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Saturday, July 24, 2010Vortex, Sunburst, Spinoza

Vortex , the final book in the (ahem) Spin cycle, is finished and the manuscript has been delivered to Tor -- let the bells ring out and the banners fly. As for me, I'm reminded of the colophonic remarks inserted into the margins of transcribed books by medieval monks: "Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides." Or more succinctly: "Now I've written the whole thing; for Christ's sake give me a drink."

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Julian Comstock adds to its necklace of garlands a nomination for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the adult fiction category. Details here, but check out the other titles on the short list: you may have missed some interesting books that didn't get a lot of attention Stateside.

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I've been reading a bunch of novels lately. I can recommend Justin Cronin's The Passage, which demonstrates that Stephen King has become a genre, and Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, an absorbing and vividly detailed Vietnam War novel by a vet who also happens to be a Rhodes Scholar.

The non-fiction book by which I'm currently fascinated is Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, which manages to be a work of philosophy, history, biography and memoir in equal parts. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656 and went on to lay the groundwork for a concept of secularism that seems strikingly modern. Goldstein approaches the subject through the story of her own encounter with Spinoza's ideas, first at an all-girls yeshiva in New York City and later when she studied and taught philosophy.

But the book isn't just a biography of Spinoza (or of Rebecca Goldstein); the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition that drove the Sephardim to Amsterdam forms a large (and fascinating and scary) part of the story.

Mentioned in passing is the Talmudic warning against kabbalism: "Whosoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be hereafter." Bad news for science fiction writers, alas!

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Currently listening to: Daptone Gold.