association-list

This book was more or less OK. It strikes me that it’s a little bit too by-​​the-​​numbers to really enjoy, but that it’s a com­pe­tent instan­ti­a­tion of its par­tic­u­lar for­mula, and thus (since it’s a good for­mula, gen­er­ally) pleas­ant enough. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This is a good, pol­ished book for a first novel, and squarely hit­ting the middle of the road on one’s first outing is impres­sive. My pri­mary tech­ni­cal com­plaint, I sup­pose, is that Downum is per­haps too eager to prove that her view­point char­ac­ter isn’t a Mary Sue, that this isn’t just a par­tic­u­larly good tran­scrip­tion of a D&D game, and in so doing largely robs her pro­tag­o­nist, Issyt of any agency in the res­o­lu­tion of the story. There are other char­ac­ters with more agency than the view­point char­ac­ter, but by the end you start to wonder why Issyt (how do you pro­nounce that, anyway?) has any screen time at all. The one thing that she does in this story could have been just as easily done as a quick insert of back­story in the next novel where she encoun­ters the other char­ac­ter in ques­tion. Per­haps the main prob­lem I had with the novel was a lack of econ­omy. Pages and pages were wasted kick­ing the crap out of the inter­fer­ing for­eigner, and too little time was spent with the local char­ac­ters who actu­ally make the story go. It’s under­stand­able that the author wants to spend time with her pri­mary char­ac­ter, but she should likely be given more to do in future novels (that said, it’d be an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in form if some­one were to do a series like this that never fea­tured its nom­i­nal pro­tag­o­nist as a pri­mary view­point character).

Not a lot to say about this one. It was a book. A book that was too YA for me, too obvi­ous in its setup for its sequels, too uneven in its pacing, too unstint­ing with its gifts of sen­tience to almost every thing in the novel. For all that, the writ­ing is con­sis­tently pretty good, and there are some play­ful sec­tions where the writer takes inter­est­ing lib­er­ties with the voice of the book, and that liven it up. Ulti­mately, though, there’s just too much going on here all the time, as if the author is wor­ried that if he doesn’t get all of the setup in for the next fif­teen books or some­thing he won’t be able to write them, or at least look clever when they come out. Addi­tion­ally, the book seems to have a hard time decid­ing whether it wants each por­tion to be alle­gor­i­cal or taken as a secondary-​​world con­struc­tion. Still, the prose is decent, the author’s heart is in the right place, and there really are inter­est­ing things hap­pen­ing here, even if there are too many of them and they’re hap­pen­ing too slowly. Did I men­tion that the pacing was absurdly uneven?

I think my strat­egy here will be to check out the author’s second series, if there is one. He’s got a lot of raw talent, but the story he’s telling here com­bined with the rough­ness of exe­cu­tion makes me think that I’ll skip the rest of this one.

A little bit late to the party on this one, but I picked it up off of someone’s shelf and thought that it was inter­est­ing enough to keep read­ing, mostly on the strength of the voice. While I think that Savage has his heart in the right place, and that the moral scolds he seeks to address are worthy of swat­ting down, I am not sure that this book finds the best way to do it. People com­plain­ing about how right now is worse than the good old days is a seem­ingly uni­ver­sal human trait. A cer­tain type of person is always going to be doing it at any given point in his­tory. For some reason, today’s media gives these people a lot more air than they used to, but it’s hardly some­thing novel. I sus­pect that attack­ing any one instance is doomed to fail­ure, because even if you win, another person with a slightly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, pos­si­bly even on your intel­lec­tual side, will take up the torch soon enough. It seems to me that a better strat­egy over the long term is to figure out a way to give just as much air to people like Savage, who think that the cur­rent is a great place to be living, as to people like Bork, who’d rather live in some mist­ily ide­al­ized past where the person and their kind had more power.

It’s enter­tain­ing enough, but ulti­mately a bit fluffy, at least at this late date, where much of the imper­a­tive has worn off.

“Tiny Feast” by Chris Adrian.

I missed the first week and some spir­ited dis­cus­sion of a fairly weak story, so it may be that this story, weak in another way, might spur some sim­i­larly inter­est­ing discussion.

I thought that this one was well writ­ten, but oth­er­wise failed on most other levels. I have to admit some bias, in that I have essen­tially no inter­est in fan­tasy specif­i­cally fea­tur­ing fairies. It’s a trope at this point that has been so bru­tally overused that it’s hard to imag­ine it having any sort of res­o­nance with anyone at this point. I real­ize that my point of view clearly isn’t shared, so I’ll try to put it aside. The story imag­ines one of the changelings taken by the fairy court, Oberon and Tita­nia and the whole lot, get­ting leukemia and going into treat­ment. In terms of play­ing the con­flict in a humor­ously dead­pan way and depict­ing the process in an accu­rate way, the author gets high marks, but as a story it never really gets any­where, or says any­thing, or really has any char­ac­ters. Any one of those could be fine, of course, but at some point the story just falls down, when you decline to pro­vide your read­ers with any reason to care.

If we’re to read this straight, Oberon and Tita­nia are fairies and so at least some­what alien and dis­tanced from human con­cerns. It’s never clear why either of them should care about this par­tic­u­lar changeling over any other, other than he’s sick. The author never both­ers to make them human char­ac­ters, nor does he manage to make them con­vinc­ingly alien. They speak on one hand from a desire for the story to move for­ward, and on the other from a desire by the author to make the story humorous.

Over the course of the sto­ries, inter­ac­tions are detailed, scenes are set, jokes are con­structed and deliv­ered. The boy sick­ens, recov­ers, sick­ens more, and dies. Noth­ing else actu­ally hap­pens. No point is deliv­ered, nor is one pos­si­ble to infer, given the half-​​assed inhu­man­ity of the characters.

It strikes me that the author had a neat idea for a story, then didn’t real­ize that his con­ceit didn’t have legs enough to stand alone at such length. Maybe he had some inkling, hence the jok­i­ness, the places where it’s over­writ­ten. Halfway to Rem­brandt Comic Book ter­ri­tory, more or less. Still, in the end, it stacks up to more or less noth­ing inter­est­ing, and the author, while clever and skilled, simply isn’t writ­ing at the level where you’ll stick around to listen to him talk­ing about any­thing, just because the prose is so good.

And so we reach the end with­out me having said much inter­est­ing or clever, but I feel that the con­ceit here doesn’t stand up to crit­i­cism any better than it stands up to read­ing; that it is, in fact, a con­ceit and only pro­vides the critic with his thinnest gruel, styl­is­tic analy­sis. I am hoping that I’m miss­ing some­thing, and that some of the other com­menters will pro­vide a view of the story that illu­mi­nates a more inter­est­ing angle from which to view the story.

I just fin­ished this this morn­ing, and I’m still not sure what I think about it. It felt kind of tossed off and uncon­vinc­ing. It has a lot of sim­i­lar prob­lems to Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, in that if you spend a lot of time read­ing either of their blogs, a lot of the argu­ments, world-​​building and asides are old hat, since you’ve read them all before as the author first wrote them on their blog. Oth­er­wise, it was some­thing of an over-​​complicated caper tale, with all of the com­pli­cated twists that can happen in a SF novel where iden­tity is more fun­gi­ble than what might be in a stan­dard mimetic novel. Which is all fine, as far as it goes, but it is not my favorite of Stross’ novels.

Candy! Good candy. I read both of these in two days. I’m not sure what I have to say about them. They’re fun, soap-​​opera type sto­ries. Inter­est­ing, but not incred­i­bly deep. From what I under­stand, these may be the last books in the series, because Tim’s editor at Del Ray got let go in the recent tur­bu­lence. He’s con­tin­u­ing work­ing on some user-​​supported pre­quel stuff here. Hope­fully, he’ll find another pub­lisher so he can con­tinue the series.

Like most detec­tive sto­ries, the rev­e­la­tion at the ending can never quite live up to the ten­sion gen­er­ated by the nar­ra­tive prior, and the whole thing sags and col­lapses like a cut string. That said, I felt like this was one of the more sat­is­fy­ing books of Lethem’s that I’d read, mostly on the strength and inven­tive­ness of the prose. Lethem does an absolutely won­der­ful job con­vinc­ingly limn­ing the inte­rior state of his Touret­tic pro­tag­o­nist, and the writ­ing, never less than good, at times rises to bril­liance. I’m glad that I finally got around to read­ing this, and it was more than good enough to over­whelm my gen­eral dis­taste for mys­ter­ies and crime fic­tion in general.

Green fol­lows the gen­eral trend of Jay’s work over the last sev­eral books, as his tech­ni­cal chops con­tinue to improve. This is a solid offer­ing with a strong first person voice. That it didn’t really push my but­tons is more on me than on the author. The author more or less did what he was set­ting out to do, but most of what was being done I didn’t really care about. I’d have pre­ferred it if there were less time spend in the narrator’s child­hood and less in her head, but it would not have been the same book at all if those things were true.

I thought that the related story here was stronger, but both are worth reading.

An inter­est­ing book that attempts to tie overeat­ing to addic­tive behav­ior in gen­eral. All of it more or less makes sense to me, espe­cially com­par­ing my expe­ri­ences with weight con­trol and quit­ting smok­ing. Con­trary to Cory Doctorow’s sug­ges­tion here, there was a lot of inter­est­ing advice in the book. I sus­pect that part of Cory’s reac­tion was simply that the advice given (mostly CBT mindfulness/​thought-​​pattern-​​changing stuff along with planning/​portion sug­ges­tions) is simply that there is no silver bullet, even when you under­stand the psy­chol­ogy of the inter­ac­tion to a cer­tain degree. But if you’re look­ing for brain hacks, here’s an idea: as soon as you’re served at a restu­rant, ask for a to-​​go con­tainer, and imme­di­ately pack away every­thing over your imme­di­ate require­ments, then put your left­overs out of the way some­where. This seems less rude and waste­ful than return­ing the por­tion that you don’t plan or need to eat.

Inter­est­ingly, Kessler pulls his punches over­much. He’s a tech­no­crat, of course, and does come across with some policy pro­pos­als, many of which are already wind­ing their ways through the halls of power (Kessler, after all, was a key Wash­ing­ton player in much of the damage done to big tobacco in the last two decades). He stops, how­ever, before coming out and saying some­thing that really needs to be said. Most restau­rant food, espe­cially the food sold by the big chains, is more or less toxic sludge, and should be avoided until such a time as these busi­nesses recom­mit them­selves to pro­duc­ing actual food that is rarely more than one or two steps removed from its source. He dwells for much of the time on restau­rants, but the same thing could be said for much of the processed food that’s avail­able in super­mar­kets, or deliv­ered at many of the coffee shops and chain bak­eries around the country.

One last prob­lem that Kessler ignores is that many middle-​​American cities are food deserts. When I go home to Tulsa, for exam­ple, I seem to find it inor­di­nately dif­fi­cult to find a restau­rant that isn’t incor­po­rated in Delaware. The super­mar­kets are a little better, but not that much, as processed food seems to take up more and more shelf space each year, but that’s more of a nation­wide prob­lem than one that’s spe­cific to the mid­west. The prob­lem of processed foods in the mar­kets is less tractable than that of the restau­rants; food is already labeled with the number of calo­ries it con­tains, yet people buy it and overeat any­ways. Per­haps the best tech­no­cratic solu­tion to this issue would be to elim­i­nate feed­lot animal pro­duc­tion and grain sub­si­dies that make the processed foods so much cheaper than their con­stituent parts bought indi­vid­u­ally at rea­son­able levels of quality.

A good first novel here. Already Teppo has a good grasp of pacing and devel­op­ment and has cre­ated a dark, con­sis­tent sub-​​creation that man­ages to make its magic feel mag­i­cal with­out ever feel­ing like it’s being made for the con­ve­nience of the plot. There’s actu­ally some mostly-​​believable char­ac­ter devel­op­ment which comes from within the char­ac­ter and his moti­va­tions, rather than being exter­nally imposed, which is rare in noir/​cyberpunk inflected nar­ra­tives. That said, there are flaws, which fall into two broad groups. I wrote the list below in an email to a friend (edited to make me look better/​smarter):

1. basi­cally no women in it at all. the semi-​​love/​hate inter­est gets all of five pages of screen time, which is mostly Markham emoting.
2. although he’s not entirely cookie cutter, there’s still a lot of generic noir pro­tag­o­nist there.
3. most of the other char­ac­ters lack a voice. every­one sounds like Markham in dialog.
4. sentence-​​level craft is uneven, weaker in the begin­ning of the book. it’s first-​​novelitis to a cer­tain extent, but I almost threw the book across the room when I ran across the groaner ‘metal whale’ purple blob of a simile in the ferry chapter.
5. we’re sub­jected to not one, but TWO Oblig­a­tory card by card Tarot inter­pre­ta­tions that are the bane of so many fan­tasies involv­ing her­metic magic and the occult. to make mat­ters worse, they seem to take up at least five-​​seven pages each (at least in my memory). by making your fore­shad­ow­ing into a cutesy game, you cheapen it. I’d have strongly sug­gested com­press­ing or cut­ting both.
6. really, I am kind of done with cyberpunk’s noirish off­spring. that may be a per­sonal thing.
7. seat­tle and port­land seem lonely. non-​​named char­ac­ters who aren’t going to be mag­icked hor­ri­bly or aren’t wait­resses don’t get a lot of men­tion past the begin­ning of the book.

So there are some per­sonal quib­bles in there. I’ve never been a big fan of noir stuff, and have always con­sid­ered it to be some­thing of a bale­ful influ­ence on post-​​cyberpunk SF, mostly for rea­sons involv­ing the character’s inter­mit­tent lack of agency and often dras­ti­cally unre­al­is­tic dystopias in which it is usu­ally set. Almost all of the other things that I had issues with were, now that I’ve had a couple of days to think about it, fail­ures with the book’s voice. Here too, as in KoNLG (see last post), we have a number of severe issues flow­ing from issues with the first person sin­gu­lar. It’s very hard to get right, as I’ve said. Here, the strain is less on the reader as the nar­ra­tor is end­lessly blind­sided, as much as it’s a ques­tion of tone in a number of places. Scene descrip­tion is all over the place in terms of level and intent, in ways that would often be fine with some exter­nal nar­ra­tor (omni­scient or per­sonal) or a first person nar­ra­tor more anchored fur­ther in his­tory, as opposed to this nar­ra­tor, where the only thing sep­a­rat­ing past and present first person sin­gu­lar is the verb end­ings. Also I would like to make a rule: In a book writ­ten in the first person, you get ONE (1) scene tran­si­tion ush­ered in by uncon­scious­ness. Per-​​instance penal­ties to follow when I think of some­thing dire enough. Points 1, 2, 3, & 7 I would ascribe to these sorts of issues, rather than any fail­ure on the part of the writ­ing (other than I sup­pose the struc­tural fail­ure of choos­ing FPS and not quite being able to make it work for the whole book).

I seem to spend a lot of time in these reviews talk­ing about how I still think the book is good and worth read­ing despite the fact that I’ve just dwelled at length on its flaws. Mostly, this is because I am a hor­ri­ble, neg­a­tive person, but par­tially it is because while I do often like the books, I spend a lot of time think­ing about what would make them better, in hopes of being able to do the same with my own writ­ing. I real­ize that this may not endear me to writ­ers who’re talked about here, but hope­fully one day they’ll have the oppor­tu­nity to return the favor. I promise to weep piteously and upload it to youtube.