a copy of Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka / The Fiction of Harlan Ellison. Here there was a kind of inversion of what Michael Whelan was doing. Whelan took (mostly) novels and provided stunning visual scenes from those words. Harlan Ellison took existing images from Yerka and created stories out of them. Art was dynamic.
My copy of Mind Fields along with my other Harlan Ellison books.Michael Whelan’s art opened my eyes to the art of science fiction and fantasy. It helped me identify style in visual arts. It got to the point where I could readily distinguish a piece by Michael Whelan from a piece by, say, Jim Burns. When Harlan Ellison wrote about the art of Leo and Diane Dillon, for instance, I understood that art with a new appreciation that traces back to The Art of Michael Whelan.
Among my all-time favorites is a piece called “Descent,” which I first saw on the Grand Master Edition of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Of course, we all know what Mars looks like today, thanks to the amazing work of scientists and engineers who put robots on the surface of the planet. But how I wish it looked the way Michael Whelan portrays it in his fabulous painting.
A portion of “Descent” on the cover of the Grand Master edition of The Martian Chronicles.Whelan’s influence stayed with me. Back when I was writing my series, Vacation in the Golden Age, I tried to focus on the art that appeared in ASTOUNDING in the late 1930s and 1940s. I learned to admire the art of people like Hubert Rogers and Virgil Finlay to name a few. I look through the covers of my ASTOUNDING collection with an interest in the artwork that I might not have had if not for The Art of Michael Whelan.
As I said at the outset, books can become waypoints to places you can’t possibly imagine. When I bought my copy of The Art of Michael Whelan, I was college student who had just started writing and submitting stories for publication, and who had just begun collecting the first of what would become hundreds of rejection-slips. Fast-forward 18 years to the Nebula Award weekend in 2011. By this point, I’d sold several stories, including my first sales to Analog. I had started attending conventions. I had become a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (now the Science Fiction Writers Association). Kelly was 6 months pregnant with our second child and she accompanied me to the Nebula Award banquet. At our table was none other than Michael Whelan and his wife. Kelly and Michael’s wife seemed to hit it off at once, chatting about kids. I was somewhat speechless at first but finally got up the courage to talk with Michael. It was an entirely surreal experience. Here I was, a kid who had scrounged pennies to buy The Art of Michael Whelanin college, now sitting next to the artist himself. It was something that, when I first bought the book, never entered even my wildest imagination.
I was recently delighted to discovery that Michael Whelan has started a Substack fittingly called The Art of Michael Whelan. He sends out daily art and talks about its creation. I got myself a subscription and look forward to it each day. I recommend it for those who enjoy art of any kind.
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February 22, 2025
Notes on a Full Week of Writing
I successfully concluded a week of consecutive posting yesterday. In the space of a week I’ve managed to debut a new series on books, marvel at the art of sports writing, lament the limitations of e-books (or the joy of paper books, if you are a “half the book left” kind of person), provide yet another example of my flawed memory, philosophize on the theory and the practice of writing a blog, and rediscover Tindallgrams. All told, I posted 6,600 words. Since I do write ahead a bit, I managed to write about 8,000 words worth of posts this week. I feel better because of it.
I’ve gone through all kinds of streaks here over the years, from writing every day for years on end, to last year, when I wrote 16 posts all year. I needed to write every day to get back into the game, but this time, I’m giving myself the option of taking Saturdays off. Not that I won’t post on Saturdays or won’t write on Saturdays, but streaks can weigh on me, and I think it is useful to know that there is at least one day I shouldn’t feel obligated to post something. Saturday is for not writing, or not posting, or posting silly stuff off the cuff. Or not posting. Or for general notes and announcements.
I made the inaugural post of my new series, Shelf-Life, last Saturday, and considering my wanting the option to have Saturdays free, I’m shifting the schedule to Sundays. Don’t worry, the second episode of “Shelf-Life” is already written and scheduled. These posts will come out on Sunday going forward.
And speaking of Shelf-Life, I put together a page to list all the episodes in one place. You can find it here, or by using the Blog Series menu above and selecting Shelf-Life.
Okay, I’m done. Enjoy the weekend. And don’t forget to check out Episode 2 of Shelf-Life tomorrow. I think I picked a good one.
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February 21, 2025
Tindallgrams
This is the story of Usenet, an obsession with astronauts, a deep dive into NASA history, a delightful discovery, forgetting that discovery for a quarter century, and my inability to successfully carry out a Google search.
This story begins in the 1990s, deep in the bowels of Usenet, which was social media in the days before social media. In the late 90s, I was very interested in NASA, and particularly, their astronaut candidate program. I thought, in my youthful innocence, that I would make a good astronaut candidate, or ass-can, for short. I followed astronaut candidate news groups assiduously. I also read news groups about NASA. It was around this time that I also began to take flying lessons1 out of Van Nuys Airport north of Los Angeles with the idea that having a pilot’s license would help in my pursuit of becoming an astronaut2.
Somewhere between newsgroups on astronaut candidates and deep dives into NASA history, I came across Bill Tindall, and Tindallgrams. Tindall was the architect of the methods used to get Apollo to the lunar surface and he was famous within NASA for writing hundreds of memos that came to be known as Tindallgrams. This was in the mid-1960s-1970, well before email. I remember reading through some of those memos, enjoying the tone and appreciating the succinctness of his writing style. I tried to model some of my emails at the time on Tindallgrams.
I may as well tell you now that I never became an astronaut, although I did become a private pilot. It turned out that astronaut candidates tended toward highest of high achievers. It seemed to me, reading through dozens of bios of applicants who eventually made it into the program that the “typical” profile of an astronaut was someone with a few thousand hours of aircraft piloting experience on a variety of aircraft, often jet aircraft. In addition, they had a Ph.D. in some area of astronomy or physics or chemistry, and frequently, had an M.D. as well. Occasionally, they’d add in a Masters in Art History to round things off. In their copious free time, they were expert rock-climbers, or competitive surfers. Oh, and they were married and had several kids.
Now, this was all happening during the Dot Com bubble of the late 1990s. While I did not work for a Dot Com, I worked in I.T. and one could not work in I.T. during this time without seeing the effects of the Dot Com bubble. I read lots of Usenet groups on tech and technology. I read groups on Linux, which at the time seemed to me like the techie version of a model train set. I read various Unix and Windows newsgroups. And, of course, I read and participated in rec.arts.sf.written. It is important to know this because it plays a role in the confusion that happens later.
Later, being twenty-five years later, or 2024. Roughly a year ago. At some point, and for some reason, I remembered those interesting memos that I’d read a quarter century earlier and I went to look for them. The problem was I couldn’t remember the name. All I could remember was that they were something-something-grams. My memory of the time conflated NASA and tech and my Google searches were all for things like “-grams famous tech memos” and similar queries. I knew that if I saw the name, I’d recognize it immediately. I never found the match I was looking for, even though every few months, I’d try, try again.
This morning, thinking about this once again, I posted the question to an internal board at my company. I figured since there are a lot of very smart people where I work, one of them would recognize what I was talking about. The initial responses were filled with names that did not match what I thought I remembered. There was a near-miss. The name Steven Sinofsky came up and my heart skipped a beat. That name was familiar. I do remember reading Sinofsky’s blog during his time at Microsoft. But I was fairly certain that what I was looking for had two syllables: blah-blah-grams. Sinofsky has three syllables, and Sinofsky-grams didn’t sound right to me.
I decided to give the search one more try. I typed the following into Google:
“-gram” famous tech memos
Now, those of you looking at this will see at once the problem, and as a career programmer, I should have recognized this a year ago, but it wasn’t until this morning that I saw the flaw in my search. I was trying to isolate the “-gram” part of the search so that I got matches that were like “blah-gram” or “foo-gram”. Google was treating my “-gram” as “exclude anything with the term “gram.” Which, of course, was fatal. I would never find what I was looking for. Duh!
I modified the search slightly to:
“gram” famous tech memos
And guess what? One of the first matches had the word “Tindallgram” in it, and as soon as I saw it, I knew that was what I was looking for. What a relief! I’d completely forgotten the source of these memos was not a tech guru in the Dot Com bubble, but an engineer at NASA. It didn’t help that my search included the phrase “tech” in that regard.
Well, I found the Tindallgrams, at last. I downloaded the PDF versions of them so that I have them whenever I want to glance through them. Along the way, I also discovered a book about the Apollo program I hadn’t already read (I sometimes feel like I’ve read them all). This is Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles who programmed the landing phase of Apollo into the Lunar Module’s computer.
And I lived happily ever after, surrounded by stacks of Tindallgrams and an exciting new book on arcane NASA history.
The End.
I took my second lesson the day after JFK, Jr. was killed in a plane crash, piloting his own plane. His wife was killed along with him. It was the talk of the FBO that day, which as a new student, made me a little nervous, you know, getting into the pilot seat and flying a plane. But I did it.
︎I passed my check ride and got my private pilot’s license on April 4, 2000. ︎Did you enjoy this post?
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February 20, 2025
The Theory and the Practice
Later this year—October 25 to be precise—will be the 20th anniversary of this blog, if you can believe that. In its original incarnation, this blog started in LiveJournal and then migrated to WordPress a few years later. But the first post I sat down to write was written in LiveJournal, and having created my account, I wrote without much thought. To some extent, after nearly 20 years and nearly 7,300 posts, not much has changed in that regard.
At some point, as my writing got more serious, I stopped with the more frivolous posts and attempted to put more thought into what I was writing. Reading the earliest posts and those posts from a few years later, I can see the difference.
For most of the twenty years I’ve written here, I’ve had a theory about how I want to approach my work. It goes something like this:
Maintain a list of ideas, culling those ideas that seem dumb while and keeping the good ones around.Plan out my post. Outline it carefully. Consider all the angles.Write a draft, set it aside for a few days, and then come back to it, read it and then rewrite the whole thing getting rid of the bad parts and punching up the good parts.Carefully proofread every word of the final draft. Eliminate all the typos that creep in mainly due to the speed with which I write.Post the thing.Repeat.A more disciplined writer would work this way. They would manage their craft like any other type of work, finding a process, breaking down into manageable chunks. There would be goals and deadlines and an infrastructure of some kind to support the writing. There would be time to research pieces and carefully collate notes.There would be a schedule for daily writing. Ideally, there would be someone else to worry about the “platform” and promotion since all I really want to do is write. For nearly twenty years, this has been the theory behind seven thousand plus posts and countless millions of words.
In practice, I’ve never come close to the theory. Indeed, I’ve mostly given up on the theory although at times it still appeals to me. My recent post, “Memory Leak” is a perfect example of how I write this blog in practice.
I do keep an informal list of ideas, mixed in among grocery lists and other notes. See the sample of a two-page spread of such notes below.On the bottom of the first page, I scribbled an idea called “Sick in Bed.” This was the post I set out to write when I began what ultimately turned into “Memory Leak.”I opened my Blog Post template in Microsoft Word1 and began typing. No outline, no consideration of all the angles. I remembered something my dad had said on a Zoom call over the weekend and I just started writing about various times I’d been sick in bed. Halfway through the original post, as I went back to my diary to verify just how long I’d been down with the flu, I discovered that my memory had failed me: while I had been sick on the day I finished David Hartwell’s Age of Wonders, it was only for a single day, not the week-long flu that I remembered. I recast the post on the fly and instead wrote about a time when my memory failed. I think business leaders call this a “pivot,” which to me is something that Ross shouts at Chandler when moving a couch up a staircase.I used to get so excited about my posts that as soon as I was done drafting them, I’d publish them. Half the comments I got were from good-natured readers pointing out a typo here or there, to which I’d respond, borrowing a line from Isaac Asimov, that I willingly traded accuracy of typing for speed. But in this regard, I have changed. I run the post through an LLM with the following prompt: “Proofread this post and list out spelling and grammar errors and any typos you find along with suggested corrections. Do not change any of my text, just list the errors and corrections.” There are usually 10-12 “corrections” the LLM identifies, and I’ll make those changes I think appropriate, at the very least fixing the spelling and grammar errors. Sometimes what an LLM thinks is a typo is not a typo.Depending on how I feel about the post, I’ll post it right away, or, if I can pass the marshmallow test, I’ll schedule it for a later date. This post, for instance, is being written on a Tuesday, but won’t appear until Thursday.
A page from my current Field Notes notebook with various post ideas.Where practice most differs from theory is the “planning” phase. In theory, I want to be better at planning out my writing. I often find that I miss things I want to say after I’ve published the post, and at that point, I’m reluctant to go back and update things. I just as soon write a new post. In practice, I rarely plan out a post, beyond an occasional set of bullet points that I work off for longer posts like the Vacation in the Golden Age pieces, or these days, the Shelf-Life pieces.
There are some things I’ve gotten pretty good at through sheer exhaustive experience. By default, for instance, if I sit down to write a post, it will be about 500 words, or roughly a page and a half in my Word template. I’ve just learned to naturally write to that length. For a post like this one2, I’ll aim for a thousand words (about 3 pages in my template) and I usually hit close to my mark.
Perhaps the most important point I emphasize here, especially to anyone considering starting a blog in theory: it took me a lot of practice to get going. In fact, nearly 20 years and 7,300 posts later, I am still practicing, aiming for that elusive “perfect.”
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︎1,019 words, it turns out. ︎
February 19, 2025
Memory Leak
Recently, my dad asked me how it is I remember the details of the past so well. He was specifically referring to my memories of the Granada Hills branch of the L.A. Public Library that I recently described in my inaugural Shelf-Life post. I can’t really explain this, except to say, that is how my memory has always been. It seems perfectly normal to me. And yet, I often feared that my memory would fail at some point. This was part of my motivation to start a diary in 1996. I figured if I wrote something down when it happened, it wouldn’t matter if my memory failed, I could always refer to my “official” record of events. In this regard, my diaries are reference books, and deserve a place on the shelf beside my copies of Merriam-Webster’s and Fowler’s. Over the decades, it is rare that my memories don’t align with what is in my diaries.
A few weeks ago, I was sick in bed. Apparently, despite getting my annual flu shot, I had the flu. I was certain this had happened a few times in my life, most notably in 1978, 1997, 2018, and now, this year. Two of the occasions turned out to be fruitful, literarily. Two others were busts.
My memories of the 1978 flu are vague, but I do recall it happened during the famous blizzard of 1978. I think our whole family was down with the flu, but it may have just been me. I was just six years old and never thought too much about it. My most vivid memories are of watching David Hartman and Sandy Hill on Good Morning America in the mornings when I normally would have been at school.
Looking back on this as a parent, it must have been scary. Several feet of snow had fallen, and we were essentially trapped in our house, all of us sick, and if any one of us needed to go to the doctor, it would have been difficult. I know that a similar situation today would have stressed me out.
It was when I was down with the flu in 1997 that I read a book that led to a kind of literary big bang, with the universe of authors that I read rapidly expanding. The way I remember it, I was down with the flu, while reading Age of Wonders by David G. Hartwell. The book was a kind of launching-off point for many other books, and while I was sick, I went through many other books that I first read about in Hartwell’s book, including The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, and Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick.
In my memory, I lay in bed, feverish, but eating up the hours of the day with these books. The books were a kind of anodyne for my illness.
Except, it turns out that is not what happened. As I went back to my diary for 1997, I found that I did, indeed, take a sick day on September 23, 1997, the day that I finished reading Age of Wonders. As I wrote:
Finished Age of Wonders this afternoon. Really enjoyed it. It caught me and tossed me back into the wonderful world of SF. In fact, now I’ve got some classics to read. Went to the Iliad Bookshop today and got Dune by Frank Herbert, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick, and To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer, and Rogue Moon by A.J. Budrys.
Now in my memory, I spent the next several days in bed getting through at least a couple of these books, but looking at my diary, my memory is at once shown to be… leaky. The next day, September 24, for instance, I wrote the following:
After more than 200+ days without rain, it rained today. In fact, I could hear the rain trickling down in the middle of the night—and could hear the wind blowing the blinds. Still, I was up early enough to beat all of the traffic into work.
Subsequent entries show me in the office every day for the rest of that week. So much for my “remarkable” memory! But it does go to show that one of the reasons I started my diary in the first place has paid off.
In 2018, by the way, I was down with the flu for more than a week. This, being a mere 7 years in the past, is much clearer in my head, and indeed, the documentary evidence backs up my memory in this regard. When I got the flu, I was reading the 3-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain. When I finished that, I needed something to distract me. I’d read the first two “Jack Reacher” books by Lee Child, so I started on the third book, and over the course of a week or so in bed, I got through 4-1/2 more Reacher books. This was great because the book distracted me from the illness. That isn’t always the case.
For instance, a few weeks ago, when I got sick, I took to bed and all desire to read had left me. This is always a worrying sign, but I was just out of it. I wanted to sleep through the illness. My few attempts to pick up a book were quickly thwarted by my inability to focus. Fortunately, while I was sick for about a week, there were only two days that I was mostly in bed.Despite a reputation for a good memory among friends and family, it is a memory that has sprung leaks and is likely to be as fallible as any memory is. My superpower is likely less about my memory, and more in my recording of the daily events of my life in my diaries and the consistency that comes with that. Still, there is a natural bias in my diary that slants things in my favor. Although I try hard to be neutral about the facts, and I’m sure that in some events I’ve described, there will be people who were there who will disagree with my portrayal. In these cases, I reserve the right to be smugly correct.
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February 18, 2025
Reading in the Margins: From Paper to E-Books and Back Again
The first e-book I ever read was Polaris by Jack McDevitt. It was June 2009, and I had just gotten my first Kindle. I was so excited. This was Isaac Asimov’s dream. In his essay, “The Ancient and the Ultimate,” he wrote about the evolution of books into their ultimate form. In his Foundation series of the 1940s, there were references to “book films” as if all the galaxy’s books and knowledge could be readily stored and accessed easily at the touch of a button. As a reader, that seemed exciting to me.
In his essay, Asimov went through the steps of evolution of the “electronic” book, with each step making it better and better. Wouldn’t it be great if it needed no power source? Wouldn’t it be amazing if, when you stopped reading, you could start up again at the exact place you left off? By the end of the essay, he described a marvel of technology, which, of course, was your standard paper book.
Since first using a Kindle in 2009, I have found myself following a similar arc. At first, e-books seemed exciting because of the instant gratification and because the books were so easily searchable. In 2013, I began using Audible and audiobooks as a way of letting me read more throughout the day while I did other things that required only a fraction of my attention. My use of audiobooks shot up, but my use of e-books waned, even as my use of paper books increased. Why? For me, it came down to two reasons, one practical, and one social.
When I read, I tend to take notes. I do this when I read fiction or nonfiction. I read a lot more nonfiction than fiction these days, but either way, I like making books my own, scribbling notes in the margins, on the endpapers, or at the head of chapters. While e-books allow one to make notes and highlights, the technology has always felt too limiting. I can’t see the note at the same time as I look at a page, but rather, I can see a reference to a note. Then, too, there is a kind of rigid structure to the notes. I can’t circle a passage and write a note around the border of the circle in an e-book, for instance. Because of these inadequacies, I’ve gradually given up on e-books, and have rarely purchased one in the last few years.
Marginal notes in my copy of Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant.There is a social reason I prefer paper, too. I usually have a book with me wherever I go, above and beyond the audiobook I happen to be listening to. (Sometimes, I have the same paper copy of the audiobook so that I can scribble down notes. As much as I love audiobooks, the interface for notes is even worse than for e-books.) Granted, there are some benefits to e-books, which I jokingly enumerated way back in 2012. But one real failure is the ability for anyone else to see what I am reading.
It is my experience that readers enjoy talking about what they are reading and enjoy learning what other people are reading. Standing in line with an iPad is far less engaging than standing in line with a tattered copy of Les Misérables or One Man’s Meat. I want people to see what I am reading. It is a great icebreaker and a great way to socialize reading in general. I know that when I see someone reading in public, I am always curious about what they are reading. Heck, when I see someone on TV with bookshelves in the background, I pause whatever it is I am watching to see if I can make out any of the books on the shelves.
It’s true that lugging around Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson can be an exercise in strength training. At the same time, I don’t have to worry about what I’d do if my phone or Kindle battery ran out of battery.
Long-time readers might note that this is a change of heart for me. One of the things I used to like about e-books was that no one knew what I was reading, and so I didn’t have to interrupt my reading to answer questions about it. That was a good idea in theory, but in practice, people tended to ask “What are you reading?” more often than if I had the paper book out in front of me—for the obvious reason that one can see the paper book, but not the e-book. Besides, these days, I am always happy to talk about books.
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February 17, 2025
Sportswriters
In the niches of writing, nestled somewhere under the heading of essay writer, is the sportswriter. It is, to me, an underrated artform as worthy of the name as any other form of writing. Reading a good piece can bring about all kinds of emotions, which is one sign of fine writing. I have on my nightstand The Best American Sports Writing of the Century edited by David Halberstam. The century referred to in the title is the Twentieth, and as these are the best American sports writing, many of the names are familiar to fans of sports history: Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Heywood Broun, Westbrook Pegler, Red Smith, Jim Murray, Ring Lardner, W.C. Heinz, John Updike, John McPhee, Roger Angell, Tom Boswell, and Jon Krakauer, just to name a few.
I love sports writing. I love the form. I think in some alternate universe, there is a version of me as sportswriter banging out copy on my Olympia portable in a smoke-filled press box. I’ve read lots of great sports writing over the years. There was the fantastic collection Red Smith: On Baseball. There was the book that first turned me on to superlative sports writing, Great Baseball Writing, Sports Illustrated 1954-20041. A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science is a superlative glimpse into the pugilistic arts. There was a fantastic overview of sports writing in No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman. And of course, there is Joe Posnanski’s luminous The Baseball 1002.
David Halberstam’s introductory essay is marvelous. He highlights several of the writers who have pieces in the book. His introduction made me excited to read the pieces, but he also piqued my curiosity about the sportswriters themselves. It seems to me to be a fascinating line of work. I once started (but I don’t think I finished) a biography of Red Smith. I read a wonderful memoir of Frank Deford, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter. I’ve read Roger Angell’s This Old Man: All in Pieces. Halberstam’s introduction made me wish for a companion book: call it The Best American Sportswriters of the Century. Instead of featuring their writing, the book would contain dozens of short biographies detailing how they became sportswriters, and the ups and downs of their careers.
How I’d love to read a book like that!
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February 16, 2025
Sunday Morning Housekeeping: Books, Blogs, Writing, and Writers
Yesterday, without much fanfare, I posted the first of a new series I’m writing called “Shelf-Life.” Each episode in the series is centered around a book on my bookshelf. The inaugural episode centers around Race Against Time by Piers Anthony. I was happy with how it turned out. If this is your cup of tea, check it out.
Yesterday, I read what is perhaps the best piece of writing I’ve come across on blogging: why we do it and what it means to us. I urge you all to check out Robert Breen’s essay on “Why Blogs Matter.” His piece is so aligned with my own views that I wish I wrote it myself. It is one of those rare pieces of writing that reminded me why I write, and why I should be writing more than I have been.
And speaking of writing, for those of you who want to see inside the life of a writer, to see in detail how the sausage is made, so to speak, there is a new episode of the Tim Ferriss Show out: a 3-hour long interview with Brandon Sanderson, which is outstanding. Probably the best episode I’ve come across so far.
Not long ago, I wrote about magazines that have been around for at least a century. This week, the 100th anniversary issue of The New Yorker arrived in my mailbox. It is a thick edition, 160 pages, and three covers, including the original cover of the first issue of the magazine from 1925. Holding it, and flipping through its pages, I can feel the weight of a century of literary history. I normally don’t even notice the ads in the magazine, but in this issue, so many congratulate The New Yorker on a century of that they are impossible to miss.
I’ve made a good start in my quest to get through all of Tolkien. In addition to The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkienand J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (edited and written respectively by Humphrey Carpenter), I’ve now also read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, finally making it through the entire thing for the first time. I’m taking a break from Tolkien now to get through some other books. Yesterday I finished reading Bill Gates’s memoir, Source Code. Among the other books I’ve got lined up are: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy (for book club), The Best American Sports Writing of the Century edited by David Halberstam (for the sheer joy of reading sports pieces); A Town Without Time by Gay Talese; Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo; The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt; and The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester. Oh yeah, and 3-volumes of Daniel J. Boorstin on the horizon as well.
Now, head over to Robert Breen’s blog and read about Why Blogs Matter. You won’t be sorry.
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February 15, 2025
Shelf-Life #1: Race Against Time
(As I recently announced, this is the first in a new blog series I am trying out called “Shelf-Life.” Each episode centers on a book on my shelf. See the original post for more details. And enjoy!)
Several years ago, needing to free up shelf space, I went through a very rare (for me) purge of books. I think of my books as being part of one big collection that reflects my interests over the course of my life. I tend to make my books my own, scribbling in the margins, jotting notes on the endpapers, and this makes me less inclined to give books away after I’ve read them. They become a valuable reference for me. But I was desperate and looking through what was then about a thousand books, I settled on about a hundred or so paperbacks, the vast majority of which were written by Piers Anthony. By the time I’d finished, I’d donated all but 9 of my Piers Anthony books. The ones I’d kept were the ones that made the biggest impacts on me: hardcover editions of the Incarnations of Immortality books, his 3-part novel Tarot, a signed copy of Kai!, and a TOR paperback edition of Race Against Time.
It was my junior high school friend, Noah, who first turned me onto Piers Anthony. He would describe scenes from Xanth novels and Apprentice Adept novels. Eventually, he loaned me copies of some of the books and I began to read through them voraciously. I especially enjoyed the Author’s Notes in Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality and Bio of a Space Tyrant books. These notes were the first things I’d ever read about what life as a writer was really like.
With many authors, it is clear what book introduced me to their work. With Isaac Asimov, for instance, it was The Caves of Steel back in the early 1980s, and then after a long gap, his memoir, I. Asimov in 1994. With Robert Heinlein it was Double Star. I remember reading a beat-up paperback copy of that book in virtually a single sitting, except that I wasn’t sitting, I was walking around the neighborhood where I lived in Studio City, California, oblivious to everything around me—including the traffic. With Piers Anthony, I can’t remember what the first book I read was after my friend Noah introduced me to him. Was it A Spell for Chameleon? Was it Split Infinity? I simply couldn’t remember.
And then one day in 1989 or 1990, while browsing books on break from my job at a stationery store in the Northridge Fashion Center, I saw a paperback copy of a book called Race Against Time by Piers Anthony, and the answer to the first book I’d ever read by Anthony suddenly fell into place.
I have a friend—a doctor—who once told me that, despite being a doctor and making good money, he never felt particularly wealthy until he bought a sailboat. Everyone has a different superficial measure of success. I’m not buying a sailboat anytime soon, but for me, seeing a book and being able to buy it without thinking much about the price is my own superficial measure of success. I say this because I can remember a time when I would pine over books I saw in a bookstore, or advertised in a magazine, wishing I could afford a copy. I was a regular at my local library and sometimes the books I pined for were available for me to check out, which did allow me to read them—and has ever since made me indebted to the public library system. But what I really wanted to do was keep the books, and that was something I couldn’t do.
As a young teenager, my local library was the Granada Hills branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. It was about a mile from my house, and nestled right next to Petit Park, which had a decent playground. On summer mornings, I’d walk the mile to the library in the dry Los Angeles heat with a book under each arm, reading a third book, and just barely keeping an eye on traffic at the major intersections I had to cross. Opening the doors to the library let out a blast of cold air that was a pleasure after the hot walk. I’d return my books and then step into what seems, in my imagination, to be a large space filled with books. Facing that space from the front desk, there were lots of shelves on the right side, with the 500s (science books, where I spent a lot of time) about a third of the way down the building. On the left side was more open space, some tables, carrels, and books racks and along the wall. One day, while browsing one of those book racks, I came across Race Against Time. I don’t know what about it caught my attention, but quite possibly, it was the text on the back cover:
John Smith is just a typical teenager growing up in a typical American town in 1960… Or is he?
He has a dog—that can climb trees and understand very complex commands.
He has parents—who watch him constantly, taking notes when they think he’s not looking.
He has a girlfriend—a girl he’s never met, whom he has been told he must marry.
John knows that something is wrong, but until he crosses the boundary fence late one night, he doesn’t realize just how much. For wherever, whenever he lives, it is definitely notAmerica, circa 1960!
That hooked me. I checked out the book and apart from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, it was the only book at that point in my life that I tore through in a single sitting.
I haven’t read the book in the 40 years since that first reading, but it has always had a special place in my heart. My memory of the plot is vague, and while the book held me spellbound, I’m not convinced it was a particularly remarkable story. It has popped up in my memory several times over the years. When I read Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint in 1997, I was reminded of Anthony’s Race Against Time. (Time Out of Joint was published in 1959 while Race Against Time was published in 1973, so perhaps the former influenced the latter.) When I saw the film, The Truman Show in 1998, I was immediately reminded of both books.
It was probably 1985 or so when I discovered Race Against Time in the library. Back then, I paid little attention to the name of the author on the book. Indeed, walking home from the library that day, I was almost certainly reading while I walked, as oblivious to the author’s name as I was my surroundings. By the time I re-discovered the book five years later, I’d read a dozen or more Piers Anthony books and enjoyed them. It was something of a wonder to realize that I’d encountered his work once before in Race Against Time.
Piers Anthony was the first author I started to “collect.” On rare occasions in high school and college when I had funds to buy books, they were almost exclusively Piers Anthony books. In his Author’s Notes, Anthony would sometimes talk about the fan mail he received. It never occurred to me, until then, that one might write to an author nor that the author would take the time to reply. Sometime in my junior year in college, I wrote to Anthony, and some weeks later, received a gracious reply. In his reply, he wrote, “Dear Miss Rubin, (I am assuming by your name you are female.)” It was after receiving this letter that I began using my middle name, Todd, on my bylines and signatures.
The correspondence continued for a year or so, reaching its peak of retroactive embarrassment when I broke a cardinal rule of writing, and sent Piers Anthony a story I’d written for his comment. I look back on that bravado with absolute horror, but to his credit, Anthony sent me a lengthy critique of the story, and I am grateful for his patience with me.
Much of the Piers Anthony I’ve read, including Race Against Time, took place before I tracked what I read. Over the years, I read all his Incarnations of Immortality series, his Bio of a Space Tyrant series, independent books like Macroscope, his Cluster Series, his Mode series, as well as his historical books like Tatham Mound and his autobiography, Bio of an Ogre. I also read (twice) the first 10 or 11 books of his most famous series, Xanth. (When I last checked, Xanth was up to 40+ books.) At my peak, I had amassed around one hundred Piers Anthony books, second only to Isaac Asimov in my collection. It was most of those 100 Piers Anthony books that I purged to make space on my shelves for other books.
Race Against Time played a pivotal role in my reading history. For one thing, once I “rediscovered” the book in 1990 or so, I made it a point to be aware of the name of the author whose book I was reading. Moreover, as a newspaper reader, I rarely paid attention to the bylines of the articles I read, but around that time, I started to look more closely at those bylines, more readily identifying columnists like Al Martinez of the Los Angeles Times when before I never really paid attention to that.
Perhaps even more important, Race Against Time changed the way I read. Prior to Race Against Time, I started many books, only to give up on them partway through. With Race Against Time, I was drawn in, and while there were parts that I recall seemed slow at times, I made the effort to finish it and was glad that I did. After Race Against Time, I finished books more often than I gave up on them. Today, with the experience of thousands of books under my belt, I am more discerning about my selection and the likelihood of me finishing a book that I start is very high. Something about the way the story drew me in stuck with me, and I think some of that has come through in my own stories that I’ve written over the years.
Looking back, it seems crazy that a random encounter with a book on a book rack on a warm summer morning in Los Angeles would have such an impact on me. That, of course, is the beauty of books and of reading in a nutshell.
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February 9, 2025
My Latest Haul from the St. Ann Book Fair
Each year, our church has a book fair to raise money. It gives people an opportunity to empty their bookshelves, which makes me sad for them but happy for me since I usually manage some good finds. We headed to the book fair this morning. Usually, we go to the “preview,” but we had a busy schedule this weekend, and so when we arrived this morning, the pickings weren’t that great. But I still managed to pick up some good books.
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years by Carl Sandburg. I read this one back in 2016, but I didn’t have a hardcover edition, so it was nice to finally get one—especially one for two bucks.The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. This is the #2 book on Modern Library’s 100 Top Non-Fiction Books of the Twentieth Century. Over time, I am slowly making my way through these Modern Library lists. I’ve read the #1 nonfiction book on the list, The Education of Henry Adams. Now I’ve got another reason to read the William James book.The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination by Daniel J. Boorstin. This is one of those books that randomly caught my eye while browsing.The Best American Sportswriting of the Century, edited by David Halberstam. Sportswriting, like science writing, is too frequently overlooked as an art form, but the best sportswriters are artists of the highest caliber in my mind. Flipping through the contents of this book is like a walk of fame with writers like Gay Talese, Heywood Broun, Westbrook Pegler, Red Smith, Ring Lardner, W.C. Heinz, John Updike, John McPhee, Roger Angell, and many others.Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 2nd Edition. This was probably my best find of the day. I have by my desk a fairly recent version of Fowler’s edited by Jeremy Butterfield, but I have long wanted something closer to the original. Incidentally, Andy Rooney wrote a charming essay on Fowler’s called “Pardon My English.” It can be found in his collection Common Nonsense.And that’s my haul for this year: history, sports, religion, art, and language. Not bad for someone with eclectic tastes.
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