January 2012, part one

I have a few books to start off with because I went on vacation for the first weekend in January that was a.) international (long plane rides) and b.) took place partially on a beach, so I got a lot of reading done.  I have a buffer!  Yay!

1.  The Help, Kathryn Stockett
I wanted to read this mostly out of the desire to be part of the conversation everyone is having about it - it's clearly problematic for some people, but has also elicited quite a lot of praise, and I can't talk about things when I haven't been exposed to them.  Now that I have read it, I can definitely see the problematic elements; you can't ignore the fact that Stockett is white, and is appropriating the culture of a marginalized group of people in order to tell her story.  I also think it's true that The Help was written out of a certain amount of guilt, owing to the conditions that Stockett herself grew up on.  BUT, I think the book is very matter-of-fact about its own problems, and isn't embarrassed to point them out to the reader.  It invites the discussion, which is important.  And the characters are just so FABULOUS, all of these marvelously strong women, and Stockett does a great job getting that sense of community across.  I recommend it.

2.  Naamah's Blessing, Jacqueline Carey
Carey has written nine books set in her Terre d'Ange world, and while all of them are enjoyable reads the latest set of three are the weakest.  Naamah's Blessing is the most recent and concludes the trilogy about Moirin, who is (in my opinion) Carey's weakest protagonist; mostly she reacts instead of acts, and is more content than previous characters to simply take her destiny as it comes.  Additionally problematic is the fact that this volume is almost a complete mirror of the third book in the series, Kushiel's Avatar, but less good.  I read it, I enjoyed it, and fans of Carey's work will enjoy it as well.  But it could have been better.

3.  Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
Easily my favorite thing I've read so far this year (which is not saying much, as it's only been eleven days, but...), this book combines many things that I love: 80s pop culture, cyberpunk, geeks, adventure...it's super fun.  Cline incorporates a lot of fascinating ideas that are particularly relevant to our current cultural landscape, like social media, technology-based communities, and the difficulties of keeping secrets in an internet based society.  Wade, our narrator, is endearing and self-deprecating and it's easy to keep rooting for him, even when Cline gives in a little too much to hand-wavey hacker science near the climax of the book; he recovers with an exciting finale.  Everyone should read this.

4.  The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
The circus of the title is composed of multiple stand-alone tents, each containing its own dream-like beauty and experience.  The book itself is composed this way as well - the plot is nearly secondary to the imagery that Morgenstern employs, describing the tents and the circus and a handful of colorful characters.  Her scenes are rich and her language is singularly beautiful.  The story, a duel between two magicians, and the romance, are hung on the scenes like a gauze scarf: floaty and nearly insubstantial, adding a sheen of color to the black-and-white striped circus tents.  It's a lovely experience; not a strong story, but it doesn't have to be.

5.  Swamplandia!, Karen Russell
I...don't really know how I feel about this?  I appreciated the ending for reasons I won't go into (I'm employing a strong anti-spoiler policy on this blog), and it's certainly got a strong, quirky cast.  They wrestle alligators!  And...have sex with ghosts?  Maybe?  I'm not entirely sure what I read here.  It's written in a really interesting fashion, though - it takes place in the Florida swamp, and it reads like a swamp.  It meanders and oozes, takes it time and rolls around in its setting.  It's never in a hurry to get anywhere until the climax starts rolling, and it gives you a lot of time to contemplate the things that go on.  Which you need.

In Service of a New Year's Resolution

It's been a really long time since I've posted anything here (Blogger is telling me almost two years.  I'm a bad blogger, apparently.), but I'd like to change that!  One of my New Year's Resolutions for 2012 was originally to read 30 books that I've never read before, but I decided that wasn't nearly as difficult as it could be, and so have decided to undertake the 52 Book Challenge.  The rules are simple: read 52 books in 52 weeks.  My own caveat is that they have to be books I've never read before, so anything I re-read this year doesn't count towards my tally.

I'll be logging the books I finish here, with a number and a paragraph or two with my thoughts on them.  I'll also be recording them on my Shelfari page, so if you don't follow me there, you should!  You can find my user page here.

Growing Up Literary

Occasionally, even though I know I should be reading new things, I re-read books that I find really enjoyable. Naamah's Kiss, by Jacqueline Carey, and indeed, Carey's whole Terre d'Ange series, are such books. And since Naamah's Kiss isn't mine but borrowed, and I know that eventually I will need to bring it back, I read it again. And there was nothing to be done except that I needed to read the Kushiel books again, too. I've now run out of those that I have in my home, and I needed something to read until I banished enough laziness to go to the library, so I picked up Exile's Honor by Mercedes Lackey. I own many of Lackey's Valdemar books, because for a long time they were my go-to fantasy books. They were fun, the characters were believable, and the stories were entertaining. Which is why I was SO distressed to realize that I may, in fact, have outgrown them.

The two series, Kushiel's Legacy and The Heralds of Valdemar, are similarly flavored. They are roughly historical fantasy, although Kushiel emphasizes the history and Valdemar has a stronger vein of magic. The main characters are usually strong women, in an elite profession, and political intrigue is a main component. I did not realize until today that Carey is essentially Lackey for grownups.

Carey's prose achieves a sophistication that Lackey doesn't, but I don't mean to say that Lackey is a less talented writer; she is writing for a younger crowd, and her stories are less layered. Carey has a larger cast of characters for whom each role is more clearly defined. Lackey is less concerned with the complexities than Carey, and as such, the Valdemar books are easier to follow and easier to read. Her characters are more transparent and easier to understand; they lack the necessity for further motivation than what's on the surface. Which made them good, easy comfort books in high school, but slightly boring now.

I feel kinda like when I moved from Tamora Pierce to Mercedes Lackey - it is weird to figure out that I am no longer an author's target audience. The good thing, though, is that there are ALWAYS more books to pick from. And I look forward to discovering where I'll go from Carey.

But I'm not in a hurry to get there, because I've still got four of her books to re-read.

Runemarks

There is a lot of crap fantasy being produced these days. I’m not going to name names, because I am a firm believer in the “someone, somewhere, likes it” theory, but you know it’s true. I also think that it is a fairly easy writing convention to base a story off some brand of mythology. This can be used to good or bad effect (American Gods was brilliant, the Percy Jackson books are shaping up to be a fun romp, Gods Behaving Badly was…only okay), and I don’t think it’s a bad thing to dig up old stories, but I do think it’s pretty amazing when an author manages to take old, worn out characters and make them new and fun.

Runemarks by Joanne Harris is a solid effort on those lines. The novel takes place post-Ragnarok, but the world hasn’t ended – indeed, she doesn’t even place us in a dystopic or post-apocalyptic type setting. Malbry, the town where all the action is, reminded me much more of Tolkein’s Shire: quiet, unassuming, and out-of-the-way. The Order, a religious sect that isn’t Christianity and yet totally is, reigns supreme even in such a small town; the Examiners dictate life from their glass cathedrals in World’s End, and they have declared magic, runes, and any other remnants from the Elder Age (before Ragnarok) to be anathema.

Enter our heroine, a sprightly girl named Maddy with an unbroken “ruinmark” emblazoned on her palm. Maddy is a fun character to ride with. She’s smart, but it’s an intelligence unpolished by age (she’s only fourteen) so she does make the occasional bad or rash decision, and she gets in trouble and has to get herself out. She’s resourceful, flexible, and endearing, and I was rooting for her all the way.

Maddy’s task is to set the world to rights and prevent another Ragnarok, from which the world probably won’t recover. Her journey takes her far from home and through an extensive network of “World Below” places, including waking sleeping gods, arguing with an Oracle, and outwitting the inhabitants of the lands of the dead. It’s an engaging, surprising journey, and I didn’t mind that I was always pretty sure how everything was going to turn out.

Harris really shines with her characterizations of the Norse pantheon. (A quick side note: these gods have so many thoroughly recognizable nicknames that I think it’s almost impossible for authors to hide their identities from the reader. I was not in the least surprised by the two big “reveals,” but I’m not sure that those reveals are for my sake anymore – is it acceptable for Maddy to be surprised, even if I’m not?) She makes them similar to the Greek gods, in that they are very human – they hold grudges, have tempers, are prone to vanity, and make mistakes. But as is appropriate to deities, those mistakes are on a MUCH larger level with a correspondingly large amount of destruction. But Harris makes sure that you really get to know them, especially Odin and Loki, the two predictable main players. Their personalities absolutely resonate with everything we know about them from their stories, and at the same time, I felt like I got to know them in a more intimate way.

Runemarks is a wonderfully fun odyssey, with a few gem-like surprises hidden in its occasionally predictable story. For fantasy lovers, it is a treasure among the largely sub par offerings, and for everyone else, it is an interesting take on mythology. Either way, it is definitely something to be enjoyed.

Patient Zero

Popular culture has been fascinated with zombies for a long, long time - I think it's because zombies, unlike other supernatural beings, can be justified through science. At the moment, it's fake science, but a virus that reanimates the meat of a dead person is minutely more probable (in our collective imagination) than a virus that turns you into a wolf. This is speculation on my part, based on the extensive explanations often provided in zombie stories - the rage virus in the 28 Days Later franchise, Max Brooks' examination in World War Z and The Zombie Handbook, and Bill Pullman's turn in The Serpant and the Rainbow, to name a mere handful. Making zombies believable has certainly been more of a focus in zombie media than it has been in, say, vampire media.

This is pretty much the only strength that Jonathan Maberry's Patient Zero has over the plentiful competition.

The novel starts strong with a really neat premise: an Islamic extremist group, backed by a wealthy third party, has developed a highly contagious disease that they intend to release on the American populace. All that stands in their way is a secret government organization (think Men In Black, only with less giving up your entire life) and our Action Hero Joe Ledger. Ledger is part military, part cop, and all badass - his friend-cum-shrink, Randy Sanchez, basically exists to prove how tough and hardened and on the edge of insanity Ledger really is. But you root for him, because he also deals with the terror and sheer bizarreness of the situation.

Ledger is backed mainly by a cast of military personnel, and his personal team is pretty awesome. For the first half of the novel, everyone is tough, ready to rumble, professional, and awesome. They kick ass. Mr. Church, head of the Department of Military Sciences (our super-secret organization) and Major Grace Courtland are a good pair for Ledger to bounce off - collectively, they have enough tactical and practical smarts so that I never felt like leaps of logic were being made without the reader to follow (until the end...but we'll get to that).

It unravels startlingly fast in the second act. It feels as though Maberry loses track of his characterizations; he feels the need to twist his established personalities into several stilted, obvious, and unnecessary storylines, that do nothing for his characters and bog down the pace of the novel. One of his villains, a deliciously amoral representative of the pharmaceutical companies, becomes a completely different person in a really irritating way. The only consistant characters are the most two-dimensional; they can't become something different because there's not a whole lot there to start with.

The other major weakness of the novel is that it changes perspective and place nearly every chapter; this in and of itself is not a criticism, but all of the sections with Ledger are told from a first person perspective while none of the rest of the novel is. This makes the prose tremendously uneven and rather untrustworthy, since the reader doesn't get a consistant narrator to hang on to throughout the story. I understand that to tell the story Maberry obviously wanted to, he can't keep the whole thing in Legder's perspective, but I wish he'd scrapped the first person in favor of a third person omniscient. It would have been smoother AND made more sense.

Long story short: Maberry isn't Max Brooks, and this is no World War Z. I just wish Patient Zero had been satisfying enough on its own that I wouldn't feel the need to make that comparison.

Prospective Reads

I was originally planning to do a fairly academic, drawn out post here about how Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash is not actually cyberpunk, but my smarter-than-me boyfriend has informed me that, in fact, it's categorized as "post-cyberpunk" and not actually the former at all. So. That happened.

(My reasoning was going to be an elegant deconstruction about how the focus of Snow Crash is actually the relationships between people, rather than mankind's relationship to technology and machines, which is what I think the point of pure cyberpunk is. Snow Crash is much more involved in tracing the connecting lines between people, following threads of religion, language, and conformity to show the web that's netting all of us into one big mass of humanity. And then that humanity breeds viruses and programs, I don't know. I stopped outlining what was essentially a college essay when I discovered that this is not a new theory.)

I could ALSO give my excuses for not reading One Hundred Years of Solitude yet, but that one boils down easy: the guy in my office who told me I have to read it, said I need to watch some bizarre film called Gummo first. I haven't watched the film yet, so I haven't read the book yet. I'm going to begin it tentatively, I can tell you that much - I'm no longer intimidated by not finishing books, so if it drags too hard I'm putting it down. But I'm probably being unfair to it; Lord knows that since finishing school I've gotten HELLA lazy in my reading habits.

What I will do is cheerfully tell you to go read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Wonderful character-driven mysteries, and Larsson the author is a master of story-telling. The fact that they are both translations (Swedish to English) didn't actually impact the prose for me, either (I tend to think translations come out a little stiff, but Tattoo and Fire are both fluid and charming).

In which I confess to failure

I've been meaning to put something up sooner, and I even found cover images for two REALLY good Charles de Lint novels (I liked Yarrow more than Angel of Darkness, but that's because I have more of a predilection for fantasy than crime noir) but I haven't for several reasons. Reasons two through seven have to do with how lazy I've been feeling, but the biggest is because I feel like something of a literary failure. And the reason for that is because I didn't like Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I didn't like Never Let Me Go by Kazu0 Ishiguro, either, and I think they're related phenomena. They both feature strings of winding narratives, sometimes only vaguely (if at all) connected to each other, and ethereal/metaphysical-thinking characters that I couldn't feel any real attachment to. I'm no stranger to introspection, and I even appreciate it in stories, but I felt like narrative was being sacrificed for the sake of reflection and that doesn't give me much to hold on to. In the spirit of honesty I confess I didn't actually finish Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but at about 3/4 of the way through it I realized I didn't care what the ending was. It is a chunker of a book, and I'd spent a couple weeks trying to slog through it, and I just couldn't do it any more. I guess I will never know what the secret of the narrator's wife is, or why the hell I had to read that horrible story about killing all the zoo animals. Oh well.

So then I read a string of Terry Pratchett novels, including one I hadn't read before (Thud!) and they were all excellent. I'm partial to Pratchett's novels about the City Watch, because Sam Vimes and Lord Vetinari have some of the best repartee I've ever encountered. Pratchett's books hover on the formulaic, but it's a formula that works - Vimes is a character that demands your respect if not your love, and from me he's got both. Following him through crime and his Batman-esque struggle to stay on the right side of the law is always a brilliant morality play (and you know the bad guy will get it in the end, sometimes by having fireworks crammed in unfortunate places).

I just finished a total absorption with one of John Connolly's mystery novels featuring Charlie Parker, who I'd only known previously from his short story collection Nocturnes. Dark Hallow was a book I waffled on the whole time I was reading it, and then at the very end it delivered me such a sharp dart of clarity that everything I'd had trouble with slotted neatly into place. My original concern had been that Connolly was spreading his resources too thin - there were too many stories, too many characters, and not quite enough holding it all together. The reward at the end is finding out they're all one story, and that every character has a purpose, and that every seemingly-chatty side story fits neatly into the narrative and becomes one cohesive whole. It is a fine bit of storytelling, which is good because I REALLY loved The Book of Lost Things (which you can read about below) and also Nocturnes.

For the moment I'm taking a break, although I'll undoubtedly return to Connolly and Charlie Parker. For now, I'm going to appease the creature-feature lover in me and see about reading The Lost World. I can't really imagine NOT liking it, since Jurassic Park is so awesome, but I guess you never know. Especially with Michael Crichton.