Lines; Sung J. Woo; 2024

Sung J. Woo's Lines begins as a Sliding Doors-style story and follows the trope of showing us two very different paths that a couple's relationship takes after they literally collide in Washington Park, or have a near miss.

What Sung does so beautifully is that the two paths of the relationship are not different purely because of some mechanistic reason (e.g., like in the movie, catching the train leads to finding your husband is cheating); instead he taps an essential truth of human relationships.  I am afraid to spoil anything further, will stop there, and simply recommend reading.

What Grows From the Dead; Dave Dobson; 2024

Note: this was actually published on 4/6/25; I backdated to 3/24/25, when I finished the book 

This is a short recommendation for friend Dave Dobson's What Grows from the Dead.  In the author's note Dave says his premise with the novel was to "merely start him out about as low as he thought he could possibly be, and then to start to make things worse for him."  Bujoldian in approach and tone!  Things are grim, but never grimdark, in this thriller / mystery / crime(?) novel set in modern day western NC.

The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great; Steven Pressfield; 2004

It takes an act of courage to write a fictional novel about Alexander III of Macedon.  He's a historical figure with an enormous body of scholarly writing devoted to him, so you will be under close scrutiny as to the "accuracy" of your fiction; at the same time, the historical records are sparse and conflicting, and many of Alexander's exploits that can be agreed upon in the ancient sources would strain credulity without corroboration, and so the need for any fictionalization seems merely a matter of filling in the gaps with some guesswork.


To write a fictional novel about Alexander III of Macedon in the first person is, ultimately, an act of foolhardiness.  Alexander's generals, all brilliant military men, would be difficult enough to write in the first person, and he was their superior as tactician, strategist, politician, and leader, as well as a consummate horseman and ferocious fighter, with a keen interest in architecture and engineering.  Mitt Romney would have a better chance of channeling the thoughts of a son of illegal immigrants.


Pressfield bravely attempts the impossible anyway, and further compounds this initial error by making his protagonist unchanging.  His Alexander claims to have learned nothing of strategy and tactics since the age of ten, and his character does not waver over the course of the book.  This is boring, and a deadly sin in a first-person account.  Interestingly, Pressfield's novel does contain a character who undergoes a spiritual transformation: Telamon, one of Philip's men who helped to teach a young Alexander what it meant to be a soldier.  He might have done better to make Telamon his narrator, both as a character who does grow and change, and as one whose voice he could believably assume.

The Terminal Experiment (1995)

This book is in clear violation of the Writ of Banning against the use of Pop Psych in otherwise readable sci-fi novels.  Half of the first 100 pages of the book are absolutely murdered by the unveiling of the protagonist's wife's affair, which occurs because she's trying to push him away, because she can't believe a man could unconditionally love her, because she had a cold and distant father.  Is there a bigger yawn than a paint-by-numbers female character with low self-esteem and daddy issues?


The protagonist's Muslim friend is enough of a stereotype to make me uncomfortable, but he's also the most appealing character because of "crisp".  From the novel:

"Crisp" was his favorite word; he used it to mean anything from well-defined to delicate to appealing to complex.

Sawyer then has Sarkar use "crisp" about once every scene he's in.  Its regular appearance gives us a very human trait to cling to, but it's not so overused that it becomes annoying.


Chapter 17: future imagination fail.  In Sawyer's 1995 imagining of 2011, we have voice-activated computers and can perfectly simulate someone's brain, but we're still using VCRs to record shows?  Really?  It's not something you tell the house computer to take care of?


More imagination fail: a character picks up a phone and hears the modem noise.  That was cool when Matthew Broderick did it in 1983; it would be slightly dated in a sci-fi novel written and set in 1995; it's ludicrous in a sci-fi novel written in 1995 and set in 2011


Once we get past the preliminaries and into the meat of the novel, the story picks up and I don't even mind that the "mystery" is really not very mysterious, because it's obvious practically from the start who the murderer is.  Ultimately, I'm a little disappointed that Ambrotos is simply dropped from the story at some point and never appears again.  


--spoilers-- 
I also don't think that we're given sufficient evidence that Sandra's "spirit" sim would necessarily let Peter go, much less go through the effort of covering up for him.  I think that would require more humanity than is left in the "spirit" sim, but that Sawyer wants the Sandra sim to let Peter go, so it does.  
--end spoilers--


Overall, this was enjoyable, but looking at the list of Nebula winners, I have to disagree strongly with the choice of this novel over Metropolitan, or even Mother of Storms.  (and I have not read the other three finalists)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 4 -- spoilers!)

Arrr, ye be warned thar be spoilers below.


Party interactions are important.  In book 1, Riordan uses a Harry-Hermione-Ron configuration, but with Harry and Hermione as the couple.  Grover is simply Percy's best friend, and there's absolutely no tension there, nor between Grover and Annabeth.  This makes the Ron character even more of a third wheel.  In book 2, Riordan swaps out Grover for Tyson as the Ron character, and Tyson works because there's actually tension between him and Percy (who doesn't want to admit Tyson is his brother) and Annabeth (who is uncomfortable adventuring with a monster).  Book 3 begins with Percy-Thalia-Annabeth, which is the BEST combination in the whole series.  This is like having Harry-Harriet-Hermione, only Harriet and Hermione are slightly hung up on a charming and talented young Slytherin who has left the school to be Voldemort's apprentice.  Sadly, we only get this combination for a single chapter, and I can't help but feel cheated.  There's nothing wrong with Zoe and Bianca as characters, but Zoe completely lacks Annabeth's history with Luke and Percy, so Zoe's only tension with Percy is "ew, boys are icky".  ARRRGHH.  Percy-Thalia-Annabeth makes a great book, Percy-Thalia-Zoe is merely a good one.


Silena playing the part of Patroclus to Clarisse's Achilles was a great touch. Making Silena the traitor just doesn't work.  We don't know enough about her to care that she's the traitor, there aren't any clues that she might be the traitor, and it's absolutely inconceivable that she would continue to feed information to Kronos after Beckendorf dies.  It would be trivial to make Annabeth unknowingly be the "traitor" by making a gift from Luke be cursed, and for her to be injured protecting Percy after Percy has revealed his weak spot to her.


Okay, I'm done.  I just wish every author had someone to point out these things before the books get printed.  Not getting more Percy-Thalia-Annabeth chapters is the one thing that really hurts.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 3)

There's also something that bothers me, perhaps more than it should, and perhaps Riordan is unknowingly committing a grievous crime.  See, Apollo is the god-damned god of poetry.  His poetry will not suck.  Riordan owes a huge apology to lovers of verse for the bilge he puts in Apollo's mouth.  Why should we turn kids on to prose that shows such little regard for poetry as to openly mock it?  If you can't write it yourself, then have Apollo quote it.  There are lines already written that can be made to fit any situation.  Percy doesn't have to understand or appreciate it, but those of us who can, should!

All right, back to where Riordan succeeds in coming up with a good overarching plot in each book, the core problem that underlies all of the individual issues above is that the journey is lacking.  We go from East Coast to West in a series of mini-episodes that don't really lead from one to the next or hang together as a coherent story.  When you look back, the events of the book should support one another so that while other events might have occurred, what actually happened seems like a series of natural consequences.

I really did enjoy the series; I mean, it's about the greek gods, so I'm there, and Riordan does get better as the series goes on (Rowling, by contrast, peaks in books 3 & 4, still has room for improvement, but just treads water for the last 3 books).  He begins to hide Grover away as much as possible.  There begins to be connective tissue that ties the episodes together so that I 'm reading a near-complete story rather than a collection of encounters from the wandering monster table.  Percy is less of an idiot.  I actually feel there is finally a moment (on the last page of the penultimate chapter in the last book - oops) which really captures a summer camp aura.


There's also a really nice parallel between Riordan's story of the family of gods that bickers and argues but ultimately has to pull together to face a common menace, and a United States that is currently in the throes of terrible partisan bickering and needs to pull together in order to get back on sound economic footing.  It is heartwarming, to say the least, to read a series by a born-and-bred Texan who is writing with great affection for New York.  You go, San Antonio.

This is a lot more than I ever planned to write about a YA series (and don't think that just because it's YA that it's okay for it to be less than perfect!), but there it is... and perhaps more with spoilers to come.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 2)

Rowling's protagonist is ignorant of much of the wizarding world because he grew up with muggles.  Similarly, Percy has never been taught anything about Greek mythology -- oh, wait, no, he's learned some of it from his Latin teacher at school.  ARGH.  What Percy remembers and doesn't remember from Greek mythology is infuriating.  Percy should know the recorded Greek myths.  It's the unrecorded details of the myths, and what the gods have been up to for the last 3000 years, where he should be floundering.  Athena and Poseidon shouldn't be on bad terms because of a B.C. dalliance; there should be a whole new set of axes that the gods are grinding.  Maybe Poseidon continues to defile Athena's temples every few decades and Percy was conceived in the NY Public Library (a temple to Athena if I ever saw one, and wonderful "MOM!" moment when Percy finds out); maybe Poseidon woos a daughter of Athena every so often because he has a weakness for the smart ones.  This gives Athena an immediate reason to tell Percy in no uncertain terms to stay away from her daughter!  We get a little of the newer grievances with the great prophecy and the agreement between the "big three", but it needs to be consistent and pervasive and there's just so much more one can do with this.

Ron can be a git, but Grover kills every scene he's in.  The name choice is bad enough; Grover should be dead as a fictional character name because it immediately conjures the image of a furry blue monster, but you have to read Grover to understand what a disaster he and all the satyrs are.

Satyrs to Grover: You figured out why so many other satyrs failed to complete our important quest for the last two millennia, but haven't made any progress in the last year.  You have one week to complete the quest or you're grounded. 

Me: Hunh? does this make any sense except as a horribly artificial injection of tension?)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Camp (part 1)

Harry Percy, Hermione Annabeth, and Ron Grover go to boarding school summer camp with other children who have magic powers an Olympian god as a parent.  During the school year summer, they foil a plot that would bring Voldemort Kronos back to power.


Oi.  Going in, I didn't think that Percy Jackson and the Olympians would lean so heavily on the Harry Potter formula, but I guess the reviews all warned that this was the "next thing" to read after HP.  Riordan definitely succeeds in writing a story whose overarching plot I want to follow to conclusion, but it falls down in several places.


To start, there's the setting.  Both authors need a place where the kids are away from their families (such as they are).  Rowling trades on the English boarding school experience to give us something "ordinary" to hold on to, and by spending time developing their class schedules and extracurricular activities, life at Hogwarts comes to be very real.  Riordan can't send his kids to boarding school; aside from the fact that it would be too like HP, middle-class Americans tend to not send their children to boarding school; the only time we're sent away from home is for summer camp, so it's natural for Riordan's heroes to go there.  Unlike Hogwarts, however, life at Camp Half-Blood is somewhat perfunctory, and only serves as a staging ground for the real adventures out in the wide world.  We're told that they do archery, canoeing, climbing walls, and other typical summer camp activities (with demigod overtones), but we're really only shown Quidditch capture the flag.


Most of Rowling's characters are afraid to say Voldemort's name, so Riordan apes this by having characters be cautious about saying the names of gods and monsters.  This is a hideous mistake, first because "minotaur" is not the beast's name; it's Asterion**.  Second, Riordan applies this rule mostly to shut down conversation about a particular god/monster when the characters get close to something he doesn't want to reveal yet or can't figure out another way to segue out of the conversation.  Other authors, including Rowling, are also guilty of coming up with silly reasons for their characters not to talk to each other about important things, but the inconsistency of the use of the "don't use the names of the gods" rule is particularly galling.  Gah.


** and it's Heracles, not Hercules.  If you're going to use Greek mythology, use all the Greek names.

Revolutionary Road (1961)

I finished this book on September 7 and returned it to the library weeks ago, but haven't managed to put this together until now.  


Arrrr, thar be spoilers below.


I remember seeing that there existed a Kate Winslet movie called Revolutionary Road, but didn't realize until after reading this book that it was based on this book.  Doink.  I'm very slightly amused to think that this what would have happened to Rose & Jack if Jack had survived; that is, if they were teleported 28 years into the future after the sinking of the Titanic and then lived through WWII before the events of the book.


So, funny story.  When I reached the part about April's 3rd pregnancy, I gave Sarahmac the plot summary to that point, and mentioned the rubber syringe thing.  Sarahmac then gave me a lecture (in the academic sense) about how the internal hemorrhaging mortality rate for young women dropped dramatically after Roe v. Wade because women could get abortions safely.  I said I didn't really think the story was about that, but as it turns out, that's precisely the takeaway for me, even if Richard Yates didn't intend it to be.  He is quoted as saying: 

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.

I'm somewhat conflicted as to whether the novel succeeds at this.  Frank and April openly deride the conformity of the suburbs at the beginning of the novel, but I feel we're given very little actual evidence of it in their community, and they display a kind of blind, desperate clinging to the idea that they are exceptional.  Well, maybe Frank isn't exceptional.  Maybe his talent lies in writing good marketing copy.  April simply made the mistake of falling in love with her idea of what Frank could be, rather than what he was (which she couldn't have fallen in love with).  Frank's great sin is a lack of communication with April concerning his fears of her plan to move to Europe.  This is not a lust for conformity, but an inability to accept that he can't live up to expectations.

The Girl Who Played with Hornet Castles in the Air

Interestingly, the original Swedish title is only the same in English (translated, of course) for The Girl Who Played with Fire; the first book translated as Men Who Hate Women and the third as The Air Castle that Blew Up.  I actually prefer the English titles because they lend a sense of consistency to a series; these are "the girl who..." books in my mind.


I actually liked the latter two books better than the first; or perhaps, my reading experience was better because I was ready for them to simply be fairly well-written crime thrillers, populated with cartoon-y heroes and villains, with some awkward bits that the editors should have caught** and without any deep thoughts*** -- something about the reviews of the first book/movie led me to think that it was more than that.  To be clear, Larsson definitely succeeded, in the sense that I was sad upon finishing the third book because there aren't any more Salander stories to read, and I stayed up late in order to finish each of the last two books.


** Figuerola is a 6 foot tall former near-Olympic quality gymnast?  Even coming after the slightly ludicrous natures of Lisbeth's mind, Niederman's physique, and Blomkvist's sex appeal, this was hard to swallow.  I also disbelieve that no one from the police went to interview Palmgren in The Girl Who Played with Fire.  That's a little bit too incompetent.  Lastly, the "mystery" of Berger's stalker is disappointing because there are no clues as to who the perpetrator is.


*** I can applaud Larsson's stance on discrimination against women without having learned anything new from it.... though perhaps something to talk about.  Blomkvist is a complicated character in all this because he is presented as someone who by their words and actions is someone who doesn't hate women in a series filled with men who hate women... and yet, he is a terrible husband and father.  Paradoxically, the only two women in the series that he actually has a socially well-defined duty to love and support are the two he does his best to ignore.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

Two pages into the prologue, I knew that the film would not measure up to the book.  These few paragraphs tell me far more about Henrik and Morell than the corresponding film scene, in about the same amount of time (reading vs. viewing).  Not an auspicious start for comparison, and only gets worse as all sorts of interesting details are left out of the film, presumably for lack of time.

But rather than catalog all the problems, let's focus on one of the most glaring mistakes the filmmakers made.  In general, the cast is good, and Rapace's Salander looks more like a real person to me than the Salander described in the book, but I feel sorry for Nyqvist because the filmmakers have miswritten Blomqvist's character.  Nowhere is this more evident than when he goes to recruit Salander.  In the book, Blomqvist is charming and talks his way into the apartment; he brings bagels and makes coffee; he tells Lisbeth that he knows she broke into his computer but comes off as interested rather than outraged: he *makes things easy*.  In the film, he practically forces his way into the apartment, is confrontational, threatens her with his knowledge of her breaking into his computer, and practically demands she make coffee.  Needless to say, he didn't bring bagels.  The real Lisbeth Salander would have taken a golf club to the film Blomqvist's head before they ever got to Hedestad.

This isn't to say that I don't have reservations about the book.  Far from it.  Upon watching the film, my first question about the first scene with Bjurman was "why doesn't Lisbeth tell him that she's a PI for Milton Security instead of lying and saying she makes copies and coffee?  That would make him back off."  Given how well she pushes other people away, this doesn't make any sense, so I was hoping that something in the book would explain this for me.  Page 166 of the paperback says, "She did not know why she had lied, but she was sure it was a wise decision."  That explains everything.  The author decided he needed Lisbeth to act out of character in order to contrive the salacious subplot.  Whee.  Why have her lie at all?  It would be far simpler, and actually in character, for her to refuse to answer his questions and have Bjurman come to his own incorrect conclusions.

Also, I have no idea why Harriet does not confide in Henrik.  By 1966, he has already shown a fondness for Harriet and a willingness to help (having extracted Cecilia from an abusive relationship).  Henrik is not immediately available on the day she disappears, but it's for an obviously good reason.  Why wouldn't she approach him immediately after the emergency on the bridge is over?  Or in writing shortly after fleeing Hedeby?  Or even a few years later once she's started a new life?  Oh, right.  Harriet needs to be unreasonably uncommunicative in order for there to be a story.  Boo.  I don't think there is an easy fix for this one.

Still and all, it was a pretty good book.

All the King's Men Who Hate Women

Finally got around to reading Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer prize-winning novel.  We netflixed the movie** a couple years ago and it's a pale, poor ghost of the book. The book's dialogue is excellent throughout, which makes a certain sense because it was originally conceived as a verse play, and there are some passages that are wonderfully written:

Tom Stark, a sophomore, had made quarterback on the mythical All Southern Eleven and had celebrated by wrapping an expensive yellow sport job around a culvert on one of the numerous new speedways which bore his father's name.  Fortunately, a highway Patrol car, and not some garrulous citizen, discovered the wreck, and the half-empty bottle of evidence was, no doubt, flung into the night to fall in the dark waters of the swamp.  Beside the unconscious form of the Sophomore Thunderbolt lay another form, conscious but badly battered, for in the big yellow expensive sport job Tom had had with him a somewhat less expensive yellow-headed sport job, named, it turned out Caresse Jones.  So Caresse wound up in the operating room of the hospital and not in the swamp.  She obligingly did not die, though in the future she would never be much of an asset in a roadster.

There is a lot packed into a few lines here; telling you just about everything you need to know about Willie Stark's son, his relationship with his father, the character of of the state police, and a taste of that time and place's view of the role of certain young women in society.


There are unfortunately many other times when Warren gets in his own way.  One of many possible examples that starts off well, giving great insight to Jack Burden's mind:

I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person.  In fact, as the realization grew that the machine-Lois belonged to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk), the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly."

but this is immediately followed by:

Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was drowned [..blah blah blah..].  Or it resembled a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire [..yadda yadda yadda..].  Or so, I recall, it seemed.

Which undermines the original comparison.  Choose a single simile, Robert!  You might argue that since the book is written in first person, this kind of waffling is in Jack Burden's character.  I don't consider that a good excuse for ruining a good paragraph.  Of course, it's also entirely possible that the stuff that drives me crazy when I read All the King's Men is a stylistic thing that was considered good writing back in the 40's; maybe it's like how I can't stand how Olivier does Shakespeare.  I still want to go back in time with Ezra Pound's blue pencil and trim all the fat out of this.  The casual misogyny is also distracting (pretty much every woman gets the same treatment as Lois and the yellow-headed sport job), but at least I know that's a product of the era.  

Aaaand, speaking of casual misogyny, Sarah finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just before we saw the movie last week.  I should probably hold my tongue until I've read the book, but... this is basically a perfectly good mystery/thriller*** EXCEPT that the entire subplot with Bjurman doesn't work at all in the movie and (according to Sarah) is far more graphic than the book.  Who is this being filmed for?  

** the 1949 version; we have some standards, here.

*** though seriously, Nazis? isn't there some form of Godwin's law that should go into effect here?  maybe the trope isn't as trite in Sweden as it is in the U.S.; he gets a mulligan, I guess...

Victory of Eagles (Novik, Naomi) 2008

Book 5 of the Temeraire series that gives us the Napoleonic Wars with dragons.  These are just great, fun books that have maintained their quality -- I worry a little about book 6, since it's holding true to the "odd books are about the actual Napoleonic wars and even books are about traveling the world", and so far I've much preferred the odd books because one of Novik's strengths is in rewriting the details of the wars -- and are being published at a reasonable rate, unlike *some* fantasy series involving dragons that began with promise but I've long since given up on (*cough* Song of Ice and Fire *cough*).  


Finished reading 3/29/10.

Little Brother (Doctorow, Cory) 2008

Good book.  For the first few chapters, I had the feeling that an "old person" was trying to appropriate my generation's voice**, it's obviously not intended in a bad way, but it just feels a little condescending when a geezer is trying to be slick.  Once he's finally finished trying to establish his young hacker cred, Doctorow gets down to just writing about universal human needs and conflicts that happen to be wrapped within a near-future teen hacker's world, and it's a compelling read.  


Still, the single best page comes early, when he gives an excellent one-line definition of LARPing: "It's like Capture the Flag in monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown in."  And later goes on to explain, "The problem with [LARPing in] hotels is that they have a lot of nongamers in them, too [...].  Normal people.  From states that begin and end with vowels.  On holidays.  / And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game. / Let's just leave it at that, okay?"  Brilliant.


I got the distinct impression that Van was originally to be Marcus's love interest, but Doctorow decided against that after an early draft and created the character of Ange, possibly while he was plotting the aftermath of the VampMob and how Marcus would get his last infodrop to the press.  The tracks are covered reasonably well, but Van and Ange go to the same school, Van has an unrequited crush on Marcus, and there's a typo on page 183 of hardcover edition that says "Van was really excited by this party" when clearly it should be Ange.  


** even though I'm just a year younger than Cory Doctorow and not at all part of the generation whose voice he's writing in.  I'd be a geezer appropriating another generation's voice if I were writing this kind of book.

Finished reading 3/25/10.  

The Embedding (Ian Watson) 1973

finished 2/20/10.  Spoilers below.  This was another Nebula finalist, one of the 87 also-rans to the Forever War in the 1975 voting.


In story A, stiff british experimental linguist Chris receives a letter from his old friend Pierre who may be the father of his child.  Pierre is French -- perhaps to more naturally explain his dalliance with a married woman? whatever -- and hanging out in the Brazilian rainforest with some natives who may hold the key to understanding some obscure poem with interesting linguistic properties.  Chris just so happens to be trying to raise four children under conditions which might also create interesting linguistics.  All right, can't wait to see what Pierre is doing directly and how the stories will converge.  Next, in story B1, instead of going to Pierre, we see an American engineer with a checkered past in Nam (sigh, the book was published in '73) and ironically and amusingly named "Charlie" working on a dam to flood the Brazilian rainforest (which would wash away all the natives with interesting linguistics).  Don't care!  Back to Chris, where he badly explains his work on "self-embedding" to Tom, a slick car salesman-ish American linguist, who in turn wants to recruit him to talk to aliens.  In New Mexico.  Far, far away from his research on the children.  Sigh, story C.  We finally go to story B2 to see Pierre and his natives, and then flip back and forth between stories C and B2, with a little bit of connective tissue between B2 and B1 in the form of Brazilian terrorists who want to blow up the dam.  Finally we check in on Chris's kids back in England to remind us they exist and that they could use Chris's help because they're starting to self-embed.  Back to story C, where Chris discovers the aliens want "embedded" minds, and they offer some Brazilian natives in exchange for deep space flight technology.  In story B1, the local authorities have captured and are torturing the Brazilian terrorists and Charlie goes apeshit.  In story C, Charlie and Tom go to Brazil with some CIA-type spooks to get some natives and blow up the dam -- they don't want to flood the forest b/c the natives' "embedding" is partially based on some fungus that only grows in the rainforest, and they can't simply stop dam construction b/c only a few countries know about the aliens.  Whatever.  Quick updates on each of the stories as we build to climax, and, oops, the CIA-types blowing up the dam got their helicopter shot down in the process of blowing up the damn and a Chinese saw the tacnuke explosion from a spy satellite.  Cut to story C1, where shadowy American government types decide to blame the explosion on "hositle" aliens, kill them all, and try to piece together their tech from the rubble.  This happens.  The natives are no longer needed, and so the gov't just picks up Chris, Tom, and Pierre from Brazil.  Chris takes Pierre home, goes to see his kids at the research center, takes one of them (Vidya) home, his wife freaks out because she thinks he's punishing her by bringing his "real" kid home to show off to Pierre, Vidya's "self-embedding" has turned him into a powerful projective empath, and Chris has a serious head trip before Vidya breaks his own neck.  In the aftermath, Chris is being taken back to the lab for observation while the other researchers talk to his wife, and Pierre has *completely disappeared* without warning from the story.  Maybe he's up in the bedroom.  He is French, after all.  Whatever.

The Orphan (Stallman, Robert) 1980

Literary Teen Wolf.  This is a depression-era story about a year in the life of an orphan -- a wild animal of no known species -- that is able to metamorphosize into a human.  This is not simply a change of shape; the human form that he takes has its own thoughts and feelings separate from, and yet tied to, the beast, and it's all a metaphor for how we integrate our human selves with our dark subconsciousnesses.  The novel is really two novellas stitched together; one for each family that he lives with during the year, and for two different stages of life: the first at about 5 years of age, and the second on the cusp of puberty, with all the attendant pre-teen angst.  I think my favorite part was reading about the flirting games I hadn't heard of before: Wink 'em and Post Office, though the game of Post Office played in the book had one person go into a dark place and call out to someone from the other room, who would go into the dark place and, a minute or so later, exchange places with the first person and call out to someone else from the other room to come to the Post Office.

City on Fire (Williams, Walter Jon) 1997

This is the sequel to Metropolitan (which I read some while ago) that I finally got around to reading.  I'd forgotten enough of Metropolitan that I was grateful that City on Fire contains enough backstory to make it unnecessary to have actually read Metropolitan first.  It takes a little while for the story to kick into gear, and I spent a fair amount of time annoyed at our primary protagonist, Aiah, but the end comes all too soon and... BOLLOCKS!  there isn't a sequel yet, and according to this interview and Williams' website, and the fact that 12 years have passed since the publication of City on Fire, I'm not sanguine about its chances.

This is a shame. The world of Metropolitan is so visually rich that someone should have exercised the film options by now.

the Thursday Next series (Fforde, Jasper)

I actually tore through Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" novels, starting with the "Eyre Affair", last year, but never posted anything. This must be rectified!  The following are my notes on each book:


The Eyre affair : a novel  (Fforde, Jasper)  2001  4/17/2008 

It's sort of a Sue Grafton meets the Bronte sisters meets Terry Pratchett meets Lemony Snicket in an alternate history Britain. I wouldn't say he's a great writer, but very good and very funny with a lot of good literary references that delight the book snob in me.  The eventual "solution" to defeating Acheron's supernatural protections is weak, and there are certain sections of the book where the narrative drags, but Fforde otherwise delivers an incredibly enjoyable read full of "high culture becomes pop culture".

Lost in a Good Book (Fforde, Jasper)  2002  5/21/2008  
More of the same from Fforde's heroine Thursday Next; it's all about the journey and not the destination, but the material remains fresh and it's a fun ride.



The Well of Lost Plots (Fforde, Jasper)  2003  5/27/2008   
The third novel in the Thursday Next series is the payoff on being patient with all the changes introduced in book 2.  Fforde has given Thursday entirely new worlds to explore, and he does a fantastic job in certain chapters of writing in the style of the "type" of book in which the action is taking place.  I'm coming to believe that the purpose of a good western liberal arts education is to be able to read and enjoy the Thursday Next novels without referring to Wikipedia.  Reasonable grounding in popular culture doesn't hurt, either.  


Something Rotten (Fforde, Jasper)  2004  6/9/2008  
My favorite in the series so far.  The purpose of the first three Thursday Next novels is to get to this one.


First Among Sequels (Fforde, Jasper)  2007  6/15/2008  
The Thursday Next series has now reached a point where it's distracting to have to read numerous passages that were written for earlier books but are included here for morons who decide to read the series out of order... or perhaps for the senile, who can't remember a few years later what the Chronoguard is.  With all such redundancies removed, the book might not top 300 pages, but what there is of the new stuff is great, as usual.

All The Pretty Horses (McCarthy, Cormac) 1992

I didn't care much for the overall plot, but it's not so much the story as how McCarthy tells it.  He generally does a wonderful job of showing us what we need in order to get to know John Grady Cole through his words and actions, rather than spilling the beans and telling us.  All in all there are three brilliant passages.  I was reading the Vintage International paperback edition from June 1993:

1. The part beginning "The hacendado had bought the horse through an agent...", which tells the story of how Antonio traveled to America to bring the stallion back to Mexico.  When Antonio turns out his pockets to deliver over the horse's papers, I laughed out at the full list of objects he hands to the hacendado.  This reads like a writer's workshop assignment to tell a story in a single paragraph that turned out outstandingly well. (pages 125-126)
   
   
2. The billiards game with the hacendado, particularly near the end where the hacendado misses a shot and then complains that "the French [meaning here the thinking that comes of obtaining a modern continental education] have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game.  No evil is beyond them." The use of "mutilate" to describe the defects in his billiard game also made me laugh out loud.  (pages 143-144)
   
   
3. Just about everything after John Grady Cole returns to Texas, but most especially the courtroom scene (pages 286-298).

My favorite parts were all comic (though the scene following the courtroom at the judge's house is both touching and sums up the character of John Grady Cole and his experiences in the book), and I'm not sure if I'm simply biased towards the comic scenes or McCarthy is simply gifted at writing them.  I think it's a happy confluence of McCarthy's minimal writing style and the level of understatement necessary to make these particular scenes "work" and be really, really funny.


[finished reading 9/21/09]

The Vampire Tapestry (Charnas, Suzy McKee) 1980

This has the best disclaimer I can remember reading: "All characters in this book are fictitious.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental -- barring a brief appearance by the author's mother-in-law, with the gracious permission of the same."  The novel itself is structured as a stitching together of five related stories to make the whole "Vampire Tapestry", with Charnas's Nebula-winning novella "the Unicorn Tapestry" as the center story, and Professor Weyland starring throughout.  "The Unicorn Tapestry" is the strongest story in the book, but I have to admit that my favorite character (after Weyland) is Katje de Groot, who is introduced in the first story and then never seen again.  I was first sad and then very sad (because the second story is the weakest of all) and then finally resigned (once I began to enjoy "the Unicorn Tapestry" and then "A Musical Interlude") that Katje wasn't going to reappear, because Charnas is too good a storyteller to bring her back when it doesn't make sense to do so.  The ending leaves wide open the possibility for more stories about Weyland, and fast-forwarding to today would be perfect; dare we hope for a sequel?

[reading completed  9/13/9]