Weasel Words
A Book Log
June
29,
2008
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...
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June
25,
2008
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.
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June
24,
2008
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.
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June
24,
2008
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.
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June
23,
2008
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)?)
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June
22,
2008
Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris
, completely redesigned for the 2007 model year, features a 4-cylinder engine with 25/33 EPA city/highway mileage and an array of safety features, including electronic stability control and Brake Assist. Though the styling is on the bland side, the mix of economy and...
No, wait, that’s the Hyundai Elantra. Common mistake!
So Sanderson is the guy they picked to finish up the Wheel of Time, which is enough to break him out of the pack of competent fantasists whose books I see lining the shelves and getting moderately positive reviews, so I picked up Elantris to see what kind of writer he is. The answer appears to be: A competent and original one.
Elantris is the sort of story where a spunky princess goes off to a foreign land to marry a kind-hearted prince, all in the shadow of an ancient mystical city and the threat of war from a world-conquering empire, while also being the sort of story where the plot is unpredictable throughout and the setting and characters are unique and interesting. That ability to use fantasy tropes in a fresh way bodes well for his work on the Wheel of Time, and not incidentally makes Elantris worth picking up in its own right.
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June
12,
2008
John Scalzi’s The Last Colony
starts off in Bad Scalzi territory, with smugger-than-thou characters bantering smugly amonst themselves in a way that makes you want to punch them in the face, and cartoonish caricature villains getting their comeuppance in hilarious ways that reveal their cowardice and the author’s heavy hand. “You’re better than this!” I shout at the book. “Your writing has gotten past this stage!“
And, in a miraculous fit of time travel rewriting, Scalzi listened to me and made the rest of the book of a piece with the subtler, more complex, and more interesting The Ghost Brigades instead of the anvilicious and trashy Old Man’s War. Some of the people in the book even make the transition from caricature to character as the writing deepens back up.
The net result is a solid if unspectacular piece of spopera, sort of the poor man’s James Alan Gardner.
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June
12,
2008
So Brian K. Vaughan and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vol. 2: No Future For You
, the second of the “season eight” collections, turns out to be more Vaughan and less Whedon than you’d’ve thought from the first volume. Wikipedia Pete tells me that they really are running this in a way not entirely unlike a TV show: Whedon is “producing” it and writing some of the episodes (the first and the last, of course), and other writers — including Buffy alumni like Drew Goddard and Jane Espenson — are doing the other bits.
So on this arc we’ve got Vaughan, who you might remember from such comics as Y: The Last Man, and he turns out to be a highly credible Buffy writer and continues to be a good writer in his own right. If you’re a Buffy person and not allergic to comics, you should be picking this up. If you’re either not a Buffy person or are allergic to comics, you’re wrong and a bad person.
Over in the Marvel universe, Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker’s Immortal Iron Fist, vol. 2: The Seven Capital Cities of Heaven
continues the story begun in — surprise! — the first volume. Who’d have thought, right? So anyway, it continues to be very mystical and very secrets-of-the-fathers, and the end result is a story that’s weirdly reliant on continuity and would like the reader to be an Iron Fist expert. I say “weirdly” because Iron Fist isn’t a popular character and has spent a lot of time without a book, so it seems a bit nichey to rely on Iron Fist fanboys. Still, I guess I sort of am one, and I liked it.
And in the Ultimate universe, Warren Ellis’ Ultimate Human
tells a reasonably good story with the Ultimate Hulk, Ultimate Iron Man, and with a new Ultimate Villain. I continue to be a big fan of the Ultimate Tony Stark, and if I find the Hulk a bit boring... well, I always have, so. Decent enough superhero story, but nothing that’s going to stand out. Definitely minor Ellis.
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June
10,
2008
So, to recap, J. Michael Straczynski had a brilliant run on Spider-Man, in which he treated Spider-Man as an actual adult — he lived in the city with his wife, he taught high school, he had joined the Avengers and was learning to work as part of a team before being forced underground by the Cvil War stuff — and then he was forced to ruin it all with a stupid devil ex machina that undid his marriage.
Now we start over with Dan Slott’s and Marc Guggenheim’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, vol. 1
. What’s Peter’s unwedded life like? Oh, he’s living at home with his Aunt May, working as a photographer at the Bugle, hanging out with Harry Osborn at a coffee shop, and running out of web fluid (they undid the change that gave him biological web shooters for some reason too).
Does this sound sort of familiar, sort of 1968-ish? Yes, yes it motherfucking does. This is the most transparently nostalgia-driven reboot ever, driving Peter Parker back to pseudo-adolescence so that the aging editors of Marvel can try to recapture their own fading memories of their youth. Gah, it pisses me off.
And the worst line, the single worst line in the whole thing is when Peter or Harry makes a remark about Gwen Stacy dying “a few years ago.” Now, rationally I know that this really is canon, and a normal consequence of Marvel’s bizarre compressed timeline (which pretends that everything has occurred roughly in the last ten years, which is why superheroes aren’t retirement age); but irrationally, it makes it sound like they really are trying to just forget the several last decades of Spider-Man. Oh, and in an afterword, they mention that they toyed with the idea of bringing Gwen back from the dead and decided not to “for now.” So I guess at least they didn’t maximally piss me off.
All that said, I do have to admit that Slott and Guggenheim do a credible job of writing old-school Spider-Man. Light, witty, and very very reminiscent of the past. If you can get past the editorial stupidity and the slap in the face of JMS, you’ll enjoy the book. Maybe it’s best if you just pretend that this is Semi-Ultimate Spider-Man and actually a totally different character than the guy they’ve been writing since 2000. In fact, I think that’s what I’m going to do from now on.
As a side note, these books never once mentioned the whole Avengers thing. What the heck is going on with that? As far as I know, Spider-Man is still a member, but that doesn’t seem to fit with this new conception at all.
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June
5,
2008
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed
is her chroncile of (temporarily) giving up her fancy life and trying to make it as a waitress/maid/retail clerk, as part of a test to see if it’s actually possible to get by in those circumstances.
There are about a zillion ways that this could go wrong, and Ehrenreich is deeply aware of all of them, and does a great job disarming all but one of them (which I’ll get to in a moment). She does a masterful job of not seeming condescending, scolding, exoticising, or smug about her experiment. And as impressive as the book is for what it’s not, it’s even more impressive for what it is, which is first and foremost some finely told and absorbing stories about life in the low-wage world.
Ehrenreich isn’t writing in the David Foster Wallace mode — no footnotes, no fancy literary tricks — but this ends up feeling like a DFW essay anyway, because of her sympathetic eye for human realities and her disarming candor. But beyond the breezy readability, this is a polemic of the sort that ought to be given out to every person who pulls the Republican lever, dagnabbit. That she’s able to make a polemic out of absorbing personal stories and a bare handful of statistics says a lot about Ehrenreich’s skill as a writer, but also a bit about the subject at hand.
The only really problematic part of the book, alluded to earlier, is her stint as a maid. Ehrenreich has some weird unexamined judgments around housecleaning — she takes a moralistic stand against ever hiring a cleaner herself, and clearly finds the work to be demeaning in a way that she doesn’t find any other job to be. Her co-workers don’t share her attitude at all, either, so it’s not as if I’m just some crazy out of touch rich person who doesn’t understand Maid Rage. This is the one section of the book where her objectivity fails her and she’s unable to get past her blue-collar attitudes to get a truer picture. Even this section, though, is still worth reading.
Highly recommended.
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June
5,
2008
I expected to really love Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
. I mean, I like literary novels, right? And I clearly love superhero comic books, right? So a literary novel about superhero comic books seems like a shoo-in. Plus, every single person I know who read it said that it was superb and I’d love it.
Which means, of course, that I thought it was... okay. I mean, objectively it was very good, but I expected it to be more than what it was, to blow me away and be this really super-awesome book, and it just couldn’t be that. It’s engaging and well-told, well-paced and with interesting characters, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with it except that it just failed to be spectacular.
Such are the perils of high expectations and poor expectation management, I suppose. You should still go ahead and read it, but keep in mind that it’s kinda just decent.
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