Black Gate

It’s the end of another year which means everybody’s thinking up “best of lists.” Partially, that’s a marketing thing — and it apparently works because I’ve just finished ordering a couple of albums that were on various critics “best of list” that I hadn’t heard. As a DJ for a local radio station, I’m supposed to be up on these things. Also as a DJ, I was supposed to have submitted my own “best of list,” but haven’t. Maybe as the short fiction guy hereabouts, I’m also supposed to come up with a list of top short stories. But, I won’t. I just have a hard time with this exercise. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve found interesting, but whether that qualifies as “best of” I’m not sure. And, then, whatever I come up with will invariably leave out stuff that I simply didn’t get to, or didn’t even know existed, which doesn’t seem fair.

Worse, as the end of a decade, there’s also these best of the decade lists. Again, this is largely to fill traditionally slow periods in the news cycle, but it is a conversation starter, which can be fun. I’m not going to provide a list (mainly because I just don’t want to spend the time thinking about it; I’d rather catch up on my to-be-read and to-listen pile), but here’s one by Jonathan Strahan that caught my eye. I like to think I’m fairly well-read and stay on top of these things, but of the ten “best of the decade” short fiction collections cited by Strahan, I’ve only actually read two, though I own two others that I never got around to (yet, I hope). At least, I’ve read all these authors, even if I haven’t made it through all the collections. If you haven’t already jumped, here’s Strahan’s list:

1. Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, Andy Duncan (2000)
2. Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
3. Black Juice, Margo Lanagan (2005)
4. 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill (2005)
5. Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link (2005)
6. The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford (2006)
7. Map of Dreams, M. Rickert (2006)
8. Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (2008)
9. Oceanic, Greg Egan (2009)
10. Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald (2009)

Some of my fondest Christmas memories involve getting (and, later, giving) a new crop of books as gifts every year. Unique among my interests, books have bridged the gap from childhood to adulthood — from the era of plastic battlesets and bolt-spitting robots to that of of daily planners, jumper cables, and bottles of Irish Cream. Books have always been there.

In fact, they tend to be the only thing that still recaptures a bit of that childhood glow of excitement of getting a gift, for me at least. The car wax, wide-toed socks, and jumbo pack of batteries are all very nice and thank you — they just don’t spark the imagination. And I think, ultimately, when you’re a kid that’s what all the excitement is about — not the getting per se, but the finding out. As a kid Christmas, for those of us privileged Westerners that celebrate the holiday in all its modern commercial glory, is an undiscovered country. In a society increasingly dominated by instant gratification, it may be one of the few delayed pleasures left to todays’ children.

And books always hold that promise of exploration — even when firmly in our hands they are unknown to us, not yielding up their secrets until we’ve read them. And reading, too, is a form of play, of the kind of stimulation we partake in less and less as responsibility waxes and innocence wanes. I’m seldom surprised by the titles of the books I’m given as gifts — after all I’m usually the one that suggested them in the first place — but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because a book is a wrapped gift in-and-of-itself, and needs no bow, ribbon, or paper to make it so.

I hadn’t planned on doing a post today, since foreign travel makes it difficult to keep up a decent post aside from writing, “Hey, I’m in Bavaria with my sister and my nephew, can’t toss you anything today.”

However . . . going to a medieval-themed Christmas Market . . . well, let’s just say it’s far better than any attempt at something remotely medieval or Renaissance that I’ve seen in North America, and I feel like telling you briefly about it. This is my vision of a grand Winter Solstice celebration: hooded peasant outfits, burning hot spiced wine, a full pig on a spit, and halberds for sale. For children! (Für kinder!)

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Here in Central Virginia, we’re having one of those once in a decade or so storms in which you fill up your bathtubs with water and just hope the electricity stays on. So far it has (or otherwise I wouldn’t be able to post this).

The good news is there’s nothing like a snowstorm as an excuse to catch up on your reading. The bad news is I won’t be getting out any time soon to see this. I’ve never been a James Cameron fan, and I had the as-you-might-expect reservations that the technology (as is frequently the case with sf/fantasy films) would override the storytelling. Evidently, at least according to this review and a few others I’ve read, that isn’t the case.

I guess what’s really weird is this all sounds like a very giant first step into an immersive computer generated “reality” that once upon a time not so very long ago was only in the imagination of the cyberpunks.