Books I DIDN'T read this year

In 2014, I read a ton of books.

Perhaps even a literal ton, although probably not. Maybe a couple hundred pounds. Anyways.

Blogging for FantasyLiterature.com has upped my reading game, but working at a bookstore has upped my reading awareness. There are so many good books coming out, all. the time. I'm still not reading as much as most book bloggers or many of my co-workers. Instead of posting a list of what I did read, I thought I'd post a list of books I missed out on reading in 2014 ... and hope to catch up on in 2015.

The Wilds, by Julia Elliot: a collection of short stories that fall roughly into the categories of magical realism or the New Weird. Karen Russell and Kate Bernheimer both blurbed it, and the cover is gorgeous.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami: I have never read any Murakami (I know!) and thought I might start this year. But time steamrolled over me and I still haven't read any Murakami.

The World of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin: This encyclopedia of Westeros, written by Martin and Elio M. Garcia, Jr., and Linda Antonsson, the founders of Westeros.org, is a nerd's dream. I can't wait to read it.

The Tudors, by Peter Ackroyd: This book came out in hardback before 2014, but the paperback (the version I can afford) was released in September of this year. Ackroyd is an amazing biographer whose specialty is London. 

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi: Oyeyemi is another author I haven't read, but who I need to explore. This book, a loose retelling of Snow White, explores issues of racial identity and aesthetic beauty. 

Words of Radiance, by Brandon Sanderson: This is the second book in Sanderson's epic fantasy series, THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE. The first one, The Way of Kings, was really interesting; I want to see what happens next.

Bone Clocks by David Mitchell: I read about a third of this book, but someone at work wanted the advanced reader's copy and I was taking too long, so I didn't get to finish it. I haven't read Cloud Atlas, either. 

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie: Really, I need to read Ancillary Justice, which came out last year, first. Leckie is the first author to win the triple crown of science fiction writing: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Arthur C. Clarke award. And Ancillary Justice was her first novel! I have heard that Ancillary Sword, the second book in the series and published this year, is just as good. These probably need to be moved to the top of the list.

Pacific Fire by Greg Eekhout: I read Eekhout's short story, "California Bones," several years ago. It stuck with me. This book is set in the same world as that story. I made our bookstore stock it, but still haven't read it myself. 

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer: This book, the last in the SOUTHERN REACH trilogy, is bound to be incredible, creepy, and mind-bending; the first two were. Plus, VanderMeer, one of the foremost New Weird writers, is a genuinely nice, funny guy. He lives in Tallahassee and agreed to come speak for my sci-fi/fantasy class one year; how cool is that?

Making Make Believe Real by Garry Wills: When this book came out, I drooled over it. It's about how Elizabethan political and religious structures used theatrical methods to establish their "truths"--how they turned the tools of the stage to their benefit. At the same time, Wills looks at how Elizabethan theater staged politics. Next time I teach Shakespeare, I will use this book.

The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan: This book follows Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons, and promises to be funny, exciting, and atmospheric. Lady Trent is the world's preeminent dragon naturalist and she is a character. Brennan's writing in general is great and she often writes about topics that I love; just the list of short stories she has published makes my mouth water.

Gretel and the Dark by Eliza Granville: Another modern story hearkening back to a dark fairy-tale world, this book explores Nazi Germany and 1899 Vienna through the intertwined stories of two different women.

Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce: This book was published in 2013, but I only found out about it in 2014, so I'm cheating and including it.  We featured this at the bookstore because Luce was coming to read, but I didn't get a chance to pick it up before her visit. However, it looks like the kind of weird magical realism that I expect from Karen Russell and Kelly Link, and I want it.

Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, by Frances Larson: This book seems like an interesting way to learn some history, grotesque though it may be. I guess I'm a little macabre in my interests. 

Lock In, by John Scalzi: A police procedural sci-fi novel that seems poised to win some awards in 2015. It has also been picked up for a TV series. 

All in all, I have a lot of reading to do in 2015!

Writings of the Tudor Court

A week or so ago, I finished reading some poems by Thomas Wyatt the Elder. His poetry, paired with that of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Courtier, and several letters and speeches by Mary Tudor, Jane Grey, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots, has really impressed me with a sense of the drama, danger, and precarious nature of the Tudor court . . . or even just of royal courts in general.

You get a sense of this with The Tudors, of course. People rising, people falling. The glorious power-grab of the Boleyns and their ignominious demise, in which Thomas Wyatt himself was implicated and tried, though not executed. Some of his poetry, specifically the translation of Petrarch's Rima 190, seems to speak to an infatuation, if not a relationship, with Anne Boleyn. "There is written, her fair neck round about, Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am." He writes about the dangers of seeking advancement as a courtier in "Who list his wealth and ease retain:" "These bloody days have broken my  heart. My lust, my youth did then depart, and blind desire of estate. Who hastes to climb seeks to revert. Of truth, circa regna tonat [it thunders around thrones]." (Interestingly for me, he writes about women as hunted deer more than once, in beautiful lyrical words. Must explore this later.)

Surrey (I can never get used to calling people by their title, not their last name) was actually executed, at thirty, because of the danger he posed to the throne as a possible claimant. He, like his friend Wyatt about whom he wrote a poetic epitaph, also translates Petrarch and hints at the dangers of court.

The Courtier makes it all too obvious that being at court is like playing a game (GRRM's A Game of Thrones, or the Cairhienin Daes Dae'mar [Game of Houses] from RoJo both spring to mind here. In fact, with their plucked and powdered foreheads, I wouldn't be surprised if Cairhien is supposed to be analogous to Elizabethan England). Words and actions have multiple meaning and the most prized attribute of a courtier is that of "grace," which means saying and doing all the right things with an unstudied, spontaneous air as if they flowed naturally from you.

And finally, the letters and the histories of the four women emphasize the risks and rewards of grasping at royal life. While religion separated them, the unpopularity and failure of three (Mary Tudor, Jane Grey, and Mary Stuart) of them were not solely because of religious conviction. They made hasty and ultimately wrong political moves. But how were they to know ahead of time that they were wrong? Each had to alternate groveling and standing firm, and when Jane Grey gambled on standing firm when her future relied on groveling, she was executed.

QEI, the one success out of the four (success being measured, I guess, by longevity, autonomy, popularity, and historical legacy), won because she played the game of court as well as any trying to court her favor. She made herself the Queen of Hearts and supplanted the Virgin Mary. Her "cult of love," as the Norton terms it, was as much about her protection as it was her popularity. And her letters use this rhetoric heavily, terming herself married to the realm of England, a mother to her English subjects, calling her subjects loyal and faithful and thereby making them so. Love is a jewel to her, and in all images she is covered in, dripping with jewels. She was able to manipulate her image by suppressing representations she thought impolitic, and encouraging representations that make her iconic (Golding's Metamorphoses, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, etc., on which more later).

At any rate, the wheel of fortune metaphor has never been more clear in my mind than in reading about the tumultuous and dangerous nature of court.

Narrative Therapy

I have finally made a tentative prelims list. It's three pages long right now and might get longer as I run it by my other committee members. I feel like crying almost every day when I think about how long it is and how dumb I am. BUT! Like I've said before, the point of this exercise is to gain expertise. Of course I don't have the expertise already, otherwise I wouldn't need to study for prelims. Right? Right. Pass the Kleenex.

My recent trip reading/entertainment has been going really well. Earlier complaints still stand, but I am learning so much from Stephen Greenblatt's book Will in the World. Reading about early modern England in such a laid-back, narrative form is helping me remember and contextualize facts much more easily than reading extremely specific academic articles. Each chapter, while purporting to focus on one narrow aspect of $'s life, also explicates a larger aspect of Elizabethan culture. I'm learning about the religious atmosphere of the time, expectations for romantic relationships between husbands and wives, and, lately, criminal activity and consequences in London.

Along with Dat 'Blatt, I've also been watching The Tudors. Yeah, yeah, it's not completely historically accurate. Don't worry--I don't plan on writing any papers where I support my arguments with examples taken from a TV show. (Or, at least not in early modern drama; I will probably write a paper about Game of Thrones sometime soon. For fun. Because writing academic papers is so fun.) But seriously, watching The Tudors is, again, helping me to remember and contextualize who people are. For instance, why are so many people named Thomas during this time? Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt . . . geez. And they don't go by Tommy, or Tom-Bo, or Big T either. So, if anything, by the time I finish watching The Tudors, I should have all my Thomases figured out.

Speaking of all the Thomases, why wasn't a king of England ever named Thomas? Is it the doubter stigma? After the Norman invasion, they're named William, Henry, Richard, Edward, James, Charles, and George. I wonder why those names became regal while perfectly normal names like Christopher, Samuel, Dylan, and Theodore were not. Even today, the three men in line for the throne are named, in order: Charles, William, and Henry.

Finally, the Neal Stephenson book Quicksilver is a lot more helpful to me than I initially supposed. It's largely set in Restoration and Interregnum England and Enlightenment Europe, but I'm getting kings and queens and takeovers and factions sorted in my head, which retroactively helps sort some of the earlier stuff, too. Also, I'm learning all kinds of awesome stuff about the history of science or, as they called it, "natural philosophy." Many natural philosophers are characters in the book: Newton, Hooke, Liebniz, John Wilkins, Benjamin Franklin, etc. As their theories are explained through the voice of a contemporary narrator, older scientific theories are displaced, many of which were in vogue in the early modern period.

At any rate, though, my life of ease and fun, light reading is at an end. I read More's Utopia today and found it better than I had supposed, but still sleep-inducing. Ah, well.