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Suzy McKee Charnas
A Nebula, Hugo, and Tiptree award winner, Suzy McKee Charnas is the author of the acclaimed Holdfast Chronicles, comprised of Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, and The Conqueror's Child. Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines are available in a single volume called The Slave and the Free. Her other books include The Vampire Tapestry, Dorothea Dreams, The Bronze King, The Silver Glove, The Golden Thread, The Kingdom of Kevin Malone, Strange Seas, Music of the Night, and My Father's Ghost. Charnas currently lives with her husband in New Mexico. Her website is located at http://www.suzymckeecharnas.com.
Photograph © Kyle Zimmerman
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My Father's Ghost
When Suzy McKee Charnas realized that her father could no longer care for himself on his own, she invited him to come live in the old adobe "in-law" cottage beside her own in New Mexico. My Father's Ghost skillfully traces a parent-child relationship inverted by the changes of aging. Over the last seventeen years of her father's life-as she drove him to the grocery store, to the bank, or picked him up off the floor after he had fallen-Charnas struggled to understand this man whose former artistic ambition seemed to hang like a shadow over his old age. She reflects on the difficulties inherent in their situation even as she reveals that her father's inability to care for himself afforded them the opportunity to bridge a gap that might easily never have been mended. A moving portrait of the last chapter in a father-daughter relationship and of the divide between the person we are in our youth and who we become in our old age, My Father's Ghost will resonate deeply with anyone facing old age or caring for an elderly loved one.
Suzy McKee Charnas' Summer Reading List
The Night Watch
by Terry Pratchett
First, I'm going to read Terry Pratchett's The Night Watch. I have just finished reading his other Discworld books after stumbling on the series when I picked up Hogfather a year or so ago (that's right, Hogfather, who is the Discworld's version of Santa). If you want an example of free-wheeling but stellar world-building, an example of a deeply witty British imagination rooting joyfully and lawlessly through the rubbish of all of human history (both real and imagined) for the delicious truffles of absurdity and truth, Pratchett is your man. Where else will you find Deathriding his pale horse, Binky, to collect the arid and terrified soul of Torquemada (or a chilling version of same), among many others? Where else does a rough, vain country witch square off against the insectoid Queen of Faerie to save the world from the elves (who are beautiful, sure, but also horrible in the extreme)? Where else does Sam Vimes, the captain of the city watch, solve the riddle of why the Golems are killing themselves? Where else --- never mind; there is no way to encompass here the richness, breadth, and prolific comic inventiveness of this author. Just go read him; I'm going to.
The Scar
by China Mieville
Next, China Mieville's SF fantasmagoria The Scar. He's another Brit with a powerful and wide-ranging imagination, although of a darker tone than Pratchett's. This is a rip-roaring adventure tale set in a city of sea-going ships and a wildly varied population of futuristic outcasts, including men derived from cactuses, others from shellfish, and people with odd bits grafted onto them as part of legal punishment for their crimes. Mieville's vision is informed by a tough sense of how the real world works, and he reminds me a bit of Brecht, of all people. He is cruel rather than funny, but sometimes cruel is what I want.
The Desert and the Sown
by Gertrude Bell
Also on my summer list is The Desert and the Sown, by Gertrude Bell, a reissue from Virago Press of a book by one of those doughty women travellers from England, who here recounts her 1905 journey through the parts of the then Empire of the Ottomans we know as Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. This is one of a series of reprints of such travellers' tales that Virago issued in trade paper editions in the eighties, and so far every one of them has proven a joy and a treasure trove of personal strength and social and political history, astonishing and invigorating.
The Quality of Life Report
by Meghan Dawn
The Quality of Life Report is a new novel by Meghan Dawn which I've seen reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and the New Yorker as an interesting, entertaining, and nuanced consideration of life in the American heartland. This is a place I have never lived in although I do live, daily, with the consequences of heartland attitudes, heartland values, heartland insularities and how these things play out in the larger world.
Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
by Anthony Swofford
Finally, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, by Anthony Swofford, reviewed in the New York Review of Books. This is about the marines as seen in action from ground level, not the cardboard cutouts of the popular media or the red-eyed fantasy warriors of war-hungry politicians and self-styled patriots thirsty for any blood so long as their own isn't endangered. As the reviewer points out, the Gulf wars have not been fought by the cross-section of society seived up by a draft, among whom some literary types are bound to be found to tell the tale afterward. Instead, the professional armed forces are working-class bodies; their reaction to the experiences of war are likely to be expressed in other forms than words on paper, so a record like this becomes extremely valuable. I'd like to see what's in it.
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