Quick September Book Reports

[leahbobet]

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)


So far this year...
#1 -- M. John Harrison, Nova Swing
#2 -- Barth Anderson, The Patron Saint of Plagues
#3 -- Stephen King, The Waste Lands
#4 -- Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
#5 -- Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
#6 -- Patricia McKillip, The Book of Atrix Wolfe
#7 -- Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
#8 -- Stephen King, Song of Susannah
#9 -- Julia Alvarez, !Yo!
#10 -- Stephen King, The Dark Tower
#11 -- Melissa Marr, Ink Exchange
#12 -- Paul Melko, Singularity's Ring
#13 -- Sarah Prineas, The Magic Thief
#14 -- Sarah Monette, The Bone Key
#15 -- Marie Brennan, Midnight Never Come
#16 -- Michelle West, The Broken Crown
#17 -- Nick Sagan, Edenborn
#18 -- Karl Schroeder, Permanence
Not-#19 -- Joel Shepherd, Crossover
#19 -- Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns
#20 -- Nick Sagan, Everfree
#21 -- Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam, Therefore, Repent!
#22 -- Barth Anderson, The Magician and the Fool
#23 -- Patricia McKillip, The Moon and the Face
#24 -- James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia
#25 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Murder of Angels
#26 -- Michael Swanwick, The Dragons of Babel
#27 -- China Mieville, Un Lun Dun
#28 -- Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
#29 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Silk
#30 -- Sandra McDonald, The Outback Stars
#31 -- Iain Banks, A Song of Stone
#32 -- Mike Carey, The Devil You Know
#33 -- Naomi Novik, Empire of Ivory
#34 -- Robert Charles Wilson, Bios
#35 -- Mike Carey, Vicious Circle
#36 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Passage
#37 -- Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy
(REREAD) -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
#38 -- Mike Carey, Dead Man's Boots
Not-#39 -- Jay Lake, Mainspring
(REREAD) -- Shannon Hale -- Princess Academy
#39 -- Sean Stewart, Galveston
#40 -- Sean Stewart, Passion Play
#41 -- Susan Beth Pfeffer -- Life As We Knew It
#42 -- Patricia Briggs -- Moon Called
#43 -- John Crowley -- The Solitudes
#44 -- Scott Bakker -- Neuropath
#45 -- Patricia Briggs -- Blood Bound
#46 -- Charles Stross -- Saturn's Children
#47 -- Patricia Briggs, Iron Kissed
#48 -- Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus
#49 -- Naomi Novik, Victory of Eagles
Not-#50 -- David Devereux, Hunter's Moon
#50 -- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
#51 -- Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
#52 -- John Crowley, Love and Sleep
#53 -- M.T. Anderson, Feed
(REREAD) -- Patricia McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn
#54 -- Susan Beth Pfeffer, The Dead and the Gone
#55 -- Sean Stewart, Nobody's Son
#56 -- Jeffrey Ford, The Memoranda
Not-#57 -- Holly Phillips, The Engine's Child
#57 -- Sean Stewart, Mockingbird
#58 -- Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man
#59 -- Ellen Klages, White Sands, Red Menace


In which I don't like anything! Rar!


#60 -- Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
#61 -- Robertson Davies, Leaven of Malice
#62 -- Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties

I have realized that, barring What's Bred in the Bone, the basic formula for a Robertson Davies novel is thus: a woman is unmarried. Clearly this Cannot Be. So a bunch of guys will sue for her hand, make asses of themselves in the process, and eventually an arbitrary decision will be reached which leaves all the humiliated bachelors still single and wary of the whole spousal thing, but the woman safely married off.

It really bothers people in a Robertson Davies novel when girls are single. Like, a lot.

Also, he'll talk about how backwards and sad and uncultural Canadians are in a chastising tone that implies we ought to go do better.

Here's the thing, though: reading this is like looking down a very long tube into an era that I'm not sure ever existed. They're set in say, the seventies or eighties, but really they're set around 1930, which appears to be when Davies came of age. What with all the hijinks and fussing and implied backtalk about how backwards these people are, it's really...it's not them. It's him. The only thing I can picture when reading these books is how he must have sat writing them, wondering how his world and country were slipping behind this way, but it wasn't the world and country, it was his. The people he talked to. His circle of acquaintance.

Because he got old.

And then I am inexpressibly sad.


#63 -- Ekaterina Sedia, Alchemy of Stone

I liked this. Enough. I wanted to love it -- and by all rights I should have, with the mixture of industrial-revolution-style setting and the thematic implications of having your protagonist be an emancipated automaton, still beholden to the creator who holds her winding key. And the revolution. And the culture war. Really, there's a lot going on in here, and I should have really really enjoyed it.

I didn't. All the ingredients are there, but they didn't really coalesce into cake for me: while the setting is based on a fascinating set of ideas, it's peculiarly ungrounded. The details aren't there in the prose to anchor it, make it real and vibrant and sensory. Likewise with Mattie and her rendering: the book seems torn between making her emotional life near-human -- she feels fear and pain and anxiety and affection (maybe) and so on -- and distancing the reader from her as an emotionally accessible protagonist. There's an argument to be made for her as an automaton and thus emotionally distant, but the effect isn't there: it's more the feeling of attention not having been paid than a genuine effort at creating someone inaccessible and alien.

Plotwise, a great deal is set up, but the payoff at the end isn't quite large enough to sustain that. Mattie achieves her purported goal (which becomes pretty much structurally immaterial not far into the book, which left me a little off-balance), and doesn't quite achieve her eventual one. And then it pretty much just stops.

There's this odd point about twenty pages from the end where the book seems to just give up, lose steam, and skip large swathes of time, skim higher over events and summarize rather than going in deep for impact. That was probably my largest issue: all the avenues that are constructed and then never explored, or skimmed over, or dismissed with a cursory explanation. This isn't quite line of direction issues, but something like that on a plotting scale. I'm not sure this book knew where it was going at first, or it was going a certain way and then ended on another road, and the beginning didn't get wrenched back true. The overall sense was of a fizzle, and then I was sad.

I did read it to the end though: the writing's nice, and the ideas, even if they're executed sometimes halfwise and move together imperfectly, are interesting ones. I'll pick up the next from this author, and see.


#64 -- Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle

If I was a less-nice person, I would chain Sean Stewart to a word processor a la Misery and make him write books for me forever. But we talked about that already.

And this is the thing with a Sean Stewart novel: they're all horribly broken. They're all broken in completely different ways. He manages to introduce a completely different terrible flaw into every book.

And it doesn't matter.

It's something about the voice, the way he sees and renders people that strikes utterly true. And something about the preoccupation with protagonists who are really, no kidding, genuine selfish fuckups. And have that brought to their attention as a way in which to grow.

(Although I will say so far that my bar none favourite Stewart character is Shielder's Mark from Nobody's Son. Because oh, he's hurting so bad under that chip on his shoulder, and the pain makes you forgive him.)

This is what all the other books I read this month were lacking. That utter, concrete sense that what happens here is true. And I need that to invest completely in a book: if you don't believe it's true how can I? and so forth. I need that to give myself into a book's hands.

Every book this man writes is true.

(I only have two left. I have to hoard them against emergency.)


Not-#65 -- Jeffrey Ford, The Shadow Year

And in a sense, this too is true, but I put this one down tonight mostly because of a disjunct of expectations.

I loved to bits Ford's Physiognomy and Memoranda, mostly because of the sheer unflinching disturbingness of them -- particularly the first. It's like reading China Mieville without the reliance on pus as a grossout device: when Ford wants to disturb you he goes for something genuinely disturbing. And I don't squick easy, let me tell you. I have the greatest respect for any book that can get to me in a way that's this smart.

However, The Shadow Year is more along the lines of one of those children-of-Dandelion Wine soft-edged fuzzed-up quasi-memoir novels about suburban childhood in the 1960s. And I am just not in the mood for that book right now. I also partially feel that once you've read that book once, you aren't going to miss much in the rest of the subgenre -- they're by nature a little self-limiting -- but that could be my own prejudices at work.

I think part of why I wandered is also the structure: it's episodic, with short chapter-stories building up into a general narrative. For me, this really diffuses tension, and I just can't get off the ground.

So that one's put down. And those are my September books more or less, and now I need to find something else to read before bed.

Comments

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

I really loved Davies' Deptford Trilogy. I haven't read anything else, although I've heard his short story collection spoken of very highly.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yes -- we do have the ghost stories one at the store, and I'm tempted to pick it up. Seeing as it'd be hard for him to put that many dangerously unmarried women in those. *g*

[phantom_wolfboy]

DAvies really only ever had one story, so he told it over and over again. Which would be a gigantic problem if he were a less talented writer.

Still, if you read his biography, the origin of each book really stands out.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- the Salterton books are very much Kingston, and they have that "I was a newspaper guy involved with theatre and music in my local area" thing going.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Which two Stewarts do you have left?

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Cloud's End and The Night Watch. Assuming I an score a copy of the latter off abebooks or somewhere.

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

Sean Stewart. Must remember. Got it.

And I need that to invest completely in a book: if you don't believe it's true how can I? and so forth. I need that to give myself into a book's hands.

You've described something which is really necessary for me, too. I've just been screwed over so many times by various media that now I'm a lot more wary than I used to be -- I'm slowly turning into a jaded reader, an aging barfly of a reader, and you need that truth to create a trust relationship. Good books -- good media of any sort -- should ideally create a "take me" feeling inside, like if the book blindfolded you and tied you up you'd be totally okay with it and forget to establish a safeword first.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Good books -- good media of any sort -- should ideally create a "take me" feeling inside, like if the book blindfolded you and tied you up you'd be totally okay with it and forget to establish a safeword first.

Heeeeeeeeeeeee.

Yes. Exactly.

But heeeeeeeeeeeeee!

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

We should call this Rule No. 7 of Good Fiction, or something. (Lust was considered the "seventh reason" behind Rome's fall. I think it's listed as such in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but even if it's not, we should still keep it as a rule.)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

*looks forward to the crit that goes 'this story has too much safeword'* :D

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

Oh believe me. I will find a way to use it. Speaking of (crit, not safewords) I posted little pieces of dialogue to a filter I added you to. So you can be the first to complain of too much safeword, if you like.