{"id":5772,"date":"2010-01-03T20:05:19","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T03:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/?p=5772"},"modified":"2010-01-03T20:11:57","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T03:11:57","slug":"whats-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/2010\/01\/03\/whats-next\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s next?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early on in our relationship, Paul and I shared books.\u00c2\u00a0 I introduced him to Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison (resulting in an interesting moment in an airport, where an African-American airline attendant stopped him to exclaim that she’d never thought she’d see the day when a white boy was reading Toni Morrison).\u00c2\u00a0 In return, he suggested a variety of science fiction, a genre where I had limited experience.<\/p>\n

To his credit, there were a few books that were good.\u00c2\u00a0 Ursula LeGuin, as an example.<\/p>\n

But then he recommended a book so horrendously terrible that he lost book credibility for years.\u00c2\u00a0 Further, it made me question the entire volume of Science Fiction literature, as this particular book had been given awards.<\/p>\n

The book?\u00c2\u00a0 Snow Crash<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Granted, I find speculative fiction generally boring.\u00c2\u00a0 In my most critical mind, I would argue it is full of self-importance; creating unsophisticated pretend worlds as excuses for storylines characterized by masturbatory fantasies for the heterosexual male.\u00c2\u00a0 The epitome of this is Snow Crash.\u00c2\u00a0 The main character, Hiro Protagonist (oh, Hero. And he’s the Protagonist.\u00c2\u00a0 Haha… isn’t that author clever? *gag*) who is basically a guy who did some okay work in his past, got screwed by the man (so to speak), now delivers pizza and has, like, a really cool score sword-fighting with his virtual identity in a virtual world.\u00c2\u00a0 In short: he’s the stereotype of Science Fiction readership.\u00c2\u00a0 Seriously, though, I LOVE geeks, but let’s be real.\u00c2\u00a0 Hiro IS the Comic Book guy in The Simpsons.<\/p>\n

It gets worse.\u00c2\u00a0 Hiro’s love interest is a teenage girl — a FIFTEEN year old girl — and yet there is never an issue with the fact that the dude is, ahem, a pedophile.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Anyway, I digress.\u00c2\u00a0 The point I’m making is that I’ve approached anything Paul suggests with caution.\u00c2\u00a0 And Science Fiction?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, if it’s even remotely related to something in the future, or fantasy, or is written by a possibly-creepy dude, I steer clear.<\/p>\n

Which is why it took me so long to come around to Neil Gaiman.<\/p>\n

Actually, laloca had more to do with turning me to Gaiman.\u00c2\u00a0 I figured if she liked him, he can’t be that bad.\u00c2\u00a0 Also,\u00c2\u00a0 I’d read Coraline and liked it quite a bit.\u00c2\u00a0 So a few years back, I gave Paul the book American Gods — because Terry Pratchett hadn’t published anything new at that time.<\/p>\n

I recently finished The Golden Compass series (which I read out of curiosity of what strong young women are available in ‘youth’ novels these days — the first two books of the series were in the dollar sale at the library, so I figured I give them a try).\u00c2\u00a0 I wasn’t ready to go back to my usual nonfiction reading, so I picked up American Gods.<\/p>\n

And I really enjoyed it.<\/p>\n

So 2010?\u00c2\u00a0 Let this be my year to be more aware of my repulsions, and work a little harder to experiment.\u00c2\u00a0 (But please, give me a few months to work up to raw oysters.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not quite there yet.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early on in our relationship, Paul and I shared books.\u00c2\u00a0 I introduced him to Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison (resulting in an interesting moment in an airport, where an African-American airline attendant stopped him to exclaim that she’d never thought she’d see the day when a white boy was reading Toni Morrison).\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5772"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5774,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772\/revisions\/5774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.coldspaghetti.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}