Reading in February

Abercrombie's latest is blood soaked, grit under your nails fun – the kind of fun that's had watching two big groups of men smash into each other for three days and watching their honor, morale, and bodies fall to pieces, all described in starkly modern and sarcastic prose. The book's structure was interesting, and it will certainly be enjoyed by fans of Abercrombie's prior work, though I don't think that he's yet managed to reclaim the revelatory power of The First Law.

 Reading an established author's debut is often an interesting experience, as well as a somewhat worrisome one. Are you going to get to see an unfettered and fresh version of the brilliance you've grown to expect or will it be a sodden, meandering mess? In the case of Consider Phlebas, it's a bit of both. Review coming.

The Face that Must Die is a deeply unpleasant novel, a nightmarish trudge through a deranged and hateful mind, a novel filled with innocents who seem unable or unwilling to save themselves and predators that are twisted, loathsome, and, above all, human. It is, in other words, damn fine horror. Review coming.

 As I said after finishing the first Sandman collection (Preludes & Nocturnes), I simply don't understand how the early issues can be immature compared to the later ones. The Doll's House more than the first collection shows signs of relative immaturity, and there were some weaker moments, but if the rest of the series truly does put the beginning volumes to shame it will have to be quite mind blowing indeed. Review coming when I finish the series.

I've had a fairly mixed experience with Hamilton. He's written scenes and arcs that I've loved, and scenes and arcs that I've hated, and so far I've yet to read a book he's written without at least one of each. This, his debut, is a rather different beast. It's far more focused than his later works, though fans of the author's imagination will probably not be disappointed by it here, even if his creations are a tad reigned in. Still, I'm so far unconvinced that the Greg Mandel novels are capable of the same highs as the Night's Dawn trilogy. I suppose Hamilton's still got two books to prove me wrong. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

 Noctuary is a quieter, subtler work than Songs of a Dead Dreamer was, though it's not quite as refined as Teatro Grottesco. Perhaps the most interesting part of the collection was the final part of three, a collection of a good deal of Ligotti's flash fiction. Besides those miniature tales, Conversations in a Dead Language proved to be my favorite of the collection, a devastatingly sad tale that's fairly unique in Ligotti's catalog. Review coming.

 I think it's pretty well established by now that I read Ligotti's work twice, and Noctuary was no exception. On second read, slower building tales like The Medusa and The Tsalal came into their own.

City of Ruin reads like a supercharged version of Nights of Villjamur, expanding on the strengths of that first novel and patching up many of its weaknesses – though that is not to say that it fixes all of the debut's problems. Review coming.

 This is the kind of book where you finish and then have to mull over what you've read for hours, reveling in the spell woven on you. Palmer's writing is excellent, and his story's deliciously bittersweet. Though it had some pacing problems, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is an excellent read. Highly recommended, just don't expect anything even approaching typical.

 To make sure that, after my rather scathing review of Frankenstein, I hadn't simply lost all affinity for classic horror, I went back and reread a dozen or so of Poe's finer tales and  found them just as fine the second time around (though, to be fair, it's closer to the fourth or fifth for a few). While I can't say that I'm as devout a follower of Poe as I am of Lovecraft, his mastery is undeniable.  The Masque of the Red Death, in particular, is pitch perfect, a bare handful of pages that couldn't be improved by a collaboration of the genre's top artists given a decade to improve as much as a single image.

 I was excited going into Frankenstein. No, really, I wasn't setting out to spear the classics. I was expecting a stunning read, a book that showed the origins of one of my favorite genres, a book that scared me, a book that made me think. Instead, I ended up bitterly disappointed. Review here.

Catherynne M. Valente's prose is versatile and opulent, and her writing is a tide of images that bears hapless readers to distant, often beautiful and often traumatizing, shores. Ventriloquism is a spellbinding collection, and, since much of its contents can be found online, there's no reason at all to not go immerse yourself in some of Valente's short fiction. Review coming.

Reading in December

Well, I'm only seventeen days late on this recap, so it's practically breaking news. Quite a few of the books have already been discussed in the various year end post, and many of them will be receiving reviews shortly, so I don't always go into that much detail here. December was my second most productive month when it comes to reading, though almost a  third of the sixteen books were from two authors (Thomas Ligotti and Haruki Murakami), which is pretty unusual for me.

 This was the Westeros book club book of the month.  The first thing that must be known about Banville, is that his prose is excellent:

We presided over this rabble, Daphne and I, with a kind of grand detachment, like an exiled king and queen waiting daily for words of the counter-rebellion and the summons from the palace to return. People in general, i noticed, were a little afraid of us, now and again I detected it in their eyes, a worried, placatory, doggie sort of look, or else a resentful glare, furtive or sullen. I have pondered this phenomenon, it strikes me as significant. What was it in us- or, rather, what was it about us that - that impressed them? Oh, were are large, well-made, I am handsome, Daphne is beautiful, but that cannot have been the whole of it. No, after much thought the conclusion I have come to is this, that they imagined they recognized in us a coherence and wholeness, an essential authenticity, which they lacked, and of which they felt they were not entirely worthy. We were - well, yes, we were heroes. (p. 10-11)

The second thing that must be known about Banville is that, in his haste to combine Crime & Punishment with postmodernism, he completely misses the dilemma of Crime & Punishment and ends up with a well written but meandering book devoid of thought provoking questions.

 The Big Sleep had excellent pacing and prose. The plot, while fast paced, managed to also be meandering and twist itself into dead ends fairly frequently, but Marlowe's character made up for that quite handily. For my first foray into Crime, this turned out to be a great choice.

Stonewielder is the best of Esslemont's Malazan novels. Which, given my thoughts on Night of Knives and Return of the Crimson Guard, might not be saying all that much. Review coming.

I already talked about Preludes & Nocturnes in my Best Reads post, so I won't really do so here, but I will say that it was simply fantastic. If this is the weakest volume in the series, as I've heard quite often, I'm damn excited for the rest.

Fast, fun, and absurdly violent. Review coming.

Like a lot of classics, the Metamorphosis had the problem that I've seen every single scene go on to closely influence three others and be parodied four times, meaning that there wasn't a single unexpected blow in the story. And yet none of those pastiches or parodies had Kafka's humor, which, for me, made the story.

Seeing as I wrote my longest review to date on the book, I won't speak more here besides to just say that I found it thought provoking and extremely well written.

Ligotti is one of my favorite authors, and this is perhaps his best collection. I talked about this in my Best Reads piece, and I'll have a review up before too long.

Like most Ligotti, I read Teatro Grottesco twice. As for how it was…see former comment.

As evidenced by it making my Best Reads list, I loved After Dark. Review coming.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was extremely interesting, but it was also extremely unfocused and is my least favorite of the Murakami I've read so far. Review coming.

Agent to the Stars was snarky fun through and through. Some events of the ending were a tad convenient, but the laughs never stopped, and, somewhere between them, Scalzi also managed to make me care. This is worth checking out, though don't expect a masterpiece.

Of the Shakespeare I've read, King Lear might be my favorite. Not much point in commenting further on something so discussed in so short a space, so I'll leave it at that.

A Thousand Acres – essentially a modern day take on King Lear – has a very powerful and affecting emotional core. Unfortunately, it also has a huge amount of slow moving scenes that served, for me, to dull the impact to some extent. It was, in the end, an enjoyable read, though I was very hesitant for the first third or so.

 Like with Oedipus and The Odyssey, my main reaction to Antigone was astonishment that something written so long ago could be read so easily. I preferred Oedipus (read a few months back), but this was still an interesting read.

I talked about this in my Best Released list, but the prose is so good that it's worth repeating the comment: Valente's prose is mind blowing. It's a flood of images that's easy to drown under, but you'll be enthralled for every second of it. 

Best Reads of 2010

I read 134 books in 2010. The following are my twelve favorites. For variety's sake, each author is limited to a single work, and books that made the previous Best Released list will not be considered here.  I’ll post my complete reading list for the year in a few days, so you know what I’m drawing from here.

In alphabetical order, we’ve got:

Review here.

Andreyev’s characters try and often fail to find meaning, their lives so well portrayed that the century’s gap between the tales’ writing and reading does not dim their impact in the slightest. This collection is often startlingly dark, with stories like The Red Laugh painting our whole world with their hellish brush, and other tales like The Abyss showing compassion and innocence defiled, destroyed, and left by the roadside. Andreyev is a master of pace, capable of making a man’s final night seem like years and of making the longest waits and isolations heavy with their inevitable ending. Though the exclusion of one of Andreyev’s best stories, Lazarus, is disappointing, Visions is still an incredible work.

Bakker’s debut is a work of powerful, vivid prose and thought provoking ideas, offering genuine insight while also succeeding at the standards by which mainline Epic Fantasy is judged. Though there are pacing issues, their detrimental effect was diminished on reread (this was my second time through), and those problems are ultimately inconsequential in the face of what’s presented. Bakker's characterization is deep, if miserable, and sympathetic, if deplorable. The various societies of Bakker’s world walk a fine line between recreating history and pure imagination, falling to one side or the other as their prominence dictates, and the magic here is innovative and excellently depicted. Highly recommended for any fans of fantasy.

The Master and Margarita crackles with vitriolic wit. Bulgakov’s writing is impassioned, outlandish, and brilliant. He can make you care for his characters. He can make you laugh at his characters. He can make you hate his characters. The Master and Margarita uses excellently realized fantasy to criticize and examine the oppressive world around it. This is a classic of genre and literature.

Malazan is a bizarre mix of larger than life fantasy and Erikson’s philosophical and social musings. The series is far from flawless, but Erikson’s large cast and powerful prose make each of the volumes satisfying and often exemplary. When it comes to balancing visceral entertainment and more cerebral pleasures, the early volumes often fell too far to the shallow-but-fun side of the spectrum, while Toll the Hounds almost wholly sacrificed plot for the sake of writing and theme. House of Chains is one of the few volumes in the series that manages to flawlessly blend the two elements. The volume features the introduction of Karsa Orlong, beginning with his extended viewpoint, and then takes us through the height of the Seven Cities rebellion. The new ground level perspectives introduced with the Malazan army that comes into play here are well done, and the battles are mixed with the atmosphere of other, imaginative scenes that take place in the farthest reaches of Erikson’s creation.

Up until last night, American Gods was on this list. Then I read Sandman. This is a graphic novel of startling scope and imagination, with a grace of writing and presence of atmosphere that make it remarkable in any category. The sheer depravity of 24 Hours and the power of The Sound of Her Wings together managed to make Preludes & Nocturnes one of my favorite reads of 2010, and I’ll even say that Gaiman edged out Moore for my favorite Graphic Novel writer. And I hear that the first volume is the weakest of the series. Is that even possible?

Review here.

Gilman’s prose in Gears of the City is among the finest that I’ve read this year. His characters are theatrical masterpieces, cackling and monolithic in their flaws and triumphs, and his world is oppressive and immersive. I could try and rationally argue for its spot here, but I think I’d rather let Gilman do that for me and just give you another excerpt of the novel’s writing:

Later, as Arjun and Brace-Bel hid in the darkness of their bolt-hole, Brace-Bel would breathlessly recount his adventures in the Museum. He explained that he had always, in his strange life, been the villain, or worse, the laughingstock; but he’d ventured into the enemy’s lair in search of his true beloved like a hero of the highest and most chivalrous romance. His purpose had been pure as the purest knight’s, because he expected nothing from [her], nothing at all. He became what he was always meant to be. It was laughable, humiliating, but also superb… (p. 233)

Review here.

Joe Hill’s debut collection is a brilliant piece of horror, which also happens to examine just what horror is and how it works. Hill is capable of visceral darkness, as he proves again and again in tales like Abraham’s Boys and In the Rundown, but he’s also adept at moments of heartwarming melancholy that leave your world feeling drained of color in comparison afterwards, as he shows in Pop Art and the title story. There’s the occasional weaker story, but they don’t succeed in bringing down the power of the collection. Hill proves himself right out of the gate and doesn’t let up; 20^th Century Ghosts is masterful and self conscious horror.

When I reread The Shining in March, I said that it was the best novel by the greatest modern horror author. Now, having discovered Ligotti, the latter part of that statement is almost painfully off (especially when one considers King’s lamentable later work), but that does nothing to dilute the power of The Shining. This is pretty much a textbook example of how modern horror should be written. The characters are complex and sympathetic, their relationships organic in their development, and the horror comes from the characters and their relationship to the world. It’s true that the ending is a disappointment, but what precedes those last pages is so powerful that the ending’s weakness fails to damage the work. This is a must read for horror fans.

Thomas Ligotti’s work is hypnotically powerful and devastatingly depressing. The man’s prose is crystalline, flawless and ornate. His grasp of atmosphere is equal to Lovecraft’s, and those are not words I say lightly. Choosing whether to include Songs of a Dead Dreamer or Teatro Grottesco here was very difficult. I ended up going with the latter. It’s less outright horror, operating even more on a cerebral level than Songs… did. The stories here are crushing, but they’re so well written that they are, somehow, beautiful at the same time. Review coming.

McCarthy’s work is brutally, horrifically violent. Most action stories, whether prose or film, manage to make violence glorious and exciting. Blood Meridian does the opposite. This is a story devoid of sympathetic characters and understandable motivations. It is a story with no goal in sight. It is, simply, violence, brutal and uncompromising, unending and representing the entirety of the world. And the reader, mesmerized by McCarthy’s masterful prose, has no choice but to keep reading.

Moore’s work is dark, powerful, and multifaceted; his inclusion in this year’s Best Of was assured. But that still leaves the question of which of his works to show. V for Vendetta (review forthcoming) was very powerful and generally devoid of some of the flaws of Watchmen (the ending-from-nowhere, for instance). Still, I had to go for the later work. Watchmen was generally deeper, and the character of Rorschach and his ultimate decision is still present in my mind despite having been read months earlier. If what you think when you hear super heroes isn't a nuanced examination of the nature of power, you need to read this.

After Dark is the story of a few almost unconnected characters in the early morning hours of Tokyo. There’s little to no overarching plot. Going in, I didn’t think that I would love this book, but Murakami’s prose made me an easy convert. This novel is beautiful, and I mean that in the fullest sense of the word. Tokyo is vibrant, alive, and bizarre, and the different characters came to feel as real as anyone I’ve ever met. Review’s on the way.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

This was no contest. Sheepfarmer’s Daughter was boring, and that's just about the worst thing that can be said of entertainment. The characters are uninteresting, the plot is uninvolving, the themes are occasionally offensive but generally unremarkable, and prose is wholly devoid of style. When reading is a chore best handled in fifteen minute increments, you know that something’s gone wrong.

THE WORKS UNCONSIDERED

When compiling this list, I left Shakespeare and Dostoevsky out of consideration for a variety of reasons. First, both are classic authors. You don’t need me to tell you that. More importantly, with Shakespeare, there’s the fact that I find it difficult to view his work in the same way that I do another author’s, and I’m not talking about quality here. Shakespeare is on such a pedestal, and his work has so seeped into popular culture, that one’s expectations going in are monolithic, and rare is (at least from what I’ve seen) the reader who, going into Hamlet (to pick a play at random) does not know the majority of the plot. If I had included Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, they would have both made the list (King Lear beating out Hamlet, for me), but that’s not to say that they would have been my favorite books on it.

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

"This paper,” said Natalie, “has one of those articles in it. ‘Is America Changing’?”

“Well, is it?”

“They don’t know. They say that maybe it is, but they don’t know how, and they don’t know why, and maybe it isn’t happening at all.” (p. 575)

In American Gods, traditions linger and refuse to fade, gods are spawned by the handed-down thoughts of immigrants, and belief and reality are one and the same thing. This is a novel about the soul of America, and the heart of the modern world, with maybe just a tad of how our past shaped us, all told through a cast of characters that’s as offbeat and well developed as it is numerous.

Gaiman’s themes here are weighty, and they could drag off and drown your average narrative with their importance. Gaiman doesn’t even try to fight this; he lets the book be tossed to and fro, gyrating wildly and leaping off into tangents in order to explore part after part of his post-mythology mythos. As such, though the story is interesting on its own, and the character’s usually well drawn, this is more a novel about America and its synthesis than it is about anything else.

The gods were brought here by the immigrants (the Irish leprechaun upon ships during the days of famine; the pixies and their ilk from English prisoners; Odin from exploratory and bloodthirsty Viking longboats; the Egyptian pantheon of Anubis, Thoth, Horus, Bast settling in New Egypt; Anansi from – well, you get the idea) but things have changed, and, in the process of acclimatization, the believers became American, and the gods were cut loose. Now, as time moves on, their belief and traditions are fading fast towards zero, and the old deities are desperate to not simply drop out of existence.

Now, in this new world, the actual facets of the gods’ being are no longer important, the funeral director gods of death are as on the verge as a New York City djinn, and all that still matters is where they came from and whether they still exist at all:

“I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blonde, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think is gray. And you look at us, you would not know what was light and who was dark.” (p. 79)

Simplification is not the only change brought on by the passage of years. The majority of Gods in the book fall into one of two pathways. The first try – in vain? – to recreate the glory days, always striving to remember. The world, however, has moved on, and their attempts frequently become depressingly comical, as they try to assert their dominance over a world that has forgotten them, such as Eoster, trying to claim that she’s still beloved due to the name of the holiday. In many cases, being the American incarnation of these gods, they don’t even have a period of power to look back upon, such as Czernobog who cannot even contemplate his days as a dark god anymore and is able to do nothing else but dream about his years in a slaughterhouse.

The other potential path is a darker one still, and it is one that we are introduced to at the end of the very first chapter: the perversion of everything that the god once held holy. The Queen of Sheba has become a prostitute. Even that, however, is not far enough. In a twisted incarnation of her need for belief, she forcers her forces her lovers to worship her and sexually devours them for sustenance. Her words hold true for her and for the array of similarly striving gods we glimpse in the narrative: There is nothing holy in [my] profession. Not anymore. (p. 373)

But is the decline of the gods really such a bad thing? In one part of the story, we see a funeral home run by the Egyptian gods of death. They provide a more personal touch, a send off by something with more of a soul than the mechanical filling of orders provided by a big funeral company. In another subplot, we get to see a community still run and safeguarded by a supernatural being. The community’s exterior is enticing and gleaming, which hides the sacrifice needed to maintain it.

Is such a thing worth it for a more ordered world? Has our modern world of machines and computers destroyed wonder and human contact? It’s impossible to truly a question like that, and Gaiman doesn’t. American Gods is not a narrative of answers, but rather a tapestry of questions. You will never get a definitive answer of how the gods interact with mortals; you will never know whether the old gods were right to fight for their survival; you will never know whether the gods will one day be gone completely. But you don’t need to know. In American Gods, Gaiman asks the questions, and I think that every reader will have their own answers.

The sprawling nature of the themes, and the narration’s tendency to leap after them wherever they may go, leads to an incredibly meandering text. Our main character Shadow, who is roped into the conflict as the assistant to Mr. Wednesday only hours after leaving prison. While it seems, at first, that the two are working towards a definite goal, Shadow is soon sent off to location after location without any discernible rhyme or reason.

Further complicating matters - if you’re a fan of anything even approaching linier plots - are the interludes, taken from the modern incarnation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. These stories feature brand new characters, often separated from the main narrative by spans of decades, living their lives and either interacting with or contributing to the nature of the various scattered American deities.

Somehow, Gaiman pulls all of this off. The trick is, I think, his intuitive grasp of character. He only need mention a name and spout a few lines of dialogue and, poof, a fully grown man appears on the stage. Each interlude feels complete enough to form its own text, and each adds to the main narrative in immeasurable ways.

And yet, this grasp of character is not applied to one character. Shadow, whose eyes we spend the vast majority of the book looking out of, is told:

“You’re not dead,” she said. “But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either. Not really.”
[…]
“I love you,” she said dispassionately. “You’re my puppy. But […] You’re like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world.” She frowned. “Even when we were together. I love being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I’d go into a room and I wouldn’t think there was anybody in there. And I’d turn the lights on, or I’d turn the lights off, and I’d realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything.” (p. 370-371)

After his release from prison, and the death of his wife, Shadow retreats into himself, and it is rare for the reader to get a glimpse inside. This leads to a good portion of the book feeling aimless, as we’re cast about in Shadow’s wake, without him even knowing – or caring – where he’s going. The reader that is willing to follow will eventually come to realize that Shadow’s recalcitrance is not shallowness, but, in order to get to that point, you need to be willing to follow Gaiman on all of his digressions.

On the subject of the book’s prose, Gaiman says in the included interview: I wanted to write American Gods in what I thought of as an American style – clean, simple, uncluttered – and push the narrator further into the background than I had in previous books. But the narrator crept out in the “coming to America” chapters, where I got to play with a wider set of voices. (p. 596)

It’s true that the writing is more subdued than it is in Neverwhere or Anansi Boys, the plot less self aware. But this is still a Gaiman novel, and it’s still filled with the delicious idiosyncrasies of language that characterize all of the man’s writing. There are sections here that are jaw dropping in their grandeur, and there are sections that are laugh out loud funny, and both build with the other to create a wry and majestic experience, filled with larger than life characters who are anything but above sarcasm.

American Gods looks like a simple read on the surface. Underneath, you soon come to realize the depth that is packed into every scene and every single glance. This is a book that is impossible to really predict, so come to it and get ready to be swept along. While occasionally directionless, American Gods is simply something that needs to be experienced. This is not the most entertaining book that I’ve read of Gaiman, but it is undoubtedly the best.

Graphic Novels

[This is a Breaking New Ground post]

Graphic novels are a bit different from Urban Fantasy in that, if I’ve ever truly looked down upon them, that period ended long ago. Still, for the longest time, they just didn’t seem like something I’d be interested in. Why would I want to read a book where half the imagining was done for me? It almost seemed like a worst-of-both-worlds between books and movies, where the images hamstring your own mental picture, while the lack of motion leaves said images static and unimmersive. Besides which, I just wasn’t sure that there were any stories told in Graphic Novels that I would actually want to read. From my ignorant outsider’s perspective, all I could see was pretty much super heroes. Now, I used to love super heroes – and perhaps I still do, because I think that The Dark Knight was several hours of sheer perfection – but I wasn’t convinced that you could make a convincing book out of a guy who beats people up while wearing tights and a cape.

Then, back in April, I read Watchmen. Well, that was the end of any real prejudice on my part. The story was excellent, and the super hero framework made it quite plain that it would never have succeeded in another form. At the time, I said (in my Reading in April post) that Graphic Novels were: “something I’m going to definitely try and do more of, now.” Months later, I’ve read followed that initial success with…nothing.

So, unlike the Urban Fantasy challenge where I’m trying to go from distaste to some degree of enjoyment or at least a position of knowledge, here I’m just trying to read some fun stuff. But, seeing as this was a challenge, I did decide to jump in at the deep end of my old apprehensions about Graphic Novels. It is, it seems, superhero time.

Now, I originally did the same thing as I did for the other Breaking New Ground post. The problem is, there I actually researched the books. Here, knowing nothing about the field, I figured out what to read by the highly scientific method of emailing someone I’d seen reading a book with pictures in it, specifying that at least some of the five had to involve super heroes. In the end, I decided that writing several hundred variants of she said to read this one. And this one! would get sickeningly old, so just pretend it says that under the pictures if you want.

Anyway, the five lucky novels are:



Review



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Seeing as I doubt I’m going to really hate any of these, I’m not going to bother with the Breaking New Ground posts that are following the Urban Fantasy reviews and just stick to the tried and true schedule of reviews broken up by random musings.

And yes, I’m aware there are seven titles here. Blame the person who picked them.