Map Novels

[notetaker]

I just completed 'Dream Children' by A.N.Wilson. It's a sweet story of love between a philosopher and a 10 year old girl.

[wildly]

I love this list, it's a great resource that I didn't realize exists until now.

My favorite of MAP themed book that I've read is All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (Bryn Greenwood, 2016), but now this list gives me a lot more books to try.

[aeterna91]

Interesting excerpt from The day before the revolution, by Ursula K. Le Guin. No spoilers, doesn't affect the plot at all. And it's just this fragment; the subject is not brought up again.

What’s so special about Noi?
She fastened the collar-frogs with her left hand, slowly.
Noi was thirty or so, a slight, muscular fellow with a soft voice and alert dark eyes. That’s what was special about Noi. It was that simple. Good old sex. She had never been drawn to a fair man or a fat one, or the tall fellows with big biceps, never, not even when she was fourteen and fell in love with every passing fart. Dark, spare, and fiery, that was the recipe. Taviri, of course. This boy wasn’t a patch on Taviri for brains, nor even for looks, but there it was: she didn’t want him to see her with dribble on her collar and her hair coming undone.
Her thin, grey hair.
Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway—my God, she hadn’t even shut the door while changing her shirt! She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman.
You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week’s shirt and last night’s braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque.
One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency, mere sanity, awareness of other people.
And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.
“Good morning,” the young man said in his gentle voice.
“Hello, Noi.”
No, by God, it was not out of mere decency. Decency be damned. Because the man she had loved, and to whom her age would not have mattered—because he was dead, must she pretend she had no sex? Must she suppress the truth, like a damned puritan authoritarian? Even six months ago, before the stroke, she had made men look at her and like to look at her; and now, though she could give no pleasure, by God she could please herself.
When she was six years old, and Papa’s friend Gadeo used to come by to talk politics with Papa after dinner, she would put on the gold-colored necklace that Mama had found on a trash heap and brought home for her. It was so short that it always got hidden under her collar where nobody could see it. She liked it that way. She knew she had it on. She sat on the doorstep and listened to them talk, and knew that she looked nice for Gadeo. He was dark, with white teeth that flashed. Sometimes he called her “pretty Laia.” “There’s my pretty Laia!” Sixty-six years ago.