You Should Read This: An Appreciation of Maya Angelou

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about books I’d recommend for writers focusing on their craft. This time I’m choosing books that are handy to have on a nearby shelf, particularly books that help spark new ideas, whether it’s at the overall story or plot level, or bits that can be used to adorn a story, the tiny embellishments like filagree or the lines in the Book of Kells, because we can always use new idea, little shocks, a kick in the head that turns the world askew in a way that lets us see it more clearly.

• The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Sometimes when I’m stuck on a story (or even a polish of a story), I like to look up things that appear in the story, using this dictionary. Looking at the lore behind a symbol can often help you use it effectively.
• Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures by Luc Reid. I love this little book both as a way to spark ideas for stories or characters, but also creating touches of authenticity when ivoking subcultures like rock climbers, sky divers, and UFO believers.
• Visual Dictionary – I like my Macmillan Visual Dictionary, but there’s also plenty of others, like Merriam Webster’s. If you don’t know what a widget or boat part or architectural feature is called, this will have it. A great aid towards precision.
• Some book of poetry. It could be anything, Shakespeare to Ogden Nash. T.S. Eliot. Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson. Something densely poetic. It can be prose, but it has to be dense, poetry-drenched prose, like Djuna Barnes or James Joyce. Recently I’ve been employing Rumi. Use it several ways – to spark timed writings or stories or whatever, but I use it primarily for coming up with titles.
• People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. (Kindle version) This is a view of history from the left, and one that looks at a lot of moments that are not covered in the mainstream history books. Look here for interesting story ideas or historical details for period pieces.
• Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer. (Kindle version) A career guide that is worth looking at repeatedly. (Disclosure: I wrote the appendix on writing workshops, but there are much, much wiser voices throughout the book, particularly Jeff’s.
• A tarot deck. Yes, technically not a book, but certainly there’s been plenty of books written about them and these books tap into all sorts of archetypes.
• The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, by Robert Graves. A rich source of European Mythology, Graves is both reading through or dipping into on an occasional basis, this can be another useful source of starting images, symbols, or even poetic titles. For similar books, look at Weston’s From Ritual To Romance or Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

In the last year or so, I found a genre that hadn’t previously been on my radar, but which I really enjoy: furry fiction. Kyell Gold had put up his novel Black Angel on the SFWA member forums, where members post their fiction so other members have access to it when reading for awards, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The novel, which is part of a trilogy about three friends, each haunted in their own way, showed me the emotional depth furry fiction is capable of and got me hooked. Accordingly, when I started reviewing for Green Man Review, I put out a Twitter call and have been working my way through the offerings from several presses.

Notable among the piles are the multiplicity by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and two appear in this armload. Clockwork Boys, Clocktaur War Book One (Argyll Productions, 2017) is the promising start to a fantasy trilogy featuring a lovely understated romance between a female forger and a paladin, while Summer in Orcus (Sofawolf Press, cover and interior art by Lauren Henderson) is aimed at younger readers and will undoubtedly become one of those magical books many kids will return to again and again, until Vernon is worshipped by generations and prepared to conquer the world. Honestly, I will read anything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, and highly recommend following her on Twitter, where she is @UrsulaV.

Huntress by Renee Carter Hall (Furplanet), which originally appeared in 2015, and whose title novella was nominated in the 2014 Ursa Major Awards and Cóyotl Awards, is a collection of novella plus several shorter stories. I’d love more in this fascinating and thought-provoking world, particularly following the novella’s heroine, the young lioness Leya, and the sisterhood of the huntresses, the karanja.

Always Gray in Winter by Mark J. Engels (Thurston Howell Publications, October, 2017) demonstrates one of the difficulties with furry fiction, which is the reader’s uncertainty where to site the fact of furry characters, primarily whether to take them as a given or have some underlying science to it, such as bio-modified creatures. Here Pawly is a were-cat, but the unfamiliar reader is forced to spend so much time figuring out whether this is something people take for normal or not that the story sometimes gets confusing, and with multiple POV shifts, the reader keeps having to re-orient themself. It’s tight, sparse military SF that readers familiar with the conventions of the genre will find compelling, entertaining, and quickly paced; newer readers may find themselves floundering a bit.

The Furry Future, edited by Fred Patten (Furplanet, 2015) is a solid and entertaining anthology that showcases how widely ranging the stories that use the rationale behind the existence of anthropomorphic beings as part of the narrative can be. Authors in the collection include Michael H. Payne, Watts Martin, J. F. R. Coates, Nathanael Gass, Samuel C. Conway, Bryan Feir, Yannarra Cheena, MikasiWolf, Tony Greyfox, Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden, NightEyes DaySpring, Ocean Tigrox, Mary E. Lowd, Dwale, M. C. A. Hogarth, T. S. McNally, Ronald W. Klemp, Fred Patten, and David Hopkins with illustrations by Roz Gibson and cover art by Teagan Gavet. This book is one that scholars writing about furry fiction will want to be including on their reading lists for reasons including its focus, its authors, the snapshot of the current furry fiction scene that it provides, and the variety of approaches to anthropomorphic body modification.

Along with the furry fiction, I wanted to point to an indie humorous horror collection that is one of the most specifically themed I have yet encountered, Ill Met by Moonlight by Gretchen Rix (Rix Cafe Texican, 2016), which features evil macadamia nut trees, including “Macadamias on the Move,” “Ill Met by Moonlight,” and “The Santa Tree” in a lovely sample of how idiosyncratic a sub-sub-niche can get. The production values of this slim little book show what a nice job an indie can do with a book and include a black and white illustration for each story.

You can read this review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/armload-of-fur-and-leaves/