Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

December 2008

Where This Column Comes From

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

I don’t review books in December to avoid fueling the commercial buying frenzy. But if you’re looking for a gift, the books I’ve reviewed this year might work. The list of what I’ve reviewed is posted all on one page at http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2008/   . You will also find the columns linked there.

Every book reviewed in this column is five star, worth its cover price, well crafted, and says something intriguing, important, amusing or just odd, but says it well.

The point of this column is to explore what students of the occult can learn from reading Science Fiction and Fantasy. That’s why I often violate many of the rules of review columns. I’m doing something different here.

I write more about the subjects of the novels, and what you can learn about those subjects while having fun just reading a story. In fact, my premise is that you can only learn some of these things while having fun. Any other mind set will work against the learning process.

This year we’ve explored how fiction has reflected decision making processes that are changing. We started with Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat Goes To The Movies which clues us in to how the general public prefers their fiction structured. To discover the occult roots of that preference, read my January 2008 column.

Then we moved on to the big feature of this year, the entry of Pluto into Capricorn, signifying a shift in emphasis of how and where change is happening worldwide. We’re entering a fifteen year period of Plutonian style structural change that might change the fiction structure Snyder reveals as most popular. Astonishingly different books and movies may result.

In January 2008 I discovered that Plutonian trend just barely surfacing in novels which had been written two or three years ago and published in late 2007 or early 2008 (I sometimes get to read books before they’re published).

A metaphysical trap door opened, and out poured an avalanche of novels about Pluto in Capricorn. And I’m pretty sure none of the authors or editors noticed.

When I read for this column, I read by whim. Publishers send me a veritable torrent of books each month, more than I could possibly read, and most all of them within the scope of this column’s subject, SF and Fantasy. So I have many 3 foot high stacks of books to read, not counting e-books and electronic copy of pre-publication editions.

I arrange the books, as they come in, by type and subject, SF, Fantasy, action, romance, humor. I pick books off the stacks according to my current mood, so I may read one to be published two months hence, then one published two years ago. Publication dates are noted on each column.

I want to give each book a fair read, a fair evaluation with you in mind. So I want to be as receptive as possible to the subject, just as you would grab books off a library shelf by what they’re in the mood for. So that’s how I read, by whim. When I want a mystery, I won’t be picking up a military SF novel – even though I love both equally.

When I finish a book, I usually write a post-it note and stick it on the cover, summarizing the theme, characters, situation – whatever is most distinctive about what the book says. Many books I set aside after a few pages, or even in the middle, if they fail my tests of excellence in structure.

If you want to know what my tests of excellence are, read Blake Snyder’s books. Although novels don’t follow exactly the same beat sheet that a film does, novels do have a beat structure. Novels that miss two or more beats in a row go into my discard stack.

That’s why all the novels I review are worth their cover price – to someone. It is an objective measure of quality that has nothing to do with content, nothing to do with what readers will post on Amazon about the book.

I can’t say whether readers of this column will like the books I choose – only that you can learn something from them, especially when comparing one with another. So I review them in an order different from the whimsical order in which I read them. I find something to show you.

When I have a large stack of novels I’ve read, and I’m ready to write a column, I start sorting the books.

Any books I don’t remember, I set aside. If I can’t remember a book three months later, you very likely don’t need to waste your time reading that book.

Then I sort them into stacks to make into columns. I make little piles on my office floor. And I think about what those novels say. I figure out what all these writers are trying to talk about. The piles may sit on the floor for a week, getting resorted each day, until the whole thing makes sense to me somehow.

Often the key bit that arranges the piles into an order that makes sense will be an old movie I see on TV, or a new episode of a TV series – or even a nonfiction book like Blake Snyder’s first Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need  which I reviewed January 2007.

A few times, the key datum comes in the News. Or it might be an article I read in a waiting room magazine or online. So, after puzzling over all these novels for a few days, I suddenly know what the underlying pattern is – what it all says and the stacks of books finally arrange themselves in a way that makes perfect sense.

Then comes the hard part. I have to try to show you what I’ve discovered among these novels. So my column usually starts with a short essay about the intangibles and imponderables revealed by these artist-authors.

That leaves little room to describe and discuss each novel. But today, you don’t need me to tell you what a book is about. Amazon provides all the descriptions and other reader-responses you could possibly want. And by including the book in this column, I am telling you it is definitely worth your time to read.

In fact, I post the list of books I will review several months in advance so you can read them before I discuss them. My comments on the novels are to prompt your memory if you have read the book.

As I said, the point of this column is to provide you with a method of learning things that can’t really be conveyed by words. Novels convey emotional truths about yourself, the people around you, and your spiritual path.

The novels I review aren’t necessarily the ones that will prompt your personal growth. But the method I am demonstrating here will work for anyone.

The essence of Art is observation. The essence of science is observation. Science Fiction is the novel form that brings art and science together, and so it is uniquely suited to hone observational skills. See my November column for the change flowing through SF, Fantasy and Romance today.

If you don’t want to read the books I recommend, then select books that suit your own moods, sort them into stacks and for each stack write a thousand word essay about what they have in common, about what they say to you, what they reveal about the world around you, what you notice about the world after reading a group of novels. It’s most likely you will discover your stacks say what my stacks say.

Editors don’t pick manuscripts out of the slush pile or commission novels in a vacuum. We’re all living in the same world, each exposed to different bits of it. The "Blind Men And The Elephant" image comes to mind. We each see some unique aspect of the world.

But artists "see" with another Eye. Even writers who don’t know it are actually artists. The artist perceives the unseen forces working to shape the world and shows them to you via their artform. And like all of us, the Artist who discovers something wants to shout it from the rooftops, call their best friend, obsess on it at dinner parties, and maybe even post it on a blog.

The storyteller, though, isn’t going to tell you what they’ve discovered. In fact, the storyteller may not even know, consciously and in so many words, what they’ve seen. The revelation will come to the storyteller as a story, and that is what they will shout out.

And stories are uniquely valuable.

Stories can reach a part of your psyche that nothing else can, the part where you know who you really are. Stories can teach you to be who you really are, to express that identity in a way that changes the world around you.

It makes a difference if the story is told in person by a raconteur, read in print, seen as a movie, or discovered in a role-playing, board or video game. Each type of fiction delivery reaches a different area of your psyche and summons different parts of your imagination.

Reading sharpens the visual imagination because the images aren’t supplied. In a game or a film, the authors supply the exact images and that can make your visual imagination flabby though it might train your observational skills. Reading couples emotional content to visual imagination, the two main tools of the Magician. This column prompts you to add observation to the emotional and visual, and have a whole lot of fun while doing it.