Dazed Rambling

Done.

2012-09-11T00:22:00.002-05:00

The end of this past August marked Dazed Rambling's third anniversary. I didn't even notice. Truth is, I haven't spared the blog much attention in a long while. My last review for the site, a proper review, was written a little over three months ago. I had to go all the way back to November of last year to find a review that I thought was even halfway decent.

I have been writing for Dazed Rambling for three years and, well, it has been a pretty static three years. My readership started small and never grew from there. If the blog ever showed up on publisher radar, it was only for a split-second blip before disappearing below notice again. You won't find this place on many blogrolls. Dazed Rambling was not a success, was never going to be a success, and I have always been, and still am, OK with that. My small readership, a mixture of readers, bloggers, and friends, is made up of some great people who have steered me in the right direction time and time again. The lack of books coming in from publishers allowed me a great deal of freedom in choosing what to read and, I have little doubt, encouraged my growth as a reader.

There is no list of accomplishments for me to go on about or haters to condemn. Greener pastures do not await me and there is nothing in my life that requires I take a step back. I'm done because the only thing I see in the future for this blog is a gradual fading away. It is not that I have lost interesting or that I don't care or that I have stopped reading. I just don't feel like reviewing anymore.

There is a good chance that I will be back, eventually, but it won't be here. Dazed Rambling came into existence with a shrug and it goes out with a 'meh.'

I'd include something about how great it has been to meet you all, but this isn't a parting of ways. I will still be around, plaguing your comment sections and annoying you on Twitter.

Introducing Adam McOmber

2012-08-09T22:07:00.000-05:00

It is rare for me to stir from my torpor and go out of my way to promote an author. The last time this happened, I was reeling from having finished Michal Ajvaz's The Other City and horrified that so few people had even heard of it. I really haven't shut up about that book since. With that in mind, I want to introduce you to Adam McOmber.

Before last week, I probably couldn't tell you who Adam McOmber is. I once saw his name mentioned on Larry's blog, but that little splinter of info only gets me to 'vaguely recall' territory. If I kept up with literary journals or paid more attention to short fiction, I would stand a better chance of recognizing the name. After all, his short fiction has been appearing in literary magazines for the past decade and a collection, This New & Poisonous Air, was published just last year. Vague recollection is better than nothing. If I hadn't heard the name before, compared to Erin Morgenstern, no less, I would have passed by his upcoming debut novel, The White Forest, without any thought spared. Instead I paused, searched Larry's blog, and then clicked the request button like mad. Since then, Adam McOmber has gone from being a name I could barely place to being the author of one of the best books I have read this year.

There is a little more than a month to go until publication, but I have yet to see The White Forest receive any attention elsewhere in the SFF community. I am afraid that the book will hit shelves next month and fly right under the radar. And I don't want to see that happen. It'd be a shame if it did. There is some hope to be found in the book being compared to Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, which was one of last year's big hits. The comparison to Morgenstern is poppycock, the two having so little in common, but if that slice of hype gets this book into more readers' hands, I am supportive. Considering my small readership, it will certainly help more than my weak signal boost.

For those interested in reading some of McOmber's work, I was able to turn up some of his short fiction online:

Poet and Underworld, Juked

What Follows Us, A Capella Zoo

Egyptomania,Web Conjunctions

For those interested in reading the novel that I consider one of the best (vague, I know, but I try not to pick favorites) novels I have read this year, here is the link to that:

The White Forest, Touchstone | Also, The Book Depository - Indiebound - Powell's - B&N - Amazon UK

["]Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father in a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret—an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of man-made objects—and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan’s interest in a cult led by Ariston Day, a charismatic mystic popular with London’s elite. Day encourages his followers to explore dream manipulation with the goal of discovering a strange hidden world, a place he calls the Empyrean.

A year later, Nathan has vanished, and the famed Inspector Vidocq arrives in London to untangle the events that led up to Nathan’s disappearance. As a sinister truth emerges, Jane realizes she must discover the origins of her talent, and use it to find Nathan herself, before it’s too late.["]

Unfortunately, I have not been able to turn up a sample.

If you are interested in reading more of McOmber's short fiction, I provide the link to Amazon below. If you prefer to buy it elsewhere, click on one of the retailer links above, buy The White Forest, and then search for:

This New & Poisonous Air, BOA Editions

My review will be up in September. In the meantime, take this post as a measure of my enthusiasm and get this book!

Read, Reading, Upcoming

2012-08-03T21:50:00.003-05:00

I have heard good things about The Book Thief for the past couple years, but never bothered with it. All it takes it being bored enough at work to wander into our horrible little book section to prompt action. As it turns out, it was a fantastic book. It was hard to put down and I could have gone through it in a single sitting, but I wanted to take it slow and had to force myself to put it down after every chapter or so. By the end, I had shed a few tears and was reluctant to let it go, but all good things must come to an end.

The author's name is one of those that lodges in your head, vaguely remembered and hard to place. I finally matched the name to Bed Bugs, a novel that hit the Vine lists a few months back sounding interesting enough to consider, but not interesting enough to request. As it turns out, I know his name from further back, as well. I have Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters sitting unread on one of my shelves down in Florida. I had to give in someday, I suppose.

The Last Policeman is a detective story set in the months leading up to an end of the world as we know it asteroid impact. Anarchy and order get along like old friends, striking a balance somewhere between Everything's Kind Of Fucked and Not Yet Gone Completely To Shit. In the shadow of our extinction, suicide has become almost as common as deciding to skip out on work to crack down on that bucket list of yours. So when an insurance actuary is found hanging in a McDonalds bathroom, why does Detective Hank Palace figure it a murder? No one else really gives a damn. In hangar town, if it looks like a suicide it is a suicide. Don't waste your remaining time on it. Palace doesn't buy, isn't convinced, and goes hunting for the truth.

The Last Policeman is part success, part failure. Winters has created a compelling setting and atmosphere in the shadow of the asteroid and I loved every bit of it, but the mystery does not live up to it. For all of the detective work Palace does, remarkably little of it does anything to aid in advancing his case. One might expect it to open up useful leads, get the ball rolling, but more often than not, it just leaves Palace at a dead end. The case and plot advance at random, as if Palace decided to see if exclaiming 'Aha!' might magically summon a new turn or lead or revelation. It does, it must, because the work he puts into certainly gets him nowhere. It comes off as convoluted and half-assed. For all that the mystery aspect of the book disappointed me, I still enjoyed the book. The other two in this proposed trilogy will no doubt find their way to me. I'll be hoping for improvement.

I have never been fond of superhero comics, so I tend to be wary of superhero novels. I read Devil's Cape a couple years ago and thought it was decent, but it didn't quite relieve me of the feeling. Prepare To Die! was skipped over a few times before I finally decided to see what it was about. This is what it is about:

Nine years ago, Steve Clarke was just a teenage boy in love with the girl of his dreams. Then a freak chemical spill transformed him into Reaver, the man whose super-powerful fists can literally take a year off a bad guy's life.

Days ago, he found himself at the mercy of his arch-nemesis Octagon and a whole crew of fiendish super-villains, who gave him two weeks to settle his affairs--and prepare to die.

Now, after years of extraordinary adventures and crushing tragedies, the world's greatest hero is returning to where it all began in search of the boy he once was . . . and the girl he never forgot.

Exciting, scandalous, and ultimately moving, Prepare to Die! is a unique new look at the last days of a legend.

Chances are, I'd have skipped over the book if it wasn't for that third paragraph. Watching a superhero brawl on film is one thing, a very enjoyable thing, but put it to page and it bores me. My years reading Forgotten Realms tie-ins provided more than enough battles and fights to satisfy me for a lifetime or three. This looked to be something different and, at about halfway through the book, it is quite different. This is not a book to read if you want action and adventure. There is introspection, a lot of it, peppered with flashbacks of events both happy and sad, pre and post hero, and rarely about putting down the bad guys. It is not great and not likely a book to remember for years to come, but I am enjoying it.

Larry mentioned it on his blog, a debut novel from one of the authors slated to appear in the aborted Best American Fantasy 4, and reported early comparisons to Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. That was all I needed to jump at the chance of getting an early copy. It is next up on my to-read list, but I have been asked to hold review for the week of publication (Sep. 11), so it will be a while for that.

It is Valente and I tend to enjoy her work. I expect it will earn me some odd looks at work though.

Everyone seems to love this. Hell, everyone seems to love Parker. I tried reading Devices and Desires some time ago, but found it tedious and dull. Maybe this will be better.

A Horrible Reading

2012-07-04T05:16:00.001-05:00

To match Larry's post from this morning, I have a snippet of something terrible:

A Reading

This was recorded earlier this morning and posted to my Tumblr account, to the amusement of some. Larry quickly followed suit with an earlier recording of his own. I would very much like to see this trend continue.

Recent Arrivals/Now Reading

2012-07-04T03:36:00.001-05:00

The Orange Eats Creeps has been on my list for a good long while, but there was always some other book that took precedence. I was in a mood for something weird, something different and interesting, and this book stood out. Unfortunately, I was not in the mood for Krilanovich's style. It was not a bad book, not at all, and I plan to get back to it. Eventually.

When The Orange Eats Creeps' style failed to worm its way into my good graces, I was left to look elsewhere for something to sate my craving. Somehow, I ended up reading through Westeros' standalone recommendation thread and came out the other side with The Fade on my Nook. The clipped prose agreed with my mood and the setting, a subterranean world that pricked an old interest, was just interesting enough that I actually wanted to see it explored despite my usual disinclination toward world-building. There are times when I question the strength of characterization surrounding Orna, our narrator. Just when you think the author has pinned her into a cliche, he switches things up and reveals another side of her. Her character is constantly evolving and no one role (be it warrior, wife, mother, spy, friend, prisoner, assassin, or slave) defines her character. At halfway through, the book is shaping up to be a solid read.

Though I was not introduced to fantasy through Drizzt, those books were the first ones to really kick things into gear and make me interested in reading more. The year following my discovery of The Dark Elf Trilogy miss-shelved at the library was spent reading through the rest of the Drizzt books and then branching out further into Salvatore's other series. His message board was the first that I ever joined and, all these years later, I am still semi-active on it as a moderator. I met Mal through that forum. That said, it has been several years since I really enjoyed these books. Times goes on, tastes change, blah blah blah. The Pirate King was the last one I actually liked, even though I put the first book of that series down in disgust. Strangely enough, other fans--real fans, I guess--didn't seem to like it all that much. Chances are, I won't be reading this. Mal will though, which means she will finally be writing a review for this blog. Who knows, I might read it... maybe if Artemis finally gets gutted or something. Hate that fucker.

A free short story from Carlos Ruiz Zafon! In epub so I don't have to read it online! Yay! It is amazing what publishers will go through when they want to publicize/market one of their better selling authors. Rose of Fire is a very short story, so short that it takes up probably a third of the e-book. The rest of the space is devoted to the excerpt from Zafon's forthcoming novel, The Prisoner of Heaven. It is hard to look at this and not see it as an excerpt with a short story attached, a way of spreading the word that something amazing is about to drop and you really, really need to buy it. With everyone going on about how much it costs to design and format e-books (not to mention cover art), I can't but think there are cheaper ways than this to do it, especially given the length of the story.

When people keep going around saying that a new book is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reborn in our modern times, I have to investigate. Stumbling across H2G2 in high school brought a great deal of joy to those four years of boredom and introduced me to science fiction that didn't make me want to pound my head against a desk. I have had a place in my heart reserved for them ever since... even the last two, which were pretty shit. Year Zero is not the new H2G2 and there is such a difference in content and humor that trying to compare the two is a mistake. There are aliens and there is humor, but having the two is not grounds for comparison. It is strange seeing him compared to Adams when there is another popular science fiction author with a sense of humor readily available.

Rob Reid is PopCulture Scalzi. Reading Year Zero immediately reminded me of Scalzi's The Android's Dream and I couldn't shake the feeling. That's no bad thing either. The Android's Dream was a very entertaining bit of fluff and I enjoyed it immensely. The same can be said of Year Zero, which is entertaining and often hilarious, but nothing that you'd call deep. It is so stuffed full of pop culture references from the past decade that its relevance and a large part of its humor is on unsteady ground. Another decade, maybe less if the world ends at the end of 2012 or the internet eats away our ability to remember trivial shit, and a large part of what makes this book so good is likely going to go poof. I suggest reading it while you can still enjoy it.

"Happy Birthday"

2012-06-16T04:37:00.002-05:00

When you belong to several message boards, even those that you haven't visited in ages, you tend to get a swarm of happy birthday emails around that time of year. Of all of the emails I get, there is only one that actually has real content, something more than "happy birthday from [insert message board here]". Each year, The Nightmare Network sends me a Thomas Ligotti poem:

Even after a person
is gone from this world,
people often tend
to remember birthdays.

They say: today is
the birthday of someone
who would have been
so many years old.

So just in case you're
not around next year:
happy birthday.

"Happy Birthday" by Thomas Ligotti
(From DEATH POEMS)

I think it may be the same poem every time, but this sort of thing is easy to forget in the span of a year. It is always a darkly pleasant surprise coming across this as I go on delete spree through the rest of the birthday wishes.

Adding to the Stack

2012-06-14T19:24:00.002-05:00

The Silent Land was last year's big disappointment, so I was wary about Joyce's newest. Graham Joyce is a favorite author of mine, but having set me to stumbling once, I fear what might happen next. Feared. I am rather late in posting this and have since read it. If all goes well, I should have a review up over the next few days.

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes it leads to good things. The Thing About Thugs was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize. Beyond a little trouble getting used to the narration, I think the book will be a very good thing.

Err... I think Aidan liked it. Really though, it has been a good while since this book hit shelves and don't remember it getting much press. Aidan stands out because he seemed to be the only one that tried to get the word out. I vaguely remember there be a couple mixed reviews for it, but have no idea where they might have come from or what the reviewers considered wrong. They may have never existed at all.

In genre terms, I suppose I prefer my fantasy to lie more along contemporary lines. I read more than my fair share of epic and traditional fantasies set in stagnant medieval pseudo-Europe and prefer to let them slide on by these days. Every once in a while though, I get these cravings and it has been a good while since the last one. So I guess I will read it--or try to--and see what the lack of fuss was about.

This has been sitting on my Nook for the better part of the last month and I really just forgot about it. It seemed interesting at the time, but I have seen so little about it from the blogs that I follow that it slipped my mind. I should probably get around to reading it...

Review | Sorry Please Thank You: Stories, Charles Yu

2012-06-01T23:00:00.002-05:00

A couple years back, there was such buzz revolving around Charles Yu that he seemed destined for great things. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was getting positive reviews and the National Book Review had awarded him a position among the 5 Under 35 for his first short fiction collection. He was set up to be the Next Big Thing, as many authors are in this age of the new shiny, but fell under the radar instead. His new collection, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories, is set to hit shelves this July, but in terms of getting the word out, there seems to be little push behind it.

Sorry Please Thank You: Stories contains thirteen stories that range anywhere from incredibly interesting to downright bizarre. There were one or two stories that I struggled through and a couple that I really enjoyed, but most fell somewhere in between. None of the stories left much of an impression and even the best stories are rather forgettable, but they are often entertaining. Length may be an issue for the frugal reader. I suspect most will be able to read through the collection in an hour or two and, well, two hours of forgettable entertainment comes cheaper from the Redbox on the corner.

The stand-outs from the collection:

Standard Loneliness Package

This is the first in the collection and one of the most interesting. "Don't feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you." The things that cause us grief and pain and embarrassment can be outsourced. The wages are low for the cubicled workers who rent their lives to suffer the experience of others, but for some, it is better than the alternative--the same thing on a grander scale, a forty-year stint living someone else's experiences for a lump sum. Standard Loneliness Package tells us a great deal about the company, about how things work, but it is a love story at heart... an uncomfortable and disturbing love story.

I enjoyed the story, thought it very interesting, but it is problematic. The story is set in Vaguely India, a strange country where familiar cities are name-dropped and connections between the pain-sharing cubicle farm of the future and outsourced call centers of today are as obvious as a slap in the face, but little else to differentiate it from elsewhere in the world. The love story... oh, the love story. Our narrator eyes a new employee, Kirthi, in the halls, talks to her a couple times and gets nowhere, and eventually, when he gets the nerve, ~~finally asks her out on a date~~ sexually assaults her. "She makes a face like disgust, But she doesn't push me away either. Not right away. She accepts the kiss, doesn't kiss back, but after a couple of seconds, breaks it off and leans back and turns her head and says, under her breath, you shouldn't have done that. Then they start "dating", according to the narrator, even though Kirthi repeatedly suggest they not. She starts opening up to him. They move in together. It does not get any less uncomfortable from here.

First Person Shooter

Very short story involving an employee who tries to build up the nerve to ask a female coworker out and a zombie trying to find the right cosmetics for her date. It is short, entertaining, and, best yet, unoffensive. On the plus side, the female coworker is packing a shotgun because of the zombie... so no unwanted moves from desperate coworkers.

Troubleshooting

This is one of the stories that I struggled through. It was neither interesting nor compelling. My eyes glazed over a time or two, but I am guessing that this story, in the form of a numbered list, is supposed be a guide to using a wish machine.

Hero Absorbs Major Damage

Probably my favorite story in the collection and from the description offered up in the collection's synopsis, not exactly what you would expect. "A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape." Reading this, the first thing that comes to my mind is something along the lines of great, someone has been playing World of Warcraft and now I get to read a story inspired by it. And that element is in there... only things are a bit weird. At first, it seemed that the narrator was a player and his group was nothing more than the scripted non player characters he gathered along the way. And then those random NPCs begin to develop, they become real characters with lives that extend beyond the quests and battles and the fantasy RPG lifestyle. When the group happens across an impressive new NPC, the narrator even begins to worry that he will be displaced as leader. The story is interesting, entertaining, and far better than I expected.

Human for Beginners and Inventory

Human for Beginners was bizarre and a struggle to read through. Inventory was interesting and took up a good chunk of the book because almost every page contained little more than a short paragraph or two of story. Interesting, but not very enjoyable.

Yeoman

Somewhat humorous story about a man who gets promoted to a redshirt position, the average lifespan of which tops out at a week. Married, child on the way, he has to come up with a plan to get out of dying while dealing with the ship's absurd and bored away crew whose exploratory duties have come to resemble screwing about in a productive-looking manner.

Sorry Please Thank You

A rambling suicide note about love and loss and little regret. Not a highlight or even a stand-out, just the end.

I was ready to recommend this book. It was all of those e-words I used throughout the last several paragraphs and a bit of the i-word, but the stories have a bad habit of not sticking around for long. Sorry Please Thank You: Stories was fun while it lasted. It is too bad the fun fades so quick. You know, Standard Loneliness Package did not strike me as so disturbing when I read the book, but looking over it again for the review lets it all settle in for a bit and it really bothers me. It is not the best note to start a book out on and I think, probably enough to keep me from recommending the book.

Review | The Infinite Tides, Christian Kiefer

2012-05-28T14:56:00.003-05:00

["]Keith Corcoran has spent his entire life preparing to be an astronaut. At the moment of his greatness, finally aboard the International Space Station, hundreds of miles above the earth’s swirling blue surface, he receives word that his sixteen-year-old daughter has died in a car accident, and that his wife has left him. Returning to earth, and to his now empty suburban home, he is alone with the ghosts, the memories and feelings he can barely acknowledge, let alone process. He is a mathematical genius, a brilliant engineer, a famous astronaut, but nothing in his life has readied him for this.

With its endless interlocking culs-de-sac, big box stores, and vast parking lots, contemporary suburbia is not a promising place to recover from such trauma. But healing begins through new relationships, never Keith’s strength, first as a torrid affair with one neighbor, and then as an unlikely friendship with another, a Ukrainian immigrant who every evening lugs his battered telescope to the weed-choked vacant lot at the end of the street. Gazing up at the heavens together, drinking beer and smoking pot, the two men share their vastly different experiences and slowly reveal themselves to each other, until Keith can begin to confront his loss and begin to forgive himself for decades of only half-living.["]

As we have learned well over the past couple years of operation, I have more than one bookish kryptonite. Even though it does not hook me every time, the depressing synopsis is one of those. Look at the synopsis for The Infinite Tides: Keith Corcoran's life goal was to become an astronaut and, just when he accomplishes this, as he is in space, he learns of his daughter's death and that his wife is leaving him. There is such potential for a good book there, but it is easy to mess up and most authors tend to. My fondness for melancholy aside, it is the curiosity that makes depressing synopses so appealing--will the author pull it off or fail? I want to know. Of course, there is more to a book than whether or not an author manages to create a sense of poignant melancholy without crossing the line into needlessly cruel, so we must consider a few things first.

The prose was cause for complaint for the first quarter of the novel. It was an unpleasant reminder of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which went to the bottom of the to-read avalanche after twenty or so frustrating pages. A distinct lack of commas and prevalence of 'and' lends to a breathless delivery that is strikingly similar to an excited child trying their best to relay the events of the day. And and and and and and. While this drove me to drop The Road, I stubbornly persisted with The Infinite Tides (thanks very much to the author telling me I ought to quit, as it gets no better as the book moves along) and the prose style eventually grew on me. Style aside, Kiefer is a capable hand and, when not getting bogged down with and and and and and, delivers prose that is well-crafted and, sometimes, striking. The first sentence, atop the draw of the synopsis, is what forced me to order the book:

["]There was no sound at all and what sense of movement he generated upon entering returned to him from every surface as if the house had become some kind of empty museum, his footfalls echoing off the tiles and the clunk of the closing door behind him so abrupt and alien that he actually shivered as he moved forward into the entryway, setting the two black suitcases by the door and flipping the light switch, the tiles and the carpeted room before him illuminating all at once: dull, white, empty.["]

Another sentence, closer to the halfway mark than the beginning and simpler than the first, stands out as my favorite from the book and has proved hard to forget:

["]There were forests somewhere according to the news, but they were all aflame.["]

Keith is our main character and the point of view sticks close to him, hovering over his shoulder as he stumbles through the weeks and months following his daughter's death. We get to know him through the current timeline and through flashbacks that flow towards the the greatest and worst moments of his life. He is a well-realized character that grows, perhaps only really starts to grow as a character and as a person, as he becomes lost, as everything falls apart around him. There is, no doubt, people like him out there--focused, driven, and living a sort of half-life. His daughter, Quinn, never becomes more than a figment flitting through his memories. She is very much like the smart, precocious daughters found in any number of novels, movies, or television shows and perhaps because of that, perhaps because she exists more as a mirror or divergent path, she never becomes a fully-fledged character. She is like Keith, has the potential to be better and smarter than him, but she takes the path he does not. Instead of delving into a career path, instead of focusing on math and living her father's neglectful half-life, she chooses another route, one more social, and lives a fuller life. And then she dies.

{As a quick aside, I would like to mention that the flashbacks were handled well, spaced out just enough that they did not break the pacing and cause me needless frustration. I wish more books would handle them the same.}

Keith's cheating wife, Barb cleans him out and runs away to Atlanta while he is trapped up on the International Space Station with his migraines and grief. For the majority of the book, she is little more than a shrill voice on the other end of the phone, but she does appear in flashbacks, where she tends to be spiteful and antagonistic. She is not a well-developed character, even if there are people like this in the world. You want to hate her and it is easy, quite easy to do. On the other end of the spectrum is Peter, Ukrainian immigrant and neighbor, who Keith initially despises. You know Peter. He is loud, cheerful all the time, and pretty much the worst person to run into when you are not in the mood. Through chance and boredom, Keith gets to know his neighbor, befriends him, and we get to know the real Peter. The sad man who sets up a telescope at the end of a cul-de-sac and thinks about the life he left behind, about having gone from working as an assistant to astronomers to a stocker at Target. It reminded me of an episode of The Big Bang Theory, where a janitor solves a complex equation no one else could guess and says something to the tune of, "Here, I am janitor; in Russia, I am physicist." He is better characterized than the other characters mentioned and far better than those I don't. Luda, his wife, is probably the only adult female character that does not come across as mean and petty, but not much time is spent with her. I would discuss Jennifer, the neighbor and participant of "torrid" affair, but again, mean and petty. The whole characterization of women thing needs work.

{First the book reminds me of Cormac McCarthy and now The Big Bang Theory. By now the author is either cheering or crying.}

After a certain point in the book, toward the end, after Keith has taken hit after hit, that I very much wanted to refer to Christian Kiefer as a cruel, cruel bastard. I saw a review describe Keith as mechanical and hard to relate to, so much so that the reviewer failed to sympathize with the character at all. This boggles my mind. Keith is mechanical and hard to relate to. He is not quick on the draw when it comes to empathy and his social interactions are often short, focused and given to dropping quickly off when the subject changes. Because of this, because he is such a hard case to crack, his opening up to others and finally experiencing emotion connected to the loss of his daughter and divorce becomes all the more poignant. And it takes a lot to crack that case, one hit after another, enough to crumple most. Curiosity sated. Kiefer has pulled it off.

The Infinite Tides is a wonderful book. I am glad the author told me to quit reading and glad that I was stubborn enough to ignore him. It is well worth reading and I suggest you do so.

Now Reading | The Infinite Tides, Christian Kiefer

2012-05-24T17:39:00.001-05:00

There were forests somewhere according to the news, but they were all aflame.

The Infinite Tides has been cause for an interesting experience. After having read the first few chapters the other night, I jumped over on twitter to run my mouth. This is what I had to say:

Quick summary of my thoughts so far about The Infinite Tides by Christian Kiefer: What does this author have against commas?

And:

It reminds of Cormac McCarthy's writing in The Road. And and and and and and and and and. Annoyed me then. Annoys me now.

I imagine being compared to Cormac McCarthy is something any author would celebrate, but it is not a compliment from me. It took no time at all for me to drop The Road and not bother looking back. The prevalence of 'and' reminded me of a young, excited child trying their best to tell a story. In this case, having The Infinite Tides remind me of this negative reading experience was less than flattering. I did not expect the author's response.

Now, the response I am used to getting for any negative or vaguely negative statement about a book I might make is silence. Most authors don't say a damn thing. Others, if they decide to reply, tend to go with encouraging me to continue reading the book. I never had an author tell me to quit. Not until Christian Kiefer stumbled across my tweets:

Probably better quit now. It only gets worse. :-)

This reply, more than any other I might have received, ensured that I would keep reading. The writing may have annoyed me in the beginning, but I won't give up that easily. Further, what followed after this was a short but interesting conversation involving DeLillo, McCarthy, and Faulkner and the inspiration behind the style of writing in The Infinite Tides.

That writing style has grown on me since, to the point that I rarely notice it and am no longer bothered when I do. It is a good book, quite a good book, but I still have a ways to go before the end. I suppose Kiefer could drop the ball before then, but for whatever reason, I doubt it.

Sorry Please Thank You: Stories, Charles Yu

2012-05-18T02:41:00.004-05:00

["]The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.

A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date . . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero? . . . A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: “Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you.”

Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in this new collection we have resounding proof that he has arrived (via a wormhole in space-time) as a major new voice in American fiction.["]

It's strange, the books that fly under the radar. I read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe a couple years ago and, despite feeling that it was a bit beyond me, enjoyed it. If I remember correctly, the book was well received elsewhere in the community, too. Sorry Please Thank You: Stories is set to hit shelves and e-readers come late July and yet I saw nothing about it before Amazon threw it on one of their "Hey, here's some random shit we'd like you to review." lists. Granted, this might be my fault. There are some--several--blogs I don't subscribe to that tend to be more on the ball than others. Or, it could just be that it is a short fiction collection and no one gives a shit.

In any case, my copy should be arriving sometime next week and though I don't get on with short fiction as well as I'd like, I plan on reading it through.

Review | Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway

2012-05-17T22:09:00.003-05:00

["]Joe Spork spends his days fixing antique clocks. The son of infamous London criminal Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, he has turned his back on his family’s mobster history and aims to live a quiet life. That orderly existence is suddenly upended when Joe activates a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism. His client, Edie Banister, is more than the kindly old lady she appears to be—she’s a retired international secret agent. And the device? It’s a 1950s doomsday machine. Having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the British government and a diabolical South Asian dictator who is also Edie’s old arch-nemesis. On the upside, Joe’s got a girl: a bold receptionist named Polly whose smarts, savvy and sex appeal may be just what he needs. With Joe’s once-quiet world suddenly overrun by mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago and pick up his father’s old gun...["]

By now, we have established that I am very much a fan of Harkaway's debut novel, The Gone-Away World, so I feel that we can go ahead and avoid rehashing the subject for this review. Also, because I feel that Angelmaker should stand on its own, I am going to try and avoid comparisons between the two novels. If that is what you are looking for, then I suggest checking out my previous postings, as I have done quite enough of it. With that, let's move on to the review.

Remember Graham Joyce's The Silent Land? Last year, it was the book I anticipated more than any other. I wanted it. I had high expectations. Then I read it and all of that came crumbling down around me. The book failed to live up to those expectations and my reaction was decidedly negative. People, myself included, tend to go on and on about hype and how damaging it can be to a reading experience because it inspires high expectations, but anticipation is rarely brought into focus. Perhaps because hype can be blamed on others, but anticipation falls directly on the reader--face it, we don't like to be wrong. More often than not, those high expectations don't work out in our favor and we are left with something either mediocre or just plain bad. Then there are those other books, the rare sort that come along every so often and not only meet our expectations, but shatter them. Angelmaker is one of those books.

In the first chapter, we are introduced to Joe Spork and the cat he has gone to war with. This is relatively sane. In fact, this is about as sane as this book gets. It is downhill crazy from here on out. The book is, for a lack of better explanation, distinctly Harkaway. There is something about his voice, his prose, the style of his writing that gives him away. Angelmaker and Edie Investigates have nearly the same narrative voice as The Gone-Away World and if you read his blog, you can see elements of it there. Perhaps if I were less of a fan, I would take this for a negative. After all, two books with separate narrators and perspectives that sound so alike should probably trigger the notion that the writer is not developing as best he could. However, I find that I enjoy the rambling, digression-packed narratives that seem more akin to oral storytelling than written. Plus, there's the meta connection between The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker to consider, which could explain the similarities.

The characterization among the primary characters and even a smattering of the secondary is well done. Spork's entire story is one of growth and transformation and we get a good deal of exploration into his past to show us how he came to be a cat-battling horologist. Edie, our second point of view character, is almost entirely exploration of the past--of her extraordinary life and the lost love that have left her a lonely nonagenarian with an ugly dog, a great deal of spite, and the knowledge that the end is not far off. Though her life is summarized throughout the novel, I find myself wanting to read more of her early years. Especially if there are more Women of Consequence to be found within them. Some characterization could be better. Our villain, Shem Shem Tsien is murderous psychopath with a flair for the dramatic. And he's Asian. Not the most original super-villain and perhaps a throwback to pulps, but still problematic because even when we do get to know the character better and learn of his motivations, there is no depth to it. He is just insane. In a similar fashion, there is Polly Cradle. While I do like the character, she seems to have been assigned the role of designated love interest. She makes strides toward becoming a realized character, but the relationship feels shoe-horned and sudden and the character never really rises above that.

Now, The Gone-Away World was something of a mess. The majority of the narrative was an extended flashback, the digressions and asides were many and lengthy, and though I loved every minute of it, even I could see that it would probably have benefited from some stricter editing. It was a lovable mess, but one nonetheless. Angelmaker is a more polished book. The plotting is tighter, the asides and digressions reigned in somewhat to avoid straying too far away from the matters at hand. The flashbacks are present, of course, but are more compact and slotted into the point of view chapters as needed instead of leaving people to dangle for hundreds of pages while some terrible thing threatens to destroy the world. There is no doubt in my mind that Angelmaker is the better written of the two and shows clear growth as a writer.

Granted, I wouldn't say that it is the better of the two books because that would be silly and not worth comparing. Angelmaker is a fantastic read in its own right and definitely one of the better books that I have read this year. In fact, I have already read it twice this year and came away happy and positive both times. It met my high expectations and then took a hammer to them. All I can say at this point is I hope Harkaway keeps up the good work.

Reading Now | Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway

2012-05-15T20:02:00.001-05:00

There are some people, strange people, who do not reread books. I can understand the appeal of allowing the memories of mediocre titles fade into vague, unpleasant memories while their book counterparts rot away somewhere out of sight, but rereading a good book, one that I have enjoyed before, is a source of joy and better understanding of the text. Why would I want to throw that away?

The Gone-Away World is one of my favorite books. I have read it three or four times now, which basically amounts to having read it at least once a year since stumbling across it in late '09. It was a couple months after finishing it that I reread it for the first time. In that, it compares to Angelmaker.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an ARC copy of the book this past February and wasted no time in devouring it with little regard to such things as attention to detail or critical thinking. I came away from the book thoroughly entertained, but my attempted reviews were shit because I absorbed so little of the text. The review would have to wait until I read it a second time, whenever that might be.

Which is now. Obviously. A two month wait, which makes for a new record.

As I near the halfway mark of the book, it is disturbing to see just how much of the text that I have forgotten. Angelmaker is a good book, a very good book that defies the negative reputation that's come to be associated with second books and removes Harkaway from the list of potential one hit wonders.

The narrative wandered about in The Gone-Away World, leaving the reader to either get used to it or move on to some other book. Here, Harkaway feels more in control. The narrative is tighter and presented in a more traditional fashion, eschewing the first-person extended flashback of The Gone-Away World in favor of shorter flashbacks, a third person perspective, and multiple points of view. It is no different than what you might find in any number of genre novels and helps to make the book accessible to a wider audience. The digressions and asides, beloved though they were in Angelmaker's predecessor, tend to be shorter and rarely stray too far from the matter at hand. The meandering sort that goes running wild away from the plot is a rare thing, alas. The humor is there, of course, but it might just be a little saner this time around.

I will have a proper review when I finish.

Adding to the Stack

2012-05-15T18:00:00.001-05:00

["]Keith Corcoran has spent his entire life preparing to be an astronaut. At the moment of his greatness, finally aboard the International Space Station, hundreds of miles above the earth’s swirling blue surface, he receives word that his sixteen-year-old daughter has died in a car accident, and that his wife has left him. Returning to earth, and to his now empty suburban home, he is alone with the ghosts, the memories and feelings he can barely acknowledge, let alone process. He is a mathematical genius, a brilliant engineer, a famous astronaut, but nothing in his life has readied him for this.

With its endless interlocking culs-de-sac, big box stores, and vast parking lots, contemporary suburbia is not a promising place to recover from such trauma. But healing begins through new relationships, never Keith’s strength, first as a torrid affair with one neighbor, and then as an unlikely friendship with another, a Ukrainian immigrant who every evening lugs his battered telescope to the weed-choked vacant lot at the end of the street. Gazing up at the heavens together, drinking beer and smoking pot, the two men share their vastly different experiences and slowly reveal themselves to each other, until Keith can begin to confront his loss and begin to forgive himself for decades of only half-living.

The Infinite Tides is a deeply moving, tragicomic, and ultimately redemptive story of love, loss, and resilience. It is also an indelible and nuanced portrait of modern American life that renders both our strengths and weaknesses with great and tender beauty.["]

The Infinite Tides was pretty much the only book from Amazon's monthly Vine newsletter that stood out as potentially interesting. The sample offered up on Amazon did not blow me away, what with the conflict between decent prose and muddled dialogue, but there was potential there. It is not genre fare, obviously, and won't appeal to the majority of my audience, but I am looking forward to reading further.

Did Not Finish | Talulla Rising, Glen Duncan

2012-05-12T03:32:00.002-05:00

Of course it was depressing--and responsible for making the question every twenty-first century female was sooner or later faced with: Will you put in your mouth something that's just been in your ass?

I may not have enjoyed it as much as some--okay, most--but The Last Werewolf was a solid read. The werewolf bits of the book were raw and dirty and pretty much established a standard to which I will hold future narratives to. The book works well as a standalone and, having started Talulla Rising, probably should have been.

Talulla Rising reads very much like The Last Werewolf, which could briefly be considered a good thing until one realizes both books are written in the first person perspective and feature two very different characters. The first book's narrator is Jake. He's somewhere around two hundred years old, tired of life, and has a thing for hookers and anal. The new book's narrator is Talulla. She's probably somewhere close to her thirties, pregnant, grieving everything, and though she doesn't have a thing for anal, mentions it a lot. So very different, these two... and yet they still sound the same. Now that I think of it, the sample I read of I, Lucifer is similar. I think anal may be mentioned in the first few pages of that book, too.

I've come to the conclusion that the point of view characters Glen Duncan can write are variations on himself. And that is just fine when you are reading a book with a male lead. It is quite different when you are reading a book that is supposed to have been written from a female perspective. Reading Talulla Rising, I got the feeling that Talulla was just Glen Duncan in drag. The quote above is a decent representation of what the rest of the narrative leading up to it was like and was the last straw for me.

Through the first fifty pages (e-book reckoning) of the book, Talulla is almost solely defined by two things: sex and sentimentality. The opening pages quickly establish that she was a "Dirty Filthy Girl" when she was young and more adjectives are added to that as we move along. Meanwhile, she grieves over Jake (natural, I suppose, despite only knowing him for a very short while) and her mother (dead for several years--one could assume that it is included in the narrative because Talulla is nearing motherhood, but it is never presented that way) and, if the spiral is given to continuing, probably any number of lost friends and family members (actually, she laments having lost touch with her best friend from school). It moves back and forth between sex and grief and there is so little middle ground that the narrative just sort of stalls with flashbacks and digressive thoughts. One is left to ponder whether Duncan needed pad the word count some.

As I read on, I grew increasingly frustrated with the character and, though I only realized it as I typed this, the writing. Fifty pages, probably a bit less. I am content with pretending The Last Werewolf was a standalone and am happier for it. I will not recommend reading it, not even for fans of the first book, but good luck to those who read it anyway.

Cover Art - Gun Machine, Warren Ellis

2012-05-07T15:56:00.003-05:00

It's due in January. Can't wait.

Am I Still A Reviewer?

2012-05-01T16:37:00.002-05:00

I posted this on my Tumblr account earlier, but feel as though it should probably go here, as well:

Late last night… or early this morning, depending on your perspective, I sat up trying my best to write a review for Infidel by Kameron Hurley. I spent a couple hours on it, but never made it past the first paragraph. To be honest, I never really made it past the first couple lines. Had I done so, I am uncertain whether I could have produced enough content for a full review.

At some point in the middle of my attempt to write the review, I went searching for the last one I’d written. If we leave out the two or three short commentaries, the last review I wrote was back in early December.

This was a ‘holy shit’ moment. I wasn’t aware just how long it had been since I last wrote a review. It had been a while, I know, but give it another week and it will have been five months since my last review. Five months! In terms of reading, the first four of those months were utter shit. There were two books that I enjoyed, but I’d reviewed one back in 2010 and I couldn’t bring myself to review the other without reading it through a second time. I finished twelve books over those five months—five of them in April—and started a great many that were pushed to the side and left to rot. Even so, not having pushed out a review in that period of time is ridiculous.

Thing is, I have tried to sit down and write reviews during that time. None of them have progressed much further than my attempt at reviewing Infidel. Used to be, I had a review half-written in my head by the time I neared the end of a book, but that seems to have gone out the window. These days, I find myself thinking about and focusing on other qualities while I read, which is why so much of my commentary recently seems to be about the treatment of female characters. And really, that’s one of the many areas I’m not qualified to speak of at any length.

Am I still a reviewer? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. Maybe that’s why I find my other blog [note: this one] so depressing.

Upcoming Titles That Interest Me

2012-04-14T03:00:00.004-05:00

Looking ahead to this year from the last, I saw little that interested me. Everyone was putting out lists of anticipated releases, but I could only name a couple books that caught my attention. Tonight, while looking through the upcoming releases for the Nook, I noticed several titles that I'd like to get my hands on.

Aurororama is already out, has been for some time, but it is finally available for e-book. I would suggest buying it from the publisher, as it is much cheaper from them than from, say, B&N. The art here, worth mentioning because I feel like it, is from the upcoming paperback release. Luminous Chaos is from the same author and the combination of awesome title and attractive cover art is hard to pass up, especially when it sounds like it'll be a great read. Also released is Brian Evenson's Immobility. This one sounds interesting and my previous experience with this work, the Last Days duology released by Underland Press a few years back, was positive. Zafon is one of my favorite authors, so I will have Prisoner of Heaven in hardback upon release. Probably from the UK, if it is released there first.

I'm a fan of Steven Erikson's Malazan series and have been wanting to read some of his non-fantasy work for some time now. The Devil Delivered will give me a chance to do that, but I do hope that it lives up to my hopes as some of his shorter Malazan work has not left warm and fuzzy feelings. This Book Is Full of Spiders is the follow up to John Dies at the End and should provide all my juvenile humor needs for the next few years. Corey's Leviathan Wakes seems to be getting some grief from some of my trusted reviewers, but I thought it was a lot of fun and am looking forward to Caliban's War. Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf was fairly decent and raised the bar for what I expect from my werewolf novels, but the ending left me cold. Nevertheless, I will continue with Talulla Rising when it comes out later this year... all I have to do is try and suppress a shudder whenever I read the character's name. Finally, there is The Blinding Knife. If there was one major surprise last year, it was how much I enjoyed Weeks' The Black Prism. It was not a great book, no, and I would hesitate to even refer to it as good, but it was readable and the horribly flawed characters, intended or not, were refreshing. I'm hoping all of them remain murderous assholes in the next book.

Recent Reads

2012-04-03T17:17:00.001-05:00

I may be in some sort of funk. It is getting harder to write reviews and harder still to finish books. A lack of time and desire means this blog gets ignored in favor of... anything, really. The time I spend surfing around the SFF community has dropped like a rock. Perhaps because there are only so many times you can read repeated discussions and topics before it all starts to get a bit dull. I have been reading though and, when needed, used my Tumblr account that nobody likely knows about. I wrote about two of my recent reads there, Red Shift and The Big Sleep.

Try as I might, I was unable to sit down and write a review for Red Shift. Several attempts were made, but they all crumbled before I was even out of the first paragraph. It is a difficult book to discuss and the format, the small islands of narration within a vast sea of dialogue, has everything to do with it. It is not enough to say that the book manages to convey depth and complexity despite this format, which I have only ever seen in comedic books that never rise above simplistic and lazy, or that the opening is strange and confusing. No, I find myself wanting typing out large swathes of text to quote because it is something that you, the reader, have to experience for yourself. There is so much skill and talent to be found in Red Shift that it left me feeling excited and amazed... and angry that I had not heard of Garner before now.

There were several things that bothered me about this book. The sexism, homophobia, and racism was a major issue that managed to knock me out of the story more times than I bothered to count. A product of the book's times? Sure. It is not, however, something that should be ignored or excused in these modern times. Even now, I wonder if looking to Chandler for inspiration might instill those same bad habits--especially given the anti-PC attitude I have seen often both in life and around the internet. The other issue I had with the book was a matter of pacing. Halfway through the book, everything that matters is settled and it is looking like a good time to wrap things up and call it a day. There's still half a book left though because there's a mystery to be solved, even though no one is paying for it and few people seem happy about our detective's snooping. Least of all me.

Speaking of books that could have ended early, I was reading Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin. Was. After 173 pages (Nook-reckoning) and fifty-seven chapters, I could not push myself any further. It was not a bad book by any means and I enjoyed reading it, but as the book continued and fell into one lull after another, my interest began to wane. Forward progression was a matter of characters waiting, doing nothing of import, as time slips by. I would love to see the book through to the end, to find out what happens, but I just can't take it anymore.

Joey Comeau is at least half responsible for the excellent webcomic, A Softer World. If the praise was anything to go by, One Bloody Thing After Another promised to be a comedic, if disturbing horror novel. Unless the parts of my brain that register humor and fear are broken, the book is neither. That is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, as the book is a decent read and, if not horrifying, definitely strange. Everything is not rainbows and sunshine though. I did not like the main character, Jackie, because she is the sort of wild, crazy character that instantly turns me off. It is like watching a romantic comedy from the perspective and mind of the cliched Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Actually, looking at it in that light makes the character less grating and more interesting. The horror aspects of the novel were rushed, developing mostly off-screen without detail or explanation and derailing any poignancy that might have been gained by its outcome. In fact, the entire book felt rushed. For all of the interesting bits and weirdness, some lingering and detail would have done wonders.

Adding to the... Nook

2012-03-15T20:54:00.001-05:00

It is unfair and inaccurate to refer to these posts by the old title. The stack is tiny, able to fit into a small cabinet with more than enough room left over. If the rest of the books waiting to be read weren't digital, that cabinet would be overflowing with piles on the floor, fighting their way toward the ceiling. I like that sort of thing. That is what I want to see when I walk into a room... books everywhere. Instead I have a sleek black case, my e-reader tucked inside, that takes up no room at all and is easy to miss. What can I say? Great deals and convenience are a great draw.

---

The Twitter antics of @mkincaidspeller, @ActuallyAisha, and @redrichie led me to discover author Alan Garner and then realize that the name should have been on my list long before now if the concept of a new novel stirs such excitement in these three. There is also the matter of Philip Pullman's commentary, which reads:

["]Alan Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful. His work is where human emotion and mythic resonance, sexuality and geology, modernity and memory and craftsmanship meet and cross-fertilise. Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street-names. But that’s the way with us: our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires. I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration.["]

In a time when being compared to Tolkien seems to be step one in marketing an author, this makes me pause. It is not often that an author is described as important or even better than Tolkien--outside of squee-ing fandoms, that is. Three people I trust are excited that there is another book on the way and a respected author is singing his praise with a tinge of lament over the author's lack of popularity. That's more than enough to pique my interest without stumbling over M. John Harrison's glowing review of another of Garner's work.

Not a dull cover at all...

Red Shift is the only novel you are going to get your hands on if you prefer e-book format, but you can also pick up Collected Folk Tales in e-book if you have a hankering for short fiction. The rest? You can get physical copies from Amazon, but going for the snail's pace delivery from The Book Depository will net you some lower prices.

I look forward to reading the book and hope to get to it soon.

By the way, it always helps to shop around when it comes to e-books. I managed to buy Red Shift from Kobo for around six dollars after applying a 35% off coupon. Half amazing, really, considering using coupons on that site is about as painful as sitting through yet another Bakker rant and not nearly as amusing.

I picked up Death and the Penguin in the same manner, paying about a dollar more because of its higher price tag.

I prefer the other cover's penguin. :(

I had intended to buy something from my Challenge Me! list, but a black comedy involving a penguin was too tempting to pass up. Sounds interesting and fits in with my goal to read more translated fiction. Given my recent foray into crime fiction, this should fit right in. Granted, I have to hope that it is not as sexist and homophobic as Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, my current read.

What I have read so far--something along the lines of forty-three pages without taking into account page number stupidity--is what I have come to expect from Michael Cisco. The prose is astounding, the narrative is tricky, and the story is weird. Believe me, if I could come up with a strong enough adjective to get the point across, it would precede "weird" in that sentence. According to people with more experience than myself in reading Cisco's work, The Great Lover is supposed to be his best work yet. I'm not going to argue.

Despite my overall distaste for traditional and epic fantasy, this one seems promising. It is also free, so...

---

With that out of the way, I should probably answer a question none of you have asked:

Where are the reviews?

A good question. Sadly, the answer is that I have not been able to finish a book in some time. The two that I have finished this year, Jenny Boully's [one love affair]* and Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker. The former is something that I am not comfortable reviewing or even writing about, as it is so far outside my typical scope that I have no idea how to write about it. The latter I sped through so quickly that I do not feel as though I received a firm enough feel for the events of the novel--grand fun and all that, but I want to wait until I reread it (soon enough) before I write a review. I have been focusing more on getting through books though, so we should see me finish Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep over the next couple days. A review will have to wait for my next day off though and that's sometime toward the end of next week.

Early Thoughts

2012-03-06T23:35:00.000-06:00

The Black Opera looked to be one of the few interesting books available from Netgalley and its first few pages was evidence enough that I was right. There was a storm-wracked ship struggling its way to an island in the grips of a massive volcanic eruption. Malicious threat held a child captive, forced a mother's voice, and thrust the ship headlong toward its doom. The writing was good, enough to capture my attention, and I was intrigued. And then the prologue ended and everything came crashing down.

I am five chapters into the book and find it difficult to continue reading because of a certain issue that just about everyone has encountered thanks to the internet. The premise of the book is that miracles can be borne through song. This is very interesting, it is what drew me to the book, but it quickly becomes problematic. As the synopsis points out, the whole process of bringing miracles about is deeply rooted in religion. This is all well and good until it is revealed that the main character of the book is an atheist. If you know what happens when you bring an atheist and the devout together for nice little discussions, feel free to groan. After four chapters of back and forth discussion and argument revolving around faith, atheism, and science, I remembered that there were other books I could try and left off on chapter five. There is a chance that I will continue reading it, but if it continues down the same route there will be a permanent end.

I admit upfront that I had no desire to read Scourge of the Betrayer. The synopsis had a Same Shit Different Title ring to it that had me yawning. It fell into my possession through an accidental bait and switch. Netgalley said I was downloading The Croning by Laird Barron, but instead of cosmic horror I got the latest gritty fantasy novel featuring ridiculous names. A shame, but whatever... fate deals its hand. Since I have the book, I may as well read it. Right?

I like to imagine some of you just shouted, "No!"

And you would be right to do so, because me reading something that falls outside the realm of "things I enjoy" is more likely to lead to another negative review than a gushing pronouncement of love. Traditional and epic fantasy, especially the sort that proclaims itself gritty and tries really hard to be so, has fallen out of favor for me over the past couple years, but that does not guarantee automatic hate. There is always a chance that I will like what I read. The chance is minimal and decreases with every surname created by smashing two words together, but still. It helps that I am a masochist.

Scourge of the Betrayer has not wowed me with its prose, but it is safe to assume that this isn't that kind of book. The writing is inoffensive for the most part, leaving a bad taste in my mouth only occasionally and mostly whenever someone is introduced. Remember the two-word surnames? Yeah, that sucks. Please, authors, stop doing this shit. Leave it for Forgotten Realms dwarves. Referring to Captain Killcoin's "dark hair" as "slicked back like wet otter fur" in the first paragraph caused a facepalm (possibly a character to be introduced later) for redundant description.

Then there's the whole dissonance between book and synopsis thing that I find hilarious. The Syldoon, described in the synopsis as (possibly) eating "virgins and babies-or perhaps their own mothers", come across as slightly grumpy teddy bears. Granted, I am only about twenty-five pages in and that could change. Considering it is latest gritty fantasy novel to hit the market, it probably will. Here's hoping the book doesn't rely on rape to get that point across. Which means that, yes, I will continue reading it.

The Gone-Away World has been one of my favorite books since I read it the first time a few years back, but Nick Harkaway has been excluded from the favorite authors list because his eventual second book could prove the first little more than a fluke. Angelmaker arrived in my mailbox about a month ago and was devoured so quick that I feel unable to review it without a second read through. What I can say is that it proved the first book wasn't a fluke, that Nick Harkaway has some serious writing chops, and that he definitely deserves a spot among my favorite authors.

Edie Investigates is a shorter work, available now in the US and UK for $1.99, which means you should probably go out and download it from your preferred e-book retailer if you haven't already given Harkaway a read. The story is connected to Angelmaker via Edie Bannister, octogenarian and former super spy, who uses her age as an advantage and has a habit of blowing shit up. She is awesome.

Despite the fact that this is a piece of short fiction, I have not yet finished reading it. I only downloaded it last night and karaoke at the bar does not make for a distraction free reading space. Nevertheless, I was able to read about half of it. What can I say from reading that much? Nick Harkaway should write more short fiction. I would buy it up for a $1.99 a pop and pick up the eventual collection, too. His writing manages to contain the same spirit in short form as it does in his novels. I am in love and unless this story falters in the last pages, I don't see that changing. Read this. Read everything from Nick Harkaway. I promise a review of this and Angelmaker over the next month or so.

Not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them by Jenny Boully has a wonderful title and wonderful prose, but stands as an obstacle to tackle. My introduction to Boully's work, [one love affair]*, left me wondering how I could even begin to write about the experience, but it was a vastly simpler presentation in comparison.

The book presents two passages per page, the text and subtext, which seems unrelated. Figuring how to read these together without interrupting the flow of text's narrative means a staggered switch between the two. Reading a couple pages of text and then backtracking to read the subtext became standard procedure. Still, very little of what I read managed to stick with me. I found myself forgetting what I read a few paragraphs back and anything more than a page gone drew a blank. Add in my general ignorance toward anything outside of Disney's presentation of Peter Pan (admittedly, even that is fuzzy) and you have a slow, steady march into confusion. On the bright side, the sights are fucking amazing.

E-Book Horror

2012-03-02T01:50:00.002-06:00

I spend quite a bit of time browsing through page after page of e-books, wading through heaps of self-published crap in an attempt to find something interesting... and cheap, for that matter. A lot of what I stumble across during these searches is harmless. Terrible, sure, but harmless. And then, there are the other books... the ones that make you flinch in horror and utter something along the lines of, "Oh God, no!" Here's tonight's selection:

OverviewBook 1 of The Monster Sex Series

If you go into the woods today…

On a weeklong outing in Mt. Hood National Forest, what begins as a flirty, fun filled trip soon turns into a nightmare, when an ape-like creature kidnaps a group of teen girls with the purpose of procreating with them.

This story contains oral sex, fingering, penetration with a large object, and ménage à trois. All characters are eighteen and above. Adult 18+

If you are into this sort of thing, here's the link.

Opening Paragraphs

2012-02-29T01:59:00.001-06:00

Shamelessly stolen from Larry, I must admit. These sorts of posts are fun and his have led me to pick up books that I would have otherwise never heard of. Since I am stuck on a couple of reviews, I figured this would do nicely for some filler. Taken from books that I am reading now, have read recently, and have lined up for the near future. Quality is not assured.

Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench's heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn't find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr Tench went across the plaza.

---

If she lays out two spoons (two real spoons) and two forks (two real forks), will her come then to take part in a meal that is wholly imaginary? The food was never real, the food was never really real and so to send them to bed without, to send them to bed without a meal, hardly meant anything.

---

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was near, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

---

At seven fifteen a.m., his bedroom slightly colder than the vacuum of space, Joshua Joseph Spork wears a longish leather coat and a pair of his father's golfing socks. Papa Spork was not a natural golfer. Among other differences, natural golfers do no acquire their socks by hijacking a lorryload destined for St Andrews. It isn't done. Golf is religion of patience. Socks come and socks go, and thew wise golfer waits, sees the pair he wants, and buys it without fuss. The notion that he might put a Thompson sub-machine gun in the face of the burly Glaswegian driver, and tell him to quit the cab or adorn it... well. A man who does that is never going to get his handicap down below the teens.

---

Norma ran. Picked up her skirts and ran as she had never run in her life. ran as though the hounds of hell were at at her heels.

---

My new patron clambered down the wagon, dark hair slicked back like wet otter fur, eyes roaming the stable yard in a measured sweep. He fixed on me briefly before continuing his survey, and it occurred to me, just as it had a hundred times since accepting the commission, that this would be unlike any other job I'd done.

---

The water rose up in a wall like the end of the world. The ship's prow dropped down--down--so far down it seemed impossible it could ever lift again--

---

As the man stepped out of the shadows, Wyatt Deminthal knew this would be the worst, and possibly the last, day of his life. Dressed in raw wool and rough leather, the man was vaguely familiar, a face seen briefly by candlelight over two years earlier, a face Wyatt had hoped he would never see again. The man carried three swords, each one battered and dull, the grips sweat-stained and frayed. Taller than Wyatt by nearly a foot, with broader shoulders and powerful hands, he stood with his weight distributed across the balls of his feet. He locked his eyes on Wyatt the way cats stare at mice.

---

Sunrise loomed across the horizon, pale as jasmine and mostly obscured by dark, feral clouds. The early morning air held and unusual chill and Adrina gathered her light shawl more closely as she stepped out onto the catwalk atop the wall. A stout breeze blew long strands of hair across her face. The hair, black as the receding night, flowed to her waist and while it was normally braided and folded over her left shoulder, it wasn't now.

Commentary - The River

2012-02-29T00:57:00.001-06:00

Famed explorer Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) went looking for "magic" deep in the uncharted Amazon basin and never returned. The shocking truth about his disappearance is out there, somewhere, just waiting to be discovered. To the millions of kids who grew up watching his nature show, Dr. Cole was a hero. To his own son, Lincoln (Joe Anderson), he was more of an enigma. Now, six months after he vanished, Lincoln is finally ready to bury the past when Dr. Cole's emergency beacon suddenly goes off. At the urging of his mother, Tess (Leslie Hope), Lincoln reluctantly joins her on a search for his father. To fund the rescue, they agree to let Dr. Cole's cagey ex-producer, Clark (Paul Blackthorne), film the mission documentary-style. The mixed crew of old friends and new acquaintances includes the missing cameraman's daughter, Lena Landry (Eloise Mumford), Magus mechanic Emilio Valenzuela (Daniel Zacapa) and private security bodyguard Captain Kurt Brynildson (Thomas Kretschmann).

~ Blatantly stolen from Wikipedia, because I am lazy.

It's not often that a show comes along, out of nowhere, and knocks me flat on my ass. It is a rare, wonderful thing that lasts only as long as it takes to issue the cancellation order or until a dim light bulb turns on above someone's head, steering the show in some godawful direction. The good news is, The River cannot be counted among this sort of show. With a few minor tweaks, especially in terms of pacing and characterization, the quality of the show would improve significantly. The bad news is, even if those tweaks were made, people still wouldn't tune in.

For a show that has considerable genre appeal, there is little discussion going on in the community. The few reactions I have been able to turn up have been mixed, with some posters enjoying the show and wishing to continue and others bitching mightily about minor matters and declaring it a steaming pile of shit. What? Fine. Yes, that was a somewhat biased interpretation of their complaints, which are legitimate.

The first complaint, which I saw among a wide swathe of viewers--I was forced to venture outside the community to places where non-genre fans congregate and share their opinions--concerned the show's format. If you have seen any of the Paranormal Activity films, then you have experienced it before. The footage used for the show, which is presented to the viewer as an edited documentary-of-sorts, is obtained through static cams and film crew. The majority of the footage is obtained from the former, with the latter patched in during more action-focused moments and when the crew departs the ship.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this sort of presentation. The static cams are many, a step away from the Paranormal Activity comparison, and offer up a plethora of angles and shots that are both welcome and hard to stomach. One starts to wonder how the crew of the Magus doesn't succumb to paranoia knowing that no matter what they do, no matter where they are, there is a camera watching them all the time. Is there one in the bathroom? Wouldn't surprise me. Static cams also find a home around the camp sites of the crew when they are away from the boat, giving us a glimpse of the goings-on when the crew is asleep or away or just not looking in the right spot. These cameras, much like those in the aforementioned Paranormal Activity, offer up the creep factor by showing the world around the crew that they, for whatever reason, cannot see.

The film crew footage is often described as shaky cam by the complaining public and I can see where they are coming from, but disagree. I have complained about bouncing cameras in the past, especially in terms of big budget action movies that have absolutely no reason to use it, but it fits for this sort of show. These are people holding the cameras on their shoulders, running around trying to get the best shot they can. Shaking and bouncing is to be expected, as are the moments when one of the film crew falls or drops the camera while traversing rough terrain.

The format of the show is interesting and novel for a scripted television series, but even though it makes the show stand out from the crowd, it is also the very thing that will likely keep viewers from tuning into future episodes. The mixture of shaking cameras and static cams have established a home among the many ghost hunting programs that people seem to eat up and I imagine the show will gain a foothold among those fans, but for those used to normal camera work and normal narrative presentations, this may prove far too different and difficult to enjoy.

Characterization proved another issue, one that I agree with to an extent. The crew of the Magus is a handful of archetypal characters that we have seen before, many times before, and will no doubt see again once this show is done for. There is nothing about them that really stands out as unique or interesting, but they are not terrible characters or the sort that you hate right off the bat. Well, one of them is and it took me a couple viewings before I managed to catch his name. For the longest time he existed in my notes as simply "Sleazeball Creep"--the soulless producer type that only cares about how the footage will turn out. Somewhat problematic is Jahel, the teenage Mexican daughter of the ship's mechanic and only non-white female character on board, who seems to exist only to fulfill the role of walking encyclopedia of Amazonian lore and supernatural activity. As some have pointed out, this would make a little more sense if she were from the Amazon region or raised there. Her past is fleshed out some though, through off-hand mentions of her mother and interviews with her father about her as a child. Also in terms of characterization, the motivation that drives Tess, the wife of missing Emmet Cole, is finally revealed... shocking nobody.

The characters could be better and the development was slight, but expecting more from the first two episodes goes above and beyond what the show was capable of given the more pressing issue holding it back. The pacing... my god, the pacing.

The season, and quite possibly the series, is only eight episodes long and there is a considerable amount of story to be told within that frame. There is little time to linger on characterization when you are forcing the story ever forward. Similarly, there is little time to linger on setting up a conflict or resolving it in a satisfying manner. The first episode of the premiere was a great example of this, as it introduced a conflict, ignored it for a while to focus on the characters, and then brought it back just in time for a quick crew member kill and swift resolution that almost feels like Deus Ex Machina in comparison to the problems surrounding the same resolution attempted by Emmet Cole.

The poor pacing, the time spent lingering on certain moments and speeding through others, also combines with hack writing to feed the predictability of the show. The show falls back on trite horror movie methods to trap the crew aboard the stranded Magus despite them being in the Boiuna, an unmapped region on the Amazon riven through with myth and magic. Long, lingering shots from the static cams work to bring that established creep factor introduced through the aforementioned films, but it eats up time better spent elsewhere and one can guess what will happen in the time it takes for the camera to focus in and out and finally get to the point.

Despite the pacing and the lack of characterization found in the premiere episodes, The River is a strong debut. It has potential and if it manages to live up to even part of it, will end up one of the better network genre shows from recent years. If they manage to constrain the stories to fit the episodes and even out the pacing so that they don't have to rely on cheap predictability and if they start to fall back on the imagination the setting allows instead of the horror film background, it can be a great show. I have watched more than the first two episode and I do know they work on this, that they do manage to improve on what they established in the first two episodes. The characters, some of them at least, gain some depth and are seen in a new light because some effort has gone into characterization. The writing isn't bad. Far from it, considering network genre shows that I have watched over the last few years (The Cape, Heroes, even Chuck). This is a show that more people should be watching, that should be discussed around the SFF community, but it looks as though no one is watching it. A shame really.

I'll be watching it, that's for sure.

Reading, Watching, Buying

2012-02-18T22:56:00.001-06:00

The blog has been silent for a good bit, but that is what happens when you separate two six-day work weeks with three days of convention. I have some reviews to write and a television show to talk about, but it will be a few days before I have the time to put any effort into something like that.

My weekend was spent in crowded convention center with a bunch of geeks from a fandom I don't begin to understand: anime. There are a handful on anime series that I enjoy and one that I am very much a fan of, but that offers nothing more than a slim view of the medium and no insight into the mindset. I go to this convention because Mal is an anime geek and, I have to admit, it is not a bad way to spend a weekend. Last year, I was broke, confused, and rather annoyed at the slapdash shittiness of several of the panels.

This year, I had a goal. I wanted to discover manga, not anime, that I might enjoy. Given that the market for this sort of thing is largely aimed at the young, trying to find something that fits my taste was going to be problematic. The vendors were little help. "Do you like boobs and blood?" asked one helpful vendor. "No," I replied, only half-lying. I love boobs. I don't mind blood. Do I want my books to revolve around them? Fuck no. After learning this and apparently concluding that I was hopeless, the vendor decided his best route to take when dealing with someone with taste was to recommend his highest priced merchandise, most revolving around boobs and blood, and most anime. Is it any surprise that I ended up relying on the internet... or that I only managed to find one of the manga volumes I was looking for after comprising my list?

Bought and consumed:

Signed, too, even if Steven Blum is only in the anime.

It was only a matter of time. I waited until the convention to get my hands on a copy of the manga release of Durarara!! and picked it up from the first (and only, as it turns out) vendor that carried a copy. No way was I going to let this one get away. I read through it later that night, thoroughly enjoying it, and ended up carrying it around the convention the next two days. Not that I really wanted to, mind you, but I was being forced to go to Steve Blum's signings and figured I may as well have something relevant.

I was a bit iffy on whether or not to get this. There are several volumes in the series and I have neither the patience or the money to read it all the way through. It was, however, one of the few manga on my list to actually put in an appearance. I picked this up on the second day and, bored later that evening, ended up giving it a go. While the art leaves much to be desired and the set-up leading toward the main characters fall from grace was hugely over the top, I enjoyed the book and would like to read further. Unfortunately, the vendor I purchased this from had only a spotty collection of volumes of this title, which means no more Monster for me.

Bought and consuming:

Takahiro Omori (director) and Ryohgo Narita (writer, for both the anime series and light novels it was adapted from) are responsible for Durarara!! and considering how much I enjoy that series, it was only a matter of time before I delved into their previous series. I am only halfway through Baccano!, but it does not at all disappoint. The humor and craziness I know and love from Durarara!! is there and so are the serious turns. Baccano! goes one step further, in a different direction than its predecessor, by including moments of intense violence and bloodshed in those serious turns. There is nothing at all wrong with that either, as it only helps to deepen the contrast between the levity created by a handful of characters and the darker, deadly serious side of others.

An older recommendation from Larry that I stumbled across during a recent trip to Half Price Books. The recent uproar surrounding Tolkien's Nobel Prize rejection dragged Greene back into the light, as he was another of the authors on the list to be considered (a couple times, at least), but never win. My reading speed seems to have slowed this past month and, despite having read it for a few days now, am shy of hitting fifty pages in. The prose, which immediately drew my attention, seems to fluctuate between holding me captive and making me struggle to push through it. Since I am not too far in, I have fairly little to say about it. The story simply hasn't developed far enough for me to craft an opinion. However, I will say that there seems to be an inordinate amount of non-Mexicans inhabiting Mexico.

The first few pages of this left me wondering if I hadn't made some sort of mistake. Chandler describes architecture and random room decoration like George R.R. Martin describes feasts. I thought it would continue on, living up to its title by virtue of curing my occasional bouts of insomnia. And then, suddenly, the narrator's treatise on the style choices of the rich is cut short by the arrival of a living, breathing person, and Chandler shows that he can handle a turn of phrase better than most anyone I've read. It kicks off from there and though I have progressed only a few chapters, I can already tell this is going to be a damn good read.

Bought:

I have been meaning to read something by Le Carre for some time now and intend to make this one of my next reads. Could read it now, I suppose, but I have trouble reading two books at one time and three would be flat out impossible.