Category Archives: literature

The Rise of the Asterisk

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It’s well-known (by people who know me) that I love punctuation. I read books about punctuation. I have two punctuation tattoos. My favorite mark of punctuation is the semicolon (which is one of the tattoos I have). But lately, when it comes to punctuation, the asterisk is in the ascendancy. And that’s because an increasing number of books have swear words in their titles. Punctuation is how we address the problem delicately.

The first example of the trend and at the time most shocking was Go the F**k to Sleep, a book that purported to be a read-to-kids goodnight book, but was really an expression of parental frustration. It caused quite a buzz.

After that came The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (and the more daintily titled The Subtle Art of Not Caring About People’s Opinion), I Used to Be a Miserable F*ck, Unfu*k Yourself, The French Art of Not Giving a Sh*t, and F*ck Feelings. For those who prefer hashtags, there’s Unf#ck Your Brain. The winner for the longest title is The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide). And Everything is #@%!ed! uses a whole string of punctuation. Fucking This shit Show: A Gratitude Journal for Tired Women dispenses with the veil of punctuation altogether. (I can’t help that inconsistent capitalization. That’s the way it’s written. Maybe shit is supposed to look less threatening in lowercase? But I digress.)

(When marks of punctuation are used as stand-ins for letters or words, they’re called “grawlix,” an almost completely useless word, but one I’m quite fond of. Most people have seen grawlix only in comic books when Popeye, for example, wants to cuss. But I continue digressing.)

What’s the reason for all the daintily disguised sweary titles? It’s not like we don’t know what the asterisks stand for. It’s not fooling anyone. Go the F**k to Sleep was obviously meant to be shocking, though it also expressed humor and frustration. After that, it looks like a bandwagon was jumped on. The book even jumped on its own bandwagon. Now it’s a trilogy, including You Have to F**king Eat and F**k, Now There Are Two of You.

(I note that most of the sweary titles go with self-help books. Does this indicate a certain irreverence regarding the concept of self-help? Frustration with the concepts in the books? I know I’ve wanted to swear at self-help books during various periods of my life. Now I write them, though (so far) none have titles that require grawlix. But I digress some more.)

Personally, I have no objection to swearing. For a long time, I couldn’t do it, but after working as a waitress, I made up for lost time. Now I swear like a sailor, though with better enunciation. Sometimes, a curse word is just the right one. And of course, when I use a swear word in writing, I punctuate it properly. No grawlix here.

My favorite unexpected use of punctuation, however, comes in this brief verse:

Mary’s little lamb / Upon the grass did frisk. / But Mary was afraid / Her little * .

Now that’s creative punctuation!

Me and the PoemBot

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The other day I started fooling around with ChatGPT, the AI program that people are using to write things for them. As a writer myself, I wondered if I would be out of a job any time soon. Realistically, I know I won’t, since the ghostwriting firm I write for does not allow us to use AI-created content.

Still, I was curious about what ChatGPT could do with various writing tasks, so I dove in. Here’s what I found.

The program did well on factual queries (Write a paragraph on bipolar disorder) and even had an answer for a philosophical query (What is the meaning of life?). The more criteria I gave it, the worse it did. (Write a practical but amusing paragraph about bipolar disorder.) It showed a definite tendency to throw in every simile and metaphor it could, which definitely ended up mixed.

For blog posts with not-too-specific topics, it did better. I asked it to write a paragraph for a blog post on a self-help topic, and it almost instantly came up with one about positive affirmations. Asked to write a blog-post paragraph on toxic positivity, it did quite a competent job.

But I really wanted to test its talent when it came to poetry, a much more difficult skill. I stuck mostly to sonnets and haikus (I did have it write one villanelle) on assorted topics. All the sonnets it produced were Shakespearean unless I specified a Petrarchan, Miltonic, or Spenserian one. The sonnets were awfully self-reverential. No matter the topic, they tended to include the words sonnet, stanza, or verse. Here’s a sonnet it wrote on the subject of writing, which I suppose gave it an excuse to refer to sonnets within it. But it also referred to a dance, a symphony, brushstrokes, a tapestry, melodies and song, a journey, and dreams.

Now, I haven’t done Lit Crit in many a year, but the result seemed muddled and mediocre to me.

Upon the page, my quill begins its dance/ In ink, the thoughts from depths of mind take flight./A symphony of words, a sweet romance/Each line a brushstroke in the poet’s light.

In solitude, I craft a world unseen/With verses woven like a tapestry./The writer’s heart, an open book, pristine/Unraveling tales of eternity.

Oh, how the words, like melodies, entwine/In stanzas, whispers of a silent song./The poet’s soul, an endless, vast design,/In every verse, a journey to prolong.

Through pen and paper, dreams find their release/In every sonnet, life finds sweet peace.

Then, I tried it on a different topic—sex. I was curious to see how it addressed this most human of activities. Here’s what it wrote:

In whispered shadows where desire’s flame,/Ignites the senses in a sacred dance./Two souls entwined, no need for words to claim,/The poetry of passion’s sweet romance.

Bodies as verses, intimate and bare,/In tangled sheets, a sonnet takes its form./Each touch and kiss, a stanza to declare,/A love that weaves through passion’s vibrant storm.

Ephemeral, the moments that we share,/As pleasure paints the canvas of the night./In silent echoes, echoes of a dare,/Two hearts entangled in this sweet delight.

Oh, sonnet of the flesh, in whispers spun,/In ecstasy, a tale of love is done.

Again with the references to sonnets, dance, poetry, verses, stanzas, and painting a canvas.

The chatbot, in my opinion, did better with haiku. Here’s a haiku on the subject of haiku:

Three lines, concise art,

nature’s essence captured close,

haiku whispers truth.

Here’s what it did with a haiku on bipolar disorder:

Storm in a fragile mind,

sunshine and shadows collide,

bipolar tides shift.

And on the subject of writing in general:

Ink-stained whispers flow,

Words on paper, tales unfold,

Silent stories grow.

But when it came to sex, the haiku was again (in my opinion, needlessly) self-referential:

Whispers in moonlight,

Bodies weave an intimate

Haiku of passion.

So, what did I learn from my experiments? ChatGPT does a decent job with factual topics, though it has a tendency to rely rather heavily on figures of speech. Here’s a paragraph it wrote when I gave it the subject of bipolar disorder in the style of my other blog, Bipolar Me. It wrote a (flattering) description of the blog instead.

Navigating the rollercoaster of emotions that is bipolar disorder is a journey unique to each individual, a theme explored with raw honesty on the pages of the Bipolar Me blog. In the midst of the highs, where creativity flows like a torrential river, and the lows, where the world appears desaturated and heavy, the author skillfully captures the kaleidoscope of emotions that define life with bipolar disorder. With a poignant blend of vulnerability and resilience, the blog illuminates the challenges faced by those grappling with the disorder, dispelling myths and stigma along the way. Through personal narratives and reflections, the Bipolar Me blog serves as a beacon of understanding and connection, reminding its readers that they are not alone in their journey through the intricate landscapes of mood swings and self-discovery.

And here’s what it said about this very blog:

The “But I Digress” blog, much like a meandering conversation with a wise and witty friend, invites readers into a realm where thoughts flow freely, detouring into unexpected intellectual landscapes. With each post, the blog embarks on a delightful exploration of diverse topics, from profound philosophical musings to lighthearted anecdotes, weaving a narrative that reflects the author’s curious mind. It’s a virtual salon where ideas intermingle, and the unexpected tangents become the heart of the discourse. Whether dissecting the nuances of contemporary culture, diving into the intricacies of literature, or reflecting on the quirks of everyday life, “But I Digress” captivates its audience with a blend of insightful commentary, humor, and a touch of intellectual whimsy, creating a space where readers can both ponder the profound and enjoy the pleasures of intellectual meandering.

I’ll take it. Thanks, ChatGPT.

The Latest Book Trends

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(I shall begin with a digression. Actually, I can’t guarantee that these are actually the very latest book trends. I buy a lot of my ebooks based on newsletters from FreeBooksy and BookBub because they promote heavily discounted books, not all of which are, technically speaking, new. But most of them cost under $3 and, at the rate I buy books, I need to economize somewhere.)

That said, I have noticed what seem to be trends.

The first one is not a book trend, per se. It’s a trend in book covers. What’s hot right now (apparently) is book covers that don’t show faces. I’ve written about how men on the covers of romance novels are cut off at the neck (so to speak) or lost in the shadow of a cowboy hat, but these books feature mostly women on the covers. And they don’t have faces either.

The most common reason for this is that the woman or women are walking away from the person viewing the cover. (Bonus points awarded if the woman is wearing a red coat.) I don’t know why this trend has come to the fore, but I suspect it’s because the cover designers don’t like to draw faces or don’t want to read enough of the book to learn what the main character looks like. Or maybe the women are supposed to be all mysterious. Or the reader is supposed to imagine the woman having their own face. Like I said, I don’t know.

(A while back I noticed that there was a book cover that featured a man in a top hat walking through the rain, in the night, beside a wrought iron fence. In fact, there were two different books that had exactly the same cover. Both were terribly atmospheric mysteries or dark Victorian tales. I guess someone made the cover for one and an unimaginative art director tried to get away with using it twice. I noticed, however. But I digress again.)

Now, as to the contents of the books, I’ve noticed trends as well. When it comes to cozy mysteries, cats are perennially favorite characters or even sleuths. And Rita Mae Brown credits her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown, as co-author of her mystery series. Cats are as popular as ever, or more so. Every self-respecting woman in a modern romance novel has a cat.

Many of those romances take place in libraries and bookstores. The trope of the young woman who moves to a small town to restart her life, taking up the job of librarian or bookstore owner and meeting the love of her life, after suitable conflicts and misunderstandings, is a common plot. (Librarians are no longer portrayed as lonely spinsters—mostly. There can be an older librarian as a mentor and confidante, at least regarding the book aspects of the story. But I digress more.)

You can easily see what’s coming. The romantic heroine has both a bookstore and a cat. And the covers of the books reflect that. In fact, sometimes the cat and the books are all that appear on the cover. The woman herself is missing in (romantic) action.

One other trend that I’ve noticed in romance novels (I don’t actually read them, you understand—I learn about them through reading blurbs) is that, although traditionally the stories involve reckless, passionate, consequence-free sex (the “zipless bleep” that Erica Jong made so popular in Fear of Flying), is that increasingly, pregnancy results from the sex. (No, I’m not saying that romance novels are getting more realistic. They still involve royalty and billionaires, after all. And men from Scotland apparently are popular now, as in the book titled Too Scot to Handle. But I digress still more.) The pregnancy adds an extra layer of potential complications, such as the impending parenthood needing to be kept a secret.

If you’ve noticed any other book trends, feel free to share ’em. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for a book that features a man in a red kilt walking through the door of a bookstore with a pregnant cat in the window.

-Punk, -Core, and Portmanteaus

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So you thought punk was something that had its vogue years ago and has disappeared since. Or maybe you just hope it has.

It’s true that you don’t hear much about punk music anymore, but punk is alive and well in the fictional world. As long as it’s combined with something else, that is. There is, as far as I know, no strictly punk genre of stories and books. But there are cyberpunk, steampunk, and even stonepunk and solarpunk.

(All of these are “portmanteau words,” squished-together words or sounds that combine two meanings to create a new one. Think smog, webinar, bromance, brunch, or spork (which I still call a runcible spoon). Or, given the time of year, spooktacular. But I digress.)

These varieties of fiction share the sensibilities of punk such as rebellion, individualism, social inequality, and unconventional thinking. (Less screaming, feedback, and safety pin piercings, though. Thank goodness.)

Most people’s introduction to the hyphenpunk world was a 1984 (appropriately) science fiction novel, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It presented a dark, gritty, dystopian society in which a killer AI invaded people’s brains. At the time it served as a warning, which apparently we have not heeded. (Since then, almost all -punk fiction has been sci-fi or fantasy. At least I haven’t seen any romancepunk or mysterypunk. Again, thank goodness. But I digress again.)

Cyberpunk didn’t start any fashion trends the way punk music did (using the word “fashion” loosely). But another iteration of -punk has: steampunk. Steampunk combines Victorian-era technology and problems with a sense of adventure and invention and owes a lot to the writing of Jules Verne. You’ll find air battles between pirates in blimps, steam-powered robots pieced together from spare parts, and plots involving gaslighting (the streetlamp kind, not the manipulative kind). It’s a celebration of innovation, progress, and developing technology combined with nostalgia for a time when science was exciting, not threatening, and possibilities for advancement seemed limitless. Steampunk, unlike cyberpunk, is uplifting.

Nowadays, you can see steampunk aficionados at clubs and sci-fi conventions dressing in Victorian garb, embellished with brass gears, gauges, and wheels. One trendy accessory is the top hat with welding goggles as a hatband. Women can dress as aviators (aviatrixes? aviatrices?) with, obviously, aviator goggles. One would assume that the expected reaction from those not in the know is goggling at them. (Sorry, not sorry.)

(And that stonepunk and solarpunk I mentioned? Those refer to fiction that immerses the reader in a Flintstones-like past and a back-to-the-land agrarian setting respectively, with technology based on those eras. But I digress still more.)

Now on to -core, another element used in portmanteau words related to the music scene, rather than fiction. As you might guess, the word “hardcore” is the origin of the term. But instead of referring to pornography, -core applies to an extreme expression of any kind of music. Skacore. Thrashcore. Even emocore, unlikely as that sounds. (Theoretically, you could have punkcore music, but I’ve never heard that term used. Nor punkpunk fiction, for that matter. There is a subset of country music called cowpunk, so I guess you could have cowpunkcore. But I digress even more.)

Historical note: Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass pioneered the creation of portmanteau words. (A portmanteau is “a case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, especially a leather trunk or suitcase that opens into two halves.” So portmanteau, when it comes to words, is actually a metaphor.) Carroll’s epic poem “Jabberwocky” contained several. Slithy (as in “the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”) is, he said, a combination of lithe and slimy; frumious, a mashing-together of furious and fuming; and chortle, a portmanteau of chuckle and snort that is still used today.

(Less historical note: Thanks to the book The Annotated Alice (annotations by Martin Gardner), which I highly recommend, I learned how to recite the first verse of “Jabberwocky” in French, a skill with no practical applications whatsoever. But I digress. My last digression for this post. I promise.)

(Just kidding. Bonus digression. Back to -punk and -core. There exists a series of books that combines steampunk, thriller, and fantasy. (A Study in Silks (The Baskerville Affair)). Steampunk-Holmes-demoncore, I guess you’d call it.)

Life (Not Death) by TBR

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By now, everyone’s seen that cartoon where a grieving widow and a coroner are looking at the squashed husband, saying, “It was his TBR pile.” There are even those who say that will be my fate – to be smashed into a literary pancake by all the books I mean to read someday.

That could certainly be true if all my books were dead-tree editions. But slowly (more quickly since the tornado) I’ve been replacing my books with ebooks. (To those who say ebooks aren’t real books, I say phooey! They each have their good and bad points. Ebooks don’t have that delicious new-book smell, but ebooks allow for dwindling eyesight without having to resort to the 50 or so books in the LARGE PRINT section of the library. They both do, however, convey the same information or story. But I digress.)

I usually read two books at a time, one with each eye. (Not really. I wish.) I switch back and forth between a book of fiction and one of nonfiction. If I read two of the same sort, they can get muddled in my easily-muddlable brain.

Right now, my two books are Artemis, a science fiction novel by Andy Weir, the guy who wrote The Martian. Artemis is a city on the moon, and our MC (Main Character, for those of you not up on the jargon) is a shady delivery person who gets in far over her head. If it were a movie, it would be a caper film. The nonfiction book is The Suspect. (It has the impossibly long subtitle An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle, which at least tells you what the book is about without me having to. But I digress again.)

But what’s next? I have over 1,000 choices (another of the benefits of ebooks – they can all exist on my bed table without the threat of pancaking me). There are a few front-runners.

Fiction:

The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal. About women astronauts.

Calypso, by David Sedaris. (I mean, if it counts as fiction, which I can’t always tell.) I hope it’s as good as his early works.

While Justice Sleeps, by Stacey Abrams. Just to see if she can really write as well as legislate.

Battle of the Linguist Mages, by Scotto Moore. Because, duh.

Any of Dick Francis’s oeuvre, which I’ve been making my way through a little at a time.

Nonfiction:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, because I’d like to see him prove that.

Live Forever: The Songwriting Legacy of Billy Joe Shaver, by Courtney S. Lennon, because I love his music, if not his voice.

To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu, by George Takei. Oh, Myyy!

Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, by Leonard Peltier. I’ve read about the case from a law enforcement perspective. Now I want the man’s own story.

Killing Rasputin: The Murder That Ended the Russian Empire, by Margarita Nelipa. Because I love Russian history.

Of course, that’s just a sampling. I have hundreds more to choose from. I tend to read the books that I’ve bought most recently, since they caught my eye for one reason or another. Almost none of the books on my Nook are popular, current bestsellers. With as many books as I buy, I try not to pay more than $3.99 per. Of course, that means I buy a few that are real clunkers. I read a chapter or two and then mosey along.

(To those who are curious, I generally read on a Nook or an iPad with Nook software. (I can also read on my phone or iPod, if I’m willing to read a paragraph or less at a time. Sometimes it becomes necessary.) Recently, I acquired a Kindle Fire (it was given to me) and I have at least a few books on it, including Rift, by Liza Cody, which I’ve never been able to find for Nook, for some reason. My problem will come when B&N (and my Nook) finally turn belly up and I have to find a way to convert the 1000+ books to Kindle. Or find someone who knows how to do it for me. But I digress again. At length.)

And for those who remember that I used to be a full-time literary maven, rest assured that I do have serious works on my Nook as well – the complete Shakespeare, James Joyce, Cervantes, Emily Dickinson, to name but a few. But I read them all, back in grad school (100 years ago), so they’re not high on my TBR list. They’re weighty tomes, to be sure – but not anything likely to topple on my head. Hold the maple syrup.

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Reading With Abandon

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I’m an unrepentant bibliophile. I started reading at the age of four and never stopped. I prided myself on the number of books I read, even after I grew too old for the library’s summer reading program. However, increasingly, there are books that I just can’t read. (And not because my eyesight is bad. My e-reader makes up for that with its bump-up-the-type-size feature.)

No, the books I can’t – or won’t – read anymore are ones that manage to annoy me. I start reading them and can’t go on anymore. I don’t actually throw them across the room, but I am tempted to. (Except that, as noted, I read on a Nook or an iPad and don’t want to throw those across the room.)

So, what kinds of books annoy me enough to be figuratively tossed across the room?

I buy a lot of bargain e-books. I get multiple emails daily offering books that are not in their first flush of youth or frequently are self-published. Sometimes I even buy them, if the title is interesting or I recognize the author. I do try to check them out a bit before I hit “submit order,” but occasionally a clunker gets by me.

There was one, for instance, that was supposed to be about how stupid decisions affected history. It sounded interesting and only cost two bucks. However, when I started reading, I discovered that every example the author gave involved a stupid decision regarding a military campaign. I was disappointed. I was hoping for stupid decisions in politics, science, medicine, and other fields as well as war. I’m not a big fan of military history – with a few notable exceptions – and I lost interest so rapidly that I abandoned the book after a few chapters, when it became clear there would be nothing else.

I also abandon books with wretched writing. I recently bought a book by a well-known writer that was a sequel to a book I remember from a couple of dozen years ago. I made it about halfway through. I like foreshadowing and setting up a later revelation if it’s done skillfully, but this novel used the “had I but known” gambit that gives away the “surprise” twist. It also used the narrator to give backstories for every character and describe their inner motivations instead of letting the reader discover them through the characters’ words and actions. And these nuggets broke up what should have been a dramatic and suspenseful story.

Another book got on my wrong side because of its descriptions. It was a mystery with a literary setting, which I ordinarily like. But the author engaged in serious fat-shaming, describing an overweight character in not just unflattering but demeaning terms. It was gratuitous, too – had nothing to do with the plot or the character’s character (as it were). It was clearly meant to make the reader dislike the character for her appearance only.

Speaking of mysteries, I have been annoyed by ones that are too easy to figure out. One, for example, gave away the killer in the introduction. I noticed that the author avoided using personal pronouns (which makes the writing very stilted and artificial), and I knew that the brutal killer must be a woman because why else would they leave out “he” or “she”? Then when a female character gave another person a false alibi – thus alibi-ing herself as well – I knew whodunnit and spent the rest of the book trying to interest myself in another character. I actually finished that one, just to see myself proved right.

And I avoid altogether buying books that are the beginnings of series. Oh, I’ve enjoyed – even adored – series in the past, but anymore I want to read a stand-alone book. Maybe it’s because I can’t commit, but I no longer want to be sucked into thousands of pages of text or endless cliffhangers. If a book wants commitment from me, I want resolution. Fortunately, most series now announce themselves proudly as “Book 1 of the XYZ Series,” so I don’t fall into them by accident. At least I don’t have this problem when it comes to nonfiction.

Despite my newfound ability to discard books and refrain from ordering ones that violate my “rules,” I feel a sense of not just disappointment but a bit of self-criticism when I’m not able to stick with a book. I know this is ridiculous – I still have a TBR list that’s long enough to keep me engaged for the next hundred-plus years. Some of them may prove less than captivating, it’s true. But though I may have given up on certain books, I will never abandon my quest for better ones – or my love of reading.

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Hooray for Horror!

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What is it about the horror genre that gives us both shivers and thrills? I’m not talking about the excessively gory kind of horror, though that has a place and a fandom. Instead, I mean the more pop-culture renditions (sorry not sorry) of horror beasties and things that go bump in the night. Zombies are a big thing on TV, in the movies, and in books right now. So are vampires and werewolves. Anything creepy that humans can turn into, really.

Let’s take a look at these creatures and their evolution.

Here Come the Zombies

Zombies are a staple of modern horror. The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and more have brought zombies out of George Romero movies and into the mainstream. My favorite version of the zombie pandemic is Feed and its sequels by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire). It rises above the body (sorry not sorry) of the typical shambling, brains-eating stereotype by being caused by a literal pandemic, despite the fact that it came out in 2010, back when few of us feared a pandemic, zombie or otherwise. It also adds meaning and interest because it addresses other pertinent topics such as media, conspiracies, and politics.

(Seanan-Mira has also plumbed the depths (sorry not sorry) of horror by writing a novel, Into the Drowning Deep, about killer mermaids, which is a lot more horrifying than that description makes it sound. But I digress.) 

Bite This!

Vampires seem passe now. They’ve been done to death (sorry not sorry). The craze, I think, really took off in 1976 with Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire, which later became a movie (now remade, I understand) and a TV series. I personally thought the novel was overwritten and too long, but that didn’t stop it from becoming a runaway bestseller. More recent but still old (from 1997) was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, still my favorite of the vampire-themed media sensations. It was based on an older movie, about which the less said the better.

The Twilight books and movies proved extremely popular as well, though I haven’t succumbed to any desire (I have none) to read or view them. What’s interesting about them is that they pitted vampires against werewolves, not as killing machines but as romantic rivals. It’s kind of disturbing that heartless killers are presented as love objects and sexual partners.

None of these modern iterations have anything to do with Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, which has been committed to film many times. Nor is this an all-inclusive list, which would take more space than I allow myself in this blog. I will, however, recommend Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly as my favorite vampire novel. (Although the first time I read it I thought one character was the main character (or MC, as we writers say). A rereading revealed to me that she was a supporting player. But I digress again.)

Loup-Garou

(Okay, I’m showing off. “Loup-Garou” is French for “werewolf.” But I digress some more.)

Werewolves became as fashionable as vampires during the heyday of the Twilight series. Fans divided into Team Vampire and Team Werewolf based on who they thought should get the girl and I don’t mean as a snack.

It should be noted that not just werewolves, but all kinds of shapeshifters have become popular. There have been were-bears as far back as Beorn in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and other shapes to be shifted into, including crows, hawks, and leopards, among other beings. I guess you’d have to think about Zeus, too, who appeared to various women as a swan, a bull, a shower of gold coins, and a goddess, to hide his extramarital exploits from his wife. While Zeus’s transformations were hardly what you’d call romantic, shapeshifters in modern fiction are often presented in those terms. It’s called the “dark fantasy” or “fantasy romance” novel.

Welcome to Hogwarts

And of course, we couldn’t catalogue otherworldly beings without including witches and wizards. Although most of the witches and wizards in Harry Potter are positive characters, that’s not the case in many other books in the genre. Evil wizards and malevolent witches abound. In more subtle books, there are those with mixed motivations – for example, a low-powered witch who eventually turns into a dragon and back (making her both a witch and a shapeshifter, I guess) in Barbara Hambly’s excellent Dragonsbane. (It’s a book that I recommend to others just so we can discuss it later. That’s how I was introduced to it. But I digress even more.)

Why do we love horror so much? I think it’s because we know that, however disturbing the beings are, they can’t really get to us. The COVID pandemic, though, made pandemics all too real, except for the fact that people turned into vectors, not zombies. Perhaps the glut (sorry not sorry) of zombies will soon recede and we’ll go back to ghost stories, the classical alternative that hardly ever gets written or filmed these days. Even the movie Ghost‘s most memorable scene featured pottery, not haunting. It’s a form of horror bait-and-switch.

If only they would find a new creature to menace the humans – like the bunyip, an Australian water monster. But I guess “Attack of the Bunyip” just sounds like something warm and fuzzy. What we need are fresh kinds of horror, something that will scare a whole new generation.

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Cats in Space

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Those of you who follow my blog know of my enduring love for cats – and not just my own. Last week my blog post was about cats in mysteries (https://butidigress.blog/2022/08/21/mysterious-cats/), so this week I’m going to tackle cats in another genre – science fiction and fantasy. Because science fiction books aren’t as predominant as they once were, I’ve expanded my source material to include various other media.

Let’s start with books, though. The most famous cat in a work of fantasy fiction is undoubtedly the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (who shared the stage for a brief appearance of Alice’s cat Dinah). Notable for appearing suddenly then disappearing slowly starting at its tail until only its grin was left, the Cheshire Cat is sometimes considered a guiding spirit for Alice, directing her to various destinations around Wonderland.

(The Cheshire Cat is prominently featured on t-shirts and other Alice memorabilia, including a coffee mug that pictures the cat’s scene with Alice. When a hot liquid is poured into the mug, the cat vanishes, leaving only its grin. This is, I think, much more entertaining than the mugs that feature ladies who shed their clothes under the same circumstances. But I digress.)

Superstar writer and opinionated curmudgeon Robert A. Heinlein had a soft spot for cats, which appeared in a number of his works. A cat named Pete appeared in his novel A Door Into Summer, which was inspired by an actual cat that Heinlein once owned. (Or that owned him. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.) Another book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (shades of Lilian Jackson Braun!) featured a cat named Pixel that mysteriously appeared wherever the narrator happened to be. Cats played minor roles in some of his other books, including one named Mr. Underfoot, which I have been known to call all my cats at various times.

Perhaps best known to modern readers are Hermione’s ginger cat Crookshanks and Argus Filch’s cat Mrs. Norris in the Harry Potter series of books. Mrs. Norris was somehow able to detect student misbehavior at Hogwarts School, which happened a lot. Crookshanks comes to no harm, but Mrs. Norris is temporarily frozen by the gaze of the basilisk in Chamber of Secrets, though she first appeared in Sorceror’s Stone. (She gets unfrozen and suffers no permanent harm.) In the book, Mrs. Norris is described as bony and dust-colored, but in the films she was portrayed by three much more impressive Maine Coons.

Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series of fantasy books features a feline character, Tybalt, King of Cats, a fairy (Cait Sidhe, technically) who can transform from cat to human size and shape, in which form he woos and weds October after an on-again-off-again semi-adversarial relationship. (The character Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet is referred to as “prince of cats” for his sleek and violent nature. But I digress again.)

When it comes to cats in SF&F film and TV, we have Ripley’s cat Jonesy, who along with her manages to survive in Alien. There is Pyewacket in Bell, Book, and Candle, a film about witches that ought to be a Halloween movie but is instead a Christmas film, much the way Die Hard is, because it takes place during the winter holiday. And then there is Orion, the cat in Men in Black, whose collar proves to contain an important plot point.

The overwhelming winner for cats in media, however, is Star Trek. In the original series (or The Original Series as it’s now known), there are two different episodes that feature cats. One is “Assignment Earth,” which features a cat named Isis who may or may not be a human being, and “Catspaw,” featuring Sylvia, a woman who may or may not be a cat.

There are two other Star Trek cats of note. One is Data’s cat Spot in the TV series The Next Generation and the movies Star Trek Generations and Star Trek Nemesis. Spot is an orange tabby, but that’s about all the continuity it has. It has been portrayed as a Somali cat and as an American shorthair. It (I use the term advisedly) has been identified as male or female on different episodes, though I think we have to settle on female, as Spot gets pregnant at one point. In one episode, Data writes and recites an “Ode to Spot,” the first stanza of which is:

“Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature.
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses,
contribute to your hunting skills, and natural defenses.”

In the series Star Trek: Discovery, the character Booker has a Maine Coon cat named Grudge, which was meant to make a one-episode guest appearance but became a more featured player in a number of episodes. We know Booker has left the ship for good when he leaves Grudge with Captain Burnham. Grudge is described by various characters as “fat,” possibly due to a thyroid condition, but more likely attributable to the fact that Grudge is portrayed by two Maine Coons that are, at 18 pounds, at the top end of the range for that breed.

There’s more that could be said about cats in science fiction and fantasy, from the Tom & Jerry movie Blast Off to Mars to one Simpsons hyper-violent “Itchy and Scratchy” cartoon called “Flay Me to the Moon.” (Scratchy is the cat. I always have trouble remembering that.)

I’m sure there are others I’ve missed, and I’m equally sure that outraged cat-fen will point this out to me. My husband wanted me to include the 1935 cartoon “Dancing on the Moon,” which featured a number of animal pairs including two cats. And now I have.

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Librarians’ Choices

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Librarians are the gatekeepers of civilization. Perhaps I should say “guardians.” “Gatekeepers” implies that librarians decide what to admit and what to keep out.

In a way, though, librarians do have to make choices about what books reside in their libraries. They must make decisions based on space, for example, although through interlibrary loans that are now available to patrons, a wider selection of books is available than can be stored in a single building. But interlibrary loans take a while to get to the ordering library. Patrons would prefer it if the book in question were available on the shelves of their nearest branch, and right away, with no queues for bestsellers.

Librarians must go through a selection process to determine what books (and CDs and DVDs and magazines and newspapers, etc.) they will stock on their shelves. Not even the Library of Congress has every book ever printed. (My two books, for example, are not in their collection.) In order to make room for new books, librarians will “weed” their collections, consult their computers to determine what books haven’t been checked out with any regularity, and then get rid of them, often by holding library book sales. That’s one part of the selection process. (Books about making fondue, for example, likely haven’t been checked out in decades and would have been weeded years ago. Besides, people can and do now share fondue recipes online. But I digress.)

At the rate that books are being published, no library can keep up. Librarians consult references like the Ingram Spark catalog, and reviewers like Kirkus and Booklist to find new books that fill a hole in their collection – both fiction and nonfiction. Of course, these new selections are limited by budget, a factor largely dependent on tax dollars and voters these days. Publishers don’t just send libraries free copies of newly published books. Libraries buy books from library “jobbers” or distributors for more than the price they’re sold for at bookstores. Libraries have to pay extra because of the special library binding.

You might think that authors don’t like having their books available in a public library, but you’d be wrong. Library sales can total even more than bookstore or online sales. And reading a library copy of an author’s book can inspire a reader to buy their own copy or seek out other works by the same author. And the author does receive royalties for sales to libraries.

Now, however, there is much talk of censorship and what ought to be included in a library. Librarians have always stood against censorship and kept numerous copies of “forbidden” books on their shelves. Not that they’ve always been successful at keeping them on the shelves. Patrons routinely steal books from libraries, and when the subject is controversial, they sometimes take the book in question into the bathroom and deface it.

Schools and other institutions have more stringent rules for what they select for their libraries. A K-6 school, for example, would not own copies of graduate-level tomes. Their selection process would favor topics that are covered in the school curriculum and books that are likely to be interesting or useful to the age group served by the school. Sometimes parents become involved, petitioning schools or school boards to remove controversial books from school libraries. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. But librarians tend to come down on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion, and have a differing opinion on what books might be interesting or useful or controversial. All of them are against book banning.

Then there are special-purpose libraries that have even more stringent selection criteria. A library in a correctional facility will have law books and even Shakespeare, but no books about gangs, Nazis, or drug use, for obvious reasons. (My husband once worked in a community-based correctional facility, which is how I know this. And no, that’s not where we met.) Prisons are also likely to include books at less-than-high-school reading levels, to take into account the population they serve. That is to say, they don’t discriminate against the minimally literate, but give them what they need and want.

It’s sad when a library closes, even if it’s just to merge with another one to offer more resources than either has individually. It still means that people who live in the catchment area of the smaller library have a harder time getting access to books and other media. But to bibliophiles and library-lovers, there was almost no historical event as tragic as the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the murder of library guru Hypatia in 415 BC. After all these years, that still hurts.

Librarians are often stereotyped as repressed spinsters who delight in shushing people who dare make noises louder than the faint rustle of pages within their domain. In reality, they are, like the libraries where they work, upholders of the tradition of free, public access to learning. I can’t imagine life without them.

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Loving the Library

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I love libraries. They and the books within them have shaped my life.

The idea of libraries went back, evidently, to ancient Assyria, but libraries in the United States caught hold in 1731, when Benjamin Franklin founded the Philadelphia Library Company with a bunch of his friends. I’m pleased to note that it’s still in operation today and has, as you might guess, many of Franklin’s papers and all sorts of historic books and manuscripts, including the Mayflower Compact and first editions of Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass. The current collection is over 500,000 books.

I have a t-shirt that says “I Love You to the Library and Back.” That’s what I should have said to my father. Every other Saturday, the bookmobile parked in the Rike’s Department Store parking lot, and I got my reading fix. I almost always checked out Green Eggs and Ham, until my mother told me that I should get something else, too. (My mother once tried to make me green eggs and ham. It worked for the eggs, but not so much for the ham. But I digress.) My dad drove me to the bookmobile and sometimes even to a small library just a bit farther away. I brought home double armloads of books and started reading them on the drive home.

Later on, my father even drove me to the library downtown, where I could check out a particular record album I loved and could find nowhere else (I now have it on iTunes, but this was long ago). Libraries now have CDs and DVDs and video games and ebooks and sometimes even tools you can check out. They also have computers that the public can use for searching the online “card catalog” and for their own wants and needs. They have children’s summer reading programs, storytimes, and crafts.

My father wasn’t really a reader himself until he was laid low by cancer and couldn’t even get to the room with the television. Beth McCarty, a family friend and the “traveling library lady,” brought books to shut-ins and never failed to bring my father bags of the Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey and Foxfire books he loved.

When I was in junior high, I volunteered to work in the school library during my free period, shelving books. It was there I became acquainted with Robert Heinlein’s juveniles and Ray Bradbury’s short stories, beginning my lifelong love of science fiction. (I once was concentrating so hard on the titles that I walked right off the little stool I needed to reach the upper shelves. But I digress again.)

I spent my undergrad college years working in the grad school library, which had closed stacks. I was a page and retrieved books for people and sent them down in what was essentially a dumbwaiter. It was my first exposure to the Library of Congress classification system, though it wouldn’t be my last. I loved the job, since when there weren’t any requests, I could read to my heart’s content from the topics shelved on whatever floor I was stationed on. In later life, I also read while on duty when I worked at an unsuccessful bookstore.

By the time I was a young adult (though older than what is called “young adult” these days in terms of fiction audiences) I made regular trips to the library. I discovered Sue Grafton’s alphabet series while she was still only a few letters in. Another type of fiction that I explored was children’s literature. The library never made me feel silly about checking out Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series. And I particularly haunted the new acquisitions shelf. I was always on the prowl for something I didn’t know about that sounded interesting.

I thought of the overdue fines I paid over the years as my little contributions to the libraries’ budget. (A much more substantial contribution to the Ohio libraries – over $600,000 – was made by comedian Drew Carey, who gave away what he had won on game shows, before he ever hosted one.)

Of course, if Ben Franklin were alive now (and I wish he was), the concept of libraries would most likely never have gotten off the ground. A place accessible to anyone where they could get books for free? Supported by our tax dollars? It’s hard to imagine that going through these days.

Anymore I think of librarians as a type of freedom fighter. They take access to books and the privacy of patrons seriously. Back in 2001, when the Patriot Act was passed, they refused to rat out their patrons based on what “unsuitable” books they checked out. Now, they resist efforts to remove books from their shelves based on the wishes of pressure groups.

At one point in my life, I seriously considered becoming a librarian myself. I sometimes still wish I had. I would be proud to join their ranks, even with the low pay, lack of funding, and political nonsense. It’s a job that needs doing, and always will.

(I’ll have more to say about libraries next week.)

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