June 11

Retro Recs–Stranger in a Strange Land

HERE’S THE PLAN: to pull out a book from my tight-packed bookshelves and share it. Qualifications? It has to be one I’ve read over and over again, one that has inspired my own writing, and one that gave me a lasting experience of some sort. There are so many older books that are just too damned good to be buried in the mosh pit of publishing fashions and frenzies. So I’m going to pull them out and have another dance with them. And hopefully encourage others to do the same.
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I grok Heinlein.

I do, and with all that ‘grok’ means. I see all the warts and bumps, all the sharp edges, and all the unavoidable misogyny possessed by men his age and station. I see the lack of atmospherics—important to me, for I want the smell and feel of a place. More, I remember the world that Heinlein’s generation—in actuality, my father’s generation—came from, and mourn that we were so immersed in that world that even science fiction—stories that are supposed to make us question and challenge our own realities—often refused to see past the ingrained, casual “‘isms” that were an unfortunate fact of life.

But I also see a stark beauty in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Despite an admitted surfeit of subterranean glitches—which passed as both unremarkable and seldom remarked upon in earlier decades—it also posed mind-bending questions and challenges. It opened my eyes to some amazing possibilities. The characters were fascinating. Stranger in a Strange Land addressed as many thorny social issues as it disregarded–or unfortunately supported. But it’s also true that it lit another spark in the fires of insubordination against an untenable reality—particularly for ‘a girl who read weird stuff’, and who was growing up in the deep south in the wake of the fifties.

(By the by, why do young women lately insist on dressing up like ‘50s housewives? Do they even know what they’re emulating? Never mind: that’s a whole ‘nother essay…)

SiaSL plays with religion by showing what it can be and what it usually, unfortunately, is. It employs a trope that I find particularly fascinating: the outsider, considered ‘other’ and ‘alien’, brought into what they consider equally ‘alien’ circumstances—and it gives both viewpoints, a startling new addition in its time. It plays with sexual mores—not nearly enough, let it be said—but an impressive amount when one considers the reality it was written against.

And that phrase is key: when one considers the reality it was written against.

Many books are dismissed because they were written in another time, to the (usually grossly inaccurate) standards of that time. I understand the anger that comes from misrepresentation. I have some pretty visceral reactions to The Searchers. History isn’t pretty, and I grew up in the midst of some damned ugly history myself, had much of my own heritage swept under the rug by shame and the dominant paradigm. (With many blessings to my grandmother’s spirit, who kept me in the loop regardless…)

And I fully applaud #itstopshere.

Yet I still recommend this book: subversive brilliance on one hand, warts and too many “‘isms” to count on the other. I refuse to dismiss something because it makes me uncomfortable, particularly when I’m uncomfortable and have the privilege of dismissal before me. Discomfort and failure and horribly wrong paths wended… all of that exists within every journey and experience. Avoiding discomfort means we don’t learn. It means we end up making the same sorry mistakes because we don’t grok what our world and its peoples have endured.

So, you may ask, what the hell is ‘grok’, anyway?

Here’s a bit from the book:

“…but Mike would have agreed if I had named a hundred other English words, words which we think of as different concepts, even antithetical concepts. ‘Grok’ means all of these. It means ‘fear’, it means ‘love’, it means ‘hate’—proper hate, for by the Martian ‘map’ you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise…”

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

This is pretty powerful stuff. And yes, I think Stranger in a Strange Land is worth the read, within a proper context.

Do you grok? Or not?

February 11

Retro Recs-All Creatures Great and Small

HERE’S THE PLAN: to pull out a book from my tight-packed bookshelves and share it. Qualifications? It has to be one I’ve read over and over again, one that has inspired my own writing, and one that gave me a lasting experience of some sort. There are so many older books that are just too damned good to be buried in the mosh pit of publishing fashions and frenzies. So I’m going to pull them out and have another dance with them. And hopefully encourage others to do the same.
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James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Smallbegan my love affair with Yorkshire.

All Creatures Great and Small also remains the book that inspired me to NOT become a veterinarian.

It wasn’t the bits one would think, like squelching about in blood and dung, dealing with breech births and uterine prolapses, or sticking your arm up a cow’s arse. I’m not squeamish about such things, and with the vet tech & equine reproductive training I needed in my career, I actually ended up doing a lot of that.

No, it was the lack of sleep.

(Well, okay, there was the realisation of college funds and college math—lots of it—that also nixed the vet career. But when the book first came out, Teenage-Me glommed onto it, read it cover to cover, and said, “No sleep? No way!” And then read it all over again, thinking See, veterinarians can still write books…)

It’s that real, that evocative. When opening All Creatures Great and Small, one is soon immersed in the early-20th-century of a Yorkshire country vet.

Check out the cover: he’s rolling up his sleeve! Because that’s what vets spend a lot of time doing, believe me.

The people are the vehicle for getting to know the animals, and refreshingly, none of them are perfect—quite the contrary! There’s a refreshing acceptance of quirks, both human and animal. Many of the animal cast have recurring roles, and in the doing, define their people’s foibles. In the first book (yes, a whole series, and I’ll detail the titles below) we meet James who, as a young veterinary intern, comes to the Yorkshire Dales. He’s newly-employed at a country practice, and that owned by two brothers who aren’t exactly as he imagined—complete with a spoiled pack of delinquent dogs.

Because it’s all too true: animal practitioners don’t always practice what they preach. 😉

And oh, the countryside! In these books, northeast Yorkshire maintains its own character—and it should. You drive through the heartbreaking beauty of the Dales (sometimes in an old beater with holes in the flooring and less-than-adequate brakes!) and open an endless supply of gates; you lie on frosted cobbles with the wind icing your veins to save the life of a cow and twin calves—and sometimes, receive an invitation to warm yourself by the fire with a fine tea. Moreover, you hear the sometimes-incomprehensible, essentially-beautiful dialect that inspired the language of elder texts like Gawain and the Green Knight or The Tale of Gamelyn.

Immersive and real—if that’s your bag, the entire series is well worth a read. Myself, I really miss books like this. It’s lovely to revisit them and find, not less, but more of a treasure.

All Creatures Great and Small
All Things Bright and Beautiful
All Things Wise and Wonderful
The Lord God Made Them All
Every Living Thing