I haven't been posting much lately, so, in case anyone was wondering, here's what's going on:

1. Dissertation writing. Seriously, this is most of what's been going on. I'm not even sure if there needs to be more of a list. I'm 40 pages into an approximately 60-page chapter 1 and I will need to completely rewrite its introduction and I'm still not sure if the argument is as good as I originally thought it was. But I'm working hard and making progress and should have a complete draft of the chapter in the next few days and should have a draft I can show my committee chair not long after that. (Then I get to go back to reading feminist SF novels for a while before attacking chapter 2.) In fact, the only reason I'm up so early today--seriously, I got up at seven and that's fucking miraculous--is the dissertation. I'm going to a university workshop on formatting the thesis/dissertation. Woo.

2. Teaching. Just one class this semester thanks to my dissertation fellowship, so it's not exactly stressful, it's just a thing that takes up time and energy. Forty minutes to campus and forty minutes back (not to mention the walk from the far end of the parking lot), plus teaching time, plus office hours, plus grading time. I actually am really enjoying my class so far and think it's going well, but that's a lot of time digging into writing. I don't get any writing done on those days. In addition, since I'm applying for jobs, I'm having people come in and observe my teaching so they can write about how awesome I am in their recommendation letters. Two have visited so far, one more this coming week, and another in a few weeks. So I have to prepare extra carefully on those days.

3. The job search. I'm not done with my dissertation (plan to defend and graduate in the fall), but I decided to apply for a select few jobs anyway. The odds say I won't get any of them because the market is just that tough, but it is possible that I'll beat the odds and wind up with a job right off the bat and even without getting a job, I benefit from going ahead and applying now. This way, when I go full-bore next year, I'll have a strong set of job materials already prepared (C.V., base application letters to be modified per job, teaching philosophy, teaching portfolio, writing sample(s), letters of recommendation). I'll be able to focus on the fine details of modifying my materials to match each job rather than trying to start from scratch and I will have had a lot more time to revise and perfect materials.

4. When I'm not doing those things, I'm spending time with Cory. I feel like I haven't seen as much of him lately as I would like because I'm always huddled over my computer working on one of the above things, but soon I will be done with chapter 1 and then I can hang out with him again. Until it's time to do this for chapter 2.

26 As a 1930s wife, I am Poor Take the test!

78 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

I am not surprised.

Inspired by drachin8's post along these lines, I thought I'd make a list of the best books I read in 2009. I read a lot last year thanks to studying for comps and doing research for my dissertation (in addition to just wanting to read, of course) and posted reviews of some of them here and probably even more on my goodreads page.

Here, in the order in which I read them, are the books that made the biggest positive impact on me last year (by which I mean I gave them five stars on goodreads):

1. Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley
2. Watchmen by Alan Moore
3. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.
4. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Záfon
5. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad
6. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Teaching with Your Mouth Shut by Donald Finkel
8. How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
9. A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey
10. Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
11. Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman

Despite my general preference for novels, this list includes quite a few other types of books, including short stories, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction (on feminism, science, and education).

And here is a list of all the books I read in 2009 organized by month and accompanied by their star ratings.

( 136, by my count. )

Whew. It's crazy to me that some months I read so many books and then in July I only read one book. Crazy.

“Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.”

It snowed Christmas Eve and we woke up Christmas morning to a lovely blanket of snow. I got up early to go outside and take pictures before it started to melt.

( More Christmas Day pictures. )

Cory and I went to meet some friends at Barcadia, a local bar that features a nicely varied selection of beers, a pretty good food menu, and arcade games. I drank a lot and took lots of pictures. I blame the many, many beers I had for the scarcity of actually good pictures from that night. Fortunately, I took a few pictures before I got very drunk.

This was a big year for me. I turned 30, completed Project 365, took (and passed with distinction) my comprehensive exams for my Ph.D., wrote my dissertation prospectus (and had it approved), was awarded two dissertation fellowships (one for fall 2009 and one for spring 2010), had a journal article accepted for publication, got engaged, moved in with Cory, and got married. I've also been making progress on chapter 1 of my dissertation, making new friends, and learning to do film photography in addition to digital. I liked 2009. A lot.

The list of big life-changing events will probably be shorter for 2010, but I anticipate it including my finishing and defending my dissertation. *fingers crossed and knock on wood and whatever other luck-inducing actions you can think of*

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a book I picked up simply out of morbid curiousity. I was certain it was going to suck and I could then rip it to shreds. I have to admit, however, that though it was not a good book by any means, it didn't suck as badly as I expected.

I can, however, identify three major problems with this book:

1. Its overwhelming dullness.
2. The gimmicky first-person omniscient narration.
3. The ending.

Dullness: Despite the subject matter (rape, murder, grief, romance), which really should have been interesting, this book was just boring. I blame this on the distance created by the narrative voice, which I will discuss in more depth later, and Sebold's tendency to have the narrator tell us about things instead of showing us the world.

Oddly, this really significant problem highlights the book's best quality and the only thing I can give Sebold any real credit for. In the midst of the hokey plot, lack of a compelling protagonist, and the many other things I didn't like about the book, there were brief, shining moments of truth. Every now and then, Sebold's narrator would include a small detail about a character that revealed something sharp and honest about that person. This happened when the narrator stopped trying to explain the person and just showed us what was there, so it didn't happen often, but this quality is what made the book readable for me. Just when I'd start to get so bored and ready to give up (because what fun is reading a bad book that's just boringly bad?), there'd be this nugget of clarity and good writing to break through the dullness, and I'd keep on reading. Unfortunately, the rarity of these moments, no matter how good they were, just made the rest that much duller by comparison.

Narrative Voice: The one thing that every person who writes about this book must mention is the fact that it's narrated by Susie Salmon, a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl who watches her family from heaven. According to many reviewers, this is something that makes Sebold's novel unique. The watching-from-heaven bit isn't unique to Sebold, though the first person omniscient perspective is certainly unusual. But there's a reason this perspective rarely gets used.

In this case, the narrative voice, aside from being fairly dull, is completely inappropriate for a 14-year-old girl. It is exceedingly rare in the book to be able to believe that the person telling this story is really Susie Salmon and not Alice Sebold. This is exacerbated by the fact that she is constantly telling us what the people she watches think, feel, desire, and even dream. She even tells us what her rapist and murderer dreams about and reveals his memories. How does she know this? Sebold doesn't bother to explain. Heavenly magic, I guess.

Furthermore, there are distinct reasons for choosing to write from a first person perspective and Sebold forsakes them all. The first of these is to develop a strong sense of the one character from whose perspective we see the world. But throughout, I don't feel like I know Susie even as well as I do the other characters in the book and this is supposed to be her story. This is partly because of the lack of a distinct 14-year-old girl voice and partly because of the additional omniscience itself, which takes the focus off of Susie, who's dead and, quite frankly, not doing anything interesting any more, and places it on the other living characters who are still doing things. The second reason to choose first person perspective is found in its limitations, which
the omniscient narrative voice undoes. It makes the story more interesting to have information unfold as the narrator discovers it and to have limitations on what we are told, to have to put the story together on our own, just as the narrator does, and to have to evaluate the trustworthiness and reliability of the narrator. None of that applies here.

Finally, this perspective is nothing more than a gimmick. It adds nothing to the understanding of Susie's family and friends that a more traditional third person omniscient perspective would--other than a weird sense of unease about how she knows what they're thinking and feeling. If Sebold wants to tell the story of Susie's family and how they deal with her death, it might be more compelling to just do so instead of adding the filter of Susie's occasional reflections on events from her vantage point in heaven. This actually goes beyond uneasy. It's downright creepy. Susie watches her family sleep, she watches them in their most private moments (both alone and with others), she reads their minds. She knows more about them than she would ever know living and, quite likely, more than any of them would really want her to know. (No girl--living or dead--should have sexual experiences vicariously through her mother and her sister.) What's more, these people have no choice in the matter and so her desire to know about them is less a nice way for her to care about them, protect them, and try to heal herself (as Sebold seems to want us to see it) and more a violation of their privacy. This lack of consent and total disregard for boundaries makes Susie's watching less that of a guardian angel and more that of a stalker.

The Ending: There is little logic in this book. It is, after all, about a wish-fulfillment heaven and stalker ghosts. However, even novels that take the fantastic as their starting point require some internal logic in order to work. The Lovely Bones does not have that.

( Here be spoilers! )

A lot of people love this book. I don't really understand why. I guess, like the cultural obsession with Twilight, it's something I won't really understand. It doesn't bother me (too much) that so many people love these books when there are so many truly great books being overlooked; people will read and enjoy what they will read and enjoy and their literary tastes are really no concern of mine. It does concern me, though, that both of these books feature distinctly stalkerish behavior presented as love. What does this say about us as a culture?

I wanted to like New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow, edited by Janrae Frank, Jean Stine, and Forrest J. Ackerman. It's a collection of a bunch of science fiction stories by women that I haven't already read in every other such anthology. With the exception of three stories (one being "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler), these stories were new to me.

However, most of the stories left me cold. The attempt to choose unfamiliar stories seems to have meant choosing less awesome stories. To my taste, the stories in the final section devoted to "The 80s and Beyond" were the best (including Lee Killough's "Symphony for a Lost Traveler," Maureen F. McHugh's "The Missionary's Child," and Karen Joy Fowler's "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things"), but this is only a small portion of the book.

The biggest problem I had with this book, though, was not in the choice of stories included. The editing is just terrible. And it is terrible on multiple levels. The copyediting is terrible: there are so many typos, not just in the introductions to the stories but in the stories themselves, some of them even inhibiting the clarity of the narrative. The fact-checking is terrible: several stories are placed in one chronological section (say the 1960s and 1970s) but really belong in another, authors' names are misspelled or misrepresented, and some publication dates for stories are just wrong. And the writing is bad, too. On top of all of that, in a book devoted to women writers of science fiction, the presentation of feminism hews frighteningly close to negative anti-feminist stereotypes.

In short, I wouldn't recommend this book. If you are looking for less commonly anthologized science fiction stories by women writers, you might find something worth reading here (I don't pretend that my tastes in SF are the same as everyone else's), but beware: its myriad mistakes make this a sometimes frustrating read, an unreliable source on some points, and considerably less worthy of the time and effort required to read it than are most anthologies.

Cory and I went to Pioneer Park in downtown Dallas to walk around and take pictures. There's an old cemetery there, a Confederate War memorial, and a massive sculpture project featuring some cowboys driving longhorn cattle down a hill. This is one of the cowboys. He looks intense and a little scary. No wonder the cattle are running from him.

( And here are a few more photos from that expedition. )

No spoilers here (don't worry, those of you who are still watching).

I just would like to say that the end of Battlestar Galactica made me very angry. I spent the last hour or so wanting to punch people for the things I was seeing on the show. Ronald D. Moore and the other writers fail.

I live in Texas.  It snows maybe once a year here.  So when I woke up last week and it was snowing outside, I leapt straight from my bed, grabbed my camera and whatever shoes and jacket were nearest the door and headed out to document this event.

It's a good thing I acted fast, too, because the snow didn't last too much longer and it certainly didn't stick.


( Cut for more snow pictures. )

The Guardian has posted a list of some of the worst books of the decade, which got me thinking about what I'd say the worst books of the decade were. Their list and the commenters' opinions are skewed heavily toward the kind of literary fiction I don't generally read, so I can't just use theirs.

So here are my suggestions for worst books of the decade (focusing on fiction):

1. Stephenie Meyer, all the Twilight books. Seriously. This should be a gimme.
2. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (as well as his other books, which are not substantially different from The Da Vinci Code).
3. Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Soul-killing, bloated, overrated.
4. Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted. Yuck.
5. Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters. Another yuck.
6. Darin Straus, Chang and Eng. Interesting premise, but thoroughly disappointing.
7. Christopher Paolini, Eragon. Derivative.
8. Connie Willis, Passage. Way too long and annoyingly hopeful in the end.

I was hoping to get to ten, but I seem to have hit a wall. Part of my problem in making this list is that most of the books I've read in the last few years have been older books that just don't count for this list, no matter how bad they were (I'm looking at you American Psycho, Stranger in a Strange Land, Almanac of the Dead, and Narnia), or have been, apparently, good books.

Or maybe I've just blocked out the other terrible books I've read recently.

Anybody have any other suggestions?

Since I finished my Project 365 a few weeks ago, I've been wanting to start a new (but not daily) project. I think I may have mentioned this before, but what I decided on was a pair of 52 Weeks projects, where I take a post a dedicated photo every week. I'm doing one on film and one with my digital camera. I started two weeks ago; it's just taken me a while to work through all the photos from that week and decide which ones to use for the project. The photos I chose to represent the first week (digital first and then film [taken on my Zeiss Ikon folding camera) are ones I've posted before, but I'll post them again for the sake of the project.

( Pictures behind the cut. )
I'll generally try to post the digital photos near the end of the week they represent, but the film ones will, since I don't develop them myself, always be late.

This is the final honeymoon post. I'm not actually thrilled with the Holga pictures. I should've used film with a higher ISO. These are too dark. And then ones that have decent light have more light leaks than past rolls.  I guess I need to tape it up a little more.  Oh well.  I'll remember that next time.

( The last of the honeymoon photos. )

Driving out of Hot Springs on Highway 7, you cross Lake DeGray.  When I lived out there, this is the lake we used to go to for fishing and swimming.  We stopped there for a while to look around and take pictures.  Because it was a cold and gray day (and a Monday), it was pretty much empty, though occasionally people would drive by very slowly and look at us.

( Loads more photos. Seriously. )
This concludes the digital photography portion of our honeymoon. I have just gotten the film photos back from the lab, though, so I'll be posting a few more honeymoon photos soon before it's all over.

On our way out of Hot Springs, we stopped near a house where I used to live. It's at the foot of a small mountain and so we--of course--decided to drive up to the top of the mountain and look around. Cory was a little nervous because it was a steep and windy drive and his car isn't really made for that, but we made it fine. We drove into some serious fog before we made it to the top, which compromised our view. Plus, the very top was fenced off and housed some kind of power exchange, but we got out and I took some pictures anyway.

( Lots more photos! )

At the time, I was a little sad that it was such a misty (and foggy) morning because I'd wanted to take some nice pictures of the two of us downtown in the morning sunlight (we only have one picture of teh two of us together, not counting the one from this trip where he's biting my head), but seeing these pictures now, I'm glad of the change in weather--and I'm glad it didn't happen until we were done hiking and on our way out of town.

After giving up on reaching the peak of the park, we hiked back to the car. On the way back, we noticed a nice lookout point on the path that we hadn't noticed at all on the initial walk through. I guess we were really wrapped up in our conversation at that point.

( More photos of the rest of the hike. )

Upon reaching the bottom, we rested for a while in the cute little park across the street before mustering the energy to get in the car and drive back to the motel. This bench was a welcome sight.

After our quick lunch, we headed out to hike the other side of the park. I really wanted us to make it to the highest point in the park, but exhaustion and the quickly setting autumn sun made that impossible. It was still a great hike, though.

( More pictures and silliness. )