Books read, January and early February

[leahbobet]

I'm going to try to do this mrissa-style this year, in hopes that it'll keep me a little better about actually doing it. Because really, 12-odd posts in a year shouldn't be onerous.

#1 -- Margo Lanagan, Black Juice

Confession: I haven't really read short stories for pleasure in a really long time. I think years of slushreading have killed the urge in me a little, or at least put it to sleep. But I had heard a lot of good things about Margo Lanagan's stuff, and msagara put the book in my hand, and I figured if I didn't like them I could just stop.

I really liked this book.

It's in how she puts language together so each story has its own language; how the implications in the way those words are shaped show us the shadow-world just off the page, and how each of those words is a fully developed thing. And it's the Australianness: these remind me around the edges of Katherine Mansfield, who was a New Zealand writer, in the worldview. It's the quiet apocalyptic feel; the unpresumptuous apocalyptic feel.

So yes. I liked these a lot.

#2 -- Elizabeth Bear, The White City (in draft)

This is in draft and pre-publication, and so I shan't comment in detail. I will say that it made me want to go out and get some of those glass Russian teacups and blackcurrant jam.

#3 -- Mike Carey and Peter Gross, The Unwritten #1-5

Picked up after recommendations from two people whose taste on such things I trust.

This is pretty much writerporn. If you're involved in making or breaking or shaping stories, this is pure narrative kink direct to your brain. It starts off a little rough -- and maybe a little precious -- but things get interesting fast, and I get all the genre in-jokes, and there's good movement to the plot. I'm going to be picking this up in trades, I think, and it really does take a lot to make me buy comics. Not out of any feeling against them, just out of a knowledge that a comics habit is about as cheap as a heroin habit, and so I treat them both with the same caution.

#4 -- Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories

Dashiell Hammett is so awesome.

I admit I didn't make it through The Glass Key; too much New England politics and not enough detectiving and calling people you're tailing birds and hard-boiledness. But I loved the Continental Op stuff, and now I am sad that this man and his fabulous white Pinkerton hair and his tight, muscular, seriously expert prose are dead.

#5 -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

...this was a decidedly odd book.

It's my first Vonnegut (yes, I know; I have holes in my education) and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I can tell that he's doing some serious riffing off the same material that Eichmann in Jerusalem dealt with a couple years later. I'm honestly not sure here whether everything was really just on the surface of this one -- no subtext necessary, thankya -- or if I'm missing the subtext entirely. Because I'm halfway not sure what the point was, and I'm not sure if that's because I'm looking too hard or not hard enough at all.

#6 -- David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

I didn't expect all that much from this one, but ended up liking it. It's less a portrait of people than a portrait of a community, and what the segregation of Japanese-Americans in camps during WWII does to that community. Another one for the Examining the Effects of a World War Like Cracks in Plate Glass subgenre.

#7 -- Sheila Heti, Ticknor

On the other hand, sometimes when I really can't see the point or subtext, that's a bad thing for the book. Because I am kind of an educated reader, in several modes and contexts. And I'm afraid I hadn't a clue why this book was here; not what it was about, I caught that much. I just don't know why we had a book about it.

#8 -- Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Hee. Continental Op. Mining town corruption! A taste of the Old West in industrial form! Gangsters! Attempted assassinations! Moonshine!

Nobody at all in this book is sympathetic, including, in this case, the protagonist. I love how Hammett closes off the Op's narration when he falls under suspicion of murder; doesn't confirm he did it or didn't do it. It's not even a hugely obvious thing, just...a tightening of the POV, of the language, that both keeps us right out of the loop and communicates the kind of internal tension in the character. Actually, that would make sense as an experimental run on the kind of objective POV tricks he pulls in The Maltese Falcon.

Oh, Mr. Hammett. I hope someone kept your brain in a jar somewhere for when we have the technology.

#9 -- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

You, sir, are no Dashiell Hammett.

The kind of shocking and interesting thing to me in dipping my toe into Chandler is realizing just how fifties it is. Hammett's protagonists live in flats in urban centres, eat in restaurants in that pre-war bachelor way where single men were not expected to know how to cook. They have associates or partners whom they work with and rely on. They have very objective, practical, sometimes ruthless sensibilities towards their work, what it's worth, and who they are at the end of the day. They are, in dialogue, frequently of few words. The women they hang around with are just as wise to the ways of the world, if not wiser.

Whereas Philip Marlowe lives alone, but lives in a house in the burbs. His pasttimes, when he's not sulking (honest) are recreating chess games and taking pride in his coffee-making skills. Occasionally he went drinking with Terry Lennox, in the early parts of the book. He's a lone wolf to an almost exaggerated degree: he actively pisses off and alienates anyone who's kind to him or cooperative. He doesn't even have a secretary. He speechifies to an obnoxious degree about how nobody else is tough but thinks they are. He does his case in a decadent gated community full of writers and people of wildly inconsistent characterization, and speechifies more about the class-based chip on his shoulder.

He is an emo kid with an anger problem.

And after reading the Hammett, this feels like some fairly unsuccessful, projective, head-shaking fanfic.

#10 -- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Read in one sitting. This has cartoons in it here and there -- the protagonist, Arnold/Junior, is a cartoonist -- and they really add to the book's whole feel of simultaneously laughing and crying and despairing and hoping, and not making a big deal out of any of that, but just living it. Authentic emotion.

It's very much that breezy YA style and deals with a lot of stuff that I'm sure will have some people's parents screaming bannination, but this is a very honest book through and through. Recommended. I'm picking up the rest of his stuff.

Comments

[saoba.livejournal.com]

And now, because my brain does the 'slightly related' kind of thing, I want to go see if we loaned out our DVDs of the Thin Man movies and if not have myself a nice long viewing party, possibly with drinks in.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Ooh. I should rent those, I think, and see what they made of the book.

[saoba.livejournal.com]

And here I was thinking I should see if my library has the book so I can read it with the movies fresh in my head.

For science, you know.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Of course. For SCIENCE. :)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I remember reading the book years after seeing the first movie, and being quite surprised that the two were related. I should reread/rent and see if I was right to be shocked.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Am I right in remembering that they just used the book as a starting point re: the movies?

[txanne.livejournal.com]

That does ring a bell. I think I was an undergrad when I saw the movies, so the details are fuzzy. I do remember wanting some of her clothes!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

At last, someone who shares my opinion on the relative merits of Hammett and Chandler.

Have you read any of Mike Carey's Felix Castor books ? Among their merits, which are IMO manifold, are doing the "Chandlerian" sort of voice in ways that actually make it work so that one sees what Chandler may have been aiming for. (And having a succubus who works as a real character rather than an embarrassing fantasy object, largely through having a clear handle on a sex demon being a demon first and sexy second. And having an urban-fantasy-type setting where the weird stuff is a relatively recent incursion and people are doing SFnal-type figuring stuff out so that it feels science-by-God-fiction. And... come to think of it, there are characters in later ones who do literally have a near-fanatical devotion to the Pope.)

I am also very much in love with Carey's Lucifer, though it starts unevenly (largely because the first collection is a self-contained miniseries plus not quite enough of the ongoing to really gel; I recommend borrowing the first two if you want to give it a reasonable assessment). I will grant that I have a sweet-spot for rationally thought-out Christianity-as-mythos fantasy a mile wide, having spent thirteen years off and on working on one myself, but Carey had me two pages in, at Lucifer muttering, on the subject of God, "You'd think part of omniscience would be knowing when to stop.."

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I've read them, yes, and am kind of ridiculously fond. Although I came at it going, "Oh, this is John Constantine with the serial numbers filed off. Fine by me!"

I shall look up Lucifer, and see if any of my local crack dealers comics-owning friends have a copy.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Sorry you didn't like the Chandler - I will say that The Long Goodbye is one of the more loosely-structured ones, and is more like "a year in the life of Philip Marlowe" than some of the others.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Is there a better place to start in?

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

So far I've most liked The Lady in the Lake. YMMV.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

*notes it* Danke. :)

[jsridler.livejournal.com]

I've dug Alexie's short stuff and have his collection Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven waiting to be devoured. Glad to hear he's good at novel length, too.

And, like you, I enjoy Chandler, but Hammett was another freaking planet of talent.

Thanks for the reviews.

JSR

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I'm most of the way through Lone Ranger and Tonto. It's good, if a little rougher prose-wise, and maybe a bit repetitive after the YA. I think because he's drawing from a lot of the same source material?

[britmandelo.livejournal.com]

I haven't read "The Long Goobye" yet, since it's about book #8 if I recall correctly without checking myself. "The Big Sleep" was the first, and none of that stuff was in there except that there's one paragraph about the chessboard where he plays the game with himself. Hm. I believe he has an apartment, too, at that point. He doesn't talk much, either.

I think it might be a more worthwhile place to pick them up, and now I kind of dread making it up to "The Long Goodbye."

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I sort of wanted to smack the guy with a fish. But I recognize that mileage may vary.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Thank you for pinpointing why I'm not wild about Chandler, but love Hammett to death. While Lillian Hellman is notoriously unreliable when it comes to autobiography, the stuff she writes about Hammett and his work as a writer does seem to read true after you've read his work.

And I just plain love Sherman Alexie.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Oh hrm, I should go look that up.

[monkeyman.livejournal.com]

Mother Night isn't really like most of Vonnegut's stuff, and honestly one of my least favourite from his work. But I strongly suspect that it's only meant to be surface-level, leading only to the specific moral that he mentions himself (to take care what we pretend to be); I think he considered it so important a warning (and thought so little of the masses after what he'd seen in the war) that he needed to make it as obvious as possible.