Jill Doughtie

This morning I ate an orange from the back yard.

A few days ago I found this strawberry growing in the front yard. Someone else had already started to eat it, but I didn’t let that stop me.

I finished it off.

Gavin and I have been walking all over town. A few days ago we walked to Euro Pane for breakfast and reading.

I finished reading this book about growing food — The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. My sister sent me a green hat and scarf for Christmas. The hat is in the picture, too.

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Kindle and veggie juice at Le Pain Quotidien.

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Kindle, coffee and Gavin at Intelligentsia.

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Kindle at Buster’s.

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I like buying books on the Kindle because I like the idea of paying for content. I think it is important for paying for content to start feeling normal, even when the content does not come attached to something tangible (like paper). I want to be able to read high quality, expensive-to-produce content without it being laced with ads, and without having to buy it stamped on dead trees. I am not sure that ads alone could pay for that content to be produced, but even if they could, I also want content that is not at the mercy of advertisers. I want a clear, clean transaction where I pay money, and where the author’s loyalty belongs to the truth or to their art or to me.

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I also like being able to search my entire library, and being able to buy books instantly.

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I like Laura, the main character in Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net. She’s not a sex symbol, although she does have and enjoy sex a few times in the book. She’s not moody. She’s not larger than life. She feels like a real person  – like a real woman — she feels true to life. This is unusual. I can’t remember finding a female main character in a book by a male author who plays a hero role and who feels this true to life before.

She’s a mother of a baby, she’s a wife, she’s a business person, and she’s an idealist. When forced to choose her priorities, she chooses her ideals and her career first. She doesn’t believe she’s being forced to choose at the time — she thinks it will all work out and she’ll end up with the world she wants to live in, her career advancing, and her family intact with her husband and baby waiting for her at home.

The book doesn’t have a traditional happy ending, but Laura is transformed. And she is a hero. And it’s not clear at all that she made the wrong choice — it doesn’t seem like the choice was ever framed as right or wrong. There was doing what she thought was right in the big picture and there was putting her family’s cohesiveness first and letting someone else worry about the big picture. She chose the big picture. Her marriage unravels, but she ends up closer to her mother, who it turns out had also made similar choices, and who she had not understood before. I was going to write that her family unravels in that last sentence, but her family doesn’t — it shifts, deeply. She’s more alone at the end, but it’s bittersweet. It’s not a morality tale to scare women off from pursuing careers — nothing like that. It’s deeper. It’s more complicated. It’s more like real life.

I’m leaving out the details of the story, which is what most of the reviewers on Amazon seem to care about. As science fiction, it’s interesting and I liked it. But it’s Laura I am drawn to here.  It’s Laura I am still thinking about. If the main character had been Lawrence, I still would have liked the book, but I wouldn’t have been struck by Lawrence. He would have seemed normal and relatively realistic. Maybe even a little bit boring. The woman heroes I usually come across are sexy, dominant, moody or somehow super. A woman character who is so normal as to be a little bit boring as a person, but who chooses what she does and goes through what she does — that’s new to me. And I like it.

Ignore the picture on the front of the book.

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I just finished the fifth book of Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series. (The link is the the first book. The picture is of the fourth book. All of them end in cliff hangers, including the fifth book. The sixth book isn’t written yet.) I like them because they feel like historical fiction, science fiction and kick ass Joss-Whedon-style strong, interesting female protagonist fiction rolled into one.

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Paul Krugman calls them economic science fiction.

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