association-list

I’ve read ten or so books since the last post­ing, but hon­estly I’ve had a run of bad luck and am find­ing that I don’t have a whole lot to say about any of them that’s par­tic­u­larly pos­i­tive. I’m not entirely sure that this is help­ful to anyone, and since this list was for my own edi­fi­ca­tion, I don’t think that it’s much worth con­tin­u­ing on with. I’ll con­tinue to post about books that I like, but since I am grumpy and they’re fairly rare, I doubt that there will be much here for the next little while, until I think of some­thing else to drive com­men­tary and content.

I really like Karl Schroeder’s books so far. Meaty SF think-​​heavy books that never shrink from engag­ing with the human char­ac­ters at their hearts. That said, I have some quib­bles with the Virga books. While the cen­tral idea is a great one, and it is explored in relent­lessly inter­est­ing ways, I can’t help but think here that there are too things com­pet­ing for space in what are, after all, rel­a­tively short novels. The first three books were pretty light, action-​​adventure novels that took us on a tour through Virga while includ­ing real human drama and the ugly choices that people are forced to make by cir­cum­stances. Since they were at ground level, play­ing out, for the most part, far from the character’s home, there’s fairly little engage­ment with soci­etal con­struc­tion, and that’s fine, because we never really stick any place for long enough for the reader to start won­der­ing how it would all work.

In The Sun­less Coun­tries, Schroeder goes darker and attempts to engage with some seri­ous, fas­ci­nat­ing soci­etal issues (absolute demo­c­ra­tic rule when the public is ill-​​informed, the hijack­ing of a polity by neo-​​fascists), all the while keep­ing up the adven­tur­ous pace and rip roar­ing action and giving us more Virga wide-​​screen SFX and taking us out of Virga for the first time and and and. This could really work well, but the down­fall of the novel is that Schroeder sticks to the format of the other Virga novels. That is, it is some­what short (maybe 100-​​110k words?) and pri­mar­ily fol­lows the view­point of a single char­ac­ter. It’s rare that you’ll find me argu­ing that a novel should be longer. I’m gen­er­ally exas­per­ated by the level of padding required to get a book out to the 200k-​​ish words that seem to be required these days. But this is a book that could really use it. Using both Hayden and Leal as view­point char­ac­ters, actu­ally fol­low­ing Leal out­side of Virga, rather than having her briefly recount her adven­tures, spend­ing more time with the fail­ure of the Eternist takeover, making the ending less abrupt, etc. Another 100 pages at least are jus­ti­fied here, and the last quar­ter of the book suf­fers a lot for their absence. Every­thing feels second-​​hand and rushed, and it skews the pacing of the novel some­thing awful. You spend a great deal of the end of the novel inhab­it­ing the per­spec­tive of some­one in a locked room while a naval battle goes on outside.

I enjoyed the book a lot, and the setup at the end could poten­tially lead some inter­est­ing places, but I hope that Schroeder will manage to rush the ending less next time, which might mean bend­ing the struc­ture more than he’d like. As the book stands, it’s a tan­ta­liz­ing hint of the book that it could have been; great fun, but not all that it could quite plainly be.

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.

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.