Tag: Short stories

Categories
Fantasy Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction

The Avram Davidson Treasury: Final Stories & Final Thoughts

*Breathes* is it over? Did I finish? Yes I did!

I’ve written on the prior sections of the Treasury in earlier posts, and now will sum up my thoughts on the final two sections and the collection in general.  Before starting, I noted that for an author that is rarely if ever circulated now despite his massive early  influence, it’s interesting to look at all the awards that he won or was nominated for.

http://www.sfadb.com/Avram_Davidson

How many authors win awards all across the mystery, sci-fi, and fantasy genres?  The entire Treasury itself also won and was nominated multiple times. Naples won a world fantasy award.  Davidson is like a shadow, an influential and widely acclaimed author that everyone seemed to love but now hardly anyone knows or talks about anymore. 

General thoughts

As far as The Seventies and newer stories, I largely liked Davidson’s older works much more than the newer ones. I have been reading through the collection slowly to avoid burn out but so much of the later stories just went straight over my head. Should I have DNF’d? Idk, I wanted to sample the works across the years.  I can’t say why the last bunch were my least favorites other than that I just tended to not understand them, or be bored by the long and winding trails from point A to point Avram.

I’ve been reading the collection since the end of January and definitely struggled at times, but feel like I learned a lot about genre history, general history, many odd facts, and about myself and my own reading habits where I love eclectic & brilliant minds but struggle to keep up sometimes.  If an author gives the editors hell and is considered Out There, I will gravitate towards it. (Y’all remember the Bukowski kick I went on recently)? That said, I can also admit when an author is just far, far too smart for me.

In the afterward, Ray Bradbury (my favorite short fiction writer, sorry Avram) agrees and stresses that reading one or two stories a night depending on the length is the best and only way to consume a book like this.  I also would stress that Davidson’s style starts ‘in a fog’ (Bradbury) and then slowly reveals itself, often times making us wait until the last paragraph or even the last sentence to get “the point” of the story. And oh, you’d better have been able to follow Davidson’s train of thought along the way too 😅. That’s where he lost me towards the end.

I’m not sad. I don’t feel like I wasted my time reading these. I tried. If you want to try too, go for it. I think this is a great collection to get some highlights of his work and related words from other authors. I think Davidson has some great classic stories that deserve to stay in circulation today, but there’s always going to be a lot of ‘other’ to wade through.

The 70’s

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From my final batch of stories, I’d like to nod to my favorites: essentially everything from the 70’s I loved except Manatee Gal, Wont You Come Out Tonight. Crazy Old Lady is sad and Selectra Six-Ten is hilarious. Obviously Polly Charms has much attention as well.

The 80’s & 90’s

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This final batch just did not connect with me. The Slovo Stove was probably my favorite because if nothing else, I thought the running joke and legitimate but impossible interest in obscure customs was hilarious. As a group these went over my head

Final thoughts

The last thing I’ll do is share an article I found by Henry Wessels

He wrote one thing that I feel wholeheartedly and have mentioned before while reading some of these stories, which is that reading Davidson just makes me feel like my reading is lacking in so many ways.  So many great authors and great  stories are mentioned that I’ve never even heard of. It makes me feel inadequate 😅 I hope Wessels won’t care that I linked to his article, it’s something I do when frankly someone just says something more eloquently than I can!

Anyway, these are my thoughts and I hope you’ll check out my other writing on Avram Davidson as I’ve made my way through this wild, difficult, wonderful book!

Categories
audiobooks Fiction Mysteries Science Fiction

The Avram Davidson Treasury: The Sixties (How I’m Getting the Hang of This)

I’m still reading a story here and a story there, and I’ve now made it through The Sixties! The first thing I’d recommend doing is checking out my intro post that also covered stories from the fifties, as I’m not going to repeat myself about the author and collection in general

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In general

Jumping right in, I think I moderately enjoyed the stories from the Sixties more than the Fifties.  Davidson’s penchant for language and linguistics came out in a more accessible format for someone like me, who’s not a genius and just likes reading good stories.

The Real MVP is Spider Robinson’s intro to Sacheverell, because it’s hilarious and now I want to read everything Spider has written. Anyone recommend where to start?

The magic of a google search

Many more good points were made by the authors introducing the stories, the main one being that most of the time Davidson omits “the point” on purpose, and leaves the reader to connect the dots.  I’m not good at this.  LeGuin pointed out that he throws in a lot of humor and extras, to see if people know what they mean, like the term “freemartin”, and it enhances the stories obviously if you catch his hints. That said, I’m so worried that I’m missing a lot of jokes and insights 🤣

A few of the stories so far have just made no sense to me whatsoever, so I jotted down a few keywords and did a Google search. Walla, boom, like magic, a historical backdrop popped out. (I’m looking at you, The Price of a Charm).

Frankly I’d just love to read these stories with someone who’s a better literary critic, because most of my insights are coming from the author intros and I’d miss the cool things if not for them, but I’m getting the hang of this!

Let’s talk about a few specific stories for kicks:
  • I read The Sources of the Nile twice, a few days apart, and I made more connections the second time around. Davidson had a lot of angst about what publishers & the public are looking for, I think, and he probably got a kick out of  writing this one
  • The Affair at Lahore Cantonment won an Edgar Award for best short story, and was on my reading list anyway for “reading that takes place in, or has meaning in London“. Personally I’m most enjoying the stories influenced by Davidson’s travels.  On the other hand, this is one of the stories that makes me feel like I don’t appreciate good literature enough.
  • I’m probably dumb. I thought Revolver had some good use of irony but I couldn’t see the humor 🤣
  • The Tail-Tied Kings … This was just weird and mildly disturbing, I don’t want to think about it any more LOL
  • The Price of a Charm I already mentioned above: this is the story that could have been read for what it was, until the end, where something happened and cast the rest into a light that made no sense. Well, insert Sarajevo into a search engine and BAM (no pun intended), a little background carries some of these stories a long way!
  • Sacheverell I also mentioned above, frankly I just took the story for it’s surface value (some guy kidnapped a talking monkey) but it’s a layered story. I just listened to a podcast about it prior to writing this. Anyway, the real MVP was Spider Robinson’s intro to the story
  • The House the Blakeney’s Built I also mentioned above, especially about LeGuin’s intro too.  This is a great story about what Davidson thought a colony would look like about 500 years after a family’s ship crashed.  Hint: it’s not Star Trek where everyone is still a genius.  I loved this one and how the language had devolved. Real or fake, he can write language!
  • The Goobers was straightforward and fun, loved the ending
  • The Power of Every Root … I feel like I should have guessed the ending based off the title but I had gotten too lost in Davidson’s depictions of everything.  As I said, the stories influenced by his travels are my favorites and I’m pretty sure he loved Mexico

Give me a couple more weeks and I’ll read the Seventies! I am reading this collection through a hardcover that I bought years ago, and partially through Audible as the book is currently free with membership. That small print gets me after a while! As always, all opinions are my own

Categories
Biographies, Memoirs, Nonfiction Fantasy Paranormal

Book Tour Stop: A Cup of Tea at the Mouth of Hell by Luke Tarzian

Thanks as always to Escapist Book Tours for having me on their tour for A Cup of Tea at the Mouth of Hell by Luke Tarzian! You can check out the book tour’s home page, see the other posts, and find out about the author at the link there!

A Cup of Tea at the Mouth of Hell book cover

Here’s the book blurb:

BRIEFLY, A WORD ABOUT ORDER

Order is the focal point around which existence revolves. Without order there is only chaos. And in the halls of Damnation (pronounced Dam-NAWT-ion, thank you kindly) the first sign of impending chaos is a cup of tea made without the water having first been well and properly boiled in a kettle.

Why is this relevant, O nameless narrator, you ask? Who cares about the preparatory order of tea in the fires of Hell?

Lucifer, dear reader. After all, how does one expect to properly greet the newcomers to Hell without having first had a hot cup of tea to bulwark the cold?

Behold The Morning Star, frantic on the annual Morning of Souls, the arrival of Damnation’s newest recruits.

Someone has misplaced the kettle.

See Also: Sad Boi Searches for His Missing Tea Kettle • Bring Your Tissues • Me, Myself, and I and the Times We Got High

My Thoughts:

I have a hard time rating emotional outpourings, it feels wrong to!! How do you even?  What can you say? The story itself is whimsy, clever, and a mix of funny and slightly hard to push through since I also lost a parent very recently and things are a bit .. fresh 

The novelette starts in one place and ends somewhere totally different.  Join the characters for Lucifer’s therapy session and a joint at a hellish pizza parlor before having a look at the author’s own life.

The story itself is a bit hard to follow in that at first the demon, Stoudemire, is telling the story, then there’s a “real life” letter thrown in, followed by more demon narration before Lucifer is the final voice. He uses the same phrases as Stoudemire too so while it’s not relevant to the story itself, it’s tough for me to follow similar voices on both narrators. Lastly, it switches back to the “real life” narrator before the third section, which is a lovely collection of the  author’s own meditations on grief, trauma, writing. I think my point is that the organization threw me off

But overall? Totally recommend. This is great. It’s funny. It’s “whimsy Hell” and you’re traversing trauma and The Phallic Forest at the same time. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it (and read it twice), I just think I’d have loved it if he would have grouped the fiction and nonfiction into their own sections to let the respective narratives flow.  I’ve actually got copies of the author’s books and 100% going to check them out sooner rather than later.

A Cup of Tea at the Mouth of Hell quotes (ig) (1)

Once again, thanks so much to Escapist Book Tours for having me. I found my copy of A Cup of Tea at the Mouth of Hell on Kindle Unlimited and as always, all opinions are my own ♥️

Categories
Science Fiction

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang (Book Thoughts)

Bookish Quick Facts:

  • Title: Exhalation: Stories
  • Author: Ted Chiang
  • Publisher & Release: Knopf, 2019 (this edition anyway)
  • Length: 368 pages
  • Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I finished the Exhalation collection yesterday and after browsing the top reviews on GoodReads, immediately decided that I was not smart enough to write any kind of reaction to this collection.  I actually sprung a headache trying to decipher some of these people’s essays.  Anyway, then I shook myself out of that idiotic train of thought because if a review is more complex than the original text, and it’s giving my fairly literate brain a headache, what service is it doing?

As I was dwelling on the complexity and profundity I didn’t feel, it occurred to me that I read most of this book while in a haze of exhaustion and general feelings of “f*ck me my face hurts”, but I also don’t think that affected my absorption or comprehension of the text and ideas.  So anyway, go read BlackOxford’s review if you want to feel smart, read mine if you want to feel like not a theological historian 🤣

Was I reading in a brain haze this week? Yes. Did I find any profound ideological connection to this? Not really. Did I enjoy reading it? Heck yes. Chiang has a straightforward, no nonsense writing style that is easy to read while not being overwhelming.  One can pick or choose how deeply to dive into the context of any given story. I’ll admit I’m not in the best place to emotionally connect to stories right now though, so when I revisit Chiang in the future I’ll be sure to do so in a clear mind.

As in any collection (short stories aren’t necessarily my favorite thing to read) there are some really great stories, as well as some that I didn’t connect with at all. Some ideas were interesting enough that I would put the book down and think it out a bit prior to reading the next, while some I admit my reaction to was: huh?

One thing I liked was that no matter how off track Chiang would get in the middle of a story, even if I had NO clue how he was going from point A to point C, he would wrap each story up with a powerful conclusion that let me come around and say -“OH OK yes that’s what he was getting at”! As in, he left no doubt between the conclusion and the author’s note what the takeaway idea/food for thought was intended to be.

My favorite part of the book in general was how each story had an author’s note at the end, so that the process of reading felt more like a conversation. It was interesting to hear where he got his inspiration from, what ideas were important, and he tossed in a few anecdotes too.  Any major questions I had were usually answered by the author’s note which is somewhat validating because I assumed it meant I was asking the right questions.

To talk about a few specific stories and ideas I liked –

The Lifecycle of Software Objects – I’m still just wondering what exactly that lady intended to do to that robot at the end. That said, it was a cool story (and the longest at 150 pages) because you can’t go wrong with AI and ethics and Chiang certainly didn’t.  I also liked all the platonic, unrequited, interesting character relationships that evolved as the humans and AI interacted with one another.

My favorite story to read was The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, because I just think it’s cool to examine memory and remembrance and the written form across cultures and society. I would certainly not want to remember every detail and argument of my life, I would go absolutely insane.  It was the most relatable to me as far as the forgiving vs forgetting theme and how we piece memories together. Oh Nicole, I feel you.

In Exhalation: so this was probably the most “profound” story but I’m a critical care nurse in real life and I don’t need anyone to preach inevitability to me.  Been there, had that existential crisis already. The robot surgery was for sure an interesting idea.

So yes, yes, go examine your life and have profound thoughts, for sure, don’t let me dissuade you from writing a dissertation on this story but I’m only here to enjoy the ride.

The other story that stood out was Omphalos and the lady that had to reassess her world view regarding the existence of God as science evolved.  It was another story where I wasn’t sure what Chiang was getting at until the end and I ended up struck by the theme of finding your own peace and satisfaction in the day to day, and, I guess finding your own validation.

Overall, the best I can do is advise people to read Chiang on a fresh brain and stay open minded throughout each story, since the ending always brings the story around full circle. Don’t let a few really, really smart sounding reviews and elitists scare you away.

I would definitely recommend Chiang to hard sci-fi fans and those who like to chew on big ideas, or, those who just enjoy a good story.  There’s enough slice of life thrown in that I  think just about anyone can read these and get some enjoyment out of it.

What made me feel small today was standing under these 8+ foot fall sunflower type variants, I don’t need the graveyard of space to feel like an inevitable ant thanks 🤣

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Categories
Fantasy Fiction General Fiction Paranormal

Book Review: Out of the Nowhere by K.B. Elijah

Thank you so much to the author for sending me a gorgeous finished copy of her anthology of short stories/novellas!

Quick Facts:

  • Title: Out of the Nowhere
  • Series: Moments in Time Anthology, #2
  • Author: K.B. Elijah
  • Publisher & Release: Self – May, 2020
  • Length: 335 pages
  • Rate & Recommend: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Yes for anyone 14+

An excerpt from the synopsis:

Out of the Nowhere: An android, a vampire, a time-traveller and Death himself walk into a bar. It may sound like a joke, yet this meeting is anything but…

Each of these novellas tells a great story with a beginning, a punch, a twist, and an ending, and most had a good laugh in there somewhere too. It is notable that anthology #1 does not need to be read prior to this one!

Death is featured as a normal guy running an office building. He is addicted to sweets and his wife is a vet. I just loved his two stories so much, especially the recap at the end where the book draws it’s title from – Out of the Nowhere.

Some other fun stories include a pirate fighting off the curse of an indignant ghost, which had me laughing quite a bit at the end. These shorter stories really connected over a short period of time which doesn’t always occur.  Another features a man trying to go back in time to save his brother, who learns a few things about fate and public nudity.

How about a god hog-tied to a horse, accidently sacrificed to another god? I can not believe how many hilarious, serious, unique things she came up with in such a short number of pages.

I ordered anthology #1 immediately upon finishing and can’t wait to read more from the author!!

Do you like anthologies?  Have you read any good short stories or novellas recently?