A Book Log
So the good news is that Jim Butcher’s Small Favor is super-great. If the ninth book of the series was a bit weak, the tenth is a return to form; so it looks like the weak book was just an aberration and not the beginning of a trend. Which is, all things considered, highly excellent.
Now, on to book... oh. Right. April 2009, eh? Sigh.
So I could tell you that Jim Butcher’s White Night isn’t as good as the previous few volumes, that it felt a little lower-key and less intense, more akin to the earlier books. But really, if I did tell you that, what would you do with it?
It’s not like anyone who’s reading the series is going to stop doing so. And it’s even less likely that somebody who’s not reading it is going to have their mind changed in either direction because I report that book nine is merely very good instead of completely excellent.
So forget I said anything. Now, on to book ten.
It’d be easy to get the impression that the Dresden books are just episodic mysteries that can be read in any order. I mean, take a look at Jim Butcher’s Proven Guilty , the eighth book in the series.
The cover starts off the pretense by subtitling the book “A Novel of The Dresden Files”. Not “Book Eight of The Dresden Files,” just “A Novel.” Inside, Butcher continues the theme by giving us the same introductions that he’s given us in every single book. Hey, Harry’s VW Beetle isn’t really blue anymore, since he’s had lots of panels replaced, but he calls it the Blue Beetle. We’re told this with predictable regularity in every single volume of the series, just as every Encyclopedia Brown book tells us that Idaville has a low crime rate. It’s as if Butcher really thinks we’re going to pick up this random novel of the Dresden Files and start reading here.
But — and this is important — you should ignore all that, because these books aren’t at all episodic, and there are deep and important running storylines and character developments, many of which come to a head in this book and are handled masterfully.
Yet another great installment of an excellent series. And now, on to book nine.
I regard basically everything I might say about the story in Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat to be a spoiler, so let me instead just say a quick thing about the Dresden series in general.
So: What’s really surprising to me is that the series is getting better as it goes along. There aren’t a whole lot of series that get better all the way through book seven. At a hasty thought, I’m coming up with Pratchett’s Discworld (which had its best volumes at either 20 or 29 by Wikipedia Pete’s reckoning), and that’s both good company to be in, and well-boding for future installments. Like Pratchett, Butcher’s writing is getting sharper, his jokes getting funnier, his characters’ relationships getting deeper, and his world-building getting stronger.
Also, despite what you may consider the high praise that I’m lavishing on these books, I think I’ve been mentally underestimating them. Whenever I tear through a series quickly and addictively like this, I tend to think of it as something fluffy and light, and I guess these are — and yet, there’s not a damn thing wrong with them, and whenever they have a chance to fall into cheap cliche and comfortable ruts, they go just a little bit off the path and do something slightly less obvious. They’re clearly entertaining reading, but they’re quality entertaining, like Bujold at her prime or Weber without all the horrid politics.
All that said, I hate to hype things up, because then you’ll read the books and inevitably be all disappointed. My own expectations for the Dresden books (gleaned from unreliable sources and misapplied snark) was that they were trashy, guilty fun like those Anita Blake books are supposed to be, which I think has been a great help toward my being so impressed. What I really want to say is that these books are precisely as good as will make you read them, but no better — so, what I need you to do is to chalk up all my raving to weird idiosyncratic reactions on my part, but figure that there must be something interesting there, even if this sort of book isn’t really your thing, and that they’re worth checking out and might be kinda okay, you guess.
Easy, right? Now, on to book eight for me.
As promised, Jim Butcher’s Summer Knight, Death Masks, and Blood Rites , books four through six of the Dresden Files.
The virtues of the earlier books — great characters, increasingly interesting world-building, and incredible pacing — continue, and are joined by Butcher’s writing getting consistently better, particularly (and unexpectedly) in the direction of humor. It’s rare for “witty dialogue” to actually be witty dialogue without the scare quotes, but in these books it mostly is — and there are some genuinely funny laugh out loud lines that I’ll refrain from quoting only because I’m too lazy to page through the books and find them considerate to spoil the joke for you when you get there.
Excellent — and addictive — stuff. And now, on to book seven.
When I’m reading multi-volume episodic series with continuing plot lines — Honor Harrington, Miles Vorkosigan, whatever — there comes a certain point when the series grabs me completely. Before that point, I can reflect detachedly on the virtues and weaknesses of the books; after that, all I can do is try to keep up as I tear through the series with rabid addiction.
About halfway through Jim Butcher’s Grave Peril is when I hit that point in the Dresden Files books. I’m hooked on Butcher’s increasingly solid world-building, fascinating characters, and developing storylines. The way this is going to play out, based on past experience, is that I’ll read through the ten books (so far) in this series as fast as I can; when I get to the end, I’ll be pissy that there aren’t more, and so immersed in the Dresdenverse that I won’t be able to read anything else for a while, and will probably end up reading a giant pile of comic books as a palate cleanser.
At any rate, it’s safe to say that I highly recommend these books. And I want to say that you should read them if you like supernatural mystery or noir or urban fantasy or whatever — but I hate all that stuff, and I still love these, so I’m not sure what the real criterion is. Anyway, onward to the fourth book...
So apparently these Dresden Files books have been turned into a TV show of some variety, and after reading Jim Butcher’s Fool Moon , I can see why — the guy’s got a writing style that’s not only visual, but downright cinematic.
In one scene, for instance, there’s a werewolf (spoiler basically given away by title and genre: the book has werewolves!) standing in a hallway doing stuff, and Butcher describes it such that not only can I see it in my head, but I see it in my head with a CG-animated werewolf. Yes, really. It had the slightly reflective skin, fakey fur, awkward movements and everything; my head apparently has its effects provided on the cheap.
But really, most scenes are like that, and there’s a lot of physical description and wardrobe talk, and when things aren’t cinematic, the narrator seems almost apologetic:
Power lanced out through the rod in a flood of scarlet light that charred a six-foot circle of wall into powder and ash and sent it flying. I stepped through it, wishing for my duster, for a second, just for the cool effect it would have.
The plotting is similarly bang-bang action-packed fast-paced, rarely giving you a chance to take a break and reflect on some of the more dubious plotting. After reading this second book, my estimate of this series has risen; this is high-quality fluff so far, and might yet be more than that.
Jim C. Hines’ Goblin War wraps up the trilogy he started in Goblin Quest and Goblin Hero , and does it very well. Hines takes what had been just a cliche-inversion series and manages to infuse it with enough world-building and characterization depth to sustain an honest-to-god non-parodic straight fantasy that just happens to feature a runty goblin as the protagonist.
In this third book, Jig (the aforementioned runty goblin, who’s been in a couple of adventures in the previous books) is forced to leave the D&D-cliche mountain where the goblin lair exists, and explore the world outside. This broadening of geographical scope matches up nicely with a broadening of the story’s scope, to encompass nations and armies instead of just parties of adventurers and packs of monsters. The result is a larger, more expansive story set in a more uniquely realized and interesting world that goes beyond a familiar monster-laden mountain.
It’s not brilliant, but it is competent light fantasy, and the upward trajectory of the series makes me optimistic for whatever Hines writes next.
Jim Butcher’s Storm Front is the first of his Dresden Files books, which mix urban fantasy with noir detective elements to make... fairly generic supernatural mystery stuff, really.
I don’t care for noir — I’ve never even read Chandler — and I actively despise urban fantasy these days, so when I say that I liked this book and ordered the sequels immediately upon finishing it, you should take that as high praise. There are elements of the book that don’t work well (despite what the narrator and characters claim, it’s not set in any Chicago I recognize, for instance), but by and large it’s fast-paced fluffy enjoyment, with snappy writing, memorable characters, and non-obvious plotting. It’ll be up to the sequels to determine if this is just genre filler or something that transcends generic-ness, but so far so good.
I first heard of Greg Egan from people raving about Permutation City , which for some reason led me to read his next few books — the brilliant short story collection Axiomatic and the slightly incoherent but utterly thought-provoking Distress — which I loved. His later books I didn’t care for so much, but when I went back and read his first novel, Quarantine , I found in it the virtues I’d admired in his other books.
So finally, I went back and read Permutation City, the book which I’d originally heard so much about, and which was written smack-dab at the height of Egan’s creative powers. I completely expected to love this book, but instead was disappointed. It’s a story about virtualized computer people and cellular automata as the basis of reality (prefiguring that Mathematica dude, I guess), and there are two problems with it.
The first is the virtualized people themselves. Egan has never been a particularly character-oriented writer, but this is a low on par with Diaspora. I just don’t give a damn about any of these people; they all seem utterly unreal in the way that all fiction characters are, but oughtn’t seem to be.
The second problem is the science bits. I understand that you have to palm a few cards and wave a few hands if you’re writing scientifiction, and I let that slide. But when your entire plot revolves around the palmed cards and waving hands, I get a lot less forgiving. And too much of the story here depends on the specific details that Egan is fudging.
It’s not a terrible book, though. There are some insightful bits about computer processing power (Egan is not a Singularitist, here — his virtual people run much slower than real people, and their virtual worlds are collections of hacks, because processing power on that scale is expensive and not getting cheaper), and amidst the mumbo-jumbo there are some more interesting points about copies and randomness and whatever else.
But ultimately, interesting side details or no, a book in which I care about neither the characters nor the story isn’t going to excite me. Egan can be a great writer, but this bizarrely reads more like late, degenerate Egan. (So much so, in fact, that I’m tempted to wonder if the couple of bad books I read didn’t represent a permanent decline at all, but just a couple of bad books. Anyone read his later stuff (Schild’s Ladder and Incandescence)?)