The world's own optimist

I have been thinking about the moment when I first thought analytically about prose. It happened sometime during my English Language A-level. I had a combative, Harold Bloom-esque relationship with my teacher, Miss M – a vivid and brilliant woman whom I would now adore and treat with the respect she deserved rather than trying [...]

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On Saturday, I went with two good friends to the Rereading Georgette Heyer conference at Lucy Cavendish College, and very good it was too. Apparently – and remarkably, to my mind – it is the first conference to be devoted to Heyer’s works. I think there were around 80 of us in attendance, and the [...]

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Happy 80th birthday, Ursula Le Guin! Hardly a day goes by without me finding yet another sentence of yours that I love, but here are a few more I found yesterday, from the 1986 Bryn Mawr Commencement Address: “…when women speak truly they speak subversively–they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, [...]

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Originally post on the Wiscon LJ here. Email from Vonda N. McIntyre: “Hi everybody, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 80th birthday is on 21 October 2009 and I’m going to post a Happy Birthday Ursula message on my website and my blogs that day, and I think I have some other folks talked into doing the [...]

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It’s a year since I joined BookMooch, so I thought I’d post about the experience. BookMooch is an online community that enables the exchange of books: you post an inventory of books that you’re willing to exchange, earn points for sending them out, and then use those points to request books that you want. Joining [...]

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I was delighted to hear that Chris Beckett won the Edge Hill short story prize over the weekend for his SF anthology The Turing Test. This is the only prize in the UK for a short story collection. The other shortlisted authors included a Booker winner (Anne Enright) and two Booker shortlisters (Shena MacKay and [...]

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I am so pleased that Powers, the third book in Le Guin’s trilogy Annals of the Western Shore has won a sixth Nebula for her. It is the most remarkable book about the quest for freedom, identity, self-knowledge. Reading it felt like being given a gift of wisdom and craft. The other books are splendid, [...]

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What a well-constructed, well-executed, vapid, and self-congratulatory book this is! Street directions lifted from Google Maps stand in for the evocation of place, compulsive lists – authors, bands, sushi – stand in for characterization. American Psycho does this, but it is a sign of Patrick Bateman’s sickness. Here is one particular offence: “I peruse Henry’s [...]

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Not to turn this journal into a constant Le Guin lovefest, but I finished up her anthology The Birthday of the World yesterday. Even when she’s at her weakest (the title story, for example) she’s pretty damn good. But I wanted mostly to blog impressions of the last, long story (novella) in the book, ‘Paradises [...]

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I can’t believe how much better I feel. Last weekend I was tottering around and my immune system felt like a fragile lace around me. This weekend I’m leaping around like a young gazelle. Well, actually I’m snuggled up in the house in front of my computer, but that’s a lot livelier than last week. [...]

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