I’m still processing 2024. One of my goals for today is to finish my reading recap, but I did publish on one of the social media things a shout-out to four books I reread last year:
- Dragonsinger (1977) by Anne McCaffrey
- Dragondrums (1979) by Anne McCaffrey
- Okay for Now (2011) by Gary D. Schmidt
- Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry (still reading)
Briefly, here are some takeaways from the rereading experience.
Those YA McCaffrey novels (preceded by Dragonsong, which I reread at the very end of 2023) had a strong influence on the way I think about fantasy in general, but especially in how I think about writing YA fantasy. The entire series is really SF, but because it has dragons, it gets lumped in with fantasy. “Science fantasy” is the newish term, I guess. I always did like good SF better than good fantasy, I guess, and maybe it began here.
I reread the series because it came up in conversation with Gin Blossom several times over the years, and a boxed set of the three novels was my Christmas gift to her the night we (a loosely applied definition of “we,” but this is a story for another day) decided to move on. I don’t think she’ll ever read it, which is sliiiiightly too bad because I think she’d like it.
I so enjoyed the reread, and before I got sidetracked on Lonesome Dove, I intended to reread the first to Dragonriders of Pern novels and then perhaps go all-in on the Pern universe. I still hope to do that this year, but:
I’ve been saying for at least twenty years that Larry McMurtry’s influence on my writing is greater than anyone else’s these past fifteen years, at least. I do not write like him (I don’t think), but I have always been knocked over by how clearly he writes. When I teach professional writing classes, our mantra is always, “Good writing is clear first and elegant second.” Clarity. There is no single more important aspect of writing than this, and I read a ton of writing every day whose writers seem to forget this.
Someone I respect asked me once, “How is your writing so readable?” and it’s maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my work, and this includes the tiny handful of comments from women in undergrad suggesting that my writing had turned them on. It’s about clarity, and while I still have a lot of growing to do in this area, when I compare what I write now to my work ten years ago, I can see this focus has really paid off. I don’t know if I’ll ever hit McMurtry-level ability, but you know, if I spend my whole life on just this and if I can look back every ten years and see growth, I will fricking TAKE it.
I read Lonesome Dove in 1992, the year I shared a rented house in Pauoa with Reid and James, then chased it with a couple of his other novels. McMurtry hadn’t yet written the sequel, Streets of Laredo, and he has since written two prequels, Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon. When I recommended Lonesome Dove to R, she pretty much inhaled it and then she inhaled all three of the follow-ups, and until last year she is the only woman I’ve recommended it to who actually read and liked the first novel. The others could not get into it.
Early last year I thought I should read the three follow-ups, but I knew I’d have to reread Lonesome Dove first. Then in October, someone from my book club asked if I’d read it, which I thought was a crazy coincidence because of course I was thinking of the reread. We agreed to do a buddy-read in November and she freaking did the whole novel in six days. It’s a long novel! I started on November 1 and today, January 18, I am still ten short chapters from the end.
I’ve already purchased the Kindle versions of the other three (anthologized with Lonesome Dove in one book called The Lonesome Dove series. I don’t like that it’s packaged in chronological order by the novels’ timelines. It should be packaged in the order of their publication, which is how I am reading it.
I finally read The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt last year. I’d had it in my Kindle library since right after I finished Okay for Now, and it was amazing. It was published earlier, and it has characters in common, so I reread Okay for Now and then a bunch more of Schmidt’s novels in my Summer of Schmidt. Fantastic. I took a break, but I plan to read the rest of his YA novels. After those McMurtry and McCaffrey books, I suppose.
So it was a great year for rereads. If all I’d read in 2024 were these four already-read books, I’d have considered it a good reading year. Outstanding, on the strength of these novels’ qualities.
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Okay let’s do a Friday 5. From here.
1. If Everyone carried personal cards (instead of business cards), what would you put on the line just beneath your name, where job titles usually go?
I might make it a small order of cards because I can’t decide. However, a line spoken by Calvin O’Keefe in A Wrinkle in Time has been running around in my brain for weeks, mostly in connection to my Silent Book Club (which I will discuss another time): “I just came to get away from my family.” I’m imagining the contexts in which I might hand someone the card, and even though I seldom go anywhere specifically to get away from my family (to get away from people in general is an entirely different thing, and my family comprises people), I think it’d be a good way to loosen up some good conversation, especially with “Madeleine L’Engle” as the quote’s attribution. If I can immediately identify my L’Engle people, we can skip a whole crapload of smalltalk.
2. What’s your favorite card game?
No contest. Cribbage. But so few people play cribbage that I’m likelier to say something else in normal conversation: either Rich Man Poor Man, if the group is the right size, or Speed, if it’s just me and one other person. There are a few games with specialized decks I really like too: Xactica, Quiddler, and Five Crowns.
3. How confidently and competently do you shuffle a deck of cards?
More confidently and more competently than most people, I’ve found. I have two methods for separating the deck so I can shuffle, and for some reason both impress many people I play cards with for the first time, and believe me, neither is very impressive. This morning, I caught some IG video of a young woman who’d practiced some card-shuffling and deck-cutting tricks she learned from YouTube and they were really impressive. Looks like she has pretty small hands too, so maybe I’ll look up those videos and see if I can learn a few things.
4. To whom did you last send a non-holiday, non-birthday greeting card?
I sent a ton of thank-you cards last year, hosting a couple of card-writing get-togethers after the holidays. I think I’ll do that again next month. Lots of people expressed interest and appreciation for the activity, ‘though I think I was joined at them by only one friend each. At least I got my cards written. By itself, that was a very positive thing. So I don’t have an answer to the question, but based on the order in which I attacked the list last year, it was very likely Penny or Grace.
5. When did you last jot something down on an index card?
I use index cards all the time for making lists of stuff I have to remember when I have to have the list on my person. A card is just easiest to keep track of, and it slides so nicely into a shirt pocket. Of course I use my phone for this most of the time, but when I’m going to be places where it might not be appropriate to look at my phone, I like an index card. Also, I use them at work for similar things when I’m having trouble keeping myself on task and organized. So the answer is: probably a couple of months ago at work.