Sunday, February 11
Rather late, but here's my book reports for the latter half of January:
Books Read Jan 15 - 31
Myrren's Gift by Fiona McIntosh (Unfinished)
Like Eyes of God, this was an attempt to scratch my high fantasy itch, and it also failed miserably. It was, frustratingly, the book I would have liked, if. The plot was quite good, with some really original points. The characters were interesting and quirky. The setting was generic-medieval and the story started on page 120 (the book, obviously, didn't), but I could have survived that.
If the book hadn't been sabotaged with over-writing.
I got nearly to the end of this book, and I swear, half the reason was the sort of fascinated horror that makes one slow down when passing highway accidents. I couldn't believe the thoroughness and the adroit skill applied to sucking every bit of life out of interesting characters and situations. I kept thinking maybe one would slip through the cracks, but no. The author got 'em all. It was amazing.
Now, mostly this was caused by the fallback of all mediocre writers, violations of the "show, don't tell" rule. If you took all the violations of that rule in this book, bound them in hardback, and used the result to beat the crap out of beginning authors, the world would be a better place. But on those occasions when the author so forgot herself as to actually show something, she became so unnerved by the risk (what if people misunderstood?) that she bent herself over backwards to explain things, from multiple viewpoints, in painstaking detail, in triplicate, so that by the time readers got to the action they just wanted it all to be over and done with.
There was also a lot of intuiting. Characters "instinctively felt" they could trust someone. Characters "just knew" that such-and-such was the right thing to do. Characters fell in love at first sight. You can sneak this by readers a few times, but do it often and some of us will start replacing "his instincts told him..." with "his author told him..." in our own minds. Instinct is not an acceptable substitute for character development and plot causality.
I got about eighty pages from the end before realizing a) I wasn't really enjoying this much, and b) since this was the first book of a series, the author had no obligation to tie up any of the dangling plot threads. Given the quality of the rest of the work, I figured my chances of getting any satisfaction were not good. Time to move on to greener pastures.
The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning
I gather that this is the fourth or fifth installation in the story of Cliff Janeway, policeman-turned-rare-book-dealer -- in fact, I have a vague memory of picking up the first book in the series, then wandering off. Too light on mystery, too heavy on book-geekery, and that's coming from me.
Dunning seems to have caught his balance by this point in the series, though, and I read it in one long sitting -- a gulped meal, as good mysteries generally are. As meals go, it was fairly satisfying. The mystery wasn't the greatest I've read, but it wasn't the worst either: the characters, if not brilliantly rendered, were sturdy and believable, the plot not too great a stretch even if it moved slowly at times. The book-geekery occurred in measured and interesting doses. It's always interesting to get a peek at someone else's obsessions and see the odd, twisty little ways they mirror your own. I adore books with a passion, and the longish scene in which Janeway and the female ingenue are used-bookstore hopping was very familiar... and yet not. I am, at the end of the day, not a collector: I am a reader. I buy these books not to own them but to curl up with them on the couch and devour them. I dog-ear the pages, I break the spines, I pile them in huge, careless heaps on my bookshelves, I write in them when I give them away. The only possible use the copyright page has for me is to tell me when the book was first published. If I have a first edition, it's sheer chance.
Reading this novel has led me to conclude that anyone who lets me get my hands on a first edition ought to be shot. There's an entire world out there -- if a rather small, insular one -- that regards my kind of book-handling with unutterable loathing, a world for whom the actual reading of books is an afterthought at best and sacrilege at worst. An interesting world to visit, even if I wouldn't want to live there.
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
This book got read because Dan found it in the same bookstore where I found Bookman's Wake and stood hovering over me waiting for me to put that book down and shove this one into my hands. Oh, the trauma. Twist my rubber arm.
My Family and Other Animals falls roughly into the same category as the James Herriot novels for me: semi-autobiographical, somewhat about beasties, a lot about people, very British, very funny, and very mad. Only with, um, extra mad. The frame story is about Gerald (who would grow up to become a zookeeper and prominent wildlife conservationist) relocating to the Greek isle of Corfu at the age of ten. There he has many encounters with the native wildlife, animal and human alike, all of them much enlivened by the presence of his eccentric family.
The book is immensely, devastatingly funny: rambling speculations and observations on wildlife, events in Durrell's daily life on the isle, and anecdotes ranging from the mundane to the bizarre all delivered in the same deadpan British voice. The dog's loyal but misguided attack on Mother's frilly bathing costume; Gerald buying a semi-tame seagull from a convict; brother Lawrence's phobia of matchboxes, developed after Gerald had captured a scorpion with her young and left her boxed for safekeeping... I honestly never knew what was going to happen when I turned the page.
I will also note that, even if only half the stories in this book are true, Gerald was bloody fearless as a kid. I like wild animals as well as the next girl, but catch me splashing through the swamp fishing around in the mud after two gigantic snakes I just saw disappear.
A lovely, funny book, recommended whether you like animals or just enjoy a taste of the absurd. I'll definitely be looking for more of these.
Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder
There's only a few hard science fiction writers I can stand to read. Schroeder is one. First, because he's writing about something really different; in the case of Suns, "different" means floating freefall cities built around nuclear-reactor suns, making for a truly bizarre but well-grounded set of societies. Second, and more importantly, because Schroeder performs that oft-forgotten but all-important step of putting actual people in his techno-dreams. And people, moreover, that I like. Gregory Benford, I hope you're taking notes.
Aside from the floating cities, the wild battles, and the woman wounded by a bullet fired in some unknown war millions of miles away (freefall! Nothin' to stop it movin'!), Schroeder also fascinates me with his... I suppose it's best described as a conflicted attitude towards AI. It's not the first time it's come up in his work -- you can see edges of it in Ventus and it's a strong undercurrent in Lady of Mazes. Schroeder seems to take the position that people in his future need to be protected from the all-powerful AIs, not because the AIs are hostile, but because the AIs can do and be everything... and thus there is no particular need for humans to do or be anything.
It's not a world-view I agree is an inevitable consequence of true AI, and certainly not one I would care to write about, but it's fascinating to watch Schroeder exploring all the consequences.
At any rate, aside from the techno-dream and the good characters, this is also a whizz-bang great bloody fun adventure story. If you've been looking for your sensawunda, I suggest you look for it here.
Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
I'd tried to read Grimwood previously, in some of his earlier cyberpunk efforts, and put it down with the conclusion it was not for me. The violence was excessive, the characters were annoying, and Grimwood had fallen victim to the concept of "eyeball kicks" -- that cyberpunk invention which, used properly, presents the reader with a dazzling Vegas-esque collage of imagery and, used improperly, presents the reader with an indigestible lump of sentence fragments which will nevertheless not be criticized for fear of sounding like a plebe. They are used properly about 2% of the time.
But the concept of Butterflies looked fascinating, and the book was free, so I thought I'd give Grimwood another go.
My conclusion was that he's become a very good writer for someone else to read.
Don't get me wrong. Butterflies is a good book, and I was chewing over it for a day or two afterwards, always a good sign. But it lost me. Grimwood's kicked the eyeball habit, thank god, and the violence was more moderate, but the characters still didn't do it for me. They were good. I kinda wanted to like them. And Grimwood's got an amazing way with snapshots, little fragments of moments that perfectly sum up a character -- this gesture, that turn of phrase. It was really a pity that the snapshots didn't mesh with each other into an actual running movie. Character hooks? Brilliant. Character consistency? Nonexistent. Nothing but a series of hooks and moments that seemed to have little to do with each other even when they weren't actively contradictory.
If I'd had a better sense of the characters, the end might have resonated with me. But I didn't, and frankly it struck me as not much of an improvement on the "and then they woke up" ending.
This was, in concept, a good book. You may well like this book. But I couldn't.
I will now get back to the trying-desperately-not-to-be-sick. Or, at least, not to look sick. My parents are leaving for their first real vacation in a year on Tuesday, leaving me in charge of the farm, and my paranoid workaholic father is perfectly capable of canceling the tickets even at this late hour over my measly little head cold.
*drinks the cure for all sick and sulks*
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: Um, 436 words. I'm hoping to get more when I get back from work. Why is it that whenever I post to the blog I've not made quota?
Comments: My subplots are trying to kill me.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: ... pretty much all of them suck today.
Books Read Jan 15 - 31
Myrren's Gift by Fiona McIntosh (Unfinished)
Like Eyes of God, this was an attempt to scratch my high fantasy itch, and it also failed miserably. It was, frustratingly, the book I would have liked, if. The plot was quite good, with some really original points. The characters were interesting and quirky. The setting was generic-medieval and the story started on page 120 (the book, obviously, didn't), but I could have survived that.
If the book hadn't been sabotaged with over-writing.
I got nearly to the end of this book, and I swear, half the reason was the sort of fascinated horror that makes one slow down when passing highway accidents. I couldn't believe the thoroughness and the adroit skill applied to sucking every bit of life out of interesting characters and situations. I kept thinking maybe one would slip through the cracks, but no. The author got 'em all. It was amazing.
Now, mostly this was caused by the fallback of all mediocre writers, violations of the "show, don't tell" rule. If you took all the violations of that rule in this book, bound them in hardback, and used the result to beat the crap out of beginning authors, the world would be a better place. But on those occasions when the author so forgot herself as to actually show something, she became so unnerved by the risk (what if people misunderstood?) that she bent herself over backwards to explain things, from multiple viewpoints, in painstaking detail, in triplicate, so that by the time readers got to the action they just wanted it all to be over and done with.
There was also a lot of intuiting. Characters "instinctively felt" they could trust someone. Characters "just knew" that such-and-such was the right thing to do. Characters fell in love at first sight. You can sneak this by readers a few times, but do it often and some of us will start replacing "his instincts told him..." with "his author told him..." in our own minds. Instinct is not an acceptable substitute for character development and plot causality.
I got about eighty pages from the end before realizing a) I wasn't really enjoying this much, and b) since this was the first book of a series, the author had no obligation to tie up any of the dangling plot threads. Given the quality of the rest of the work, I figured my chances of getting any satisfaction were not good. Time to move on to greener pastures.
The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning
I gather that this is the fourth or fifth installation in the story of Cliff Janeway, policeman-turned-rare-book-dealer -- in fact, I have a vague memory of picking up the first book in the series, then wandering off. Too light on mystery, too heavy on book-geekery, and that's coming from me.
Dunning seems to have caught his balance by this point in the series, though, and I read it in one long sitting -- a gulped meal, as good mysteries generally are. As meals go, it was fairly satisfying. The mystery wasn't the greatest I've read, but it wasn't the worst either: the characters, if not brilliantly rendered, were sturdy and believable, the plot not too great a stretch even if it moved slowly at times. The book-geekery occurred in measured and interesting doses. It's always interesting to get a peek at someone else's obsessions and see the odd, twisty little ways they mirror your own. I adore books with a passion, and the longish scene in which Janeway and the female ingenue are used-bookstore hopping was very familiar... and yet not. I am, at the end of the day, not a collector: I am a reader. I buy these books not to own them but to curl up with them on the couch and devour them. I dog-ear the pages, I break the spines, I pile them in huge, careless heaps on my bookshelves, I write in them when I give them away. The only possible use the copyright page has for me is to tell me when the book was first published. If I have a first edition, it's sheer chance.
Reading this novel has led me to conclude that anyone who lets me get my hands on a first edition ought to be shot. There's an entire world out there -- if a rather small, insular one -- that regards my kind of book-handling with unutterable loathing, a world for whom the actual reading of books is an afterthought at best and sacrilege at worst. An interesting world to visit, even if I wouldn't want to live there.
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
This book got read because Dan found it in the same bookstore where I found Bookman's Wake and stood hovering over me waiting for me to put that book down and shove this one into my hands. Oh, the trauma. Twist my rubber arm.
My Family and Other Animals falls roughly into the same category as the James Herriot novels for me: semi-autobiographical, somewhat about beasties, a lot about people, very British, very funny, and very mad. Only with, um, extra mad. The frame story is about Gerald (who would grow up to become a zookeeper and prominent wildlife conservationist) relocating to the Greek isle of Corfu at the age of ten. There he has many encounters with the native wildlife, animal and human alike, all of them much enlivened by the presence of his eccentric family.
The book is immensely, devastatingly funny: rambling speculations and observations on wildlife, events in Durrell's daily life on the isle, and anecdotes ranging from the mundane to the bizarre all delivered in the same deadpan British voice. The dog's loyal but misguided attack on Mother's frilly bathing costume; Gerald buying a semi-tame seagull from a convict; brother Lawrence's phobia of matchboxes, developed after Gerald had captured a scorpion with her young and left her boxed for safekeeping... I honestly never knew what was going to happen when I turned the page.
I will also note that, even if only half the stories in this book are true, Gerald was bloody fearless as a kid. I like wild animals as well as the next girl, but catch me splashing through the swamp fishing around in the mud after two gigantic snakes I just saw disappear.
A lovely, funny book, recommended whether you like animals or just enjoy a taste of the absurd. I'll definitely be looking for more of these.
Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder
There's only a few hard science fiction writers I can stand to read. Schroeder is one. First, because he's writing about something really different; in the case of Suns, "different" means floating freefall cities built around nuclear-reactor suns, making for a truly bizarre but well-grounded set of societies. Second, and more importantly, because Schroeder performs that oft-forgotten but all-important step of putting actual people in his techno-dreams. And people, moreover, that I like. Gregory Benford, I hope you're taking notes.
Aside from the floating cities, the wild battles, and the woman wounded by a bullet fired in some unknown war millions of miles away (freefall! Nothin' to stop it movin'!), Schroeder also fascinates me with his... I suppose it's best described as a conflicted attitude towards AI. It's not the first time it's come up in his work -- you can see edges of it in Ventus and it's a strong undercurrent in Lady of Mazes. Schroeder seems to take the position that people in his future need to be protected from the all-powerful AIs, not because the AIs are hostile, but because the AIs can do and be everything... and thus there is no particular need for humans to do or be anything.
It's not a world-view I agree is an inevitable consequence of true AI, and certainly not one I would care to write about, but it's fascinating to watch Schroeder exploring all the consequences.
At any rate, aside from the techno-dream and the good characters, this is also a whizz-bang great bloody fun adventure story. If you've been looking for your sensawunda, I suggest you look for it here.
Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
I'd tried to read Grimwood previously, in some of his earlier cyberpunk efforts, and put it down with the conclusion it was not for me. The violence was excessive, the characters were annoying, and Grimwood had fallen victim to the concept of "eyeball kicks" -- that cyberpunk invention which, used properly, presents the reader with a dazzling Vegas-esque collage of imagery and, used improperly, presents the reader with an indigestible lump of sentence fragments which will nevertheless not be criticized for fear of sounding like a plebe. They are used properly about 2% of the time.
But the concept of Butterflies looked fascinating, and the book was free, so I thought I'd give Grimwood another go.
My conclusion was that he's become a very good writer for someone else to read.
Don't get me wrong. Butterflies is a good book, and I was chewing over it for a day or two afterwards, always a good sign. But it lost me. Grimwood's kicked the eyeball habit, thank god, and the violence was more moderate, but the characters still didn't do it for me. They were good. I kinda wanted to like them. And Grimwood's got an amazing way with snapshots, little fragments of moments that perfectly sum up a character -- this gesture, that turn of phrase. It was really a pity that the snapshots didn't mesh with each other into an actual running movie. Character hooks? Brilliant. Character consistency? Nonexistent. Nothing but a series of hooks and moments that seemed to have little to do with each other even when they weren't actively contradictory.
If I'd had a better sense of the characters, the end might have resonated with me. But I didn't, and frankly it struck me as not much of an improvement on the "and then they woke up" ending.
This was, in concept, a good book. You may well like this book. But I couldn't.
I will now get back to the trying-desperately-not-to-be-sick. Or, at least, not to look sick. My parents are leaving for their first real vacation in a year on Tuesday, leaving me in charge of the farm, and my paranoid workaholic father is perfectly capable of canceling the tickets even at this late hour over my measly little head cold.
*drinks the cure for all sick and sulks*
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: Um, 436 words. I'm hoping to get more when I get back from work. Why is it that whenever I post to the blog I've not made quota?
Comments: My subplots are trying to kill me.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: ... pretty much all of them suck today.
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