Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 27

Order to chaos, order to chaos, order to chaos (saying it over and over will make it happen, right?)

First round of August company just departed; second round is due in two weeks and in between I have the Mazama Book Festival soooooo, it's hella crazy around here.

I am so freaking behind!!!!

I need to have a ton of pages on the next book to super agent in September and I need to write a ton of reviews and I need to sort and read and research and GET ALL THIS CRAP DONE.

Seriously.

Here is where I'm at right now:

For Booklist I have four books due by the end of month: A Random Book About the Power of Anyone (youth activism), Secrets of the Ice (the global importance of Antarctica), Apocalyptic Planet (science & adventure around the world that is not as depressing as the title suggests) and Lynn Marguilis: the Life & Legacy of a Scientific Rebel (biography).

For September column: Need to write reviews for The Plant Hunters (19th century botantical explorers), America's Other Audubon (stunning story & art about someone you've never heard of but should have) and Invincible Microbe (the story of tuberculosis). Also need to finish reading & review Science on Ice from the University of Chicago.

For down the line I'm reading Sailor Twain, a gn by Mark Siegel that is quite well done. Not sure where this will fit - sometime this fall/early winter. Also for down the line, The Boolean Gate a novella by Walter Jon Williams with Mark Twain and Nicola Tesla, The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (I'm leaning toward November for this one but only 1/3 of the way through and the jury is still out) and Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls and Wonder Show (which I started months ago but set aside when I realized it would fit in the fall) both for the October column.

Also still need to get that dang review of "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown", a short story by Holly Black, written for my October column. (I will mention the whole collection but really want to go a bit more indepth on this particular story.)

And I have to finish the feature on house-building books I got completely blocked on this month - that will be sent to Bookslut with the September column and I want to do the joint review I posted about the other day on Half in Shade and Trespasses and finding/losing family history but that is not going out until Oct or Nov.

For my wip, there are no books left to read but some different articles to go through as I write including one on aircraft accidents in Merrill Pass and another on naturalism in Hemingway's early fiction (especially the Nick Adams stories). (I swear it makes sense that I'm reading about Hemingway.) (Not that anyone ever needs an excuse to read about Hemingway.) Oh and I just printed out an article from the Sports Illustrated vault on Don Sheldon, one of the greatest mountain pilots of all time. How cool is it that SI has decades of articles online?!

And the University of Iowa just sent me Gathering Noise From My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir by Donald Anderson which looks very interesting but I must resist until everything else has moved a bit off the table. (And while writing all this I just realized I lost Trespasses. It's somewhere in this house but not where I thought it was. What the heck????)

So whew - that's it. Organization is really necessary at this point, yes? Remove piles from my life and all will be good. TOTALLY. (The moral is no travel, no company and no festivals when a book is being written. I promise not to forget this in the future. I SWEAR.)

A brilliant young woman born before her time

"On one of these outings, Genevieve found an intricate nest that neither Nelson [her father] nor Howard [her brother] could identify. She searched her father's extensive library to discover the bird that had built it, only to learn that no one had yet written a book on the nest and eggs of American birds. Gennie remarked that surely someone would have created a book to help people differentiate one nest from another. Howard casually offered to gather the nests and eggs for such a project if Gennie, who enjoyed painting and drawing, wanted to illustrate them. For many years as Nelson, Gennie and Howard furthered their study of American ornithology, the subject of the need for such a book came up during family conversations."

And they did it - more on America's Other Audubon and the heartbreaking story of Genevieve Jones can be found here. The book will be reviewed in my September column.

Order to chaos, order to chaos, order to chaos (saying it over and over will make it happen, right?)

First round of August company just departed; second round is due in two weeks and in between I have the Mazama Book Festival soooooo, it's hella crazy around here.

I am so freaking behind!!!!

I need to have a ton of pages on the next book to super agent in September and I need to write a ton of reviews and I need to sort and read and research and GET ALL THIS CRAP DONE.

Seriously.

Here is where I'm at right now:

For Booklist I have four books due by the end of month: A Random Book About the Power of Anyone (youth activism), Secrets of the Ice (the global importance of Antarctica), Apocalyptic Planet (science & adventure around the world that is not as depressing as the title suggests) and Lynn Marguilis: the Life & Legacy of a Scientific Rebel (biography).

For September column: Need to write reviews for The Plant Hunters (19th century botantical explorers), America's Other Audubon (stunning story & art about someone you've never heard of but should have) and Invincible Microbe (the story of tuberculosis). Also need to finish reading & review Science on Ice from the University of Chicago.

For down the line I'm reading Sailor Twain, a gn by Mark Siegel that is quite well done. Not sure where this will fit - sometime this fall/early winter. Also for down the line, The Boolean Gate a novella by Walter Jon Williams with Mark Twain and Nicola Tesla, The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (I'm leaning toward November for this one but only 1/3 of the way through and the jury is still out) and Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls and Wonder Show (which I started months ago but set aside when I realized it would fit in the fall) both for the October column.

Also still need to get that dang review of "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown", a short story by Holly Black, written for my October column. (I will mention the whole collection but really want to go a bit more indepth on this particular story.)

And I have to finish the feature on house-building books I got completely blocked on this month - that will be sent to Bookslut with the September column and I want to do the joint review I posted about the other day on Half in Shade and Trespasses and finding/losing family history but that is not going out until Oct or Nov.

For my wip, there are no books left to read but some different articles to go through as I write including one on aircraft accidents in Merrill Pass and another on naturalism in Hemingway's early fiction (especially the Nick Adams stories). (I swear it makes sense that I'm reading about Hemingway.) (Not that anyone ever needs an excuse to read about Hemingway.) Oh and I just printed out an article from the Sports Illustrated vault on Don Sheldon, one of the greatest mountain pilots of all time. How cool is it that SI has decades of articles online?!

And the University of Iowa just sent me Gathering Noise From My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir by Donald Anderson which looks very interesting but I must resist until everything else has moved a bit off the table. (And while writing all this I just realized I lost Trespasses. It's somewhere in this house but not where I thought it was. What the heck????)

So whew - that's it. Organization is really necessary at this point, yes? Remove piles from my life and all will be good. TOTALLY. (The moral is no travel, no company and no festivals when a book is being written. I promise not to forget this in the future. I SWEAR.)

On Glaciers, Trespasses and Half in Shade (but really all about family history)

I had some intriguing readerly synergy recently when I picked up Alexis Smith's Glaciers. Family history plays a big part of this slim novel, not in the angsty painful Thanksgiving sort of way (hello Home For the Holidays) but rather in a questioning of memory and collecting of artifacts. In the midst of this truly lovely portrait of a single woman who dreams of Amsterdam and works diligently at a quiet job as a book restorer, there is much thinking about where she came from and what she remembers of that place and her people. (It happens to be Alaska which makes the book all that much more appealing for me.)

But I did not pick up Glaciers expecting all of that - I gravitated to it because of Isabel's job in a library and the potential for a truly smart romance (the love story is so subtle and sublime, I can't recommend it enough). But I read it while finishing up Lacy Johnson's Trespasses and on on the heels of Judith Kitchen's Half in Shade. Initially I was reading each of those books for separate review but the different way in which they address the same topic (family history) has compelled me to plan a dual review. In Trespasses, Johnson has collected short narratives (often only a page long) either garnered from interviews with family members or fancifully created from what her family members don't tell her. She knows enough history (and has access to those who know) to create what is likely a very true story of who her people are. (And in a long series of interesting endnotes she reveals what she does not know but suspects.)

In Half in Shade, Kitchen is left with a collection of family photos (replicated in the book) and she does not know who many of the people are. She is forced to write about the little she knows and lament how much she lost by not gaining the pictures when there was time to ask the questions of who and where and why. Her book also includes created memories but she is left with making things up (something she admits up front) in the hopes that she is maybe correct. (Perhaps a couple on a ship are distant relatives emigrating to the US - but she will never know.)

As I sit on an huge pile of pictures from my own great grandmother I can sympathize hugely with Kitchen and having been lucky enough to ask my grandmother many questions before she died, I can understand Johnson's determination to get the history down while she can (she does reveal the questions that were too difficult to ask however). Both books have had me thinking a lot about my own family history and the gaps we have and the pictures with unidentified people. And then in the mist of all this, I consumed Glaciers in a few short days falling madly in love with Smith's characters and incredibly elegant writing style. (Writers need to read this book - it's a lesson in understatement.)

Family history never ceases to compel me; I could write about it forever. (And that is why I wasn't surprised when my own family history, just a bit, crept into MAP.)

What Tim Flannery seeks...

To open the drawer of an old museum cabinet and find the remains of a creature that lived on a distant tropic isle long since dramatically changed by European impact, and which had traveled halfway round the globe to reach its keeping place, is a magical experience - like traveling in time itself. That moth-eaten skin, or even fragment, may be all that remains of an entire species, tinting the thrill of seeing with with immense sadness. For here lies all, perhaps, that is knowable of a branch of life that may have gone its own way for a million years or more, a life form that once played an important role in an island ecosystem, but which had now winked out, never to be seen again.

From his upcoming title: Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific

[Post pic from The Natural History of the Museum by Mark Dion; it depicts Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Nîmes. View of the main exhibition room, beginning of 20th century.]

Mid cleaning chaos literary snapshot

Rather than spring cleaning it seems we ended up with summer cleaning around here, especially of the magazines and assorted papers. Here is what has landed on my dining room table at the moment:

* An article on Orlando from a 2007 issue of National Geographic. (Interesting Jack Kerouac mention worth considering and following up on.)

* The Moon Moth (by Jack Vance) gn adapted by Humayoun Ibrahim from First Second. (For review as Cool Read probably in October column.)

* Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith. (Fantastic - very short - novel that I devoured in the past day and half and heartily recommend. I shall post about it this week along with two other books that I'm reviewing that all fit together. I bought this one on a total whim due to recent online buzz and couldn't be more delighted.)

* Superman #712 with Krypto on the cover. My son loves Krypto and wanted me to 1) bag and board this issue for him to keep it safe and 2) find other Krypto issues. But no luck - there is an all ages series that includes him but its a bit young. So we shall have to keep our eyes peeled for a new Krypto story. I hope one appears soon!

* Hoagland on Nature - essay collection by Edward Hoagland. (I was reading this yesterday during my son's golf class. It's for the current wip research largely due to his "Big Two-Hearted River" reference.)

* Dream School by Blake Nelson. (Wrote about it Monday; still here waiting to be reviewed for the November column.)

* America's Other Audubon by Joy Kiser. (Stunning, gorgeous, truly remarkable nature book from Princeton Architectural Press that I loved. It will be in the September column and I'll post a bit about it here in the next couple of weeks.)

* Assorted pages on birds that my son wanted cut out of another 2007 National Geographic. He has a plastic file box full of articles/pictures that catch his eye. I figure as long as it is neatly contained and organized (which it is) more power to him! (These are waiting to be filed as we just cut them out.)

* Short review from the current issue of Audubon on A Glorious Enterprise - a book on the history of The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia from Univ of PA Press. I don't know how I missed this when it came out earlier this year but it sounds amazing. MAJOR excited about it!**

* Several recipes ripped from recent magazines; all waiting to be filed. (Which happens tonight!)

* Several pages from recent issues of Booklist for books to add to the Ballou wish list for the September book fair. I'll do that as soon as I'm done with this post.

* An article on naturalist William Bartram from the March 2001 National Geographic. (Don't ask me why we had such an old NG still around here.) I am fascinated by Bartram so this was quite the serendipitous discovery.

* An article entitled "The Marvelous Antikythera Machine" by Meg Moss in the current MUSE magazine. This is for my son - very interesting though! (We all adore MUSE.)

* "Breaching the Boondoggle" on the Rodman Dam in FL from the current Audubon. Also includes mention of William Bartram which I frankly found weird - he is really turning up in a lot of places lately (or I'm noticing him all over).

* Review for Soundings: The Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt (Holt) because it sounds like a book I would like a lot and I want to add it to my wish list.

* Dragonfly article from current Audubon (now do you know why we subscribe to Audubon?) for my son.

And several other pictures of volcanoes, sharks, whales and birds from a variety of magazines all of which go in my son's file box. Also current issues of Men's Journal, Outside, National Geographic (duh), Orion and Gray's Sporting Journal. And Holly Black's The Poison Eaters because I'm going to mention it in my October column - especially the story "The Coldest Girl in Cold Town".

My table is a big hot interesting mess, don't you think?!

**See the Brain Pickings review of A Glorious Enterprise. Here's a bit:

And what a story it is -- from how Ernest Hemingway shaped the field of ichthyology to what Edgar Allan Poe was doing in the oldest-known photograph taken inside a museum, it's a story brimming with rare glimpses of strange specimens and obscure images, laced with tales of scientific rivalry, boundless inspiration, ruthless pursuits of scientific immortality, and perseverance in the face of terrible odds, with cameos by Thomas Jefferson and James Bond, among other unlikely heroes.

Attending a dream school with Blake Nelson

My dream school was sometimes Notre Dame, sometimes any one of those fabled and famous former girls schools in New England. (And sometimes it was the University of Hawaii but I think everyone wishes for that one at least once.) The reality was a school in my hometown and living with my mother and stepfather for the first three years of college which meant that until I was 20, life was pretty much the same as it was when I was 16. In retrospect, I would have done things differently but back then I didn't have anything other than big expensive dreams of distant schools that were as unreal to me as Oz or Wonderland. I didn't know enough about them to really know how to get to them and honestly I didn't know enough to even know if they were reasonable choices for me. They were just dreams and still remain so even today.

In Dream School author Blake Nelson sends his college freshman Andrea Marr off to Wellington College in CT, the place she believes will be life changing. The reality, of course, is not nearly as dazzling but Nelson doesn't stack the deck with outrageous events; he lets Andrea's school experience unfold in ways relatively dull and ordinary. She makes friends, takes classes, dates, parties and tries to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. Disillusionment with Wellington creeps in slowly as she forms a disconnect with some of her classmates and instructors but Nelson lets the reader slowly work out if Andrea is the problem, or if the school is. Nothing is obvious, not even the sudden crushing issue that turns Andrea's world upside down in a moment.

Everything in Dream School, even the more outlandish moments, will seem familiar to anyone who ever attended college. (Parts of it are so familiar they seem almost eerie.) More than anything else though it is Andrea, with her sometimes naive, sometimes arrogant perspective, that makes the novel sing. She is equal parts confident and terrified, bubbling with eagerness one moment and desperate to hide another. In other words, she is very nearly every teenager in the first excited moments of leaving home. (Remember that stunning moment when Rory gets told she might not be cutting it in Yale? That is Andrea every step of the way.)

Dream School worked for me because it is as messy as life, because it doesn't shy away from the issues of drugs, alcohol and sex that every teen faces when they are out on their own and because Andrea is neither preternaturally smart nor eye-rollingly stupid. I loved this kid, even when she screwed up. I know her, I understand her and there are certainly moments (after I finally left home) when I was her. This is a great summer read - I'll have more about it in my formal review in the column this November.

Bohemians, steampunk, ocean residents & MORE

Several books have caught my eye lately - here's the skinny:

Cherie Priest has a new entry in her Clockwork Century steampunk series due in November: The Inexplicables. With an 18 year old protagonist and all the familiar horrors of the transformed city of Seattle, this looks like another winner. Fans of her earlier Bonecrusher will want to check this out as it follows up on those characters.

I've been following Hollister Hovey's blog for a while - she's a design aficionado who would love to live in khaki and a pith helmet which pretty much makes me love her. She got a book deal with Rizzoli from the hard work she has done on her blog and with her sister taking the pictures Heirloom Modern is due out next year. Eye candy for sure.



Rizzoli also has a new one from James Prosek this fall: Ocean Fishes. I have not always been a big fan of Prosek's prose - when he writes about fish or fishing or people who live and work in that environment then I think he does really well but when he has pushed to boundaries for fiction I've been disappointed. I'm really looking forward to Ocean Fishes though - I'm sure the art will be amazing and I hope he writes a bit about how he worked on the book and researched his subjects.

I'm also hugely excited about Marie Curie and Her Daughters by Shelley Emling (who previous wrote The Fossil Hunter about Mary Anning - see my review). I have been fascinated by Curie FOREVER (did you read Radioactive by Lauren Redniss? Talk about a gorgeous and interesting book!). Any insight into the Curie family has me eager to read it.

And closing some tabs: Reif Larsen is a bit freaked out by meeting the film TS Spivet; I've got my issues of the rebooted Captain Marvel on the way from my hometown comic shop (who still supplies me from Florida) - see the reasons why all of you who love female superheroes need to grab this one; The LA Times reviews the new Abrams title out on Charles R. Knight, the man who gave us vivid illustrations of dinosaurs (I have this one on my holiday list for sure); the "Fast Food Nation" book on fashion tells us why we should avoid Target (nothing is really that cheap, people!) and did you see the "new bohemians" article in the WSJ a couple of months ago? It's all about a modern Bloomsbury group but I don't know - this seems a lot like an urban commune idea to me. But makes for interesting reading even if you wouldn't want to live that way.

Books I'm hoping to read/review in the coming months: The Hunting of the Snark illustrated by Oleg Lipchenko (Tundra), Unusual Creatures by Michael Hearst (Chronicle), The Carter Family gn by Frank Young & Daivd Lasky (Abrams), Yoko Ono by Nell Beram and Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky (Amulet), Errantry by Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer), Blackwood by dear friend Gwenda Bond (Strange Chemistry), Brides of Rullrock Island by Margo Lanagan (RH), The Bronte Sisters by Catherine Reef (HMH), A Geography of Blood by Candace Savage (Greystone), Emily's Dress & Other Missing Things by Kathryn Burak (Roaring Brook), The Lost Christmas Gift by Andrew Beckham (Princeton Arch Press) and many many more.

Sally Ride and Locus magazine

Oh, Sally Ride. I remember everything about that first flight, especially how it made me feel. She was amazing. (Did you read her obituary? AMAZING.)

In the midst of the research hibernation the YA issue of Locus came out and I am pretty stunned to have my name on the cover. Talk about a bucket moment; I've read Locus for years (years!) and never thought I would see my name there. I don't just want to marry this cover I want to carry it around and flash it at the world. "Look how cool I am! I'm on the cover of Locus!!!!" (And yes, Bradbury is there too - both of us on the cover.)

I really enjoyed writing this piece because of the opportunity it gave me to write good things about a lot of books. I was able to mention books I've reviewed already and enjoyed (like Radiant Days by Liz Hand and The Book of Blood and Shadows by Robin Wasserman) and a lot books I'm looking forward to (upcoming ones from Cherie Priest and Libba Bray and Laini Taylor and Gwenda Bond and man, could I go on and on and on :)

This is just a moment made of awesome that I can't stop grinning about.

Research reading madness

What I've read recently:

Wallace Stegner's essay collection The Sound of Mountain Water (on being a western writer)

Breaking Point by Glenn Randall (on climbing Mt McKinley) (It's bizarrely out of print!)



The Sourdough Expedition by Terence Cole (on the first group to reach McKinley's North summit in 1910) (They dog mushed from Fairbanks!!!) (I think this was in print for 15 minutes. SIGH.)



My Life of High Adventure by Grant Pearson (one of the early superintendents of Denali Park). (Yes, he also climbed McKinley.)



Mt McKinley: The Pioneer Climbs by Terris Moore (are you detecting a theme?)

"Up the Black to Chalkyitsik" essay by Edward Hoagland (from Hoagland on Nature which I promptly ordered a copy of from Powells) (used - no new copies in print?!)

The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx ed by Alex Hunt (this just made me want to read The Shipping News again. And again.)

And many essays/articles on Don Sheldon, Ernest Hemgingway, Annie Proulx, Denali climbing, glacier flying, and accidents in mountain passes. I've read a lot of news stories from the late 1920s and early 1930s when aviation was nearly always mentioned on the front page of Alaskan newspapers (which is really pretty cool). I also read several essays in American Alpine Journal and Alaska History and more back issues of the Explorers Club Journal and OUTSIDE and CLIMBING then I care to mention. (It is so easy to get sucked into articles that have nothing to do with my research but are fun to read!)

I am presently surrounded by stacks of photocopies all demanding some sort of organization which will happen later this week or I shall be buried in chaos. The most important page however in my BOOK book (the book where I take notes on the WIP) is the one outlining several chapters. I have direction on eight chapters and hints of several more (not to mention several accident reports to dive into which will likely fill in any gaps that develop).

Fifty pages are due to my agent by September 1st. I am finally feeling like they will be fifty GOOD pages. What a relief!