Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls (Katherine Larsen & Lynn S. Zubernis)

N.B.: As this is perhaps the niche-iest books I've ever read, I am simply gonna write this as a chatty book report for my fic friend Jessi. The rest of y'all, feel free to stop reading; I won't be mad.

Hi sweet pea! Super jealous of your 3 a.m. lasagna.

Let me first of all tell you what may, for you, be the fatal flaw of Fangasm: it was completed in 2008, and took five years to find a publisher. Thus, it contains woefully little Misha; he shows up in the last chapter, is awesome and adorable, and then the book ends. This also means that the discussion of fic is limited to Wincest, which I know is on your NOPE list, and RPS, which is on mine.

But fic is actually a small part of the story here. It's a strange book, a hybrid of memoir and sociology (a little heavy on the former for my taste, but I'm kind of a jerk about memoirs generally). The authors, both college professors with real jobs and lives and children, document their trajectory as SPN fangirls. They discovered the show, then fic & wank, started attending cons (much to the chagrin of partners & children. I'm not gonna lie, were I a 15-year-old girl and my mom was flying across the country to ogle some hot twentysomething actor, I'd be mortified).

At some point, they had the admittedly brilliant idea to write a book about their fandom, which had the sneaky side effect of parlaying their academic credentials into access to the cast & creators. There are some great interviews in here: J2, obviously (and now I can say, yeah, they seem like nice dudes, but realllll ordinary. Whereas Misha? Total weirdo, hence one of My People), but there're also some nice moments with Jim Beaver, Samantha Ferris, etc. The more they approach BNF, however, they find the line between shrieky fangirl and serious scholar ever more difficult to navigate; eventually, their project comes to the attentions of TPTB and they're signed on to do an official book on SPN fandom (which comes with waaaaay increased access, natch)--but they finally realize that TPTB aren't interested in what they actually wanted to write about, i.e. fangirl guilt, shame, infighting, and above all, the sexual aspects of the fandom. (Because obvy, as much as they keep putting gorgeous people in our faces, TPTB don't want to hear about fan appreciation of such beauty, because Nice Girls don't have libidos.) Whereupon they were promptly dropped, slapped with a freakin' cease-and-desist order, and were left with a nearly completed orphan.

So. Would you like it? Probably, though it's not as insightful as Fic. I do like their notion that we all define "crazy fan" as the person juuuuuust over the horizon from where we're at, and they've got some smart things to say about how odd it is that a group of people linked by passion can clique off and turn on each other for not liking the same thing in the "right way." I really feel bad for Larsen & Zubernis having to wait so long to publish, because there's so much they weren't able to cover, and the book feels understandably dated. And also, it needs more Misha.

The Haunted Bookshop (Christopher Morley)

What to say about Christopher Morley's delightful The Haunted Bookshop that I didn't already say about his first adorable novella about the bookselling life, Parnassus on Wheels? Honestly, not much. This one takes place in Brooklyn itself, itinerant bookmonger Roger Mifflin having settled down with his wife, Helen, and opened a bookshop in place. There's a bit of a romance and a shred of plot, the latter of which hinges on some embarrassing-in-retrospect anti-German sentiment, but one can overlook that in a 1919 work. There are, regrettably, no actual ghosts.

There are, however, quotable bits in spades, so I'm just gonna let Morley take it from here. Many of these could be a framed manifesto on the wall of any indie bookstore. Or a tattoo:

• "I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. . . . My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms."
• "Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives."
• "The life of a bookseller is very demoralizing to the intellect," he went on after a pause. "He is surrounded by innumerable books; he cannot possibly read them all; he dips into one and picks up a scrap from another. His mind gradually fills itself with miscellaneous flotsam, with superficial opinions, with a thousand half-knowledges. Almost unconsciously he begins to rate literature according to what people ask for."
• "One thing, however, you must grant the good bookseller. he is tolerant. He is patient of all ideas and theories. . . . He is willing to be humbugged for the weal of humanity. He hopes unceasingly for good books to be born."
• "[A gathering of booksellers is] likely to be a little--shall we say--worn at the bindings, as becomes men who have forsaken worldly profit to pursue a noble calling ill rewarded in cash."
• "The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them."
• "I will tell you a secret. I have never read King Lear, and have purposely refrained from doing so. If I were ever very ill I would only need to say to myself 'You can't die yet, you haven't read Lear.' That would bring me round, I know it would."

Fic (Anne Jamison)

My forays into different genres have lately led me to dabble in the least respected one of all: fanfiction. And by "dabble," I mean that I've written 27,000 words since August--and read many, many more--that center on the pairing of Dean and Castiel from Supernatural, because they are madly in love, dammit, and no amount of furious backpedaling from the writers this season will convince me differently.

Uhm. Excuse me while I wrestle myself back to the point . . . or, rather, use my obvious emotional investment in a subtextual relationship between fictional characters as the perfect segue into the marvelous project that is Anne Jamison's book Fic.

Part anthology, part literary criticism, part sociology, Fic faces the concept and community of fanfiction (as the title implies, people who write/read it don't call it fanfiction) head-on, warts and all, through the lens of history, technology, and a few exemplary fandoms--Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, The X-Files, Harry Potter, Twilight, and yes, my dearly beloved Supernatural. Jamison includes essays by fan writers galore; interviews conceptual writers excited by fic's alterations in the relationship between text and author, media and consumer; and delves deeply into the Fifty Shades of Grey controversy, which it turns out is far more complicated and illustrative of the collaborative nature of fic than I'd imagined.

As a guide, Jamison herself is first-rate, her writing conversational, but a conversation with a snarky smartypants (like pretty much all the acquaintances I've made at Archive of Our Own, a huge fic archive whose founders speak in these pages as well). She understands the urge to expand upon and correct primary texts, having written some Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic in her day, and is able to draw parallels between modern fanfiction and old concepts of authorship without simplistically equating them:

Reworking an existing story, telling tales of heroes already known to be heroic, was the model of authorship until very recently. This book is organized to highlight both this kind of continuity with the past, and also what I see fanfiction doing that I believe to be new. . . . Paradoxically, fanfiction, the cultural enterprise apparently dedicated to revisiting familiar ground, ends up leading us to new models of publishing, authorship, genre, gender . . . and to voyeuristic aliens who resemble lava lamps, vampire peaches, sex pollen, and an entire universe based on the structure of the canine penis.

Reading this book has erased the last vestige of shame I felt about writing fic rather than wholly original work (though I still think it's prudent to post my slash under a pseudonym), has in fact made me proud to be part of both a history of reader engagement that spills over into creation--didja know that William Thackeray was so pissed off by the end of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe that he wrote his own ending instead, where Ivanhoe married the right woman?--and nebulous new worlds that blur the line between (as Lev Grossman says in his introduction) "genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality."

Also, I'll have you know I write world-class smut.

(FTC disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Smart Pop, in exchange for an honest review.)

Hild (Nicola Griffith)

My rave review of Nicola Griffith's imagined life of St. Hilda of Whitby, written for F5.

I liked these books, 2013 edition.

This hasn't been my best year for reading or blogging, alas. But as end-of-year tradition dictates, here are the ones I did read that knocked my socks clean off! (Links go to my reviews if I managed to get them written.)

Bury Me Deep and Dare Me, Megan Abbott
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic, Emily Croy Barker
Fatale (comics series), Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips
The Book of Dangerous Animals, Gordon Grice
NOS4A2, Joe Hill
The Wooden Shepherdess, Richard Hughes
At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson
The Next Time You See Me, Holly Goddard Jones
Ghost Lights, Lydia Millet
Anna and the French Kiss, Stephanie Perkins
All three Fairyland books by Catherynne M. Valente
The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer
Saga (comic series), Brian K. Vaughan/Fiona Staples
Winner of the National Book Award and Amy Falls Down, Jincy Willett

Winner of the National Book Award (Jincy Willett)

I picked up Jincy Willett's Winner of the National Book Award used at KC's Prospero's Books, cause it was across the street from the Indian restaurant we were meeting relocated NYC friends for one of the best brunches I've ever had. Merciful Zeus, it's good. Heartbreaking and terrifying and utterly, completely hilarious.

The setup could easily make for the dourest of Important Literary Novels (you know, the kind that actually win the National Book Award): it's the story of the inseparable lives of twins Dorcas and Abby Mather, one spinster librarian, one overweight sexpot, and the latter's operatic and abusive marriage to novelist Conrad Lowe--which ends in his death at her hands. Most of the novel is flashback, as Dorcas hunkers down in her library during a spectacular storm, reading the true-crime account of Abby's life and crime . . . correcting as necessary.

Dorcas is a clear-eyed, cynical narrator, and it's her Saharan wit that makes this tragic tale into a comic delight. She's eschewed sex for a lifelong love of books, and her descriptions of the bookish soul made me proclaim "YES EXACTLY" out loud multiple times. (There's a whole paean to reading Nancy Drew and world fairytales as a child that I could've written.) Willett's sharp eye for the excesses of literary culture is on display here too, as in her most recent novel, Amy Falls Down, one of my faves of the year.

And here's where I stop talking and just quote:

• "Nobody appreciates the horror of a good book dying on the wrong shelf."
• "Guy gleamed with sweat, as though mere existence on the material plane were physically exhausting."
• [A blurb on Abby's bio]: "...you will weep, you will tremble, you will cheer, and yes, you will laugh...incredible, horrifying, nauseating, and, ultimately, life-affirming and empowering. Abby Mather's triumph is our triumph.--Victoria Fracas, author of Rape, Rape, Rape
• "New Yorkers genuinely have no curiosity. They don't want to know. New Englanders do, but they'll be damned if they'll ask."
• "How well do you remember that, say, six-year-old six-hundred-pager the Times assured you was destined to  become a classic? You know. The 'monumental work of fiction' that you were supposed to run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore to purchase, the book that was going to change your life, that you must read this year if you read nothing else...Winner of the National Book Award. You remember. Handleman's Jest. Parameters & Palimpsests. The Holocaust Imbroglio. We sell these babies for fifty cents apiece, or try to, seven years after they come out. We sell them because nobody has checked them out for four years."

And my absolute favorite paragraph, which encapsulates my experience with reading better than I've ever been able to:

Reading was not an escape for her, any more that it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking.

(Parting words: two fantastic essays by Ron Hogan on criticism also made me proclaim "YES EXACTLY" a few times this week. He puts forth the notion that book critics err when they start to believe they can judge a work's intrinsic worth, suggesting the humble but still valuable alternative that I've been trying to do all along: "Instead of saying 'This and only this is how fiction should be done!' we can say 'This is a way of doing fiction that works for me,' and if we can work past that level to 'And here’s what I’ve figured out about why it works for me,' even better." Good stuff.)

Scrambling up-to-date.

I'm not gonna make you listen to my excuses, because snoozers. Let's just get to the good stuff.

First, a handful of comics:

• The second volume of Saga (Brian K. Vaughan/ Fiona Staples) is every bit as marvelous as the first, and I'm just leaving it at that. You should all be reading it.
• Superhero-wise, Chris insisted I'd like Flashpoint (Geoff Johns/ Andy Kubert), and indeed! The Flash is my favorite character in the DC Animated Universe, cause he's such a goofball--this story's quite different, but it's gritty without being too gritty for my taste (*cough Frank Miller cough*), an AU where Barry Allen (The Flash's forensic scientist alter ego) wakes up in a world consumed by the war between the Amazons and the Atlanteans, his old friends scattered and changed, many beyond recognition. There's the parallel-worlds fun of matching up the new characters with the familiar ones; my favorite of these was the reimagining of Captain Marvel as a ragtag bunch of teens, each possessing one of Shazam's powers. And I'm a sucker for time-travel narratives, the more twisty the better.
• And since I've read and loved all of Joe Hill's prose-only fiction, I wanted to add his just-completed comics series, Locke & Key, a try. I didn't dislike it--Hill continues to be my favorite modern horror writer--but I found myself wishing it was a novel; all Gabriel Rodriguez's dudes have really big chins and I found that super distracting. (I know, I'm not very good at reading comics.)

And some books without pictures!

• Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider is nineteenth-century horror in microcosm: come for the deals with the Devil and some frowny-face-earning sexism and class snobbery...stay for the titular evil arachnid literally bursting out of someone's face in gloriously florid detail. So worth it.
• And for my feelings on Catherynne M. Valente's astonishing The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, I shall refer you to my prior gushing over the series. These are seriously among the best books for children I've ever, ever read. No, scratch that, they are among the best books period I have ever read. This one ends on a cliffhanger, which usually annoys me--but in this case, it just means there's more to come. I am already breathless with anticipation.

(FTC disclaimer: I received free copies of  The Black Spider and The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two from NYRB Classics and Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan Books for Children, in exchange for honest reviews.)