2011 Reading #14: Mammoths of the Great Plains by Eleanor Arnason
Books 1-10.
11. The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron.
12. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith writing as Claire Morgan.
13. Surviving the Siege of Beirut: A Personal Account by Lina Mikdadi.
14. Mammoths of the Great Plains by Eleanor Arnason. This is the sort of book that I hesitate to describe much at all, because part of the pleasure of it is the way it opens and you're not sure, at first, whether it's fiction or memoir, set in present day or some alternate future. So I think that I will not say much more than that, except that there's a particular enjoyment in reading it that comes from being an upper Midwesterner and knowing something of the history of Minnesota and the Great Plains--an enjoyment apart from the simple fact of this being Arnason, who can be simultaneously laconic and evocative. Witness this paragraph:
She sat silent for a while, her bony hands folded in her lap and her bright blue eyes gazing right through the living room wall, it seemed to me, into the west river distance. There was no one in my life like her then, and I have never found a replacement for her.
The title work is technically a novella, I think, so just in case anyone was thinking about award nominations and that sort of thing. It's accompanied by an essay based on Arnason's Guest-of-Honor speech from WisCon 28, and an interview with her conducted by Terry Bisson.
11. The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron.
12. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith writing as Claire Morgan.
13. Surviving the Siege of Beirut: A Personal Account by Lina Mikdadi.
14. Mammoths of the Great Plains by Eleanor Arnason. This is the sort of book that I hesitate to describe much at all, because part of the pleasure of it is the way it opens and you're not sure, at first, whether it's fiction or memoir, set in present day or some alternate future. So I think that I will not say much more than that, except that there's a particular enjoyment in reading it that comes from being an upper Midwesterner and knowing something of the history of Minnesota and the Great Plains--an enjoyment apart from the simple fact of this being Arnason, who can be simultaneously laconic and evocative. Witness this paragraph:
She sat silent for a while, her bony hands folded in her lap and her bright blue eyes gazing right through the living room wall, it seemed to me, into the west river distance. There was no one in my life like her then, and I have never found a replacement for her.
The title work is technically a novella, I think, so just in case anyone was thinking about award nominations and that sort of thing. It's accompanied by an essay based on Arnason's Guest-of-Honor speech from WisCon 28, and an interview with her conducted by Terry Bisson.