Author: Marilyn Evans

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Where the Heck Have I Been!

People who read my blog: So, Marilyn, what have you been up to (instead of writing blog posts)?

Me: Grab a beverage, sit down. This might take a while.

First and foremost, sometimes I feel like I’ve got nothing to contribute to the world of literature at large. Other times I have lots of ideas but don’t seem to get them down and in the ether before they slide away. Either way, there can be a long pause. I apologize to my teeming masses of adoring fans.

Of course, there are other things in my life than writing blog posts. There is the eternal struggle with my garden, for example. Cloud, our opera singing cat, has taken it upon himself to keep the bunnies and chipmunks in hand (paw?) which my growing things much appreciate. At least those of the growing things that could be bothered to come out of the ground. I have discovered that our house is too cold in the winter for seeds to germinate. Maybe next year starting in February or March we’ll all snuggle together under the electric blanket. Then in the spring, out of doors it was first too cold, then too wet, then too dry, then too hot. The seeds stayed in bed. Not sure I blame them. But there is always one showoff—the cucumbers are going berserk. I have so many that pickles are inevitable. As for the rest? The tomatoes keep losing focus, the radishes have forgotten that they exist for roots, the cantaloupe and watermelon have all the vines in the world but not much else. I may have potatoes some day, but I’m afraid to look. I’ll just believe and hold out hope until I’m forced to dig them up. Schrodinger’s potatoes.

In other adventures, when I couldn’t get glasses to make things pretty and clear, cataract surgery it was. Since the worse of the two eyes is always done first, for a week or so you get to walk around switching eyes and saying, “Holy mackerel! I had no idea I have been looking through pond water!” Now I get to see without glasses for the first time since first grade, except when I want to read. Putting on glasses instead of taking them off to read is sort of weird.

And finally, what have I been writing instead of blogs? Query letters, synopses, cover letters, the things I hate most in the world. I know Stephen King says he loves all aspects of writing, but honestly, these are harder for me than anything. I’ve now sent off my father’s memoir to a publisher and The Gingerbread House, as well. I should be getting rejection letters in a few months, and then I’ll do it all over again. But now that those odious tasks are out of the way, on to the fun stuff.

First, I get to write a blog post moaning about my garden and the agony of trying to get things published. Next I’ll start working on my very first screen play, which I’m pretty pumped about. Mind you, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, but that has seldom stopped me in the past. Between the scenes, I’ve started working on a nonfiction book. I’ve written way more nonfiction than fiction, so this should be easyish. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see. After those, there is probably going to be a Gingerbread House sequel, I need to finish Wickham’s Daughter, there is still The Iliad in Space (working title), and Jocasta of Thebes hasn’t even loaded into the starting gate. If I have a great time with the screen play (I’m doing my friend, Dennis Young’s, Mercenary because the tutorials say you should never do your own adaptation first), I will go on to do a screenplay for Beloved Lives.

So that’s what I’m doing on my summer vacation. You?

Image: Cloud taking a break from bunny wrangling. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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1800’s Science Fiction Part I

Jonathan Hutchins, Rachel Ellyn, and I had the great pleasure presenting a panel at Planet Comicon Kansas City on the science fiction of the 19th Century. Anyone who didn’t  make it, or anyone who did and is curious about our list of works and authors and a few other fun facts, here it is! At least as much as I have time, space, and stamina to put down.

For the purposes of this panel, the 1800’s included 1800 to 1899. Some of the authors wrote into the 20th century, but we did not include these. Also, we excluded for the most part, fantasy and gothic novels. Science fiction we defined (as did Mary Shelley) stories where the action is based on scientific possibility whereas fantasy usually has some magical element. Also please not, many of these stories have elements of misogyny, racism, nationalism, and other things that were current to the time and should be read with that in mind.

1805 Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville publishes The Last Man, a novel about the end of humanity (and the world). Includes balloon flight from Europe to Brasil. The planet has lost fertility from overuse, and only one man and one woman remain fertile. Apocalyptic and futuristic.

1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, considered proto-science fiction. Published in three volumes, sometimes called a three-decker or triple decker, this was a standard form of publishing for British fiction during the nineteenth century.

The 1831 “popular” edition was heavily revised by Mary Shelley to make the story less radical. The one most widely published and read although a few editions follow the 1818 text. Some scholars prefer the original version, arguing that it preserves the spirit of Mary Shelley’s vision (see Anne K. Mellor’s “Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach” in the W. W. Norton Critical edition).

1826 Mary Shelley publishes The Last Man, an apocalyptic and dystopian novel set in the 21st Century after a global plague, one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction published. It was critically savaged and remained largely obscure at the time of its publication. It followed several other last-man themed works including a French narrative (Le Dernier Homme de Grainville’s book[1805)]), Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816), and Thomas Campbell’s poem “The Last Man” (1824).

Receiving the worst reviews of all of Mary Shelley’s novels, but she later spoke of The Last Man as one of her favorite works.

1827 Jane Webb The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century Published anonymously in 1827 by Henry Colburn in three volumes. It drew many favourable reviews. In 1830, a 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon tracked down the 22-year-old author and married her. She filled her world with foreseeable changes in technology, society, and even fashion. England is Catholic and ruled by Queen Claudia. Her court ladies wear trousers and hair ornaments of controlled flame. Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. Air travel, by balloon, is commonplace. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms—galvanic shock rather than incantations—”she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies” to those later in the 19th century.

1830 First intercity passenger railroad, Manchester to Liverpool

1833 Edgar Allan Poe publishes “MS Found in a Bottle”, a hollow earth story, submitted as an entry to a writing contest offered by a weekly magazine. The judges unanimously chose “MS. Found in a Bottle” as the contest’s winner, earning Poe a $50 prize. The story was then published in the October 19, 1833, issue of the Visiter.

1834 Cambridge University historian and philosopher of science William Whewell coined the term “scientist” to replace such terms as “cultivators of science” or “natural philosopher”. It was used to describe Mary Somerville, astronomical mathematician whose calculations, among other things, led to the discovery of Neptune.

1835 Poe publishes “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall“, a short story published in the June issue of a monthly magazine as “Hans Phaall — A Tale”, intended by Poe to be a hoax. He uses meticulous technical descriptions. The story traces the journey of a voyage to the moon. Poe planned to continue the hoax in further installments, but was pre-empted by the “Great Moon Hoax” which started in the August 25, 1835 issue of the New York Sun daily newspaper.

The “Great Moon Hoax“, also known as the “Great Moon Hoax of 1835“, was a series of six articles published in The Sun beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of that time. Authorship of the article has been attributed to Richard Adams Locke (1800–1871), a reporter who, in August 1835, was working for The Sun. Locke publicly admitted to being the author in 1840, in a letter to the weekly paper New World.

1836 First long distance balloon free flight

1838 Poe publishes the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket first as a few serialized installments, though never completed. The full novel was published in July 1838 in two volumes. Some critics panned the work for being too gruesome and for cribbing heavily from other works, while others praised its exciting adventures. Some hollow earth elements. Considered an influence on Melville and Verne.

1839 Poe publishes “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” an apocalyptic story first published in December 1839, and was included that same month in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Inspired by comets and religious end of the world predictions (1842 was proposed).

1844 Nathaniel Hawthorne “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a Gothic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844, and later in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher, grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others. Scientist who experiemnts on his own daughter, her lover tries to “detox” her but she is a poison herself and dies.

1851 Jules Verne A Voyage in a Balloon has been described as a techno thriller. Verne uses the devise of the balloon travel to describe the then fairly unknown (to Europeans) areas of Africa. The first of Verne’s stories to appear in English. His works were widely plagerized largely due to the lack of copyright laws at the time.

1859 Hermann Lang The Air Battle: A Vision of the Future Ostensibly Lang is a German professor, but, there is no German edition of his novel and Lang is likely a pseudonym of a UK author. The novel presents a world several millennia in the future, long after European civilization has been destroyed by floods, earthquakes and other disasters. Peace-loving Black rulers of the country of Sahara dominate Africa, and in a final battle with other powers using their great heavier-than-air machine weapons establish a beneficial worldwide Pax Aeronautica, possibly the first use of air power in science fiction. Remarkably for this period, mixed race marriage is strongly approved of.

1864 Jules Verne Journey to the Center of the Earth Subterranean world. This is not strictly a hollow Earth story as the travelers only go a few miles underground but they encounter a lost world. A great adventure story.

Arthur B. Evans is regarded as the best translation of Jules Verne. Recognizing that there were so many bad and abridged and redacted versions, new translations are available including by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. The translations available on Project Gutenburg are considered quite good.

1865 Verne From Earth to the Moon Space travel by means of a “gun”. Detailed technical descritions are included in this story. Suggests the use of a solar sail.

1865 Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures Underground Subterranean adventure

1868 Edward S. Ellis The Steam Man of the Prairies Possibly the first science fiction “dime novel”, preqels to “pulp fiction”. The Steam Man is based on a real invention, built by and patented by Zadoc P. Dederick and Isaac Grass (U. S. patent no. 75874). A fur trapper, two gold miners and a teenaged boy who is a brilliant inventor as well as a hunchbacked dwarf, use the steam man to aid them on their adventures to mine for gold. Many steam powered, robot-like mechanisms appear later in the Frank Reade series 1876-1893. Indians are encountered (during the 1800’s there were continuous Indian wars until 1891) as well as a gigantic trapper who wants to rob them.

1869 Edward Everett Hale “The Brick Moon”, a novella. Friends discuss the need for something akin to the North Star to navigate by but allowing east to west not just north to south; they propose building a brick moon. They build a huge satellite of hollow bricks, and a fly wheel, powered by a dam, to fling it into the air. A storm causes the families of the builders and others to shelter in the nearly finished moon when an accident causes it to launch prematurely. The narrator, with the help of an incredibly strong telescope, discovers the people are still alive and getting along just fine. They communicate with Earth by jumping up and down to send Morse code. The Earth people figure out how to send messages by huge sheets (reminiscent of how The Martian communicated in the film). They send some things by the flinging fly wheel (the ladies insist on sending baby clothes). In the end, they decide to just live and let live like letting a grown child go.

1869 Verne Around the Moon The sequel to From Earth to the Moon. Again, many detailed technical descriptions.

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For the Child I Was

I was one of those little girls who was mad for horses. And ponies. And equine creatures generally. On my fifth birthday, I blew out the candles on my cake and ran to see if my pony was standing in the snow. My father couldn’t get me a pony, of course, but that didn’t stop me from wanting and dreaming and loving, and it didn’t stop him from trying every way he knew how to make it up to me. When he built a house for himself and my two brothers and me, the wall paper in my room had horses, the lamp on my dresser was a black knight on a black horse, pictures of horses cut from magazines and traced from books covered the wall by my bed. When we went to the Kansas City Zoo, I always got to ride the ponies, a slow plod up and down a narrow track, once when we first arrived and once just before we left to go home. I must have been a strange figure, sitting completely still, holding on to the little bar on the saddle, solemn in the moment of bliss that had to last me until the next trip to Kansas City.

Fifty years after blowing out those candles, I finally got a horse. She was slender and delicate, a lady’s horse, copper colored like a bright new penny. I loved her more than I can say. When, after years of great adventures together, she developed severe laminitis, a terrible and painful affliction, she had to be put down. My heart was broken.

My husband still has a horse, and we ride her one or two times a week. I no longer fox hunt or go over jumps or even really gallop. But the little girl I once was needs to ride a horse sometimes. To have wanted something so much for so long, it would be wrong to deprive myself of that. On a cold day when it would have been easier to stay home and read than to go out to the stable and brush all the mud off of the horse and clean her feet and tack her up, I realized that the little girl I had been would have done nearly anything for the opportunity to brush that horse and ride her. That made me wonder what other things she had longed for, prompted me to try to remember what that the girl I once was longed dreamed about. I’m a grownup now and can fulfill her wishes. I can see an ocean, walk on a mountain, write a book, visit friends late into the evening. I can have a pet who sleeps in the bed with me. I can paint and learn to play the piano and write poetry. No one says I have to do any of it well. But she can. I can do that for her. For me.

Image: Amish Honey and me, by Jonathan Hutchins.

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Food of Love

Happy New Year everyone! This was supposed to go out yesterday, but as Bob Cratchit said in A Christmas Carol, “I was making rather merry yesterday.” So here is the last post of 2022 or the first of 2023, however you care to count it.

Over the holidays I did a lot of baking. I made cookies and candy and various quick breads, most to give away as gifts and most from old family recipes. While I was making all these holiday treats, I was remembering every person who had given me a recipe or a cooking implement or who had taught me some baking skill or who had been in my kitchen or whose kitchen I had been in.

Food is so often the language of love. We have our personal favorites , and when someone makes that dish for us, we know we are loved. I used a bundt pan that formed a ring of pine trees to make a cake for a Christmas party. At the party was the woman who had given me that pan, one that her dearest friend had bought some time before she died and, as far as I know, had never been used. I made the cake as a gift of remembrance and affection.

My stepmother and I, at times, had a rocky relationship, but time mellowed us both, and we came to have a great affection for one another. One thing she did touched me more than any other. When I was visiting my childhood home, I commented that her date pudding was my favorite dessert. Every time after that when I came to visit, she made sure to have that special dessert waiting for me. Eventually, I got the recipe, so now that she is gone, I can make it and remember her and the love she and my father bore for one another.

Some of the cooking I do for my husband has been reverse engineered. He will tell me what he remembers about the dish, and I will acquire recipes that approximate it and modify as required. My mother-in-law gifted me with the family recipes for some of the more exotic family favorites. One is a lebkuchen that is different from the ones most people are familiar with. This is because Jonathan’s Nana was Swiss and not German. He has always called them shuttle tiles (with a frosting that is obviously the tile adhesive) because of their intense crunchiness. They are spicy and crispy and amazing, and definitely  not German.

I consider the maintaining of gifted family recipes and utensils a sacred trust. My aunt’s pickles, my mom’s date pudding, the Swiss Lebkuchen, and all the other gifts of cookie cutters and pans and assorted utensils I’ll use, and I will remember every person who brought the foods of love into my life.

Image: Holiday cookies, by Marilyn Evans

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Hope Springs Eternal In My Garden

In An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” We quote him all the time, and because we dare not do anything but hope, because it is easier than wearing ourselves out with despair, or because we are fools, we keep hoping. I hope that next year my democracy will be intact, the climate will not kill us all, wars and assassinations will go away, and people will be civil to one another. I hope famine and homelessness will abate. But more than all of those, I hope my family and friends will stop dying for a little while, if only so I can catch my breath. And in addition to all this, I hope my garden will stop being an unmitigated disaster.

Yes, I know. With all the woes in the world, I shouldn’t be moaning about my garden. But honestly, the thing that is supposed to bring me joy and respite from the weary world is making me unhappy. Now that the beds are put to sleep and any pots that can be have been moved indoors, it’s time to take stock. In the war to have a few fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers, I’ve lost most of the battles. But I have arms and armor. I have the entire winter to lay out a plan. So next year….

I keep hoping that rabbit-proof fencing will spare the greens, that diligence will thwart the squash bugs, that drip lines will make up for a complete lack of rain for weeks on end. I hope the squirrels will find someplace else to dig than in my flower pots. I hope I can give my poor, sad lilies of the valley some friends to fill their bed. I hope the stressed trees and shrubs survive the winter, the perennials come back, and the invasive species stay dead.

Gardening is always an act of faith. We trust the the dead-looking seed really is waiting to burst into life. We believe dirt and water and time will make a little sprout peek out into the daylight and reach for the sky. I watch eagerly as blossoms appear and insects travel from one to another, dispersing fertility. Every spring–in fact, every winter after the initial disappointment of the fall has faded a bit–I am wildly, madly hopeful that the spring will be wonderful, the summer will be bountiful, the autumn will be a celebration of abundant harvest. I hope the frosts will end early and return late. I hope to can and freeze and cook for everyone I  love. I hope to foist excess produce off on unsuspecting strangers.

So as we go into winter, I will lay out my battle plan for my garden. And I will vote in every election. I will reduce my carbon footprint. I will give plasma.  I will donate to Harvesters and the DAV and anyplace else that is fighting to stave off hopelessness. I will speak out against hate and violence, and I will strive to be kind. Because just hoping isn’t enough.

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More Editing

It’s been a long time since I posted and that was about editing. This one is too.

I follow Chris Brecheen’s Writing About Writing on Facebook, he of the “You should be writing” admonitions. He’s clever and wise and very funny, and occasionally he answers questions. He recently got a question about whether to use an editor or not. He comes down on the side of using one if you can possibly manage it. I have said before on this blog that everyone needs an editor. I am here to tell you that I am an idiot who sometimes does not follow my own good advise. However, sometimes I learn from my mistakes and therefore become slightly less idiotic.

As you know, I’ve been editing the Bloodlines vampire series for my friend Dennis Young, so of course, I got all over confident and decided to edit my dad’s World War II memoir. To do this, I typed the entire book into a format I could easily manipulate in preparation for publication. Now, I once took a typing test long ago, and we determined I could type about 5 words a minute with 25 mistakes—that is, I’m a lousy typist (world records have been well over 100 words per minute with no mistakes). But I was determined. Happy with the job I’d done correcting the typos and other issues that the vanity publisher had let pass in my dad’s book, I sent copies to some veterans I know for them to review. One kindly responded that he liked the story, though it brought up some difficult memories, and the other went radio silent.

My dad had only published the book to give as gifts to his family members and we were very grateful for them, never mind the minor issues. Because I was ready to move forward with making the book available to a wider audience, I went back to review it again. Holy cow! The manuscript I had typed was full of transcription errors, typos, and other embarrassing mistakes. I feel like a total fool and that I owe those two readers an apology. So, back to editing my own darn work, and then on the hopefully getting someone else to review and comment. EVERYONE NEEDS AN EDITOR!

Even if your editor or reviewer is not a pro, it should be someone who understands grammar, spelling (spell checker doesn’t catch homonyms or correctly spelled words that aren’t at all what your meant to say), and plotting. Find someone who is really interested and honest and won’t pull any punches. There are actually several kinds of editors, how many depends on who you ask. There is general agreement that among these are developmental editors, copy editors, and content or line editors. There are also proof readers. Each one looks for different problems with the writing. But anyone who is reading along as says, “I have no idea what the heck you mean here” should get your attention. We pretty much always know what’s in our head, but all too often that doesn’t end up on the page. And if it does, it may be misspelled. Or badly phrased.

Yes, we all need editors. Preferably one who isn’t typing the manuscript at the same time. Especially one who types 5 words a minute.

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Adventures in Editing

There are certain times in your life when you go back to visit old ideas and adventures that you’ve put on hold. Currently, besides all the other stuff I’ve been doing, I’ve gotten interested once again in backpacking and editing. The backpacking is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never seemed to get around to. The editing I’ve been doing in one form or another for a long time, but never really did a deep dive until now.

I blame my friend, Dennis Young, for seducing me into editing in a focused sort of way. I’ve been putting in my two cents worth on his Blood Lines series of vampire novels for some time now. That indirectly got me connected to someone who, sadly, wasn’t really ready for writing novels. Not that he was a bad writer–he just couldn’t make his story go in an orderly fashion toward a coherent whole. I wished him luck and ran.

When I was a lab rat, I wrote, edited, messed about with grant proposals and articles. When I was a corporate weenie, I wrote, edited and messed about with SOP’s , quality manuals, audit reports, and other such stuff that makes the pharmaceutical world go round.

This summer I got down and dirty with editing my father’s World War II memoir. I hope to have it up as an e-book sometime this fall or winter. I had a really good time doing that. It was like having a sit-down conversation with my late father. I got to hear his voice in my head, laugh at his humor, live some of his doubts and fears. The thing I probably learned most clearly in reading and correcting the typos in my dad’s book was not to change his voice. He spoke a certain way. That comes through in his writing. I’ve said here before that it was his voice I used, unaware, for the voice of my young heroine in “Wasting Water”, my novella in the anthology Undeniable: Authors Respond to Climate Change.

As I always do when faced with a new adventure, I hit the library. There I found a book on editing for journalists, The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists, by Arthur Plotnik,  that I wish I had read before or even during the time I was editing The Rune, a small-circulation, local magazine. Editing, I am finding, is a great opportunity to see how other authors work, help them avoid some of the pitfalls I hurled myself into, and encourage good writing. And it’s an opportunity to catch the homonyms, malapropisms, misplaced modifiers, and other stuff that makes you crazy when you’re reading an article or a book. To borrow from Jeff Foxworthy, if you make corrections to nearly everything you read, you might be an editor.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for my summer vacation. Now it might be time to get back to writing.

Image: Once again, my catastrophic desk. By Marilyn Evans.

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Revisiting Old Friends

I commented several years ago that now that I was retired, I could finally write. My friend, Chris, laughed at me. “What,” she asked, “do you think you were doing for The Rune and for classes you’ve taught and all the other things you’ve been writing for all these years?” Point taken.

The Rune was a small regional journal that I had written articles for before Lane Lambert and JoLynne Walz, the founders of the magazine, decided to do other things. That’s when I took over as the editor, and stayed at it longer than I care to admit. I had a lot of fun working on that publication, including encouraging new writers, tracking down events for the seasonal calendar, and the other jobs that editors with very small staffs find themselves doing. On a few occasions, we were a page short in the layout, and I had to figure out, on very short notice,  how to fill the space. Some of the more fun articles that I wrote were among those fillers.

Now that I’m getting on in years and looking back at all that stuff I wrote, I decided this was as good a time as any to archive, in a public way, all those good, bad, and indifferent articles. My blog now has a new section called The Rune Archives. Only my own articles and the ones from the Tarcanfel Society are there because all copyrights from The Rune have reverted to the authors. If you’re curious about the old articles, poems, stories, art work, and so forth, as complete a set of The Rune as we could manage to compile is at the University of Kansas Library.

I’m not posting all the articles at once, instead dribbling them out as I get to them. You see, I’m a bit busy at the moment working on making my father’s World War II memoir an e-book (available, I hope, within the next few months), gardening (also known as battling rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels for meager scraps of vegetable matter), and attempting to have a social life in a cautious post-pandemic way.

I must say, revisiting the pages of that old magazine is being an entertaining stroll down memory lane. I hope you’ll enjoy the articles if you decide to visit them. And if you were ever a contributor to The Rune, thank you so much.

Image: Some issues of The Rune. Created by Lane Lambert. Photo by Marilyn Evans.

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Reading Lists

While I was visiting my friend, Chris, down in Tucson, I was admiring her late husband’s book collection. Selling beautifully bound “Great Book” collections used to be a thing–maybe it still is. I have my own collection of world fiction classics with leather binding, gold lettering, marbled end papers, and silk ribbons to mark your place. That got me to pondering what are the current best books to read.

I am a fan of nonfiction so I went looking for the ubiquitous lists that clog the internet. The Greatest Books gives you 1319 nonfiction titles, generated from 130 “best books” lists. That might keep you busy for a while, but if you are interested in more recent works, Book Riot gives you the top twenty nonfiction books of the past decade. Good Housekeeping has a list with a slight bias toward women’s and social issues. You obviously can pick and choose your focus based on the source of the list.

I get a lot of my ideas for books to read from the reviews in The Economist and other media sources. Whenever Retired Admiral James G. Stavridis is interviewed on NBC news, he has a book prominently displayed on a table behind him (he is often the author). The Sailor’s Bookshelf: Fifty Books to Know the Sea looked so interesting I got my hands on a copy. It’s obviously another book list and with a very particular emphasis.

One of the books I found on the Discovery weekly list of best nonfiction books was The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning by Maggie Nelson. This book seems to address the very issues I was writing about in my last blog post, Killing the Dog. I have it on reserve at the library now and can’t wait to read it.

I was surprised, and perhaps shouldn’t have been, at the number of these books I have read. I just might be better informed and well read than I thought. But there are a great many I have yet to read. These reading lists should keep me occupied all through the summer, deep into the winter, and well beyond. Great adventures lie ahead, and I am eager and ready to begin.

Image: Where the books live, Kansas City Public Library, Waldo Branch. By Marilyn Evans.

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Killing the Dog

One famous maxim about writing is “Don’t kill the dog”, its premise being readers will tolerate a lot, but killing a beloved pet is beyond the pale—you risk losing your readers who can forgive a lot, but not that. Of course, rules are made to be broken if there is a good enough reason. Old Yeller and John Wick both kill the dog. John Wick’s story has to justify the murder and mayhem that ensues because a horrible injustice was done to him and his dog, Daisy. This is how we know what bad people John is up against so anything he does is justified (and they are trying to kill him as well, so, self defense). It may be cheap and cheesy short hand, but it gets the job done. Old Yeller, like so many children’s books, is trying to teach kids a lesson that is good for them. I abandoned children’s books from an early age because of the “lessons.” I asked myself, incredulous, the Little Princess is supposed to suck up all the abuse she got when she was suddenly poor, then all was forgiven when she was rich again? I don’t think so.

Children’s literature disgusted my grade-school self, so I turned to murder mysteries. Death usually happened early and off-stage. The rest of the story was about catching the bad guy(s) (usually through cleverness and perseverance) and dispensing justice. I didn’t need those depressing children’s books. I learned my “good for you lessons” from “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. The bad guys may not always have been caught by the authorities, but the universe had a way of evening things up. One way or another, justice came and no dogs were harmed.

Beyond avoiding killing the beloved pet, how authors write about death and violence depends on the genre. The mysteries I was reading when I was a child were mostly “cozies” with characters like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. But not all mysteries are cozies, and I have enjoyed gritty novels, films, and television programs as well. These can get extremely violent, and the morality sometimes is ambiguous. No one would describe the writing of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Thomas Harris as cozies. True crime can be the most violent of all genres, sometimes with little or no justification for the violence, but hopefully, because the crime has been discovered, solved, and written about, justice was finally served. In the end, most readers and viewers want some sort of justice, even if it is the Twilight Zone kind.

You may recall I’m a fan of horror fiction. Once upon a time, a lot of the violence in horror was fantastical and often had some moral basis underlying it. Fairly stern censorship also limited the depiction of violence during certain eras, but a sub-genre of horror has arisen in the last decades that is increasingly violent. Though “classic” horror still persists, non-human monsters and psychological thrills have in many cases given way to slashers and gore—who dies and how can be pretty much no holds barred.

Our views on violence have changed over time, and our attitudes are affected by the context. How would you write this story? A man slaps another man in a very public setting to defend his wife’s honor. At a certain time and in a certain place, this would demand a duel. In a tragedy, the loyal husband would be killed or maimed. A comedy, a mystery, a romance, a horror story would likely all handle the situation and its outcome differently. In real life, Will Smith gets shunned, and Chris Rock gets sold-out audiences. Assaulting someone in public is not acceptable, we say, suggesting nowadays we have a lower tolerance for violence in real life than in fiction or in the past. But do we?

A man claims self defense, and is free to walk the streets after killing someone. If the man “in fear for his life” is a White police officer and the “threat” is an unarmed Black man, how do we feel about that? How do we read it? How do we write it? Or if a man has a permit for his gun, is startled awake by yelling men crashing into an apartment, and reaches for his gun, is he standing his ground and defending himself? And if the intruders turn out to be cops with a no-knock warrant and possibly the wrong apartment, is that different? Is it a horror story, a tragedy, or an extremely dark comedy? Does race, gender, nationality, social status of the victim or the cops make a difference? Should it? I image how you read it and write it, may very much depend on your personal experience.

If you have a friend or relative who has been the victim of violence, or you yourself have been victimized, you might respond differently to a fictionalized account of an incident that resembles your own. If it’s personal, all abstraction is gone—this was real, this happened to me, and I’m not detached, I’m not okay with it.

How realistic is the violence in modern fiction? How realistic should it be? A convenient fictional device is to hit someone over the head to render them unconscious, removing them from the action but not killing them. In reality, this kind of attack can lead to permanent brain damage or even death. In the novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, Stephen King describes a beating that renders a man permanently crippled. This is entirely possible. People who are violently attacked don’t usually jump right back up and carry on as though nothing has happened. Few authors describe the true toll of violence on the body and the mind.

Writers are told there can be no story without conflict. One quick and easy route to conflict can be a fight and a body count. The people who die may become ciphers, not real, not important except to show the prowess of the one killing them. In the real world, dead people have families and friends who mourn them. I have long thought that if more stories told about the aftermath of violence, the emergency rooms and months or perhaps years of physical therapy a victim might endure, it might seem less attractive to those who try to emulate their fictional heroes or anti-heroes by assaulting others. The quiet scene of the family at the grave side does little to show how damaged a death leaves family and friends. Yet for all the discomfort and reluctance authors (and perhaps their publishers) may feel, some stories have addressed the aftermath of death—its effect on those left behind, the ones truly grieving and feeling all the pain. Some novels and memoirs deal honestly with the pain of loss. Do we really want to read about this? Isn’t it painful and uncomfortable? Should it be?

I wonder how we will write the violence of the war in Ukraine. The Russian soldiers have been told a story—that Nazi’s are committing genocide against Russian-speaking people—so any violence they commit is justified. But even if they believe this, how could anything justify the torture, rape, execution of non-combatants, the indiscriminate deaths of children, pregnant women, and old people? Even animals are not safe from the violence. Ukrainian cows have been shot dead, in one instance while they stood in their stanchions waiting to be milked. I doubt there is any evidence that they were Nazi cows. Once violence is unleashed, it is often hard to contain. The Russian soldiers seem to have lost sight of what it is they are trying to accomplish, unless the death of every living thing in Ukraine is their true goal.

I fear violence and death casually depicted in fiction may desensitize people and should be used carefully, yet truthful depictions are required to ground a story in the sometimes grim realities of the world. Storytellers have a responsibility in how they portray those realities. I believe we must write honestly about the consequences of violence, the harm that can be inflicted, mental as well as physical. One of the things that makes Stephen King a great horror writer is that in as little as a paragraph he can make you care about a character so when he kills off that person in the next paragraph, you are horrified. And we should be horrified when someone is killed by violence. Anyone. Not just the dog.

Image: Bourbon, a dog who is very much alive. By Laurie Jackson-Prater.