|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0061779725
| 9780061779725
| 0061779725
| 3.87
| 29,038
| Mar 23, 2010
| Mar 23, 2010
|
it was ok
|
Previously, on Ben’s reviews… … the characterization of the two protagonists is much improved. The other characters? Not so much…. Fridging women is notPreviously, on Ben’s reviews… … the characterization of the two protagonists is much improved. The other characters? Not so much…. Fridging women is not OK. Joking about fridging dead whores is also not OK. Yes, this entire book is a sitcom about moving to the apartment down the block. And now, the conclusion… Well, I did it. I read Bite Me, because I am a sucker (gaaaaaah, vampire puns again) for punishment. And also I like my trilogies like I like my modifiers: undangling. So, we pick up with Thomas and Jody bronzed and Abby as our viewpoint protagonist for much of the book. Eventually Thomas and Jody escape, or get released accidentally, and the book follows them for a bit too. So it alternates between Abby’s annoying first-person narration (I love Abby, hate her narrative voice) and a third-person narrator. This book is actually the best of the trilogy. Better yet, I can tell you why. With the convergent plots of Chet the Vampire Cat and Elijah’s child vampires cleaning up this mess in San Francisco, Christopher Moore doesn’t have as much time to make stupid, unfunny jokes at the expense of women and minorities. They are still present, but their quantity is greatly reduced, and they tend to be sandwiched in between more important bits. This is a sharp contrast to the previous two books, which seemed mostly to comprise such jokes strung together with the remnants of what once was a plot. Bite Me’s story is actually good and, in some parts, fairly intense. Elijah’s children want to eliminate anyone who knows about vampires. That’s basically the entire cast from the previous two books. Meanwhile, Steve discovers that people turned by anyone other than Elijah (the “prime” vampire) don’t last long. This is bad news for Abby, who turns herself into a vampire by injecting blood from a rat (you don’t want to know how the rat became a vampire). So it’s pretty much chaos in San Francisco, and there is a lot going on, and it gets very confusing at times. Nevertheless, I enjoyed a good deal of it. The characters always have something to do—and because they have something to do, Moore can’t spend pages reflecting on how Jody’s vampiric state will impact her continual disappointment of her mother or her need to lose five pounds. It’s win–win. I only wish Moore had introduced Elijah’s children in the first book. We get hints that there are other vampires in the world, and then of course they show up at the very end of You Suck. But there is a rich backstory to this world that Moore doesn’t reveal; I can’t help but wonder if it is more interesting than what we get in these three books. This has been a long journey, and it’s not one I would want to take again or recommend someone retrace. Bite Me might tickle vampire fans. In general, though, these are not the Moore books that I want people reading. Their humour does not work for me. Moore relies on stereotypes, clichés, and generally very lazy types of humour. The result is occasionally, almost accidentally, funny, in the style of the brain-dead sitcoms of network television. But it lacks the literary comedy that I so value in some of Moore’s other work. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 16, 2015
|
Aug 16, 2015
|
Aug 16, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1476785651
| 9781476785653
| 1476785651
| 4.07
| 49,800
| Aug 11, 2015
| Aug 11, 2015
|
really liked it
|
When I heard that Felicia Day had a book coming out, my knee-jerk (emphasis on jerk) reaction was, “Isn’t she a little young to be writing memoirs?” T
When I heard that Felicia Day had a book coming out, my knee-jerk (emphasis on jerk) reaction was, “Isn’t she a little young to be writing memoirs?” The word connotes a sharing of memories as one surveys one’s entire life. A memoir, to mee, is something that people write at the end of their careers; Day doesn’t seem anywhere near the end of her career. But I think that’s the whole point of You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). It’s about how Day has achieved all that she has by short-circuiting the traditional processes. If you pardon me for talking about the end of the book at the beginning of the review: her points in the last chapter are very valid. The web, social media, and online video are a disruptive force in the entertainment industry. I probably wouldn’t know who Day is, aside from being “one of the potentials from season 7 of Buffy,” except that she chose to delve into the world of Internet video-making, and she made videos I like. In her introduction (there, I’m back at the beginning—happy now?), Day says she prefers the term “situationally recognizable” over “internet famous,” because the latter category is more for the viral sensations. I understand that. Regardless, both terms carry with them an important truth of the digital age: fame is no longer a universal signifier. This is probably the most disruptive aspect of social media and web video on the entertainment industry, even more so than the ability to Kickstart a project or distribute media in the blink of an eye. Time was, studios made actors famous. They would pick the actor, elevate them to some kind of stardom, and that actor would be a Celebrity. Everyone would know who they are, even if one didn’t exactly like or admire the actor. Fame was to be a household name; that was the mark of the entertainment industrial complex’s hold on Western media. Then along comes YouTube, and suddenly you’ve got people who are famous within subcultures and completely unknown to everyone else. As Day says, she is a rockstar at cons but just another unremarkable, if slightly awkward-looking, woman in a Lancaster Build-a-Bear: “situationally recognizable.” Similarly, I can list a dozen well-known YouTubers, Twitter users, or other situationally recognize people whom I follow and enjoy but who are entirely unknown to some of my close friends. The explosion and proliferation of information means that it is nearly impossible to become a household name. Such a status is still only within the purview of the entertainment industrial complex—and only then through achieving a kind of mainstream lowest-common-denominator appeal that seems to get blander with each passing year. (Reboot? No? What about a “gritty reboot,” will you watch it then?) Day’s descriptions of her childhood are fun and funny, both in the “little chuckle to myself” and the “laugh out loud” kind of way. There will hopefully be at least something you can identify with. Her story about how her mom practically forced her into making out with an online friend is hilarious. And I quite liked the chapter about getting her college degrees and how she worked her ass off to ace group theory, of all things, as a summer course, because she couldn’t deal with not getting a perfect GPA. As someone who really enjoyed doing well in school, and now as a teacher who is trying, slowly, to get rid of grades as much as possible, I really sympathize with her perspectives, both past and present. But the book really comes into its own when Day talks about her move to Los Angeles, her struggle getting acting work, and her addiction to World of Warcraft. As someone who really started paying attention to Day after finding The Guild (and I tried but cannot for the life of me remember where I first heard about it), I was fascinated to read more about its inception in her own words. I knew that much of The Guild’s story was inspired by her own experiences, but I wasn’t sure how much of Codex’s story was autobiographical. Day is quite candid in talking about her addiction to WoW and how it affected the rest of her life. Similarly, I wasn’t expecting to be interested in the chapter on conventions (because I’m not interested in going to a convention, ever), only to be surprised by Day sharing her perspective on meeting fans. Suddenly I found myself on the other side of the interaction, if you know what I mean. It’s so easy for us to interact more directly with celebrities, thanks to social media like Twitter. Even those these interactions are often more direct, they are still mediated. We don’t share everything with everyone. In the book, Day discusses how the stress of running Geek & Sundry was affecting her relationships even while she put on the happy face to make videos. The connection that Twitter gives us, and its ability to let people share anything, makes it easy to forget that what we see is not all there is. So that’s why we have memoirs. It’s one thing to tweet that you’re feeling down on a particular day, but if your job is to make funny Internet videos, you’re going to suck it up and make funny videos, damn it, even if you’re depressed. As a fan of The Guild, I had no awareness of the financial pressures Day and her co-producers were under trying to get a second season shot. I was just incredibly enthusiastic about the idea there would be a second season. And I loyally navigated the harsh, Zune-branding–infested world that was the Xbox Video marketplace to download the new episodes the day they were released. I didn’t necessarily think Day and The Guild had “sold out” in their deal with Xbox—but I don’t think I understood how a second season literally couldn’t have been made without Xbox’s combination of funding and a hands-off approach. Day’s last chapter before the conclusion focuses on GamerGate. I remember reading the blog post in question where she describes how, for the first time, she didn’t feel like she would automatically belong to this group defined only under the label of “gamer,” and how that was an indescribably sad feeling. What I didn’t know about until reading this book, however, was the aftermath—Wil Wheaton having to phone Day to tell her to disable commenting because people were posting her address (among other vitriol). I mean, I knew it happened, but I didn’t have the context of Day’s emotional reaction. Because when it comes down to it, all we know about people online is what they share. (This is also true, to an extent, about people offline, just to a different degree.) With her memoir, Day shares a bit more, in a different way, from a slightly different angle—it’s a “behind the scenes” look, if you will, with the result of giving her public persona a dimension that she didn’t previously have. (I assume she’s already at least four-dimensional, with the power to travel in time, so I guess that makes her fifth-dimensional now?) Also, I loved her analogy of the absurdity of GamerGate abuse through knitting fanatics: You don’t generally see hard-core knitters reply to someone who says, “Knitting is cool, but the needles could be made from more environmentally sustainable wood,” with “Oh no you don’t, idiot. My knitting is perfect the way it is, don’t you DARE try to change it. You’re obviously a fake. What’s the diameter of that yarn? Don’t know? Go die in a fire!” (I can personally vouch that I have never had such an experience among my fellow knitters—but that might be male privilege at work, I don’t know.) You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is a fascinating memoir, and contrary to my sarcastic initial reaction, entirely appropriately-timed. It says something about the power of books that even in this digitally-obsessed age they’re still a useful way of sharing more about yourself. I loved learning more about Day’s life. I hope this inspires girls who consider themselves geeks and gamers and counteracts the poisonous trolls telling them they are posers, fakers, or generally unwelcome online. More broadly, I hope it inspires people in general who want to create, to share what they can do, to reach an audience. I suppose that is the measure of a memoir, right—whether, in the telling of the story, it can have an impact. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 15, 2015
|
Aug 15, 2015
|
Aug 15, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0399154752
| 9780399154751
| 0399154752
| 2.79
| 1,416
| 1916
| Apr 01, 2008
|
did not like it
|
I like meta-books, books about books and writers and readers and how stories influence our lives. As someone who spends what, I admit, is probably an
I like meta-books, books about books and writers and readers and how stories influence our lives. As someone who spends what, I admit, is probably an inordinate amount of time reading, reading about books is important and informative. Wit’s End is metafiction about mystery. Rima’s godmother, Addison Early, is a successful Agatha Christie—like mystery writer. Rima comes to stay with Addison at Wit’s End, Addison’s little refuge from the world in Santa Cruz. Cut off from the rest of the world by the loss of those closest to her, Rima is adrift. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, she latches on to stray elements from Addison’s past, determined to unearth some sort of mystery to solve. This idea that the detectives in mystery novels have it easy because the author does the hard work of supplying the mystery is perhaps Karen Joy Fowler’s most sublime observation in the entire book. I had never thought of it that way before, but it’s true. Detectives get all the breaks: neat, orderly clues; clear-cut motivations; a nice timeline of events. Real life is much messier than that, and in many cases, as Rima discovers, the nature of the mystery is not clear. Alas, little else about Wit’s End held my attention. Rima herself is a cipher of a character. We never really get close to her. Fowler shares morsels of backstory with a parsimony that I would envy in a science-fiction author. I got the sense that she was never really close to anyone except her late brother. With him they were a dyad; now she is a monad and unsure of how to live. None of the other characters are all that intriguing either. Fowler tries. She alludes to Tilda’s checkered past of homelessness and alcoholism and the struggles reconnecting with her estranged adult son. Addison is supposed to be a kind of ageing grand dame, resplendent in her achievements but worried by the ticking clock on the mantle. Martin is supposed to be … I don’t know, what passes for a cad these days? Yet all this amounts to is a series of set pieces, and static ones at that. None of the characters change much (not even Rima). I kept expecting Addison to get tetchy when Rima continued to prod Addison’s past and look into Holy City. I kept expecting a fight, or at least an argument—nothing. Aside from that very real, very rewarding moment between Rima and Martin, the emotions in this book are flat. Even when Rima winds out trapped in a house with her “stalker,” Fowler manages to puncture the tension building in the room and replace it with an underwhelming, albeit humourous, resolution. In its attempts to be a character-driven story centred on Rima, Wit’s End fizzles out into a boring book where nothing happens. The promise that this book’s cover copy makes—that this would be about how Addison’s fans have taken over her characters and plotlines—never materializes. There are references to fanfic (especially slashfic) and Wikipedia pages and blog comments, but it’s all ancillary. That would have made for a more interesting story. Still, this is not merely a case of a book misrepresented by its description. I enjoyed the way Fowler uses Addison to share one type of writer’s perspective on readers. But that’s about it. The characters in this book are dull; the plot is largely a collection of unrelated events; as a protagonist, Rima is about as interesting as paint that has very nearly dried. Fowler can do much better, and you, as a reader, can do much better. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 12, 2015
|
Aug 13, 2015
|
Aug 12, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0857663305
| 9780857663306
| 0857663305
| 3.76
| 9,137
| Apr 30, 2013
| Apr 28, 2013
|
really liked it
|
There was this show, Chuck, on NBC back in the day. It began as the story of a computer technician at a “Buy More” who receives an email from a former
There was this show, Chuck, on NBC back in the day. It began as the story of a computer technician at a “Buy More” who receives an email from a former college roommate. The email uploads the Intersect, a CIA/NSA supercomputer, into his brain. So the CIA and NSA send two agents, Sarah Walker and John Casey, to be Chuck’s handlers, to watch over him and keep him safe until the new Intersect is built and Chuck can be “decommissioned.” But if Chuck isn’t prepared for life as a spy, Sarah and Casey are equally unprepared for the crazy world of the Buy More. And as the show progresses, all the characters change. Chuck becomes less the nerdy and awkward “loser” type character—but even as he gets new Intersect abilities, he never quite loses a certain goofy quality. He and Sarah fall in love, as you do on these kinds of shows, and they rescue each other all the time. It’s just such a great show, because the writers take the time to develop the characters along a long, meandering, but totally believable arc. The Lives of Tao reminds me of Chuck. Roen Tan is a computer programmer in a dead-end job—Office Space, if you’ve seen it, but instead of the hypnosis, confidence comes in the form of a gaseous alien who takes refuge in Roen’s body. Tao is a Quasing, and his people crash-landed on Earth millions of years ago. Unable to survive in our planet’s frigid atmosphere, they inhabit living bodies and have shepherded humanity throughout its entire existence, advising people telepathically, hoping to propel us to a point where we can help them return home. Roen is drafted into this conspiracy—Tao has no choice but take Roen as a host, because he’s on the run from the other faction of the Quasing. So no one asks Roen if he wants his entire life to change. And, frankly, Tao is not enthusiastic about taking on a “fixer-upper” as his next host, as he puts it. So we have a dynamic very similar to the one in Chuck: a loser character joins a secret organization carrying a lot of knowledge in his head but little enough experience or physical training. It’s up to Tao and a few supporting characters to train Roen literally into shape. What could have been boring gets spiced up by the way Roen interacts with Tao, Sonja, Antonio, and the others. As with Chuck, Roen’s development is gradual but noticeable. By the end of the book he is just becoming competent—not unbelievably badass, but probably better than he ever thought he might be at something like this. I give Chu a lot of credit, because most of the time writers don’t put much effort into making the “zero to hero” transformation very believable; they just hope the audience will put up with it for the awesomeness factor. Chu has no choice to make the transformation believable, of course. The Lives of Tao is all about the measure of a person. Tao recounts snippets of his past lives to Roen and the audience, explaining his mistakes with Genghis Khan and the founder of the Ming Dynasty and an Italian priest. Nature versus nurture runs as a common motif throughout these stories, culminating in Roen’s transformation. It’s not the fact that Roen has access to an alien being’s knowledge and assistance that matters, really—it’s Roen’s discipline and determination (both of which are enforced, somewhat, by Tao) that allow him to achieve so much. Chu deliberately presents Roen as somewhat unsympathetic at first—Tao in particular is very critical of Roen’s attitude, and this perspective infects the narration. This innoculates the reader against the intensive training regime that Tao and the other Prophus inflict upon Roen: we are allies against him, deaf to his misery, because we know he’ll be better off for it. And by the end, when Roen starts showing more confidence in matters like dating Jill, it’s actually very rewarding. As Tao fills Roen (and the reader) in on the backstory of the Prophus versus Genjix factions, Roen goes on a series of escalating missions. That is, missions with stakes that escalate, not missions that require Roen to scale things. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I don’t visualize when I read, so when I say something is “cinematic,” I mean I can imagine movies like this book working for me. The Lives of Tao certainly feels like it could work as a science-fiction action movie. The whole arc of training is Act I, with Roen’s minor missions as Act II, followed by the Decennial as Act III leading into the climactic assault on the evil fortress. Did I see the ending coming? Like many action movies, yes I did. But it was still fabulous. Although the whole “Holy One” rhetoric that the Genjix foist on their hosts is over the top, for the most part Chu portrays the two Quasing factions as different rather than good versus evil. It’s easy for us to empathize with the Prophus and support them, because they seem to be the ones who want to keep humanity largely intact and out of major conflicts. But Chu shows us that the Prophus are also responsible for problems—polio in the States, anyone?—and reminds us that, ultimately, they don’t care as much about human affairs or happiness as they do about getting home. They are, in short, alien; while individual Quasing like Tao or Baji might feel somewhat human because of the time they have spent inhabiting humans, the Prophus and Genjix collectively are frighteningly alien in their aims and plans. As far as debut novels go, this is impressive. I was sceptical when I started. I was worried that the story would drag, that there would be too much back-and-forth between Tao and Roen. But it never really gets in the way, and Chu balances the need for characters to remark on changes and the need merely to show those changes obliquely to the reader. This grasp of subtlety, combined with a flair for the larger-than-life action sequences, makes for a great read. My reviews of the Tao series: The Deaths of Tao → [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 10, 2015
|
Aug 11, 2015
|
Aug 10, 2015
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0060590297
| 9780060590291
| 0060590297
| 3.84
| 50,242
| 2007
| Jan 16, 2007
|
did not like it
|
**spoiler alert** Previously, on Ben’s reviews… Jody and Thomas. I can’t even. I find Jody’s characterization hugely problematic…. I just wish Moore had**spoiler alert** Previously, on Ben’s reviews… Jody and Thomas. I can’t even. I find Jody’s characterization hugely problematic…. I just wish Moore hadn’t ruined what might have been a great thing by falling back on clichéd jokes, like, “I could stand to lose five pounds.” We get it: women are obsessed with their weight! Hah-hah, very funny. I’ll pencil in a laugh sometime next week. I’m going to try the next book, because Moore has earned a lot of credit with me. But if Thomas pulls anything like that again, I’m out of here. I have better things to do with my time than watch an insecure guy try to stop his vampire ladyfriend from leaving her in progressively creepier and rapier ways. And now, the continuation… You Suck picks up almost literally where Bloodsucking Fiends left off: C. Thomas Flood is a vampire, having been bitten by his vampiric girlfriend Jody. Once her daylight minion, now they have to find a new minion for the both of them. But the heat is on in San Francisco, because they have savvy detectives, an Emperor, and a Safeway night shift crew breathing down their pale necks. I have to say, this book starts off with much more promise than Bloodsucking Fiends. Tommy and Jody’s relationship dynamic has changed. I wouldn’t say they are on “equal” footing now, but they are both vampires, at least. Jody herself is definitely more confident here, and Moore explicitly shows how much she delights in flaunting her sexuality for herself, because she no longer fears walking alone at night. That’s all well and good. Indeed, I’ll go ahead and say that the characterization of the two protagonists is much improved. The other characters? Not so much. Every remaining character falls back into one or more stereotypes in Moore’s attempt to wring as much clichéd humour from this book as possible. I started to tune out and skim when he introduced Blue, the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold (and blue skin), and almost entirely checked out when dead whores started showing up. Right, Moore, look … I don’t care whether your book has a “strong female protagonist.” I don’t care if your book has two female protagonists who show interesting and different sides to living as a woman in San Francisco. (I love Abby’s gothy teenage geekiness!) Fridging women is not OK. Joking about fridging dead whores is also not OK. The former does not, will never, excuse the latter. Similarly, the fact that Blue comes back—out of the blue—as a vampire doesn’t make up for the tasteless jokes at her expense. Any enjoyment I was getting from You Suck was sucked out of me—pun intended—by these missteps. At least Bloodsucking Fiends had stakes. (No, I mean plot stakes, not wooden stakes—gah. Why is this happening?!) The elusive and mysterious Elijah was a credible antagonist in the first book. Now he’s just a nuisance, and most of the conflict comes from Tommy and Jody running around trying to train Abby and move. Yes, this entire book is a sitcom about moving to the apartment down the block. Towards the very end, the book shifts more and more into Abby’s first-person diary perspective. Now, I love Abby, and I loved her diary entries when they were intermittent. The more frequently they appeared, the more they grated in tone, though. The sudden appearance of Steve as a vampire hunter/love interest for Abby at the eleventh hour is almost as unsatisfactory as the wimpiness of the new vampires on the block. Sigh. I didn’t even realize how worked up I was about this until I wrote this review, and now I just can’t even. Do I read the third book? It’s on my shelf, checked out the same time I borrowed this one. They are quick—I read this at a ball game, so I could read book three in less than an afternoon. But is it worth it? The cover copy seems to promise that it foregrounds Abby and includes a vampire cat. But is it worth it? I have since read the third book. It was worth it. Kind of. Review forthcoming! [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765334232
| 9780765334237
| 0765334232
| 3.28
| 1,977
| Sep 24, 2013
| Aug 26, 2014
|
did not like it
|
These people are oddly obsessed with putting bathrobes on after showering. She used his bathrobe, so he had to settle for a towel—what, you don’t towe
These people are oddly obsessed with putting bathrobes on after showering. She used his bathrobe, so he had to settle for a towel—what, you don’t towel off and then put on a bathrobe? I was hesitant to borrow this from the library—the description screamed “generic pseudo–science-fiction thriller.” Neverthless, I resolved to give it a chance. I swear I didn’t notice that John Scalzi had blurbed it until I started reading. And it makes sense that Scalzi would blurb this, because it’s in his wheelhouse—but neither Steven Brust nor Skyler White writes it the way Scalzi does. The Incrementalists is a bizarre mix of John Scalzi and Tim Powers (I like one and not the other, but it’s the worst of both, so don’t take this as a recommendation). Now, I love me some Scalzi, but I’ll happily admit that there are things about his style I don’t like. He writes great, snappy dialogue—a lot of great, snappy dialogue. Too much, sometimes, to the point where all of his characters just feel so snappy and sarcastic and witty that they fade together. Scalzi is not a hugely descriptive writer. And that’s OK—not every writer needs to be descriptive or should be. And I get that thrillers, as a genre, tend to be lighter on description and heavier on dialogue and action. The fact that I only enjoy this occasionally, like I only occasionally enjoy a whipped topping dessert, is one reason I don’t read them that often. Unfortunately, The Incrementalists seems to reside towards the lower end of the scale. It’s particularly nondescript, except when it gets way too descriptive. I just opened to a random page (303) and was confronted with this gem: He was all that mattered. The taste of his mouth on mine, the solid unyieldingness of his body that my body wanted to wrap and mold and form itself around. Everything else felt irrelevant and trivial to me, and we almost shedded our clothes trying to get free of them fast enough to fill our hands and mouths with each other again. There was no fear, no pulling away or even holding back, nothing reserved or restrained or considered. His hands hurt me, and I wanted them to. His mouth took from me and I wanted nothing left behind. This is only really a problem when it comes to the scenes in the Garden, where description is everything. I admit I’m not the best person to critique stuff like this, because I don’t visualize places as they are described when I read. But everything about this book just seems like a confusing mish-mash of same-same. Even Ren and Phil feel very similar. The first-person perspective jumps between them within chapters. Now, I recently ran across an identical narrative device in Trouble. It worked fine there, because Pratt managed to differentiate between the two main characters. Here, I often forget whether Ren or Phil was the narrator, reminded only if the other character was in the scene and being referred to in the third person. The basic premise of The Incrementalists is great. It’s like reincarnation lite—personality continuity suspended in a kind of symbiosis, with an agenda on top to “make the world better.” I liked it, and I genuinely liked how Brust and White handled the concept. Even the plot—Celeste, a recently deceased Incrementalist, is running a Xanatos gambit (TVTropes) that could destabilize the entire operation—is fantastic. By all rights, this should be a fun thriller. Other than the stylistic and narrative issues, though, I just feel let down by the execution of that plot. The main characters spend far too much time sitting around talking about the Garden, explaining the Garden to Ren, “grazing” in the Garden, or mumbling pseudo-scientific stuff. It’s all very Roger Zelazny (or, as I mentioned, Tim Powers), in that it’s the magical realist equivalent of science fiction. But the most tense moment has to be when Celeste and Phil are at odds over a gun—that was exciting. The rest of the book is just work trying to follow the meandering, sometimes thorny explanations that Brust and White serve up to shore up an increasingly fractured “magic” (for lack of a better term) system. Look, if you have a higher tolerance for this type of novel, you might enjoy this, just as I have a much higher tolerance for the pedantic hard SF technobabble of Alastair Reynolds than a lot of other people just as, if not more, intelligent as me. To each their own, right? But just because other people might enjoy this novel doesn’t mean it’s well-written or even all that good, in the same way that a serviceable cup of Tetley orange pekoe tea is nowhere near as good as loose-leaf. I drink the former pretty often when I’m too lazy to steep it properly—but I don’t pretend it’s amazing. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 08, 2015
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
Aug 08, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0060926082
| 9780060926083
| 0060926082
| 3.96
| 50,917
| 1979
| Jan 01, 1996
|
liked it
|
Remember when David Mitchell came out with Cloud Atlas and everyone freaked out? Was it a novel? Inter-related short stories? What was with the weird
Remember when David Mitchell came out with Cloud Atlas and everyone freaked out? Was it a novel? Inter-related short stories? What was with the weird nesting? I don’t get the movie! All our neat little categories are coming tumbling down and now it’s the end of the world! Well, Milan Kundera does much the same in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (but since it hasn’t become a Major Motion Picture, only literary snobs care to comment on it). The cover proudly proclaims that this is “a novel,” which is a stretch by any definition of the word. It’s more like a 300-page meditation of getting old under Communist rule. I’m not so bothered by what this book is, however, or how to label it. Let’s talk about more interesting things, like sex! There’s a lot of sex in this book, or talk of sex. Most of the characters are middle-aged, and Kundera conveys the way this turning point in life heralds a subtle shift in our perspectives. (Or, you know, so I gather, not having quite reached it myself.) The title is a good hint at the lines of inquiry Kundera lays down: there are relationships that make us happy, and there are ones we would rather not dwell on; there are relationships that make us rueful, and there are ones that never happened, so we wonder what never will be. And in this pursuit of memories real and unattainable, Kundera tries to sort through some of the psychic baggage the Russian invasion has left behind on Czech culture. Mostly my experience with this book was one of treading water. Almost everything in here concerns things I don’t know much about. I can’t pretend to talk intelligibly about Kundera’s response to Communism in this, because I know little enough about that period. This is not a novel about being under Communist rule in the sense that Kundera isn’t about to give us exposition; it very much expects a certain familiarity. Similarly, the emphasis on sex just reminds me how much this activity baffles me at the best of times. I get the basic idea, understand its evolutionary origins and its utility as motivation in so many tragedies. I can empathize with the characters here—but I can’t sympathize, and I’m not sure I reacted to the events in these stories in the way most readers would. It’s not just the presence of sex, because of course that happens in a lot of stories! It’s more Kundera’s emphasis on the way emotion is mixed up in the embodied sensuality of the act. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting places a lot of importance on the awareness of bodies and embodiment. Much of the sparse physical description in the book is devoted to appearances and shapes and movements of limbs. We are our bodies, or at least, the way we interact with the world is informed by them—and while I agree with that thesis to an extent, mostly I’m just reminded of my own discomfort with it. Nevertheless, there are definitely moments that spoke to me here. I very much enjoyed “Mama,” in which Karel and Eva play host to Karel’s elderly mother the same weekend they’re having a threesome with another woman. Oops. And as hilarious as the situation is, Kundera manages to turn it into so much more than a farce. He illustrates how each of our actions can have a litany of unforeseen effects. And he manages to create three-dimensional characters in a short span of pages. Karel’s mother isn’t just a stereotypical disapproving matriarch growing ever more infirm: she is as much of a person as her son or her daughter-in-law, and thanks to the limited omniscience of our narrator, we get to see the perspectives of both generations. Kundera reminds us that the people who sit across from us are … well, people, who have thoughts and feelings and failing memories as much as we do. Kundera reminds me of a few writers. Vonnegut is one, because there is an almost weary acceptance of the absurdity that comes with authoritarianism. Orwell, another, for the commentary on the futility of fighting that absurdity. He reminds me of Murakami too, not just because of the foreignness of the experience of the stories, but for the way his characters reflect on their bodies as four-dimensional objects—existing in time as well as space. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is fun, but in a subtle rather than exciting way. It made me think—a little about life under an occupation, a lot about how we change over the decades. I’m not sure “enjoyed” is the word for this book. I don’t know if I “got” it. It’s not really my cup of tea, but I can appreciate how it might be for others. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 05, 2015
|
Aug 08, 2015
|
Aug 05, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0590494244
| 9780590494243
| 0590494244
| 3.87
| 4,605
| Jan 1998
| Jan 1998
|
liked it
|
Marco books might be the best books if you’re looking to jump into Animorphs. After fifteen books that might very well be the case. Applegate, cogniza
Marco books might be the best books if you’re looking to jump into Animorphs. After fifteen books that might very well be the case. Applegate, cognizant of course that random books from this series would end up on library shelves the world over, with unconscionable gaps as a result of poor funding and attrition, tries her best to summarize the key points at the beginning of every book. But Marco does it best: succinct, but with that typical Marco humour. Like Jake, Marco knows what it’s like to have a family member who is a Controller. But Marco’s mother isn’t just some random Yeerk … she’s Visser One, one of the most powerful members of the Yeerk Empire. And now she’s back on Earth, doing nasty things with sharks. That sounded wrong, sorry. She’s back on Earth, planning to invade a planet with a sentient aquatic species by modifying hammerhead sharks. Which frankly sounds terrifying, and I’m very glad that the Yeerks are only using Hork-Bajir on Earth. Can you imagine if Sharknado was a thing back in the 1990s? Visser One would be all over that. Random Yeerk: Visser, my host’s family was watching a program on their primitive video transmission devices— And so the Yeerks develop actual sharknado technology and win the war. Thanks, Hollywood. Anyway, so The Escape is obviously most notable for the return of Marco’s mother and the feelings that result. Marco has to make the whole “save your mother or save the world” choice, with Applegate once again foreshadowing how bad it’s going to get by the end of this whole war. And now the rest of the Animorphs know that his mother is Visser One, so that’s cool. Also, Tobias has his morphing powers back. He used them a little in the last book, but now we get to see him acquire a couple of new animals. I love his hesitance because he can’t fly in something like a dolphin or shark morph. It’s hard, sometimes, to get a read on Tobias’ character; we forget he’s just this goofy, shy kid who really doesn’t want to draw too much attention to himself. So no wonder he’s reluctant to leave behind his hawk form—which he is used to now—for another strange animal experience. The entire underwater setting is a welcome change of pace. Marco does a great job describing the nature of the shark mind and what it’s like to be able to sense electromagnetic fields and just be a stone-cold killing machine. It’s also important to note that, for once, the Animorphs’ plan actually works fairly well. They infiltrate the base, sabotage it, and escape without too much hullabaloo. Maybe they’re finally not sucking at this whole saving-the-world thing. All in all, definitely an enjoyable instalment in the series. It has some series moments, but they don’t eclipse the rest of the book. This is mostly about the plot, the Yeerks’ machinations, and Marco’s feels for his mom. It’s good stuff. Next time, the Animorphs venture onto the strange and glorious information superhighway! And it is glorious. My reviews of Animorphs: ← #14: The Unknown | #16: The Warning → [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 03, 2015
|
Aug 03, 2015
|
Aug 03, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0425067947
| 9780425067949
| 0425067947
| 3.87
| 102,359
| 1923
| Feb 01, 1984
|
really liked it
|
Hercule Poirot returns to once again solve a murder, this time of a wealthy Frenchman who seems to have foreseen his death. It’s not about Poirot bein
Hercule Poirot returns to once again solve a murder, this time of a wealthy Frenchman who seems to have foreseen his death. It’s not about Poirot being smarter than other detectives or about him noticing more details—it’s about his method, his organized way of approaching those details and fitting the theory to the facts rather than the other way around. Contrary to what the title might imply, there is no golf in this book. (Thank God.) Rather, the body turns up in an open grave on the golf course undergoing renovation. This is the first oddity in a series of oddities that the police overlook, much to their sorrow. But Hercule Poirot, no, he does not overlook such things! That and the lead pipe. Much like The Mysterious Affair at Styles , this novel has Captain Hastings as the narrator. Hastings is even more of a buffoon here: he falls in love with a girl he meets on the channel ferry. In what is a most magnificent coincidence, she turns up again near the crime scene, and happens to be embroiled in the mystery. Excuse me while I roll my eyes. Though Hastings’ characterization isn’t great here, the mystery itself is much more engaging. We’ve got two bodies, a neighbour who turns out to have a checkered past, unsanctioned love—all the good stuff. Christie even arranges for a tense climax where Poirot has a woman act as bait to reveal the murderer—but because she neglected to tell him that she changed rooms, she almost dies. Oops. And while the characterization might not be great, the way Christie portrays the friendship between Poirot and Hastings is excellent. When it briefly appears as if Hastings’ sudden lady love might have done it, he sets himself against Poirot. Christie plays it as all very comical and English: Hastings is the utmost gentleman to Poirot, and Poirot mocks him for it in that needling Belgian way of his. Of course, it turns out in the end that Hastings was being a big galoot and Papa Poirot had it right all along—not that he bothered to tell Hastings. Still, it’s a wonderful little diversion from the slavish loyalty one might expect in the detective/sidekick duo that now seems to pervade the mystery genre. As with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and the more recently read Death on the Nile , Poirot doesn’t just solve the mystery: he plays matchmaker and generally raises the happiness of all involved, aside from those who deserve justice. Indeed, I’m not sure if this is something Christie sets out to do as a way of balancing the scales—her way of showing that even after tragedy, there is hope. The Murder on the Links doesn’t stand out as one of Christie’s most salutary efforts, but it is by every measure competent and enjoyable. Hastings’ gentlemanly sexism and contrived romantic notions might be annoying, but if you read it with a sense of humour, you’ll have a grand afternoon ahead of you. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 2015
|
Aug 2015
|
Aug 02, 2015
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765375249
| 9780765375247
| 0765375249
| 3.71
| 4,709
| Feb 03, 2015
| Feb 03, 2015
|
liked it
|
I would be lying if I said I read this book for reasons other than a) it's by Elizabeth Bear and b) it's received some good attention, particularly in
I would be lying if I said I read this book for reasons other than a) it's by Elizabeth Bear and b) it's received some good attention, particularly in a few of my Goodreads groups. I know this because I struggle to find something compelling to talk about in this review. There's not really one thing that hooks me about this book. It's not a time period I'm interested in. The whole "wild West" motif is something I usually don't go for. But I gave it a try, and while I didn't love Karen Memory, I didn't hate it either. The setting is remarkable in its understatement. There's a somewhat steampunky alternative-universe happening here. Bear's Rapid City is a merger of a lot of real or imagined places in nineteenth-century America, just as several of her characters are drawn from real or imaginary people. But this isn't straight-up historical fiction, because there are also airships and Mad Scientists and advanced submarines. For the most part, these larger-than-life science-fictional elements are background for the story--Karen talks about Mad Science, but Mad Scientists don't figure so prominently in the plot. I respect it when an author can create a world and resist the urge to play with all her toys. Of course, a little Mad Science leaks in there--I would be disappointed if it didn't. We get to see an awesome submarine commanded by a Russian version of Captain Nemo. And Karen, though no Mad Scientist herself, manages to co-opt a steampunk sewing machine into a weapon of war. So there's that. The depth of the story has to come from the characters, of course, and specifically the narrator. Karen is utterly frank about her life as a sex worker. At the same time, however, this work doesn't figure as prominently in the story as it might have. Bear stresses that prostitution is something Karen does, not something she is--it's a practical profession and part of a practical choice, one that allows her to save more money than she would in a domestic position. This isn't the only reason someone might be a prostitute, of course, and Bear shows any number of different experiences women have in the sex trade. This is what happens when you have multiple women characters: instead of having one or two women stand in for all women, you can depict a more diverse and nuanced version of women. In contrast to Karen's fierce independence, we have Priya and her devotion ot her sister, or Madame Damnable's hints of weariness. And of course, there's Miss Francina, whom we learn early on is trans--but no one sees this as a big deal. So kudos to Bear for creating a story that is historical fiction yet still managing to have main characters who are just as, if not more, progressive as some people in our present society. I think "historical accuracy" is a terrible justification for a lack of diversity in a story, and Bear proves diversity is not detrimental to telling an action-packed thriller. There is prejudice and hatred here, of course: plenty of racism and misogyny, some based in history and some just plain evil. But these sources of conflict are even more meaningful because of the progressiveness of the characters. I was a little worried from the description inside the cover that Karen was going to play amateur sleuth alongside Marshal Reeves. Not that I have anything against prostitutes moonlighting (daylighting?) as detectives. But amateur detective hour isn't my favourite. Fortunately, Bear puts a slightly different spin on things. Karen is more of an ally to Reeves: they share some mutual interests and manage to pool their resources. In doing so, they discover that their mutual enemies are embroiled in a far larger plot than murdered and missing women. This escalation fuels a carousel of increasingly intense action scenes. From confrontations in the bordello to infiltrating the enemy's house to fighting off a Russian submarine with a sewing machine, Karen Memory certainly doesn't lack in bombastic moments of awesomeness. These are contrasted by quieter moments, though. All in all, perhaps that's what is most impressive about this book: it is remarkably balanced. Keep in mind that I haven't always had awesome experiences with Bear--in fact, I'd characterize her as more miss than hit with me. Karen Memory is a hit. It isn't a home run, again, more because the whole wild West aesthetic doesn't appeal to me. But it's one of the better Bear books I've read so far, and in general, if steampunk or wild West speculative fiction is your thing, you're going to be happy about this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 28, 2015
|
Jul 29, 2015
|
Jul 28, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1442480610
| 9781442480612
| 1442480610
| 3.72
| 9,524
| Oct 01, 2013
| Oct 01, 2013
|
it was ok
|
Meehhhhhhhhhh? I’m not sure what prompted me to grab a book so obviously in the dystopian YA camp. I guess it’s that bad habit of reading widely—I mean Meehhhhhhhhhh? I’m not sure what prompted me to grab a book so obviously in the dystopian YA camp. I guess it’s that bad habit of reading widely—I mean, it’s great in the sense that I discover books I love I might not have read otherwise. But it means I tend to read a lot of books that I find mediocre even when I know others are going to love them. It’s one thing to rip into a book that is legitimately terrible and another to lob half-hearted critiques at a book I don’t actually feel passion for, one way or the other. Perfect Ruin is perfect in that regard: Lauren DeStefano shows us the intriguing floating city of Internment, whose citizens are beloved of the sky god but can never jump off the Edge. If you do, you get ricocheted back up by the winds that surround the city, and if you survive, you are broken, mentally and physically. Morgan’s brother jumped, and now his family lives with the consequences. Morgan just wants to get through school and marry her government-arranged betrothed and, you know, get on with life. But all these pesky murders get in the way. As public order unravels in Internment, Morgan starts to question the very basis on which her society operates. In other words, your standard “teenager starts to reflect on the organization of her society, discovers it’s a dystopia, and decides Something Must Be Done.” Points for making that Something a jailbreak rather than a revolution. Unfortunately, Morgan spends most of the book out of the loop of most of the interesting stuff. Right around the climax—which kind of came out of left field—we get a huge infodump once Morgan has the curtain pulled back for her. Just once I’d love for the main character to know about all this terrible stuff at the beginning. The stakes, too, are extremely low, then they’re suddenly life-or-death high. For most of the book, the question seems to be, “How will this affect Morgan’s utterly normal life?” before it suddenly becomes “the powerful people want Morgan dead!” Don’t get me wrong: I love the twist and subsequent high-stakes plotting. I just wish I had the opportunity to read more of that. I’m also calling shenanigans on the cliffhanger ending. Although it’s an appropriate place to leave off in the narrative, I suppose, I’m just disappointed because I would love to find out what happense next … but not so much I’m actually going to read the sequel. Just not that invested. The characters offer little for me to care about. Morgan is a nice enough girl, and I like her friend Pen, and I guess Thomas and Judas are all right. But Morgan just never shines for me. And while Basil’s unwavering support for her is a refreshing change from jealous and manipulative fiancés, I just wish he had more depth to him. Pretty much the only secondary characters with more than one dimension are Pen (who proves she has a mind of her own when she isn’t immediately on the whole “let’s escape” bandwagon) and Morgan’s brother and sister-in-law. Similarly, Internment is pretty “meh” as far as dystopian worlds go. I’m not going to bother critiquing the way DeStefano explains how it gets power or controls its population size or whatever. I’ll even pretend that DeStefano doesn’t carry the baggage of Lois Lowry’s over-simplified approach to naming things (“decision-makers” anyone?). Let’s assume the logistics of Internment make sense in this world. Aside from its different-from-us policies about social conformity, let’s examine its dystopian nature, and specifically, it’s name. Internment implies imprisonment, albeit on a grander scale—Britain used to “intern” people in Australia, because its empire was so far-flung it literally gave zero fucks about colonizing a continent with criminals. So were the original inhabitants of Internment prisoners, or exiles from Earth? If so … why? I don’t care how your prison floats in the sky, but it must be expensive. Unless the universal constant of gravitation has altered, you can’t just suspend a chunk of rock and dirt and people in mid-air without spending some serious juice, not to mention using some serious technology. That is a lot of work to go to if you’re going to store prisoners there. Internment should be a resort spa. And maybe it was. Maybe Internment was actually some kind of refuge for the privileged during the apocalyptic global war. Then, somehow, they forgot all that and called it Internment and made up their sky-god religion. I guess stranger things could happen. If the second book explains any of this, then I’d welcome anyone who has read it to spoil it for me in the comments. (Please use spoiler tags, though, for the benefit of people who do want to continue with this series!) DeStefano is a capable writer on the micro-level (i.e., sentences and paragraphs). On the macro-level, Perfect Ruin could have used another editing pass to condense some scenes and fix what I see as a weird transition between two plot states. None of my complaints about the pacing, plotting, or even the dystopian nature of Internment actually ruin the experience of the book. But here’s the thing: I read more than a hundred books a year. It’s not just that I can handle a dud every now and then; statistically, I expect several duds at the very least. I know most people just don’t devote the time to reading that I do—they manage, what, 10 books? 20? If you’re reading 10 or 20 books a year, even if most of them are dystopian YA, you probably want to prioritize and read the best 20 books you possibly can. I just don’t see Perfect Ruin making that list. It’s OK, I guess, but there are better ways to spend your precious reading time. Shame. It has such a pretty cover. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 27, 2015
|
Jul 28, 2015
|
Jul 27, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0590494236
| 9780590494236
| B007D3A3JK
| 3.63
| 4,699
| Jan 1998
| Jan 1998
|
it was ok
|
I’ve spent a lot of time so far talking about how the Animorphs series is amazing. It deals with complex topics and themes in a way that remains enter
I’ve spent a lot of time so far talking about how the Animorphs series is amazing. It deals with complex topics and themes in a way that remains entertaining and accessible for adolescents. It’s a great gateway drug to full-blown science-fiction fandom. Although most of the books tend to feel light and fun, there is a very serious undertone to the entire series, one that finally comes to the fore as Applegate (and her legion of ghostwriters) draws the series to a close. So it’s easy to forget that this is, ultimately, a kids’ series, and so there are times when the books are … shall we say, lighter? That’s not an excuse for The Unknown, but it’s a reason. The Animorphs, narrated by Cassie this time, investigate Zone 91. They do this as horses, because it turns out that the Yeerks are also interested in the alien tech the government is hiding in Zone 91, so much so that some poor low-level Yeerk grunts have to become horse-controllers. Visser Three could literally morph an army officer, waltz onto the base, and take a peek—but no. He makes his underlings be horses. He is a horrible boss. He makes that Kevin Spacey character from Horrible Bosses look like nice-guy Boss of the Year. Even the Visser eventually realizes this plan is beyond bonkers and falls back on the tried-and-true method of taking over humans. So shenanigans go down at the Gardens between the Yeerks and the “Andalite bandits” over the army officers having a field trip there. And the commander of the base, who caught Marco and Cassie and Rachel when they were trying to sneak onto it the first time, is a fairly incompetent loonie right out of … well, a kids’ book. P.S., the alien device? An Andalite toilet. A defunct model of Andalite toilet. Hilarious, no? Very little about the plot of The Unknown makes sense, even within the Animorphs universe. But this gives me an opportunity to nitpick elements of that universe. Zone 91 is Area 51 in all but name. That’s because if Applegate set the action at Area 51, then we would be able to conclude that the Animorphs live within flying distance of Groom Lake. It’s a big deal that the Animorphs’ location is undisclosed—not only does it make the story seem more secretive, but it creates a “this could be happening in your town!” atmosphere that surely thrills young readers. Still, it’s awfully nice of Visser Three to confine so many of his operations to this small area of the United States. It seems like the invasion would proceed more quickly if the Yeerks set up their base somewhere like Washington, D.C., or even a metropolis like New York. For that matter, this whole secret invasion strategy doesn’t seem to be paying dividends. The Visser’s Blade ship took out an Andalite Dome ship—so why, exactly, hasn’t the Visser just landed a full-scale military force? I mean, yeah, there would be rebellions to deal with, and I guess dealing with the then—five billion unruly population might be difficult. So maybe an all-out invasion would be untenable—but this torturously slow process of taking over middle school principals is absurd. I guess that’s why he’s Visser Three, not Visser Two, eh? None of these complaints are serious jabs, mind you. The bar is totally lower for a series of Scholastic novels. For that same reason, The Unknown is not bad. It just lacks the gravity that I, as an adult fan, have come to appreciate about most of the books up until now. And even the humour doesn’t work well for me here. I liked Rachel and Cassie’s exchange about the latter’s (lack of) fashion, as well as Cassie’s eavesdropping on her parents’ conversation about discipline. Yes, Cassie, parents totally lie to you for your own good! But the whole throwaway gag of the Andalite toilet and the bumbling base commander and whatnot is just too juvenile (and it was probably too juvenile for teenage me reading this for the first time, because teenage me was just as much of an old, crochety man as I am now, although I had already ditched the corduroys by that time). I just glanced quickly at my ratings so far, and it seems like my lowest-rated book has been #9: The Secret . It’s also a Cassie book—I should make it clear that my issue here is not Cassie. She’s a great narrator; she brings a kind of dry sense of humour to the table that is quite distinct from Marco’s buddy-buddy comedy. That is, I love her observations. Still, The Secret had more meaty motifs than The Unknown, for the most part. So I guess that means this is my least-favourite Animorphs novel so far. It had to happen eventually. And keep in mind that this is not a bad novel, so think about what that means for the rest. It just lacks the punchiness of many of the previous instalments, and that tends to be what I’m looking for these days. Next time, Marco’s mom is back in town. And she brought some mind-reading friends. My reviews of Animorphs: ← #13: The Change | #15: The Escape → [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 27, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1416558497
| 9781416558491
| 1416558497
| 3.94
| 65,329
| Sep 01, 1995
| Dec 15, 2008
|
it was ok
|
**spoiler alert** Shall we start by agreeing that Christopher Moore is a literary comedic genius? I’ve had some good times with him. Both
Fool
and
**spoiler alert** Shall we start by agreeing that Christopher Moore is a literary comedic genius? I’ve had some good times with him. Both
Fool
and
Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art
are amazing, laugh-out-loud funny.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
is hilarious and irreverent and the perfect gift to give your atheist or agnostic friends (or your theist friends, if they have the right sense of humour!). Everyone once in a while, though I hit on a
Fluke
…. That’s the problem with comedy: it’s really tough, and even comedic geniuses don’t get it right all the time. Bloodsucking Fiends has a lot going for it. I considered, for a while, giving this book one star—but I can’t do that, ultimately, because there was definitely a time where I was enjoying this book, maybe more than I should have. (For those who have read it: the scenes with the Emperor are all priceless, and the scene where the Safeway crew boards the vampire’s boat and start blowing shit up is high-octane of a calibre I was not expecting in a book like this.) In particular, if you were looking for a more humorous take on the whole “becoming a vampire” plot, then Moore has you covered here. But. Jody and Thomas. I can’t even. This is subtitled A Love Story, as are the sequels to this book (which I also have out from the library). The idea is that Jody, after becoming a vampire, looks for a man to cohabit with (and have sex with, if convenient) who can go out during the day, when she is asleep, and run errands. A sex-Renfield, if you will. (Oh God, now I’m envisioning all the Dracula/Renfield slash-fic I am not going to search for after finishing this review….) Mr. C. Thomas Flood from Indiana has just moved to San Francisco to become the next Great American Writer. He hooks up with Jody by chance, sticks with her even after she confesses that she is a vampire, and quickly falls in love with her. But I don’t really buy it, you know? I can buy that Thomas thinks he’s in love with Jody, and that Jody feels co-dependent with Thomas. Moore paints Jody as the type of woman who feels that she “needs” a man, having lived with ten in the past five years. And I love that Moore doesn’t make this a head-over-heels, hit-by-Cupid’s-arrow type of romance—Jody and Thomas fight and argue and call each other names, and it’s all very realistic. (Except for the whole vampire thing, obviously.) I find Jody’s characterization hugely problematic, though. There is nothing wrong, a priori, with portraying a woman who serially enters dysfunctional relationships. That’s all part of diverse portrayals of women in fiction. Unfortunately, that only works if you have diverse portrayals of women in your story (I think there are three named women characters in this book, and it only technically passes the Bechdel Test because Jody talks to her mom). And it only works if your characters are multi-dimensional. I was hoping that, amid the standard Moore silliness of the plot, Bloodsucking Fiends would be a story about Jody’s personal growth. Moore starts off by showing us a woman who doesn’t have a lot going for her, who has a really bad day by being assaulted and transformed into a vampire, and who subsequently decides to make lemons out of lemonade. And on one level, this does actually happen. The ending of the story affirms Jody’s desire to embrace her newfound vampiric powers, to learn more about them, and to make the most of this life. So I just wish Moore hadn’t ruined what might have been a great thing by falling back on clichéd jokes, like, “I could stand to lose five pounds.” We get it: women are obsessed with their weight! Hah-hah, very funny. I’ll pencil in a laugh sometime next week. This sense of cliché looms ominously over most of the book. Jody is a walking cliché. Thomas’ situation—growing up in Indiana and being suspected of homosexuality because he has intellectual tendencies—is so cliché. It’s as if Moore assembled a checklist of the most overused tropes, then proceeded to work his way down the list—maybe alphabetically? Boy, those Asian people—aren’t they funny? And people who can’t read and hide it—hilarious! What about sales clerks—they sure are jerks, right? This might be comedy, but it is lazy comedy, thoughtless comedy—in other words, bad comedy. I know Moore is capable of, well, more. You can’t write two novels parodying Shakespeare to the level that Moore has without actually reading and understanding Shakespeare. And while Moore’s portrayal of women doesn’t receive highest marks, I’ve seen him do better than how he does in Bloodsucking Fiends. Oh, but the whole part where Thomas literally fridges Jody? Then does it again by bronzing her? That’s not funny, Moore, and it’s not endearing. It’s terrifying and sick, and it doesn’t show that Thomas “loves” Jody, just that he’s obsessed with her and willing to imprison her rather than let her go. We have names and prisons for those sorts of people. I’m going to try the next book, because Moore has earned a lot of credit with me. But if Thomas pulls anything like that again, I’m out of here. I have better things to do with my time than watch an insecure guy try to stop his vampire ladyfriend from leaving her in progressively creepier and rapier ways. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 25, 2015
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 25, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1466853441
| 9781466853447
| 1466853441
| 4.08
| 394,639
| May 01, 2006
| Nov 11, 2014
|
liked it
|
Woo, non-Western science fiction! I love the opportunity to get out of my ethnocentric mindspace. Liu Cixin offers up a science fiction set (mostly) i
Woo, non-Western science fiction! I love the opportunity to get out of my ethnocentric mindspace. Liu Cixin offers up a science fiction set (mostly) in China during both the modern day and the Cultural Revolution. As such, he brings a lot of history to the story that Western readers are probably not familiar with. Nevertheless, he and translator Ken Liu do an admirable job spinning an engrossing story about humanity’s responsibilities, and what might happen if we don’t start taking them seriously. A simple way to summarize The Three-Body Problem might be to say that it’s about an alien invasion. Or you could think of it as being about a philosophical video game. Or maybe it’s better to call it a conspiracy thriller. No matter how you slice it, you find that this is a novel with layers. Indeed, most reviews tend to note that it has three main plots—Ye Wenjie’s time at Red Coast Base, Wang Miao’s involvement in an international effort to discover why prominent scientists are committing suicide, and the story of the Trisolarans as told through the video game The Three-Body Problem. So the three plots in The Three-Body Problem come to resemble the problem itself, which has been a thorn in the sides of mathematicians and physicists for a while. The interaction of any two plots is pretty simple to delineate. But trying to understand the interactions among all three becomes a complicated task. The story excels when it is peeling back the mystery, layer by layer, only to reveal a new set of questions. My interest probably peaked at the moments when Ye was recounting her time at Red Coast Base, either to Wang or the interrogator, because we are aware of the significance of her actions in context. It’s possible to see the influence of the Cultural Revolution on Ye’s decisions: her faith in humanity has been destroyed by the way the Cultural Revolution tore apart her family. When she discovers it’s possible to correspond with an alien species, she sees this as an opportunity to change the Earth forever. The virtual reality game, on the other hand, falls flat. This is a shame, because it’s a really intriguing idea. I just have so many questions, though. The way Liu portrays it makes it seem like Wang has a privileged perspective in the game—which would make sense if each player’s instance were isolated, but then how would Wang interact with these other human player characters who seem to recur from civilization to civilization? It’s difficult to understand, and trying to puzzle this out affected my enjoyment of the game as it climaxed and revealed the secrets of the Trisolarans. I’m also not sure how the Trisolarans managed to advance so far if their civilization keeps getting reset. They make a big deal out of how the pace of scientific and technological development on Earth is accelerating, while theirs has always maintained a constant or decreasing rate. (Or is it that each previous civilization retains enough hazy memories of the last that it can bootstrap itself slightly faster, given a long enough Stable Period?) I’m not too bothered by that, though, just because I can recognize a compelling SF idea when I see one. The Trisolarans are intriguing on two levels. Firstly, in them Liu has imagined some of the challenges alien life might face as it evolves in a completely different star system. I’ve never quite heard an idea like this before, and I love that. Secondly, their nefarious scheme to slow down or stop the pace of scientific discovery on Earth is also something new. Usually an “alien invasion” plot involves the aliens showing up with advanced technology and using big guns on bigger ships. Parts of this plot are stretching what is otherwise a fairly realistic science-fiction novel, but I can deal. I suspect that your mileage with The Three-Body Problem lies neither in a particular plot nor a particular character, though. Rather, it comes back to what I was saying above about the way these three plots interact somewhat unpredictably. There’s a lot of philosophy in here, particularly when it comes down to the way science interacts with society. But the major theme, as Liu relates it, is the way in which we will react when we discover we are no longer the only intelligent species in the universe. Will it bring us together or drive us apart? The Three-Body Problem proposes one possibility but hints that, as the story unfolds in the sequels, that too might change. In the end, I enjoyed the novel rather more than I thought I would given some of the reviews I read from friends. The ideas here, if not sweeping, are stimulating. This is one of the types of science fiction I truly enjoy, where the ideas drive the story in new and often unexpected directions. But I also agree with many of my friends’ critiques. This is a dry novel, reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s approach but, I’d argue, drier still in its absence of emotional anchors—even Robinson’s characters have fits of pique. I suspect that’s intentional, though, because there is plenty of emotion during the prologue, and it leaks through at other points as well, such as when Ye confronts her mother or her father’s murderers. The question at the back of my mind, of course, because I’m reading this as a Hugo nominee: is it Hugo-worthy? Definitely worthy of a Hugo, in the sense that I wouldn’t be upset to see this take the title. (And, you know what, Sad Puppies? In his afterword Liu mentions how he doesn’t use his fiction “as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present,” so there you go. Although I don’t know if that’s just there to throw off the scent of the censors.) In the end, though, I’m probably going to vote for The Goblin Emperor. It’s a story that just has so much heart, in addition to being damn good, whereas The Three-Body Problem is good and idea-heavy—against a similar book, like 2312 from a few years back, it would have the edge. My reviews of Remembrance of Earth's Past: The Dark Forest → [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 25, 2015
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 25, 2015
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 059049418X
| 9780590494182
| 059049418X
| 4.00
| 5,303
| 1997
| Dec 01, 1997
|
liked it
|
The titles of Animorphs novels might seem mundane, but they are always appropriate. The Change begins as another supposedly simple Animorphs versus Ye
The titles of Animorphs novels might seem mundane, but they are always appropriate. The Change begins as another supposedly simple Animorphs versus Yeerks plot. It turns out to be so much more. Still, an alternative and equally appropriate title might have been The Hope. Following the revelations from The Andalite Chronicles, Applegate finally returns to the perspective of the most marginalized Animorph, Tobias. Trapped in hawk morph, a nothlit, Tobias can’t exactly contribute to missions in the same way that the others do. The rest of the Animorphs have been good sports about pretending he’s an integral member of the team—and there are moments when he does save their bacon. But Applegate has bigger plans for him, so much so that for the second time in two books, the Ellimist intervenes and makes things get all timey-wimey. You might have noticed, if you’re still reading these, I’m not flagging them for spoilers. That’s precisely because if you’re still reading these, thirteen books in, then either you’ve read the series at some point in your life, or you really don’t care about things being spoiled. So Applegate offers us that rarest of all tonics, hope, in two forms. Tobias totally gets his morphing powers back!!!! Also: free Hork-Bajir! “Free or die!” The Change has something else in common with the previous very-special-book: like The Andalite Chronicles, it highlights and humanizes an alien species. The previous book showed us the Andalites (and even the Taxxons) in a way we hadn’t experienced. Now we learn more about the Hork-Bajir. Despite their fierce appearance, they are herbivores. They have tight-knit family structures. They are peaceful creatures, for the most part. They have names. Until now, the Hork-Bajir have just been interchangeable foot soldiers for the Yeerks—the Stormtroopers of the Animorphs universe, if you will. They exist for the Animorphs to dispatch—without thought, because they aren’t human—and as imposing, physical barriers to plot advancement. With Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak, Applegate makes the Hork-Bajir—or at least, these Hork-Bajir—into characters. Into people. We can take a couple of things from this. Firstly, this is yet another example of what the Yeerks do to you. They have enslaved an entire species, transformed a peaceful species into a warrior species, simply to serve them. If you weren’t already frightened of what the Yeerks have done and could do, then you should be frightened now. More broadly, though, this is another facet of the war motif Applegate examines in these books. Civilians and soldiers alike are encouraged to view the enemy soldiers as Others. Some of the best moments in war stories—and I’m talking about non-fiction as well as fiction here—are the moments that remind us how the people on the other side are humans. They have families and hopes and dreams as well. In this case, the Hork-Bajir obviously aren’t humans. Nevertheless, they have all those other qualities. They are not the machines that kill without question that we have seen so far. So Applegate introduces another layer of moral complexity. The Animorphs don’t just have to worry about saving the Earth. Now they’re responsible for the only free Hork-Bajir in the galaxy. No pressure. Meanwhile, Tobias can morph again. I don’t think anyone, with the possible exception of the Animorphs, was surprised when the Ellimist gave him his morphing powers back instead of just making him human. Perhaps the coda where he acquires himself in the past was a surprise, though. (Having read this book when I was younger, I remembered this vividly—I thought it was a great twist.) I still think it’s a great twist. Ordinarily, timey-wimey deus ex machinae are annoying. Indeed, the flashes of information Tobias receives would, in another context, rob the story of tension. Instead, they heighten the urgency: Tobias is now aware that he’s acting as the agent of this higher power, so something big must be on the line. Next time, Animorphs go full horse. You never go full horse. My reviews of Animorphs: ← The Andalite Chronicles | #14: The Unknown → [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 15, 2015
|
Jul 15, 2015
|
Jul 15, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0306819643
| 9780306819643
| 0306819643
| 3.76
| 4,395
| Oct 01, 2011
| Jan 31, 2012
|
it was ok
|
The universe is big. Mindbogglingly big. Our minds have trouble conceiving of the vastness of the universe, on either scales of time and space, or the
The universe is big. Mindbogglingly big. Our minds have trouble conceiving of the vastness of the universe, on either scales of time and space, or their unified presentation as spacetime. And the moment we think we might possibly be able to get used to this idea, it becomes apparent that the very foundations of our universe are small. So small, so tiny, that the energy required to probe these depths is nearly as impressively vast as the scale of the universe they conspire to create. This is The Quantum Universe that Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw want to explore with us. Quantum mechanics is notorious among physicists and laypeople alike for appearing to be nonsensical and unintuitive (or at least counter-intuitive). The chapter titles of this book illustrate this line of thought: “Being in Two Places at Once,” “Everything That Can Happen Does Happen,” “Movement as an Illusion,” etc. But such ideas are fundamentally biased by our perspective as macro-sized beings. If we experienced the world at the quantum level, then quantum mechanics would seem quite normal. Since our larger world is based on the confluence of so many quantum-level events, the picture this builds up is so far removed from those quantum effects that we get a false sense of reality. So Cox and Forshaw follow Heisenberg in establishing that the job of quantum theory should be to predict directly observable things…. It should not be expected to provide some kind of satisfying mental picture for the internal workings of the atom, because this is not necessary and it may not even be possible. This is really difficult to accept. I know because I read a lot about physics and science, and I still picture a really tiny, featureless sphere when I picture an electron. But, of course, the whole idea of “picturing” an electron is the part that doesn’t make sense. Particles are not solid lumps of matter that happen to be really small. Particles are waves and waves are particles because both are descriptions of specific phenomena, often at a particular space and time in the universe. Cox and Forshaw do a pretty good job, then, of deconstructing this false notion of particles. I also appreciate how they ground this deconstruction in the historical development of quantum mechanics. I knew the names, and had a vague idea of what the heavyweights behind quantum mechanics were known for—Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Rutherford and the structure of the atom, Dirac and antimatter, Schrödinger and the wave equation, etc. But Cox and Forshaw provide a more detailed context and chronology. They would describe, for instance, how Rutherford quickly realized the solar system model of the atom was wrong, or how Born or Dirac or Feynman would feed off each other’s discoveries very quickly. The 1920s was a really interesting time in the rapid development of quantum theory! Starting around chapter 3, the book tries to explain these basic ideas in quantum theory to a reader who is assumed to have little scientific or mathematical background. Cox and Forshaw try to be reassuring, claiming that if someone is intimidated by the math, they can safely skip it. To their credit, although they refer to calculus and other higher math, the actual math they show is comprehensible to someone who took high school physics. Nevertheless, if you do skip the math … well, you’ll end up reading very little of what’s already a short book. I fear The Quantum Universe suffers from trying to have its cake and eat it as well. Cox and Forshaw are so invested in not having to explain complex-based trigonometry to a lay audience that they manage to invent an analogy even more complicated than this math! I pulled down my copy of The Illustrated A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell , really the best, to see how Stephen Hawking deals with this. He dodges it by just not discussing the math behind it (famously, of course, declaiming in his original introduction that each equation would apparently halve book sales). Yet somehow he manages to discuss the double-slit experiment, quantized electron orbits, and sum-over-histories just fine. Buried deep in later chapters, Cox and Forshaw explain the difference between the Copenhagen and many-worlds interpretations (though they don’t identify the former as such). And then they take a half-hearted stab and describing the Standard Model but acknowledge it’s going beyond the remit of the book. ( Knocking on Heaven’s Door , although laden with a lot of other information and tangents, provides one of the most cogent explanations of the Standard Model I’ve read.) It’s a shame, because in between the confusing analogies and inexorable unravelling, The Quantum Universe treats the subject of quantum mechanics with wit and a graceful touch. Cox and Forshaw write well together. There is a sense of humour to the descriptions, particularly when they take a stab at the intelligence of drum players (since Cox used to be in a rock band). Despite making assurances about being able to skip the math, they never patronize the reader. This could have been a brilliant introduction to quantum mechanics for the layperson. As it is, while it’s not a total trainwreck, I wouldn’t recommend starting here either. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 14, 2015
|
Jul 16, 2015
|
Jul 14, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553119222
| 4.12
| 272,898
| Nov 01, 1937
| 1978
|
really liked it
|
So if you’re a famous detective like Hercule Poirot, you’re probably steeped in murder. It’s just murder, murder, murder, all day, every day. What’s a
So if you’re a famous detective like Hercule Poirot, you’re probably steeped in murder. It’s just murder, murder, murder, all day, every day. What’s a Belgian to do? Go on vacation, of course! Tour the Nile, they said. It’ll be relaxing, they said. No one will kill anyone on your boat, they said. In case the title doesn’t give it away, Death on the Nile is a punishment of sorts for Hercule Poirot. Poor bastard doesn’t get a moment’s peace and quiet. I guess it’s payback for being so insufferably arrogant. Poirot is a badass, with one badass moustache, and this book proves that pretty definitively. Borrowing a page, anachronistically, from a television crime procedural, Christie ramps up the stakes with not one but two additional murders. The guests aboard the S.S. Karnak are all suitably aghast. It’s up to Poirot and the able, but not as sharp, Colonel Race to discover the culprit. Who killed the heiress, her maid, and the novelist? It’s like Clue, set on a boat in Egypt. The characterization here is brilliant. As with And Then There Were None, Christie spends about a chapter introducing each character in sequence. This has the potential to make one dizzy—I find this technique is far more effective in movies, because of all the different visual cues one has at one’s disposal. Soon enough, though, we are off on the cruise. We get to watch as Lynette and her husband Simon attempt to elude their stalker, Joanna. Tim Allerton and his mother just want some peace and quiet. Rosalie Otterbourne is stuck tending to her mother—I love how Christie pokes fun at her own profession here, creating a somewhat melodramatic woman novelist, albeit of a more … um … delicate type of novel than the murder mystery. There’s also Dr. Bessner and the archaeologist Signor Richetti. And Cornelia Robson accompanies her cousin, Madame Van Schulyer. Into this vast cast Christie thrusts Poirot, who wastes no time getting mixed up in all the business. It would be very easy to see Poirot as nothing more than insufferable. He spends a lot of time talking about how clever he is. But at the end of the day, he’s right. He’s not talking himself up: he’s just being accurate. Modesty on his part would necessarily be false modesty. Countless characters label Poirot a mounteback, a rogue, or a loonie, and underestimate him and think they can hide things. He always ferrets it out. (I seldom do. I am not Hercule Poirot.) In Death on the Nile, Poirot insists on playing matchmaker before revealing the identity of the murderer to Colonel Race. This is brilliant. It reminds us that in spite of his emphasis on order, organization, and cleanliness, at his heart Poirot is a romantic. He believes that the young deserve happiness; I think, in part, his obsession with the criminal element and solving mysteries is an obsession with what makes people happy. So often we are stirred to crimes, passionate or coldblooded, because we are not happy, and we think that removing someone or gaining something will make us happier. Alas, it seldom works out that way. Egypt itself does not feature so much in this book. In that respect, the Nile portion of the title indicates setting only barely—this could just as easily have been a cruise down the River Thames, though I doubt there would have been any takers if that were the case! This is a straightforward murder-on-a-boat kind of mystery, very similar in tenor and tone to The Murder on the Orient Express, which Poirot references here. However, two things elevate this and explain its presence in my omnibus of Masterpieces of Murder alongside The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and And Then There Were None . Firstly, the motives. Revenge. Lust. Love. Betrayal. So primal, much impressive. And there is plenty of motive to go around. You might or might not deduce the identity of the killer, but there are plenty of red herrings. Not only does everyone have something to hide, but everyone has something to be upset about. Christie is a master at pulling the curtain back and exposing the torrid emotions that beat beneath our breasts. Secondly, the construction of the mystery. Christie uses a combination of timing and subsequent murders to set up a twist at the very end, just as Poirot reveals the killer. As usual, trying to find the murderer is a process of elimination—but it also involves making assumptions on imperfect information. Poirot reminds us that if one isn’t willing to discard an assumption and create new theories to fit the facts, then one won’t get very far at all. Death on the Nile is certainly an enjoyable Poirot mystery. It showcases all the best about Christie’s writing, and the Belgian detective of the little grey cells is in his prime here. Part of me feels so sad that these people have to die to bring me joy. (And is it terrible that part of me doesn’t care? I mean, they are fictional….) [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 2015
|
Jul 02, 2015
|
Jul 12, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0312330871
| 9780312330873
| 0312330871
| 4.28
| 1,426,362
| Nov 06, 1939
| May 03, 2004
|
really liked it
|
Hot on the heels of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd we have Agatha Christie’s other “best novel”, And Then There Were None, alternatively known under a fe
Hot on the heels of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd we have Agatha Christie’s other “best novel”, And Then There Were None, alternatively known under a few other racist titles. Loosely woven around an equally racist poem, the actual mystery is not in itself racist but instead another one of those clever stories that blew minds all around. I, however, didn’t like it very much. I’m not going to argue that this is a bad book or even a bad mystery. I understand why other people enjoy it so much. Despite the twist, however, I feel like Christie’s technical achievements here have been overrated compared to something like The Murder of Rogery Ackroyd, which is indeed quite a feat. Beyond that, this just doesn’t have what I’m looking for in a mystery. The whole premise is mind-boggingly unrealistic. I can believe a retired judge buying an island under an assumed name. Even if he manages to dig up the necessary information on all these people, what are the chances they are all available to travel to this island? And they all manage to arrive on the same day, at roughly the same time? British trains are not that reliable. And Then There Were None is like an episode in the seventh or eighth season of a procedural: the writers have literally been doing the same thing for so long that they have to come up with increasingly contrived ideas to keep the plots fresh. Note, however, that I’m not going to extend that metaphor and claim Christie was just retreading old ground here. The plot is original, and the story might even be entertaining. The atmosphere is certainly one of suspense: with everyone unsure as to the identity of the murderer, everyone becomes increasingly paranoid. It’s lovely. In this respect, Christie is one of the inventors of the modern thriller; And Then There Were None is a literary version of an extreme, life-or-death Survivor. But there isn’t much mystery to it. I think one reason the Poirot mysteries, above Christie’s other work, stick with me is the sheer presence of Poirot. His personality, his unique combination of egotism and brilliance, makes those mysteries work. I love watching Poirot on the case, because it’s like watching an amazing concert pianist or an Olympic athlete: you just know they’ll nail it. In contrast, all these amateur detectives running around feels like changing channels from the Olympics to a kids’ sports match. It’s not bad, just like kids’ sports are not bad—but it certainly can’t be judged by the same metrics. So I’m forced to concede this kind of conflict between my subjective taste and my appreciation, at a remove, for what Christie has accomplished here. Though I’m inclined to disagree with those who label it her best work, I agree it’s a masterful piece of storytelling. As a mystery, as a Christie mystery, however, it just leaves so much to be desired. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 26, 2015
|
Jun 26, 2015
|
Jul 06, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1579126278
| 9781579126278
| 1579126278
| 4.27
| 292,292
| Jun 07, 1926
| Sep 01, 2006
|
it was amazing
|
**spoiler alert** There’s nothing quite like a good Agatha Christie novel, hmm? I find reading one of her mysteries so comforting. It’s like the perfe
**spoiler alert** There’s nothing quite like a good Agatha Christie novel, hmm? I find reading one of her mysteries so comforting. It’s like the perfect intellectual beach read: you know what to expect, yet there are still surprises (even if you manage to guess whodunit, which I seldom do). The Hercule Poirot novels in particular must be among my favourites. Mystery was my first genre love, even way back before I got into science fiction and fantasy, and in mystery, Christie made history. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, sensational and controversial and regarded by so many as her best work, definitely attests to her skill as a writer. We start, as we often do, in a quaint English country village. This is set sometime after Poirot has retired “to grow the marrows.” But just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in! Poirot finds himself neck-deep in the murder of the eponymous Ackroyd, with a whole household of suspects. In the place of the faithful Captain Hastings we have a Watsonian Dr. Sheppard, who not only narrates the book and assists Poirot but also found the body. For the first part of the novel, Poirot figures very little. We learn about Sheppard’s practice and life, how he attended to Mrs. Ferrars after she died, and we see him meet with Roger Ackroyd. During this time Christie lays the groundwork, scattering clues—or clews as they are spelt here—that will be significant much later in the story. Poirot is just a batty old “Frenchman” who has taken the cottage next door and who is so opaque that not even Caroline, Sheppard’s sister and the town gossip, can divine his identity. That all changes, of course. But I love the idea that Poirot wants out of the limelight in his retirement—just as I find it eminently believable that he wouldn’t be able to resist the thrill of the mystery. Although there is a little bit of the, “Oh, poor M. Poirot is past his prime and really should go back to growing marrows,” in general the other characters treat Poirot with a little bit of veneration. He is known, here. Of course, it’s the identity of the killer that ultimately resulted in this novel receiving so much acclaim (and controversy). Christie was the first to employ “the narrator did it!” I find her use of an unreliable narrator itself enjoyable, regardless of the fact he also happened to be a murderer. I like to think that in any of the books narrated by Hastings, part of the reason I don’t solve the crime is because I’m forced to “wear a Hastings cap” and see everything through his eyes. Here, the narrator isn’t just omitting or garbling information that Poirot readily receives first hand: he is actively deceiving both Poirot and the reader. I want to take a moment to emphasize what a technical feat this is. Separated from this book by just shy of ninety years, and exposed to countless derivative plot devices since then, it’s tempting for a modern reader to shrug their shoulders and go, “Meh,” when they read those final chapters. Even if you aren’t impressed by Sheppard’s guilt (if, indeed, he is guilty—we have only his word to go on here, and he has already lied to us!), just think about what Christie had to do to write this book. I like think of murder mysteries as n-dimensional objects. The writer of a mystery necessarily must perceive it from a different perspective than the reader: the writer knows, from the beginning, who did it and why. All the pieces are apparent to them, whereas the reader only discovers this as a function of time. But that’s not all a writer does. She has to rotate this mystery and perceive it from other angles. She has to consider how it looks to the detective—how does Poirot fit all the pieces together to get to the solution? Then she has to consider how the mystery looks to the narrator (and thus, usually, to the reader) at a given point in time. In other words, writing mysteries be complex, yo. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd stands out because Christie took it a step further, having to consider how the mystery looks to the narrator and then how the narrator makes things look to the reader. That must have required a lot more thought and planning. So my hat off to her. I’ll also just add that I love how as these novels age they become intricate studies in the attitudes of the day. Christie’s characters have so much unexamined class privilege. I just find it so fascinating that our ideas of class have changed so much with time. Back then, to be considered reasonably well-off, you had to have some servants. Even Sheppard and his sister, who live alone in a little house, have a servant! Servants are a curious fixture in Christie novels, because they tend to be invisible and nameless (think of the Breton-capped woman who waits on Poirot in the Larches) unless they are relevant to the mystery, in which case they are naturally suspect. So I wonder if we’re reaching a point where Christie’s novels are beginning to go the way of the Regency romances. That is, the writer assumes cultural knowledge the reader no longer has, so that which is left unsaid, or implied, is almost entirely lost on us. Just as modern readers have a hard time really comprehending the world of Jane Austen without some historical grounding first, I suspect that most of us don’t have as full an understanding of the world Christie depicts here either. Unlike Shakespeare, where this problem has a great deal to do with language drift, this is almost entirely a function of cultural assumptions. While I lack some of the understanding to completely immerse myself in her world, however, I still fully enjoy these novels. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is no exception. It is every bit as clever and charming and compelling as you might be led to believe. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 23, 2015
|
Jun 24, 2015
|
Jul 02, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 077354481X
| 9780773544819
| 077354481X
| 3.66
| 35
| Mar 01, 2015
| Mar 20, 2015
|
liked it
|
Election time is just around the corner, and boy am I … not excited. I would dearly like to see a change in the party that forms the next government …
Election time is just around the corner, and boy am I … not excited. I would dearly like to see a change in the party that forms the next government … but I am somewhat sceptical we will manage to bring that about. But this isn’t about how much I dislike what Stephen Harper has done to Canada. I wrote a blog post about that for Canada Day. This is a review of Dismantling Canada, by Brooke Jeffrey, and former Liberal policy adviser. So let’s get our biases declared up front. Jeffrey, obviously sympathizes with the Liberal party and seems pretty liberal in her political leanings. Similarly, I tend to get placed quite left on the political spectrum, although I eschew associating myself with any particular party. There are elements of both the Liberal Party and the NDP I like, and there are elements of both parties I dislike. That’s one reason I love our Parliamentary system so much: the party in power, even in a majority, tends to have to work with the other parties in a somewhat collaborative way. Harper has worked very hard to change that and to poison the atmosphere on the Hill, one of many effects Jeffrey catalogues here. If I’m already set against Harper, why bother reading this book? It’s not like I’m going to use the facts in here as fodder at dinner party conversations. I don’t go to dinner parties, and even if I did, I’m not the kind of person to stump for or against politicians in polite conversation. Instead, Dismantling Canada caught my eye because Jeffrey promised to explain Harper’s politics in the context of recent Canadian history. Although I was always somewhat aware of politics growing up, it wasn’t until Martin was on his way out that I was old enough to follow the political scene. I first voted in the 2008 federal election, so Harper has been Prime Minister for all of my voting life. (All seven long years of it.) One point that Jeffrey makes clear is how Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada differs so much from the previous Conservative government led by Brian Mulroney. Those “Tories” where Progressive Conservatives and continued the conservative tradition that stretches back to Confederation. The current Conservative Party of Canada, on the other hand, is a result of the Reform Party (of which Harper was a founding member) merging with the Canadian Alliance. Both parties are far-right splinters of the former Progressive Conservatives; after they merged, they swallowed up the Progressive Conservatives to become our present-day Conservative Party. But somewhere along the way, there was a glitch in the matrix. Now former high-profile Progressive Conservatives have declared they’d rather have a Liberal government. That’s messed up. You know you’re Conserving … Conservating … whatever … wrong when Joe Clark tells you he’s voting Liberal. And see, this was a cool detail that is probably obvious to people like my dad, who have lived through such regime changes, but was not so obvious to me. Harper’s Conservatives are, sadly, pretty much the only Conservatives I’ve ever known. So now I feel sorry for the people who have conservative or right-wing ideologies but don’t want to vote for Harper because of how he has managed the Conservative Party. Those people have even suckier options than liberals like myself who think even the NDP are too centrist for our taste…. So Jeffrey then takes Harper to task for not actually delivering on a lot of what typical conservatives would want from him. The Conservatives have always billed themselves as sound fiscal managers, yet there are numerous examples of how their fiscal policy doesn’t make sense. The government cut a lot of programs in an attempt to gut social welfare—and, OK, while I think that was a terrible move, I understand the ideology behind that. But there’s one example where the government announces, very abruptly, they are cancelling a program they themselves established a year previous, and then forcing the provinces to pay for a different program that fulfils somewhat the same purpose. Despite the fact that the original program was actually working and cost less. I won’t even get into how the Liberals left the next government with a surplus … which has somehow become a deficit on the Conservative watch, despite their constant trimming and slashing of government-funded agencies. Just where is all this money going, anyway? We don’t know, because the party that campaigned against a corruption-riddled Liberal government on a platform of accountability and transparency is anything but. Harper is running a dark show, one where Access to Information is scarce and expensive, and the government routinely ignores and maligns the Parliamentary Budget Officer and other watchdogs it created. Ottawa is on the verge of tipping into a bizarre, Orwellian universe. The other running theme throughout this book is an analysis of Harper’s ideology versus his pragmatism. Jeffrey points out that one reason he has been so successful is an evolving willingness to sideline his ideology if it’s more practical to do so. She illustrates how the earlier Harper didn’t do this, but as time went by and he rose to prominence again as a politician, he has changed his tune. He still isn’t quite willing to engage in diplomacy, as his deplorable treatment of the UN shows. Nevertheless, Harper seems content to pursue his agenda more slowly than he might like if he thinks it will win him some votes in the next election. Dismantling Canada is really well written. Despite being very information dense, I had an easy time getting through it, at least until the very end, when I could see that the end was in sight and Jeffrey was reiterating a lot of what came before. As far as Jeffrey’s own biases go, she obviates them to a great extent simply through her use of facts. You can debate the merits of the Harper government, but you can’t deny they now run a massive deficit. (You can only try to hide the fact, or mislead the public….) And she’s quick to point out that Harper’s rise to power owes a great deal to incompetence and corruption within the Liberal ranks (though I suppose, in its own way, this is a backhanded compliment acknowledging the Liberals the “natural governing party”.) I think the only really jarring part comes at the very end. After a somewhat tedious chapter about the Conservative brand, Jeffrey launches into the conclusion, where she tries to determine whether Harper has succeeded with his agenda yet. She concludes he has made a lot of strides politically but has not yet succeeded in changing the culture of Canada. The last few sentences are an abrupt and optimistic change from the rest of the book, which quite frankly reads as incredibly depressing. I’m not sure, then, how such wishful thinking can follow from everything else that comes before. We just don’t have the data to know if a majority of Canadians agree with Harper’s vision now—thanks for screwing up the census, Harper. Political polls are notoriously unreliable, as is our electoral system, which is first-past-the-post and now disenfranchises voters who are less likely to vote Conservative. So, you know, there’s that. Obviously both Jeffrey and myself would like it to be true that Canada remains a more liberal place, but confirmation bias is a bitch. I guess we’ll see what October has in store for us. Dismantling Canada went to press well before the surprise NDP victory in Alberta. Jeffrey discounts the NDP, mentioning them here only a few times, and only in passing, as historical interest. She’s quite convinced the Liberals under Trudeau are Harper’s true competition (and that was probably the case up until a few months ago). Whether the NDP’s prominence means they could form the next government, or if they will split the vote and pave the way for another Conservative government, remains to be seen. I cannot be as sanguine as the conclusion of this book is, especially not after reading it. This is full of details that will make a political junkie happy (although a Harperite who doesn’t want their convictions questioned won’t like it). It’s fairly well-written—predictably, somewhat on the dry side, but less so than I feared when I picked it up off the library shelf. And it provides a lot of good historical context, especially for younger people like myself who are only just getting into the whole election thing. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 27, 2015
|
Jul 02, 2015
|
Jun 27, 2015
|
Hardcover
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.87
|
it was ok
|
Aug 16, 2015
|
Aug 16, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.07
|
really liked it
|
Aug 15, 2015
|
Aug 15, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 2.79
|
did not like it
|
Aug 13, 2015
|
Aug 12, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
really liked it
|
Aug 11, 2015
|
Aug 10, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.84
|
did not like it
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.28
|
did not like it
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
Aug 08, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.96
|
liked it
|
Aug 08, 2015
|
Aug 05, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.87
|
liked it
|
Aug 03, 2015
|
Aug 03, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.87
|
really liked it
|
Aug 2015
|
Aug 02, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.71
|
liked it
|
Jul 29, 2015
|
Jul 28, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.72
|
it was ok
|
Jul 28, 2015
|
Jul 27, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.63
|
it was ok
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 27, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.94
|
it was ok
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 25, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
liked it
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 25, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.00
|
liked it
|
Jul 15, 2015
|
Jul 15, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
it was ok
|
Jul 16, 2015
|
Jul 14, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.12
|
really liked it
|
Jul 02, 2015
|
Jul 12, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.28
|
really liked it
|
Jun 26, 2015
|
Jul 06, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.27
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 24, 2015
|
Jul 02, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
liked it
|
Jul 02, 2015
|
Jun 27, 2015
|
Loading...
