Sunday Spectacle: Books and Stories to Check Out

WRITING UPDATE: The new Full Moon Story is up. An Unhaunted House is a comedic tale about Miliwata, Florida, the most haunted city in the USA.

Check out the previous stories, The Conscience Switch, a peek behind the curtains of power that explains how the world can be so horrible sometimes, and Blissful Skies, about a little boy that hates his grandmother and loves falling stars.

I am now officially behind on the novel writing. I wrote exactly zero of the three thousand words I had targeted this week. I’ll be traveling later in March and my dream is I will be able to make up some wordage as I sit in airports and on the airplane. We’ll see. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

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BOOKS TO CHECK OUT: I note the books I’m currently reading in the right-hand column, and I have a page for books I’ve read in 2017 with a brief comment. This new feature Books to Check out will be an irregular post pointing to books that have caught my attention and made it to my to-read list. These are not books I’ve read, but books I might check out of the library. My personal inclinations and my day job combine to make me think about books. A lot. If you click through the links you can purchase the books at Powell’s. Or, my recommendation, visit your library. If they don’t have the book ask them if they have an interlibrary loan program.

I love Richard Kadrey. His Sandman Slim series is pure entertainment. And now he’s added a new comedic series.

“Coop, a master thief sort of gone legit, saved the world from an ancient doomsday device—heroism that earned him a gig working for the Department of Peculiar Science, a fearsome top secret government agency that polices the odd and strange. Now Woolrich, Coop’s boss at the DOPS, has Coop breaking into a traveling antiquities show to steal a sarcophagus containing the mummy of a powerful Egyptian wizard named Harkhuf. With the help of his pals Morty, Giselle, and a professor that’s half-cat, half-robotic octopus, Coop pulls off the heist without a hitch.

“It’s not Coop’s fault that when DOPS opened the sarcophagus they didn’t find the mummy they were expecting. Well, it was the right mummy, but it wasn’t exactly dead—and now it’s escaped, using a type of magic the organization hasn’t encountered before. Being a boss, Woolrich blames his underling for the screw up and wants Coop to find the missing Harkhuf and make it right, pronto.”

The Wrong Dead Guy (Another Coop Heist) by Richard Kadrey

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“From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism’s most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement’s rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability. At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, and Old Wives’ Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people’s lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement’s tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today’s feminisms.”

The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability by Kristen Hogan

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I was recently introduced to the concept of the nepantla, which prompted me to add The Gloria Anzaldua Reader by Gloria Anzaldua to my reading list.

“Nepantla is a concept used often in Chicano and Latino anthropology, social commentary, criticism, literature and art. It represents a concept of “in-between-ness.” Nepantla is a Nahuatl word which means ‘in the middle of it’ or ‘middle.'”

“Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was an American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, on her life growing up on the Mexican-Texas border and incorporated her lifelong feelings of social and cultural marginalization into her work.”

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“The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years.

“Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the future.” Over the decades, DARPA has been responsible for countless inventions and technologies that extend well beyond military technology. Sharon Weinberger gives us a riveting account of DARPA’s successes and failures, its remarkable innovations, and its wild-eyed schemes.”

Imagineers of War The Untold Story of Darpa the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World by Sharon Weinberger

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Out at the end of April. I’ve already pre-ordered it.

“In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company―a biotech firm now derelict―and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech.

“One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as salvage is little more than a green lump―plant or animal?―but exudes a strange charisma. Borne reminds Rachel of the marine life from the island nation of her birth, now lost to rising seas. There is an attachment she resents: in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet, against her instincts―and definitely against Wick’s wishes―Rachel keeps Borne. She cannot help herself. Borne, learning to speak, learning about the world, is fun to be with, and in a world so broken that innocence is a precious thing. For Borne makes Rachel see beauty in the desolation around her. She begins to feel a protectiveness she can ill afford.”

Borne by Jeff Vandermeer