Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
91. Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 by Duane Schultz.
92. Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith.
93. The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
94. The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin.
95. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith.

96. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. More stories, mostly quite good, a few good but not too memorable. Standouts, for me, were "Newton's Sleep," "The Rock That Changed Things," and "The Shobies' Story," the last of which is seriously unsettling. I think I would prefer not to mess with churten travel, thanks. The title story starts out feeling sort of like just reading someone's slightly rambly life story and then suddenly turns into something much more boggling; in retrospect it seems clear that it was structured that way for a reason, and it's an interesting, risky choice. It worked for me, ultimately, but I could see where it might not for another reader.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
91. Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 by Duane Schultz.
92. Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith.
93. The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
94. The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin.

95. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith. In which things get worse; more tense, more appalling, more insane, but with the veneer of gentility. This time Tom Ripley draws an innocent into his activities, family man Jonathan Trevanny, who happens to be suffering from terminal leukemia; asked to do a couple of simple killings, Ripley instead suggests recruiting Trevanny, who proves surprisingly (and distressingly) malleable. This is dark, dark stuff, fascinating but despair-inducing--of the three Ripley books I've read so far, this is the one in which Highsmith most effectively evokes the horror of the familiar, the paranoia of what might lie behind a polite smile.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
91. Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 by Duane Schultz.
92. Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith.

93. The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Full disclosure: Ben is a friend. As it turns out, nearly all of this collection was a re-read for me, but reading a collection is a different experience. (And hell, I could probably read "The Orange" every day without it ever getting old.) For instance, I never noticed how many of Ben's stories had an undercurrent of yearning for a closer relationship with a god/parent. There's "The Orange" of course, but also "The Valley of Giants," "Start the Clock" (in which it's most noticeable for its omission/denial), "Embracing-the-New" and "The House Beyond Your Sky." Also, I tend to think of Ben as coming more from the "ideas" end of genre fiction, and yet his love of pulp/adventure elements comes through more clearly in bulk--the epic fantasy of "A Siege of Cranes," the vampire story of "The Book of Jashar," and the baroque air-pirates-meet-Sabatini giddiness of "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum." The point is, you should read this.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.

91. Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 by Duane Schultz. I've done a fair amount of reading about the Dakota War by now, but this is the most on-the-ground account yet; Schultz culls from memoirs, letters, etc. to create an hour-by-hour account that reads like one of John Toland's books about WWII or the Korea conflict. He lingers a bit much on the Dakota atrocities reported by the surviving settlers, I think--partly because I'm skeptical of the accuracy of their reportage, but mostly because the amount of detail seems unnecessarily sensationalized to me. On the other hand, I appreciate the perspective he gives on Sibley's cautious entry into the conflict, since the biographical material I've read about Sibley largely neglected to report the controversy and criticism of his involvement.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz.
82. A Life on Paper: Selected Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin.
83. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
84. Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann Vandermeer, Jeff Vandermeer, and Matthew Cheney.
85. It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, Edited and with an Introduction by Josh Lukin.
86. All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak.
87. The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin.
88. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

89. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I was remembering, when I picked this book up, that the first time I ever read Sherman Alexie was in one of the Datlow/Windling (later Datlow/Link/Grant) Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies. I am still heartsick about the loss of that annual hunk of great fiction. Anyway, this is Alexie's award-winning first stab at YA literature. I liked that it was a mix of comedy and horrific tragedy, but it didn't blow me away. It falls short of the giddy defeatist absurdity of Reservation Blues, f'r instance, but then it's trying to accomplish something rather different. And, y'know, I'm not the target audience, which I sometimes have to remind myself of when I'm reading YA. I hope that some kids read this along with all the other lit poseurs like me who just have a Pavlovian reaction to anything with Alexie's name on it.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz.
82. A Life on Paper: Selected Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin.
83. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
84. Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann Vandermeer, Jeff Vandermeer, and Matthew Cheney.
85. It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, Edited and with an Introduction by Josh Lukin.
86. All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak.

87. The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. A very short and disturbing novel about (planetary) colonialism, trauma, and murder. I don't seem to have a lot to say about it, partly because I feel like saying much of anything would be spoilery for those who haven't read it, and partly because, although it's very effective, it's not a "big" novel in the way that The Dispossessed is. It's much more focused, even a bit angry, concerned with the violence of thought and action. I enjoyed it.

I think it's time that I admit to myself that I don't enjoy horror movies.

The problem with that statement, of course, is that "horror" is too imprecise a term. Is "Alien" horror? Is "Evil Dead 2," or "Scream"? Is "Silence of the Lambs," or even "The Talented Mr. Ripley"? I enjoy all of those films. But ED2 and "Scream" are really comedies, and the latter two lack the unpredictability of a supernatural or SF element. I'm not sure why "Alien" is an exception for me--maybe because I've seen it enough times now that I don't get tense watching it.

'Cause that's primarily the trouble. Scary movies make me tense and worried, and I don't enjoy that. That's more or less my default setting, anyway, and these films just make it worse. I like suspense, but I don't like going into a film knowing that people are going to get splattered and just waiting for it to happen. (And yet I'm not nearly as bothered by shoot-em-up flicks, so go figure.) There's also the fact that a lot of horror movies rely on slimy, oozy, dripping things, and I dislike those things enough that I'm always worried I'm going to puke. I haven't, to date--the closest I came was after the bit in "RoboCop" (not a horror movie) where the guy gets the barrel of toxic waste dumped over him and then splashes apart when the car hits him--but I'm always sitting there worrying that this is going to be the one that makes me hurl.

I watched "Slither" the other night, and it's a great movie, really funny, smart, excellent cast, really well done. But I didn't really enjoy it. I couldn't relax. Slugs, people. Ish. I spent the whole time clenched up on the edge of the couch. It was the same with "The Descent" (except for the slugs), which is objectively an incredible film, and one that I don't think I'd ever watch again. (The fact that I'm mildly claustrophobic may have something to do with this.) These are both good horror movies, I think, and I failed to get much enjoyment out of them. I think they're good, though, because they had me scared; the horror movies that don't scare me mostly feel like a waste of my time. That's how I felt about "The Ring" (the Japanese original), which I saw recently; I was intrigued, and mildly creeped out at the end, but ultimately felt like there wasn't much point to it. The only exception that's coming to mind right now is "Let the Right One In" (the original Swedish version), which was a well-made horror film that I really enjoyed and would definitely watch again. It's pretty up-front about what it is, though, and it's not gross (I guess movie blood doesn't bother me much). Again, I don't know how useful a term "horror" really is.

Maybe this is like Lovecraft; they say that if you read him at around age 14 you'll be a fan of his forever, and if you miss that window you'll never get it. I didn't read Lovecraft until my 20s, and I must have missed my window for horror flicks, too; I guess I was about 12 when I got too scared by "An American Werewolf in London" to watch the whole thing, and I kind of missed that whole '80s horror boom. I went back to watch some of them later--I sort of like "Halloween," because it's a really technically smart film--but most of them do nothing for me except wind me up and leave me wondering what the point is.

I guess the reason I care is that my experiences with "Slither" and "The Descent" are proof that there are really good horror movies of that type, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to enjoy them. Maybe if I got really drunk? That would seem to increase the danger of puking, though. Do y'all enjoy being scared by these things? Do I just need to medicate, or what?

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz.
82. A Life on Paper: Selected Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin.
83. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

84. Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann Vandermeer, Jeff Vandermeer, and Matthew Cheney. I had a hard time with this anthology; some of the stories were great, and some of them bored me, struck me as unambitious, or actively irritated me. (My reaction seems to be similar to that of Gwyneth Jones's, although the specific stories that bothered me vary from hers somewhat.) Kelly Link has a story here, and Meghan McCarron, and those are of course wonderful, but I had read them both before; all but one of the other stories were new to me. Many of them--more, probably, than in any genre "Best" I've read before--come from various literary journals. This is good in that I should read more from the literary journals than I do, but it's bad in that most of the stories from the literary journals made me less inclined to do so. Standout stories included those by Kevin Brockmeier, Daniel Alarcón, Julia Elliott, and Nicole Kornher-Stace. Only a couple of the remaining stories struck me as actively bad, but several of them struck me as playful in the wrong way--to me fantasy should be playful in the way that children are playful, and children are playful in a very serious way. Some of the selections here are playful in a more academic way, and came across as simultaneously less serious and more joyless than I prefer my fantasy--really, my fiction in general--to be. It's possible I'm just rationalizing a prejudice here, since the stories I did like seem to come mostly from the more genre-centric publications and writers. One thing that a reading experience like this does is to help me calibrate my tastes, and sometimes I'm surprised at how conventional they can be.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz.
82. A Life on Paper: Selected Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin.

83. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. The most annoying thing about seeing the film before you read the book is that sometimes you get the characters locked into those actors in your head. I saw the film adaptation of this some years ago; it was the first time I was ever impressed by Matt Damon, and it was difficult, particularly in the beginning, not to see him as Tom Ripley throughout. Jude Law, on the other hand, fell away pretty quickly, and I eventually managed to separate Marge from Gwyneth Paltrow. Freddie Miles, however, is stuck as Philip Seymour Hoffman, and that's not such a very bad thing, is it?

None of which has anything to do with the book itself, really, which I enjoyed. Highsmith is my new project, along with filling in the gaps in my Le Guin. I've never read her before; based on this book, I'd characterize as a very patient and focused writer--the reason she's able to keep the reader's sympathy with Tom is because of that focus, her manic adherence to the tight limited third POV. She's so creepily good that (SPOILER ALERT) when Tom came around to the point of murdering people, part of me completely bought into his logic and thought, "Well, of course. He has no other choice." This is an obvious parallel, perhaps, but the feeling was reminiscent to that of watching Dexter (which I am watching on DVDs, so please do not spoil me for the current season in the comments). It has that similar feel of a student of human nature--almost an alien being, at times--telling a story about another student of human nature (Dexter being the one telling the story about himself). Since I often feel a bit alienated myself, this resonates with me in a major way.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.

81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz. You may have heard of the conflict that happened here during the American Civil War; while the men of the First Minnesota were out east fighting for the Union, back at home a two-year drought, the corruption of the frontier Indian agents, and decades of broken treaties and promises resulted in what is variously called the Sioux Uprising or the Dakota War. It wasn't a long war; it began in August and was essentially over by late September. Over three hundred Dakota men were sentenced to die for their involvement; the number was later reduced to 38 by President Lincoln.

Part of what's interesting and tragic about the aftermath of the war is that some 1600 Dakotas were held in Fort Snelling from the fall of 1862 to the spring of 1863. The majority of them were women and children, and the few men who were held there had mostly been either uninvolved in the conflict, or actively worked to protect settlers and/or prevent the war. In fact one of the primary reasons that they were held in a stockade below Fort Snelling was for their own protection, since the whites in the state were so terrified and incensed by what had happened that they took any and all opportunities to retaliate with random mob violence. Monjeau-Marz reprints a first-hand account from one Samuel Brown of how, in transit from the army camp in the western part of the state back to Fort Snelling, the Dakotas were attacked by a mob at Henderson, Minnesota:

[W]e found the streets crowded with an angry and excited populace, cursing, shouting, and crying. Men, women, and children, armed with guns, knives, clubs, and stones, rushed upon the Indians as the [wagon] train was passing by and, before the soldiers could interfere and stop them, succeeded in pulling many of the old men and women, and even children, from the wagons by the hair of the head and beating them, and otherwise inflicting injury upon the helpless and miserable creatures.

I saw an enraged white woman rush up to one of the wagons and snatch a nursing babe from its mother's breast and dash it violently upon the ground. The soldiers instantly seized her and led, or rather, dragged the woman away and restored the papoose to its mother, limp and almost dead. Although the child was not killed outright, it died a few hours later. After the body was quietly laid away in the crotch of a tree a few miles below Henderson and not far from Faxon.

Without question, atrocities had taken place on both sides, but this account of the treatment of the unarmed and defeated Dakota dependents--the warriors had either fled or were transported separately--chills me. And this was only the beginning of the diaspora; at Fort Snelling the Dakotas were besieged by epidemics of measles and diphtheria, mistreatment by soldiers and townsfolk, and generally treated like exhibits for curious whites who were permitted to visit the stockade almost at will. Monjeau-Marz exhaustively chronicles all of this, with an emphasis on hard data from army records and primary sources, but she stops short of chronicling the journey to Crow Creek Reservation which took place in the spring and summer of 1863. This is a valuable book, although I dearly wish there was an Index in it.