Tag: book-review

Reading at 13 vs. 73

By James Wallace Harris, 10/19/25

At thirteen, I read books entirely differently than I do now at seventy-three. I think everyone does, but it’s not apparent why. Our memory gives us the illusion that we’ve always been the same person. But if we think about it, there is plenty of evidence that we couldn’t have been.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between my younger reading self and my older reading self while writing a review of The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov for my other blog. Every so often, I reread a book I read as a teenager. For some books, it’s a nostalgic return to a familiar, comfortable place. For most books, it’s just vague recollections.

My first realization from trying to reconstruct my reading mind at age 13 was to remember that I read very fast. I consumed books like potato chips. Reading was like casually watching TV. Words just flowed past my eyes, and I didn’t always pay attention to every word. I just read to find out what happened.

I have a fond memory of reading The Foundation Trilogy, but a limited one. I liked the idea of a galactic empire in decline. However, the only chapter I can remember is the first one, “The Psychohistorians.” It wasn’t until decades later that I learned that the trilogy was a fix-up novel based on nine stories running from short stories to novellas.

Thinking about it now, I realize that most of the ideas in the book didn’t mean much to me at 13. I had not studied or read about the Roman Empire, Asimov’s inspiration. Actually, I probably didn’t know what an empire was either. Nor did I understand all the references to nobility, aristocracy, and politics.

As a teenager, I mostly read science fiction books. I did read some popular science books too. My awareness of the world and my vocabulary were limited. However, I didn’t know that. And I wasn’t the kind of person who looked up words I didn’t know. What’s weird is that I was a kind of know-it-all.

One way to judge my teenage brilliance was that my favorite TV show at the time was Gilligan’s Island. When I catch that show today, I can only assume I was brain-dead back then.

I’ve tried to reread The Foundation Trilogy twice now. The first time was in 2015, and now in 2025. In both cases, I could only finish the first book of the trilogy. I loved the first story, but with each additional story, I detested them more.

At first, I thought that Asimov’s most famous books were just bad. But I’ve known people smarter than me, and just as old, who say they still loved the Foundation series. One woman in our reading group said the Foundation stories were a great comfort to reread. And I recently heard that twenty million copies of the series have been sold.

Not only was my current reading self different from my younger reading self, but I’m out of step with millions of readers. This got me thinking about the different modes of reading.

I think the most basic mode is just to let fiction flow over you. You read whatever pleases you. And you don’t think about why.

Then, as we age, we become more judgmental. We learn more about life and reading. We develop a process of natural selection by rejecting what we don’t like. We don’t think much about why we don’t like what we don’t like. We just evolve into a reading machine that knows what it likes.

Two other reading modes are: English teachers or literary critics. These are very critical modes, and often they take the fun out of reading. I think as I’ve gotten older, my reading habits have taken on a bit of these two modes. While in them, it’s all too easy to shoot Asimov down.

However, I’ve discovered another mode recently when I read “Foundation” for the fourth time. “Foundation” was the first story published in the series in 1942. While reading this story yet again, I kept admiring Asimov for where he succeeded and not where he failed.

In my rereadings, I’ve always come to the series wanting to love it. And I’ve always been disappointed by how much I didn’t. But with this reading, I worked to think like Asimov. What was he trying to do, and how did he go about doing it?

I’m in the process of documenting this for my other blog, Classics of Science Fiction. I’m writing this now because the other post is going to take a long while to complete.

I never would have put this much effort into reading a story when I was a teen. Or any time before I was 73.

One reason I dislike this story in recent years is my skepticism. I don’t believe humans will ever travel to the stars, much less form a galactic empire. Another reading mode I’m trying to develop is to read with the mind of a person from when the story was first published.

Trying to read like Asimov thought and how science fiction fans felt in 1942 is difficult. I’m reminded of Samuel R. Delany’s concepts of simplex, complex, and multiplex that he described in his story Empire Star. I started out as a simplex reader and eventually evolved into a complex one. Now I’m moving into a multiplex reader.

Multiplex thinking often involves holding contradictory viewpoints. I really dislike the Foundation stories. But if I work at it and look at them in just the right way, I can like them too. It’s hard. It’s a Sisyphean struggle learning to admire something that triggers so many annoyances, but I’m working on it.

JWH

Should I Overcome My Prejudice Against the Undead?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/24/25

I truly dislike vampires. Ditto for zombies. (Although I sometimes like ghosts.)

My short story reading group is discussing the stories from The Best Fantasy Stories from Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman. I must admit I also have a prejudice against fantasy in general. On the other hand, I want to participate in the group. I want to be positive in my comments. I don’t want to constantly whine about my annoyance with the common themes of the genre.

The second story up is “My Dear Emily” by Joanna Russ. It was first published in the July 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (You can read the story online.) F&SF provided my favorite genre magazine reading while growing up. I’m so fond of this periodical that I’ve collected an almost complete run of issues from 1949 to 1980. So, how can I be so prejudiced against fantasy?

I imprinted on science fiction when I first discovered reading. I consider science the only cognitive tool for understanding reality. Fantasy is based on magic and the love of the magical. Magic and science are polar opposites. I’ve never understood why people love fiction about beings that never existed. I will admit that science fiction is about beings that might exist, but are probably no more realistic than fantasy creatures.

My first impulse after reading “My Dear Emily” was to post this comment to the group: “Mediocre vampire story obscured by dense prose.” But would that be fair? Joanna Russ is a well-respected writer, even outside of science fiction. Within the genre, she is known for writing such classic feminist SF as The Female Man. Does “My Dear Emily” anticipate second-wave feminist themes in this 1962 story?

The story is set in 1880s San Francisco. Emily is returning from school in the east and bringing her friend Charlotte with her. Russ says, “They had loved each other in school.” Russ was a lesbian, but the story doesn’t appear to go in that direction at first, although in 1962, we might have been only expected to read between the lines. Emily and Charlotte do sleep in the same room.

Emily has returned to San Francisco to her father and Will, a man she is engaged to marry. Charlotte laughs at Emily’s endearing words about Will, and Emily wonders if God will strike her down for being a hypocrite.

However, Emily comes under the influence of Martin Guevara, a vampire. Why bring in the undead? We have the beginning of a good story with hints that Emily loves Charlotte but must marry Will in 19th-century America. My standard theory about why there are fantasy elements in literary stories is that it was easier to sell to genre magazines than get published in literary magazines. Literary magazines paid in free copies, but were usually a dead end for a story. “My Dear Emily” has been frequently reprinted in genre anthologies, earning additional payments and readers. In other words, would-be writers had a strong incentive to add fantasy or science-fictional elements to their stories.

Would I even be writing this essay, or have read “My Dear Emily,” if it hadn’t had a vampire in it? However, does Joanna Russ intend Martin Guevara to be meaningful in this story or just an in with the editor at F&SF?

Martin Guevara offers to get Emily out of her engagement to Will, but he exerts power over Emily, taking physical control of her. Emily already seems to know that Martin is a vampire. Did she know him before she left for school? And she leaves her house and finds me. How did she know where he lived?

On my second reading, this story seemed less murky, but it suggests things that aren’t explained. Emily tries to kill Martin with a silver cross, but he isn’t vulnerable to the power of that symbol. In fact, he isn’t affected by several of the classic defenses used against vampires. Martin tells Emily, “We’re a passion!” about his kind, and “Life is passion. Desire makes life.” He says desire lives when nothing else does.

The story becomes more about vampirism. But is it really? Russ’s prose is far from explicit. Is the story a vampire fantasy or one of lesbian liberation? Are Will and Martin two poles of masculine power?

This story did not need a vampire. But to get published in F&SF, it did. Fantasy obscured the real intent of this tale.

Why does pop culture love the undead? Do they really add anything valuable to fiction? Or, are they just popular stock characters? At best, they might be symbolic, but isn’t that symbolism usually ignored?

JWH

STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood

by James Wallace Harris, 4/12/25

Stone Yard Devotional is about how reality puts the peddle to the metal when life gets all too real. Stone Yard Devotional reads like a memoir, a diary, but it’s classified as a novel. The book was nominated for several awards.

The entire time I was listening to this book I wondered if Charlotte Wood was the unnamed narrator, however after reading “‘The shock was so deep’: Novelist Charlotte Wood on the experience that changed everything” in the Syndney Herald, I realized the novel was only inspired by her own life. Wood and her two sisters were being treated for breast cancer, while she was contemplating mortality and drafting this book.

I have no memory of how I discovered Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. The cover and title intrigued me for sure. Maybe it was because it was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The audiobook was part of my Spotify subscription, so I gave it a try, and I’m glad I did. It’s not the kind of book I normally read, but it’s wonderful to read if you’re getting old.

The story begins with the Covid pandemic. The narrator separates from her husband, ghosts her friends, and hides out in a guest house of a religious order, even though she is nonreligious. She wants to be alone. But after her initial stay, she returns to the order to live with the nuns. I was never sure if she joined the order or not. I have often thought the monastic life has certain appeals.

The story is about the narrator’s observations while living a contemplative life. These include the death of her mother, the remembrance of childhood, studying the nuns, working in the garden and kitchen, and the guilt of living with a woman she and her classmates horribly bullied as a child. The narrative is simple, like meditation.

The setting is Australia, which is exotic to me. As a kid I wanted to live in Australia. Over the course of the novel, there is a plague of mice that invade the convent. The mice are so numerous that they cover the roads in gray fur. At first, I thought Wood added this element to give her tale some excitement, but I researched and found that her part of Australia they did have a mice plague of Biblical proportions in 2021.

That made life in the convent extremely inconvenient. The mice ate electrical insulation, throwing daily living in the convent back to the 19th century. The illustration for the book’s review at The New York Times might have been another reason I read this book.

Much of what the unnamed narrator contemplates throughout the novel is what everyone thinks about as they get older. The fear of declining health and death, the regrets, the desires for wanting to have done things different, the desires to connect with others while also wanting to pull away, the changes we see in ourselves and others, the appeal of nature and living simple. Wood’s story explores all of that and more, triggering the reader to think about their lives.

Charlotte Wood was born in 1965, so she’s fourteen years younger than me. However, her battle with cancer has likely aged her perception on life. At 73, I’ve been thinking about the things in this novel for years. But I don’t know if everyone who collects social security meditates on these issues. Stone Yard Devotional is a great title for this novel. Even though the narrator said she was an atheist at the beginning of this story, getting old and dealing with people who die, pushes you to be spiritual even without a belief in God.

JWH

NO COUNTRY FOR A WOMAN by Jane Dismore

by James Wallace Harris, 3/30/25

In 1992, I read a one-paragraph description of a science fiction novel published in 1926 by a woman named Lady Dorothy Mills. The book was called Phoenix. The blurb said the book was about an elderly woman undergoing a rejuvenation treatment that made her look twenty again. Because very few SF books were being published in hardback in the 1920s, especially by women, I decided I wanted to find a copy to read. However, it took ten years of dedicated searching before a copy came up for sale. Along the way, I became intrigued by finding out more about Lady Dorothy Mills. It hasn’t been easy.

Many writers dream of achieving immortality through publishing a book. Sadly, that seldom happens. Most books are first and only editions. Writers are remembered only as long as readers read their books. Dead writers tend to fade into forgotten writers as their books disappear from bookstores. Lady Dorothy Mills is almost forgotten today.

No Country for a Woman, a biography of Lady Dorothy Mills by Jane Dismore, might change that. (Amazon USA: Kindle, Hardback). I knew Dismore was on the trail of Lady Dorothy Mills when she published a two-page newspaper article about Lady Dorothy in 2014, where I learned more about Mills than I had in twenty-two years of research. I contacted Dismore. She replied that she was working on a full biography. I’ve been waiting years to read No Country for a Woman. I hoped it would do two things. First, it would answer the many questions I still had about Lady Dorothy Mills, and it has, and much more. Second, I wanted it to resurrect Lady Dorothy Mills. By that, I mean to get new readers for Mills. That remains to be seen.

Unfortunately, Lady Dorothy Mills’ books are out of print, and used copies are rare, so even if No Country for a Woman becomes a best seller for Jane Dismore, Mills won’t get new readers unless her books are reprinted. Dismore’s excellent biography chronicles Lady Dorothy Mills’ rise to fame in the 1920s and 1930s, but will it inspire publishers to reprint Mills’ books today? Evidently, Dismore is more realistic than I am. Her biography makes Lady Dorothy Mills into an exciting woman to read about, but nowhere in the biography does Dismore promote reprinting Mills or recommend reading her books.

Lady Mills was a fascinating woman. To be honest, I don’t know how well her books would be received today. I used to ask my friends: Which would you rather be, a famous novelist or an exciting person that inspired a famous novel or biography? Lady Mills achieved a level of fame in the 1920s and 1930s as a novelist and travel writer. However, No Country for a Woman, focuses on the woman, and not her books. The immortality that Lady Dorothy Mills ultimately finds might not be based on what she wrote, but how she lived. Jane Dismore pictures a woman worthy of a bio movie.

Lady Dorothy Mills’ real life upbringing rivals the fictional Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey. Unlike Lady Mary’s sister, Lady Sybil, Lady Dorothy was cut off from her family when she married a commoner. To make ends meet, Lady Dorothy and her husband, Arthur Mills, wrote novels and travel books to make a living. They each spent three months a year traveling alone in exotic locations hunting material for their next book. Lady Mills first gained fame in the English-speaking world with her 1924 travel book The Road to Timbuktu. The press claimed she was the first white woman to visit Timbuktu alone; after that, it became a tourist destination for adventurous rich travelers.

Over the next ten years, Lady Mills visited several hard-to-reach and dangerous destinations in North and East Africa, the Middle East, and South America, publishing five travel books and one memoir. Newspapers in America, Canada, England, and Australia often ran sensational articles by and about Lady Mills. Mills even got minor respect as a legitimate explorer and was one of the early women accepted into the Royal Geographical Society.

Lady Dorothy also wrote nine novels, but they mostly appealed to shop girls who wanted to read about romances set in exotic locales. A couple of them were science fiction and fantasy. However, her heroines were progressive, promoting feminism and advocating diversity. Lady Dorothy Mills’ early novels dealt with upper-class England during the fading aristocracy. And Lady Mills hung out with many famous English people, including many in the Bright Young Things crowd. Unfortunately, even though her novels often got good reviews for being fun reads, they were never considered part of the English literary movement between the wars.

I hope Jane Dismore’s biography of Lady Dorothy Mills will resurrect Lady Dorothy so she won’t be forgotten. Unfortunately, the website I maintain, ladydorothymills.com, gets damn few hits. It averages about forty hits a week, with zero hits on many days. The only way Lady Dorothy Mills will ever be as famous as she was in the 1920s is if someone makes a movie out of No Country for a Woman. I doubt that will happen but there’s abundant content in the biography for several possible films.

I’ve considered taking down the website I maintain for Lady Mills. The key information has been put on Wikipedia, and No Country for a Woman is now the best source of information for Lady Dorothy Mills. I’ve also thought of putting Lady Dorothy Mills’ public domain books online. I just don’t know if there would be enough interest to merit all the hard.

I do have one regret about the Dismore biography. During the 1930s, Lady Dorothy Mills disappeared from the spotlight of the popular press. She quit writing. Evidently, after inheriting a small amount of money from her mother’s estate after her father died, Lady Mills no longer needed to write for a living. Lady Dorothy eventually became a recluse, living in a seaside hotel. I wanted to know what she thought during all those lonely years.

It’s not Dismore’s fault for not knowing what Lady Mills was like during her fading years because I don’t think anyone knew. But if I had a time machine, I would visit her.

Further Reading:

My Collection of Books by and about Lady Dorothy Mills:

JWH

The Limits of Memory

by James Wallace Harris, 3/3/25

It annoys me more and more that I can’t recall names and nouns. I don’t worry yet that it’s dementia because most of my friends have the same problem. But I’ve been thinking about my ability to remember and realized that I’ve never been good at remembering things.

I know I have aphantasia, which means I can’t visualize mental images in my head. I wonder if there’s a connection between not visualizing images and poor memory? People with astounding memory often use mental images as mnemonics.

The ability to remember is on a spectrum. On one end of this range, are rare individuals with photographic memories, while at the other end, are a tiny group with no short-term memories.

My new theory. One possible reason I have poor memory is my education. More precisely, how my personality approached learning as a kid. I considered K-12 a thirteen-year prison sentence. I paid just enough attention to pass tests. I mostly got Cs and Bs, with a rare A and D. I remembered things just long enough to pass a test.

I was never motivated to remember for the long haul.

I do like to learn. I’ve read thousands of books. Of course, most of them have been science fiction, but I also love nonfiction. However, information leaves me as fast as I consume it.

I’m starting to wonder if I would have a better memory if I had developed a different approach to school and learning. Primary and secondary education aim to give kids a well-rounded education. And in college, over half the courses are required.

The idea is we should learn as much as possible about the world. Is that a valid approach? After school and college, we specialize in whatever our work requires, and become selective about what we study for fun. Those subjects are what we remember best.

Reality is too big to know everything. What we need to learn is how to coexist with reality. We need the knowledge to fit in and survive. Would knowing more about fewer subjects help? Or would memorizing the deep dynamics of how things work better yet?

I do believe the more we know, the wiser we are. But there are limits to what we can understand and memorize.

I’m currently reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. In chapter 2, Harari shows how fiction drives our societies, not truth. We live by stories we want to believe. It’s much easier to vaguely understand fiction than to learn the details of reality. For example, more people accept The Bible than biology. That suggests a natural tendency to minimize how much we know.

That would be okay if the Earth were sparsely populated. But we live in dense, complex societies racing at the speed of computer networks and artificial intelligence. Living by fiction is fine if the year is 500 BCE, but we live in 2025. CE.

Let me give one example of what I mean by learning less to know more. I’ve been reading American history books to understand how our society got to now. That gives me a certain level of wisdom about our problems. However, I’m also reading about French history, especially the French Revolution and 19th century history. Seeing the parallels ups my level of understanding. But do I need to read the history of every country now and then? What I see is common dynamics. Reading more histories will give me more examples of the same dynamics.

The same is true of religion. I like studying the history of the Bible. I’ve also studied Buddhism and Hinduism. As I do, I see common dynamics at work. Harari’s new book Nexus points out the common dynamics of society and history.

The educational philosophy I experienced growing up pushed me to memorize a million details. What I needed to understand and remember is the fewer dynamics of reality.

People like to live by fiction because it’s easier. Politics is currently overwhelmed by fiction. Read Nexus to understand why I say that. The question we have to answer is if we can reject fiction.

Real information is seeing patterns in reality. Wisdom is seeing patterns in the patterns. The only real cognitive tool we’ve ever developed to understand reality is science. However, it’s statistical, and hard to learn and understand. We live in a time of simplex thinking. People see or are told about one pattern and they accept that as a complete explanation of reality. All too often, that pattern is based on a cherished story.

We can’t live by memes alone. Nor can we live by infinite piles of memorized details. The only way to understand is to observe consistent patterns. But it has to be more than two or three. That can lead to delusions. Even anecdotal evidence of ten occurrences could still deceive. How can this lead to learning more from less? It’s a paradox.

Last year, I read a three-volume world history. It provided hundreds of examples of strong man rule over thousands. of years. But how many kids, or citizens can we get to read a three-volume world history? Would a listing of these leaders, including the wars they started, and the numbers of people who died because of their leadership be just as effective? Would all the common traits they shared help too? Such as wanting to acquire more territory, or appeals to nationalism?

Could we create a better educational system with infographics and statistics? I don’t know. I do know I tried to process too much information. I also know that I only vaguely remember things. Memory has limits. As does wisdom.

JWH