Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, there's been a "reading challenge" on facebook these last few weeks. You're supposed to post your top 10 most personally influential books with a cover photo. Well, I'm not going to spend space posting covers here, but here goes nothing. . .. (Books presented in the order in which I read them.) The Ten-Speed Babysitter , by Allison Cragin Herzig and Jane Lawrence Mali . This following one shouldn't be considered a "favorite," but it's the first novel I ever read. 3rd grade, maybe early 4th grade, I'm thinking. Previously, I had read non-fiction books about dogs and dinosaurs, but no fiction. Honorable mention: Where the Red Fern Grows , by Wilson Rawls. The Little Eddie series by Carolyn Haywood (4th grade). The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley (5th grade). I didn't read my first fantasy novel, Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon , until maybe the summer between 5th grade & 6th, although now I'm less-than-pr

So, odd but cool thing . . . got a random e-mail the other day from a nice lady who offered me her entire Tolkien collection. Turns out she was downsizing for an upcoming move. Her e-mail also included an itemized list of everything she had, and it was quite the impressive collection, I thought. Unfortunately, I already either had the books or had already read them -- thankfully, as an academic, I've learned that interlibrary loan is my friend. So I told her I had to pass, but I also knew another Tolkienist who heads the library at Pima Community College, so hopefully that'll pan out. Out of curiosity, I also asked her how she got my name. Apparently some fellow Tolkien enthusiast friend of her's in Hawaii (!) had heard of me and, somehow, knew that I resided in the Tucson area.

From the interview I posted about a few weeks ago, the podcast(s) has gone up. The first is a mini-podcast (only 6 minutes) on " Violence and Ghosts ." The second is the first official full-length "true crimes" episode of Wildcat Crimes : " The Myths, Legends and Crimes Behind the Haunting of Maricopa Hall " -- i.e., one of the local all-female resident dorms. I appear at the 22-minute and 34-minute marks. I'm a bit embarrassed about my first answer in the full-length episode . . . the question about ghosts and women, and I answered with the old tradition about women being less rational and more emotional than men. That's true as far as it goes, but I could have mentioned the concept of transgressed gender roles and the idea of the "monstrous feminine." Plus I'm a horrible speaker. Alas. . .  still a fun experience, though.

Back in January, I wrote a blog entry wondering why Marion Zimmer Bradley wasn't a bigger dealing of academic critics -- she was a feminist, a combo SF&F writer, an analyst of male and female sexuality, a massively influential editor, and several other awesome things. She wrote a lot of forgettable novels, as any pulp-writer does, but I wrote that entry after finishing The Heritage of Hastur and being blown away by it. After recently finishing the follow-up, Sharra's Exile , the question occurred to me again, so I did some digging, and found something that I'd originally glossed over: the fact that Moira Greyland has accused her mother, MZB, and her father Walter Breen of raping her as a child. Greyland's blog post is here . The Guardian covering this story. I had known that Walter Breen, to whom MZB had dedicated several of her novels, died in prison on multiple accounts of child abuse (and he had even written publicly on the legitimacy of man-boy relations