The Bookcase

Getting Stoned with Savages

2010-05-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

GETTING STONED WITH SAVAGES (J. Maarten Troost) - Three Stars

I haven't been reading much lately, and was pondering closing down this site. I decided to keep it open (since my reading thirst waxes and wanes), but I'm scaling back. From now on, each "review" will simply be a start rating and maybe one or two sentences about the book. Detailed conversation can occur in the comments section if anyone desires.

Getting Stoned with Savages doesn't have quite the freshness of Troost's preceding book, Sex Lives of Cannibals, but his writing does have a good humor to it and his books are a nice combination of travel guide and anthropological study.

The Road

2010-03-11T20:35:00.001-08:00

THE ROAD (Cormac McCarthy) - Four Stars

Too much post-apocalyptic media is focused on the apocalypse itself. We are with the protagonist(s) when tragedy strikes, and we follow them through the aftermath. "The Road" focuses several years down the line, when whatever threat that originally caused the apocalypse is long dead, and the survivors must deal with the new threats that have risen from the rubble. Indeed, the apocalyptic event in "The Road" is barely even mentioned. Vague flashbacks hint at a nuclear holocaust, but the whos, whys, wheres and whens aren't even thought about.

This vagueness and lack of detail permeates every aspect of the novel. There are no names: places are referred to as "the river" or "the house," the protagonists of the novel are simply "The Man" and his son, "The Boy." Time, too, is irrelevant: it is mentioned infrequently in monthly classifications, and McCarthy often leaps forward weeks at a time unannounced, leaving it up to the reader to determine how much time has past. And, of course, the landscape plays right into this: dead trees, blasted earth, deserted cities. McCarthy's palette has no color, only a thousand shades of gray.

The simple plot: The Man, certain they won't survive another winter at their current location, leads The Boy south on a road to the sea, in hopes of finding warmth, food, and (theoretically) good people. However, the father is so fanatically protective of his son (and distrusting of every stranger) one wonders how anyone could ever get close enough to them (literally and figuratively) to be seen as good. The ruthless selfishness with which The Man protects The Boy precludes them from being anything but loners, and every day is simply a rote journey of trying to find enough food to stay alive while avoiding the roving gangs of starving cannibals.

Despite the constant threat, very little happens in the novel. The threat is constant, but again, just a kind of vague, gray threat hanging just outside the current events. McCarthy's biggest success is keeping the novel interesting and preventing it from sliding into monotony, despite the absence of intricate detail and the fact the same thing happens in pretty much every section of the book. All of this combined gives me zero desire to see the movie. This is a story that can only be told in literary form. If the movie is at all exciting, it hasn't been faithful to the book (which sounds like an indictment against the novel, when it isn't). Even the horror of what humanity has become is kept at arm's length for most of the novel, so when McCarthy hits you in the face with sparsely-placed gory details, they are doubly shocking.

However, the book lost some punch for me. Being as it is almost entirely about a father's love for his son, my own damaged relationship with my father (coupled with my total absence of desire to have a child) may have sapped some of the impact. To me, it was a three-star story written with five-star skill. And what skill! This is a master author at the peak of his game. Anyone with even a little interest at reading skilled writing should give the book a go.

In the end, the lengths The Man will go to for his son brings his own claim about being one of the "good guys" into question. It's just one last way McCarthy surpasses the standard. Instead of tackling the philosophically simple "how far would you go to survive?" McCarthy poses a far trickier question: "how far SHOULD you go?"

The Secret History of Moscow

2010-02-16T21:40:00.001-08:00

THE SECRET HISTORY OF MOSCOW (Ekaterina Sedia) - Two Stars

The Secret History... is a story about disaffected 1990s Russia citizens who discover an alternate-dimension/underworld underneath the streets of Moscow. A place where all of the old Russian fairy tales actually exist, as do some people who had to escape tragedy on the surface. Father Frost, rusalki, domovoi, Napoleonic soldiers, Decembrists' Wives and many other inhabit this strange underworld of black water and glowing trees.

The plot, what there is of one, involves a Russian mobster who has discovered a way to trap people's souls and send them to the underworld (the "whys" and "hows" are never gone into in great detail). The story is primarily about a handful of surface world denizen's adventures in the underworld as they try to find out while people have been turning into birds But the plot meanders and the pacing is uneven.

A few of the characters are pretty well fleshed-out, but the cast of the story is quite large and most are barely more than cardboard cutouts or plot contrivances. The various sub-plots are handled in a similar fashion: some are quite ingenious, some are aborted barely after being started, and several more fade into the background and are left unresolved.

I dunno. It was an easy read and mildly enjoyable, just not terribly fulfilling. In a way I feel bad for giving it two stars, but it's warts are plentiful and evident. Plus, I look at the list of three-star books and it's not as good as any of those.

Black Projects, White Knights

2010-01-04T20:43:00.000-08:00

BLACK PROJECTS, WHITE KNIGHTS (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

BPWK is a collection of fourteen short stories by Kage Baker, all pertaining to the seven-book Company series. These are all supplemental short stories, providing more depth and detail to some of the characters in the Company series, but are not relevant to the main plot of the series and reveal no spoilers.

The biggest problem with most of the stories is that Baker can't decide whether she's writing for people intimately familiar with the Company novels or for people completely new to the universe. Some stories over-explain, others go the opposite direction. As a result, most of the stories settle safely in the three-star range, with one or two outliers in four-star territories.

Baker is at her best when she muses on her fairly Orwellian views of the future (specifically with regards to personal liberties). Baker's 24th Century England is largely 21st Century England with only a few subtle but significant cultural twists, making it all the creepier. As a result, the best short story in this collection is "Monster Story", about an SAT-like exam all 24th Century ten-year-olds take that determines the course of their entire lives (including what types of work they can do). Baker's preface is prescient:

In the future we will all be very healthy, very attractive, and very, very good. It will be illegal to be otherwise.

Today, the ordinary citizen in Britain is under more constant surveillance from remote cameras than in any other country in the world...In America, there is a movement afoot to outlaw serving large portions of food in restaurants, on the grounds that this is a criminal act contributing to obesity. Several public interest groups have successfully criminalized the wearing of perfume in public places. Many communities have laws in effect penalizing untidy yards or even the ownership of clotheslines, on the grounds that they lower property values. Can it be long until physical ugliness is prohibited too, for the mental distress it occasions in others?

Popular psychology now informs us that our misfortunes and illnesses are our own fault, brought about by our unconscious urges; secular puritanism, as I live and breathe! But surely Coercive Law will set us all to rights, and make certain that we cannot pose a threat to ourselves or others. Hooray.

Filler

2009-10-13T12:23:00.001-07:00

Sorry, sorry, nothing interesting here. Just a little note to let you know that I haven't abandoned this blog, I just haven't been much into reading for a few months. Hopefully that will change soon.

I'm currently reading the rant-tastic "Why We Suck" by Dr. Denis Leary. I suppose I'll review it in a week or so just to get something new up here. But I've got a stack of "serious" novels that I've been meaning to get to, and hopefully will start on soon.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide

2009-08-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE (Douglas Adams) - Four Stars

I think everyone that likes to read should make a point to read their favorite books again at least once a decade. For one, I think any great book contains too much to grab 100% of it on your first read. For two, over time you develop both as a reader and a person, leading to new understandings and different interpretations of the material.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three, I probably read the first four books in the Hitchhiker's "Trilogy" at least a half-dozen times a piece. I found them wildly hilarious and endearing. Earlier this year, I realized it had been probably a decade (at least) since I last read the series, and made it a point to go through the books again. I discovered there was much more to them than I initially thought.

I had some trouble deciding how to format this review. I didn't want to review each book separately, because the first three books are so obviously each part of a larger, whole story. I didn't want to review all five books together, because the last two are very different in style from the first three. In the end, I decided to review the first three together and the last two independently.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe, and Everything

The first book is by far the one I have the most memorized, assisted in no small part to the wonderful 1981 BBC Mini-Series. The plot is well-known by many: incredibly average Englishman Arthur Dent is saved mere seconds before the Earth's destruction by the space-faring Vogons (because we were in the way of a new hyperspace bypass) by his friend Ford Prefect, who is an alien from a planet near Betelgeuse (and who gained his unusual name because his computer misidentified the dominant life-form on Earth as automobiles). Alone in space, they are rescued by Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford's childhood friend, Galactic President, all-around rogue and ne'er-do-well, who has just stolen the most impressive spaceship in the galaxy. Zaphod's flight crew consists of Englishwoman Tricia McMillen (an astrophysicist whom Arthur failed to succesfully hit on once at a party) and the robot Marvin, who has one of the universe's largest brains and is, therefore, one of it's most depressed entities. Zaphod wants to find and rob the mythical planet of Magrathea, a place where (supposedly) custom planets were designed and built for the very, very wealthy. Once there they discover that the Earth was actually the universe's largest supercomputer, designed to discover the true question to life, the universe, and everything (the answer to life, the universe, and everything being, of course, 42), and was destroyed only a few minutes before its several billion-year program was set to finish running.

There's much more than that, of course. That's only a sparse outline of the first book. One of the things that astonished me when re-reading the books is that the plot is densely detailed, and surprisingly lucid considering the borderline insanity and breakneck pace the stories are infused with. Another thing that surprised me was how much of a quality science-fiction story the first three books are (since the plot arc pretty much goes unbroken across all three). I remembered the books as being riotously funny, but Adams did not give the science fiction angle short shrift in order to throw in a few more gags.

The first three books are all wonderful, and stay fresh and original throughout because Adams' prodigious imagination hardly ever repeats itself.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

As is explained in the first book, the dolphins were the second smartest creatures on planet Earth (humans were third). Moments before the Earth was destroyed by the Vogons the dolphins escaped to an alternate dimension by their own means, leaving a farewell message to mankind that is also the title of this book. Fish is a bit different from the first three. It's a happier book and, basically, a romance novel, one of the most effective I've ever read.

Arthur finds himself back on Earth or an Earth-clone (long story, read the first three books) where the Vogon destruction is nothing more than a big hoax played by the CIA. He falls in love with a girl named Fenchurch (referenced in passing but not named in the first few chapters of the first novel), who is one of the only people on the planet who, like him, feels that things are not quite right in the world. Arthur's and Fenchurch's romance is not only charming but believable: they act like I've seen real people in love act, something I can rarely say about other novels or movies.

And this story is about Arthur and Fenchurch. Ford and Marvin make a brief appearance at the end, but Zaphod and Trillian are absent from the story. The book deals less with space travel, turning its sci-fi gaze onto time travel and alternate realities, which sets up the fifth book nicely. All in all, a challenge to Hitchhiker's as my favorite book in the series.

Mostly Harmless

The book is much different from the rest of the series. There's a bitterness and anger underlying every chapter. The humor is there, but is more muted and dark. The sci-fi aspect is stronger than ever, and while Adams gets a little tangled in his myriad alternate realities, the concept of The Guide 2.0 and its purpose is a brilliant conceit.

Ford and Arthur are the main characters in this one, with Trillian coming back for an important sub-plot. Trillian brings along a daughter, Random, who is possibly the least fleshed-out major character in the entire series and rarely feels like anything other than a plot device to keep things moving. I am also highly critical of the unceremonious abandonment of Fenchurch, who is done away with in the first couple of pages and never mentioned again. The ending of the book is bleak, but it is by no means a cheat and nicely ties up many loose plot ends.

All in all, the series comes highly recommended. However, the reader needs to be prepared for the drastic changes in tone in the last two novels.

Adams himself was dissatisfied with the final result. He confessed to having personal drama during the creation of the novel (my guess is that it involved a woman, just from the tone of the book and the way the female characters are treated), and stated an intention to write a sixth book in the series. Tragically, Douglas Adams died of a sudden heart attack at his gym in Montecito, CA (outside Santa Barbara), in 2001 at the age of only 49.

However, the sixth book, And Another Thing..., found life after all in the hands of Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series. It was written with the full support of Douglas Adams' estate and his widow, Jane Belson, and will be released on October 12, 2009: the 30th Anniversary of the publication of the first Hitchhiker's book.

Who Goes There?

2009-07-19T15:52:00.000-07:00

WHO GOES THERE? (John W. Campbell, Jr.) - Four Stars

Okay, this is a little bit of a cheat, as Who Goes There? is a forty-page short story. But my current book is 800-pages, and I figured not posting anything for two months might alienate my hundreds and hundreds of (meaning: six) avid readers.

Who Goes There? is one of my favorite short stories of all time. It was the first major science fiction short story to present the "aliens masquerading as humans" concept. The story was adapted (very loosely) as the 1951 film "The Thing from Another World" and (much more closely) as the superior 1982 film "The Thing" by John Carpenter. It was also the inspiration for many other films of a similar vein, including "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

The basic story structure: a group of research scientists in Antarctica come across a spaceship that has been buried in the ice for hundreds of millennia. The occupant, also buried in the ice, still has life at the cellular level. As this "thing" awakens, the human researchers realize with horror that it is the perfect chameleon: it can duplicate itself as anything it eats, right down to the cellular level. It eats a dog, it can turn into the perfect dog copy. It eats a person, it can turn itself into a perfect copy of that person (even the person's mannerisms, if it's observed them long enough). Thus the meat of the story: an increasingly tense atmosphere of fear and paranoia, as no one knows who's who.

Campbell tosses out a few five-dollar words where they don't belong, and his characterizations are thread-bare with the exception of a few characters. But the novelty of concept and the excellence of execution in creating an atmosphere of fear and mistrust makes the story. I highly recommend the 1982 movie version by John Carpenter. It not only remains my favorite horror movie of all time, but has possibly the most incredible non-CGI special effects of all time. It also has Kurt Russell with a cowboy hat and Chuck Norris-beard kicking all ass in room, and it has a pre-Diabeetus commercials Wilford Brimley going nutso with a fire ax. This alone makes it worth the price of admission.

"Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr.

And Then There Were None

2009-06-21T22:21:00.000-07:00

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (Agatha Christie) - Three Stars

Between the move and everything, my brain has been in "shut-down" mode and not really ready to tackle anything intellectually demanding. Agatha Christie is a good way to ease back in, because her stories are interesting, entertaining, and short.

They're also impossible to review, since to talk about the story at all would be to give something away. Mrs. Mallowan's habit of italicizing every dramatic revelation is charming (I had to keep reminding myself that most of the murder mystery cliches started with Agatha Christie). The book was good, but not as good as Murder on the Orient Express, the best of her stories that I've read.

The epilogue cleared up a lot, per usual. Christie was brilliant in that her stories are always feasible (fantastic, maybe, but not implausible) and she never has to resort to crappy deus ex machina endings (teeny, tiny, mini-spoiler: this means that, yes, one of the ten on the island is the murderer). But I will say I had trouble with the last two deaths. If you haven't read the book, don't highlight this next section:

The last two deaths are Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne, and their final scene together struck a wrong note for me. Lombard had been painted as an unscrupulous, mercenary type figure. If, at the end, he knew he wasn't the murderer, he would automatically assume Vera was: why didn't he just shoot her and be done with it? Then there's this exchange: Vera said, "How was it worked--that trick with the marble bear?" He shrugged his shoulders. "A conjuring trick, my dear--a very good one..." Now, if you've read the book, you know that neither of these two were the murderer. Why does Lombard's response sound like a confession to a murder he didn't commit? If he suspected Vera as the murderer, why was he answering as to how SHE committed the murder? To wrap up the Lombard puzzle, I find it incredible that he could be so guileless as to let her lift the gun from his pocket and kill him.

Lastly, Vera's death. While Christie (rather heavy-handedly) elaborated on Vera's guilty conscience, her "suicide" comes FAR too quickly after she shoots Lombard and (for all intents and purposes) "wins" as the last survivor.

The Sons of Heaven

2009-05-25T11:00:00.001-07:00

THE SONS OF HEAVEN (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

I actually finished this book two weeks ago, but didn't sit down to write the review until today. I also haven't started a new book yet. Between the move and everything else, there probably won't be another review until July sometime. Anyway...

I'm okay with how this series ended. The series wasn't as good as it could have been, but it didn't completely fall apart like I'd feared. The triple-Adonai conceit I still find particularly annoying, because there was simply no reason for it. One Adonai personality became a main character, the other two served no purpose to the story (except for being the basis of an extremely bizarre, Oedipal plot arc). The Tiara and Lewis storyline was also wholly unnecessary and contributed little.

But, once again, Baker showed skill and manipulating a large-scale story, with numerous main characters in numerous plot arcs all converging on the same place and time. The subplots involving Joseph & Budu, Labienus, Suleyman, and others were all well developed. Still, the conclusion of the series leaves one with a slight feeling of "what might have been" if Baker had honed in on a specific direction for the series sooner than the fourth book.

The Machine's Child

2009-04-20T14:21:00.000-07:00

THE MACHINE'S CHILD (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

I kind of wonder what this series might have been like had Baker made up her mind a little earlier. The first three books were all focused on the individual (Mendoza, Joseph, Mendoza), and pretty much stayed in one place and told one story. And they were good.

Much of the last few books have a much broader scope: numerous characters, places and times. The "X-Files" conspiracy angle of the storyline has come to the forefront, and Baker has handled this stylistic device with adroitness. Instead of becoming a jumbled mess, I've found the macro-scale Machiavellian politics to be some of the more interesting parts of the series.

But, I fear, at the end of this book the series takes a turn for the worse.

It may seem a strange complaint for a book about time-traveling cyborgs, but it asks me to suspend my disbelief just a little too far. I don't have any expectations of a happy ending, and I won't hold Baker to task for characters doing things I don't like. I do, however, expect them to be consistent, or at least have reasonably explained development (apologies to Mr. Twain, my stance could be summed up something to the effect of "When a personage acts like an intelligent, confident, aggressive, bold, lively entity at the start of a sentence, he shall not act like an inconsequential milquetoast at the end of it").

Quite simply, my problem is this: nowhere in the history of time has a version 3.0 been weaker or less advanced than a version 2.0. Regardless of whether or not I like or dislike Nicholas (Adonai v.1.0), Edward (Adonai v.2.0), or Alec (Adonai v.3.0), I just can't bring myself to accept that Edward, who spent his entire life in the 19th century, could quickly "out-learn" high-end technical concepts better than 23rd/24th Century Alec and Captain Morgan (the world's most powerful A.I.) (especially considering that Alec initially was presented to the reader as an astonishing mechanical/technical savant). I don't buy it.

I also take technical issues with how Nicholas, Edward, and Alec, at one point three very separate and uniquely developed characters, have been kind of boiled down into simple writer's constructs (Nicholas: melancholy or invisible, except when his fundamentalist rage would serve to move the plot along; Edward: one-note conniving superiority; Alec: depressive dimwit, a jarring change from the way he was initially written); and how Mendoza, also a well-fleshed out character, has been hollowed out into almost an emotionless object.

I'm already reading the eighth and final book in the series, but the ending of this one did not encourage me.

Black Swan Green

2009-03-31T23:20:00.000-07:00

BLACK SWAN GREEN (David Mitchell) - Five Stars

In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Golding depicts the regression to savagery of a bunch of British school-boys once they are removed from the structured, cultured life of civiled England. In David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Mitchell astutely points out that the removal from structured, cultured life isn't even a necessary step: teenage boys are often naturally savage, and even naturally monstrous. One of the best parts of Black Swan Green is that, with one notable exception, Mitchell never tries to rationalize or explain the mean actions of the popular kids and the bullies. The bullies torment the Jason and other outcasts because they WANT to, nothing more, nothing less.

This book gets five stars for one simple reason: I have never in my life read a novel where author has so pitch-perfectly conveyed the reality of being an awkward teenage boy. I never identified with Holden Caulfield; I identified almost too much with Jason Taylor. There were parts of this novel that made me ACHE they hit so close to home. I challenge anyone who grew up as a slightly geeky, not-part-of-the-in-crowd teenage boy to not identify at least in some fashion with Jason Taylor. Literally several of the experiences and emotions he had during the course of the novel occurred to me in identical fashion. Very, very little in the book came across as unrealistic hyperbole.

Unlike many novels which try to do too much--and bungle it by focusing just enough attention on an item to make it a major element, but not enough attention to do that item justice--Black Swan Green succeeds by addressing, just briefly, numerous large issues and allowing them to develop in the margins. The slow decay of Jason's parent's marriage, for example, is almost never tackled head-on, but gradually falls apart in between sentences here and there, scattered throughout the chapters. A brilliant section detailing the shittiness of war is all the more effective because it passes briefly: the novel does not dwell on what has been lost.

If there's one speed-bump in the novel for me, it's the chapter where Jason learns the importance of being one's "true self," in the guise of poetry discussions with Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck. While it dutifully propels the story forward, the tone of this chapter feels completely off from the entire rest of the novel. In a novel filled with vibrant, realistic characters, Eva de Crommelynck also seemed completely phony to me, like a writer's construct instead of a real person. I later learned that she was a character in a prior Mitchell novel, and I feel her inclusion in Black Swan Green was an imprudent attempt to shoehorn the novel into the "universe" of his other works. I was also extremely puzzled as to why the same amount of page time (a full chapter) was given to poetry, a relatively minor aspect of Jason's personality (at least for the purposes of the story) that only pops up a half-dozen times during the course of the novel, as was given to his stammering, a major feature that influences almost every scene in the novel.

But that really is nitpicking. The rest of the novel had me enthralled with Jason's fantastical view of what could be, and the adventures that spring forth from happenstance, and had me horrified (but no less enthralled) at the brutal reality of teenage boys' cliques.

The Children of the Company

2009-03-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

THE CHILDREN OF THE COMPANY (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

The sixth book of eight in the company series, by itself is very good. The series keeps progressing deeper and deeper into the cloak-and-dagger stories of the Company, and this book deals with the histories of Labenius and Victor, two peripheral characters from the prior books. Much of the book deals with Victor and Labenius participating/directing the large scale salvage of artifacts from San Francisco the night before the 1906 earthquake. The story is interesting, the plot-arc for the series keeps getting increasingly sinister, and the characters hold your attention.

Kage Baker does not have a problem creating interesting characters. She does have a problem focusing on them for any length of time, however. I wonder how this series would read if re-edited for a different structure. After the first book, you're led to believe that Mendoza would be the main character of the series. But really, she was only the main-character in books one and three, a minor character in two and five, and virtually non-existant (other than as a motivating force) in four and six. Joseph was a minor character in book one, the main character in two and four, and non-existant in the others. Through six books there have been, I'd say, eight main characters. But none of them have had more than two books dedicated to them.

I have nothing against large-scale epics. But the Company series seems to lack the focus or the foresight of, say, "The Lord of the Rings" or "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series. Nonetheless, only two books to go.

"Do you suppose the Christ left Heaven for Earth to save mortal souls? Or is it possible he left because God's behavior disgusted him?"

Their Eyes Were Watching God

2009-02-07T12:55:00.000-08:00

THERE EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (Zora Neale Hurston) - Two Stars

I'm not going to put a caveat in this review. I'm not going to say "maybe I just didn't get it because I'm a man." I'm not going to say "maybe I just didn't get it because I'm white." I think I got it just fine. I think every glowing review I've read about this novel is off-base. I think these people read more into the story than was there, reviewing what they WANTED to read or HOPED to read instead of what was actually there.

All of the dialogue in the novel is written in dialect, Hurston's analysis of how Southerners talk (more specifically, poor Southerners, even more specifically, poor black Southerners). "She sho don't talk much," "Dat's uh new idea 'bout varmints," etc. Some times it's pitch perfect, though it can be hard to read (this is one of those rare novels, I think, that would be even BETTER as an audio book). However, sometimes the dialogue falls on the other side of the line, and instead of being completely realistic is sounds kitschy and stereotypical, like the language you'd hear in a racist joke or from an insulting white jester in black-face.

Which is a shame, really, because Hurston handles "proper" literary English with great skill, and some of her sadly infrequent exposition is gorgeous prose:

Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun. So Janie had another day. And every day had a store in it, except Sundays. The store itself was a pleasant place if only she didn't have to sell things. When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of the life made it even nicer to listen to.

The story itself is a disappointment. There's a decent love story, once Hurston finally gets around to it (literally halfway through the novel). But the plot is threadbare and the characters, as colorful as they are, severely lacking in depth. Tea Cake is by far the most interesting character in the book. Even the protagonist/heroine Janie Crawford is a disappointment, as she is defined in the novel not by her own actions and desires, but by the men she chooses to associate herself with. We learn almost nothing about Janie except what is shown to us in how she acts and reacts with each of her husbands. The Janie of the novel is barely her own person, she is an effect to the male causes in the book.

The novel has not aged well. In 1937 Janie may have been viewed as quite a rebel, but compared to the bold, independent, women of the 21st Century she is a bland milquetoast. Likewise, is there anyone reading this review who is unaware of the injustices black people faced in post-Civil War America, or of the horrors of domestic violence? Again, perhaps shocking in 1937, but nothing new or enlightening in 2009.

I'm also puzzled as to why this is hailed as one of the first feminist masterpieces. Contrary to the apparent popular opinion, the Janie at the end of the novel is not a strong, independent woman simply because she's lost the love of her life and doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks about her. Indeed, feminism is in pretty sorry shape if the best message it can provide is "you're going to go through a lot of crap in your life, and the best you can hope for is to endure."

Everything is Illuminated

2009-01-18T10:16:00.000-08:00

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (Jonathan Safran Foer) - Three Stars

Some people have called Everything is Illuminated a "home-run of a novel." I prefer to think of it as a home-run DERBY of a novel: entertaining but shallow, flashy and pretentious without a lot of depth. Which are strong words for a book that (kind of) deals with the Holocaust.

The narrative is broken into three separate, interspersed parts. The first narrative is Ukrainian tour guide Alex's story. He tells the story of how his family's tour business is hired by an American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer to search for a woman that saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Nazis. Alex intersperses this with stories about his family, specifically the other males in his life: his younger brother "Little Igor," his abusive, alcoholic father, and his grandfather (who bears his own scars from WWII and seems, at times, on the verge of Alzheimer's or dementia). Alex speaks in a semi-fluent form of "Engrish," and his translations usually just miss the mark. You get the feeling he translates with a thesaurus, as many of his words are adjacent to what he's looking for (e.g., his frequent use of the word "rigid" to mean "difficult"). This narrative is told in the immediate past tense (as if it just happened) and gives the feeling of the present, even though in the timeline of the novel it occurred many months ago.

The second narrative is a novel-within-a-novel, character Jonathan's story about his ancestors' shtetl. This is a fantastical story, and despite being a supposed historical account, author Jonathan sprinkles lots of features like magical realism into this narrative. The third narrative is tied to the previous two, and is Alex's letters to character Jonathan commenting both on his novel and on their journey. The third narrative is told in the "current" past tense, months after the activity of the first narrative. As all three narratives are told simultaneously, in more or less alternating chapters, you learn about character Jonathan's ancestors at the same time the characters are engaged in their search, and at the same time Alex is reviewing/replaying the search from the storyline future. Thus, Foer tells the past, present and future of the story arc at the same time.

I have a couple of big problems with the novel. The first is that Foer attempts to do so much within Everything is Illuminated that he fails to do justice to most of it. The best example I can give is that of the translator, Alex. Alex's closeted homosexuality and relationship with his abusive father are really only hinted at or glossed over, amongst other things. Alex is the main character of the novel (not character Jonathan), but I really don't feel he was in depth as he needed to be.

The second is that too much of the novel does not seem fresh or original. Too much of the novel doesn't read like a fresh, new literary voice, but like an intelligent writer aping a pantheon of great 20th-Century novelists. The novel-in-a-novel gimmick reminded me of Margaret Atwood. Alex's stilted English in Everything is Illuminated has been compared to Anthony Burgess' nadsat language in A Clockwork Orange (a ludicrous overreach: Burgess cobbled together a whole new language of slang, Foer just uses a few mistranslations (and do I need to point out the "coincidence" that the protagonists of both novels is named "Alex"?)). Foer uses magical realism in a fashion very similar to Salman Rushdie (not Gabriel Garcia Marquez; though Foer's usage of one family to tell the history of a town, combined with the themes of history and memory, plus the repetitious use of the same name for family members across multiple generations, and the story of the town ending in a cataclysm smacks heavily of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude). The usage of an eponymous character caught in a strange adventure is immediately reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth. I could go on.

The book has its moments: some of Alex's engrish is genuinely hilarious, and Lista's story about the destruction of Trachimbrod during WWII is easily the most gripping part of the entire novel. But for the most part, Everything is Illuminated seems to fall short of the lofty goals Foer sets for it. Basically, instead of just coming out and writing a novel Jonathan Safran Foer tries to reinvent the wheel, and it doesn't completely work.

The Life of the World to Come

2008-12-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

The fifth book (of eight?) in Kage Baker's "The Company" series details the life of Alec Checkerfield, the third—uh, shall we say "incarnation"—of Mendoza's lover (Nicholas in "The Garden of Iden"; Edward in "Mendoza in Hollywood").

Most of the novel is pretty interesting: an almost LeCarre-ish cloak-and-dagger story of Alec (and his best friend, "The Captain," a sentient A.I. in the persona of a 16th-century pirate) trying to unravel his connection to Dr. Zeus, Inc. and the company's secrets. It details how Alec unravels his past(s) and steals a time machine (and, in rather contrived fashion, stumbles across Mendoza, trapped 150,000 years in the past). There is also a side-story that uncovers the mind-set and workings of three movers and shakers in the company. By the time the book wraps up it feels like it's close to the denouement, so I'll be interested to see how Baker stretches/delays the plot arc through three more novels.

In my last Kage Baker review, someone warned me that the story goes off the rails here. Well... not yet. There is a point of concern for me towards the end of the novel, when Alec meets his previous selves. I still have mixed feelings about this plot twist and how it was executed. But the series hasn't nuked the fridge just yet.

A side note: Christmas brought many books, so hopefully there will be more reviews in the New Year. The five currently on my nightstand:
Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer) (currently reading)
The Famished Road (Ben Okri)
Black Swan Green (David Mitchell)
World War Z (Max Brooks)
The Book of Jhereg (Steven Brust)

Love in the Time of Cholera

2008-12-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - One Star

What could go wrong, right? Marquez has four three-star or higher rated books on my bookcase already, and this is one of his most acclaimed novels. I'm sure to like it, right?

Or not.

Here's how the book starts: old man (Juvenal) dies, second old man (Florentino) proclaims his love to first old man's widow (Fermina), flashback of young Florentino wooing young Fermina and failing, flashback of young Juvenal wooing the young Fermina in a relatively similar fashion and failing. Boom, there's 125 pages. The novel is less than 350 pages long, so in the first third of the story you learn... NOTHING! Florentino as a young man was a hopelessly love-struck buffoon, Juvenal as a young man was obsessed with sanitation, Fermina as a young woman was an unapproachable ice queen. 125 pages summed up in one sentence.

I had never understood a complaint I'd heard from others about J.R.R. Tolkien: "too much description of scenery." I understand it now. The cities and landscapes are detailed down to the minutest detail in the first third of this novel, but only the minutest character development and plot is given to the reader. Massive fail.

The Graveyard Game

2008-11-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

THE GRAVEYARD GAME (Kage Baker) - Four Stars

Now it starts to get intersting.

The Graveyard Game, Kage Baker's fourth book in "The Company" series, lives up to the promise of the first three and plunges headlong into a massive, X-Files-style conspiracy story, spanning thousands of years of time and every continent on the globe.

At the end of the previous novel (Mendoza in Hollywood), Mendoza lost her shit and killed a bunch of humans. Needless to say this was frowned upon, and as punishment she was sent to a place called "Back Way Back," several hundred thousand years in the past. Graveyard Game follows recurring character Joseph and (minor character until this novel) Mendoza's friend Lewis as they try to uncover where she is and how to rescue her. It is in attempting to do this that they begin to uncover unsettling hints at not just one but several much, much larger mysteries: just how many agents for the Company have disappeared? Why are they disappearing? Why does the same human being that tormented Mendoza in one incarnation in 1500s England and in another incarnation in 1800s California seem to keep recurring through history? What are his connections to the Company? And is there really a secret sub-species of humans hidden underground that is sworn to destroy the Company?

The book also finishes with a delightful twist that changes the playing-field completely for the books to come. I'm already anticipating the next volume.

Kage Baker is better than almost any sci-fi writer I've encountered at writing sci-fi stories that aren't overwhelmed by the sci-fi element. Too many writers make the sci-fi portion the point of their stories; Kage Baker writes interesting mysteries and human dramas where science fiction is merely an element of the plot, not the over-riding force.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun

2008-10-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

ISLAND OF THE SEQUINED LOVE NUN (Christopher Moore) - Four Stars

This book was a delight (as Moore's books, so far, have always been) but also a bit of a surprise. One of his earlier books, Island..., while still full of laughs, has a surprisingly strong plot and moments of drama, particularly in the first two-thirds of the novel as the reader tries to figure out what's going on.

Here's the setup...

Tucker Case, pilot for the pink lear jet of the "Mary Jean Corporation" (hmm, who is that supposed to be), crashes said jet during a mid-flight sexual liason and is forced to flee the country. He ends up on a tiny atoll (Alualu) in the South Pacific populated by a "cargo cult." To explain the cargo cult: during WWII, an American bomber with a blonde bombshell painted on the nose crashed on the island, introducing the natives to a variety of Western goods. In the present day, the cult still worships this "Sky Priestess" in hopes she will return to them with more gifts. When Tucker arrives on the island, he discovers a missionary doctor (Sebastian Curtis) and his blonde bombshell wife (Beth). Beth Curtis routinely appears naked before the villagers and they worship her as their god. Beth and Sebastian need a pilot, and Tucker finds himself in their employ even though not entirely sure what the heck is going on.

Unravelling the mystery of Alualu was an unexpected joy in the book. Expecting straight comedy and slapstick, Island... also presented me with a pretty well-structured and obfuscated mystery. Trying to figure out the purpose for Sebastian and Beth being on the island, what Tucker's role is, and the motives of the mysterious Vincent help to keep things grounded in a story involving shark attacks on man, man attacks on sharks, an old polynesian cannibal, a transvestite Filipino navigator, and a talking fruit bat named Roberto (yep).

Water for Elephants

2008-09-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (Sara Gruen) - Four Stars

What facts I know about the circus I've learned simply from my study of circus marches. This book (which I keep accidentally calling "Like Water for Elephants" ...ha!) is so well-researched you will learn a lot about the train-circuses of the early 20th century without even trying.

This is beside the point, since the story is really a love triangle slash murder mystery, and the circus is merely the setting. But it's the vibrancy of the characters (not just the main characters, but all the background and auxiliary characters) that really drives the story. The story is told in flashbacks by the (now) nearly 100-year-old main character. The alternating chapters also detail his current life in a nursing home, and the horrible indignities of grow old, in very poignant fashion.

The book is not without its flaws. Towards the denouement Gruen gets a little melodramatic with her description of the action (I could almost envision characters raising the back of their hands to their foreheads before speaking) and the ending, while heart-warming and "feel-good," requires a bit more of a suspension of disbelief than the rest of the story.

Still, wonderful characters, vibrant settings, and good plot pacing; there's not more you can ask for from an enjoyable, "light" read.

Under the Volcano

2008-09-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

UNDER THE VOLCANO (Malcolm Lowry) - One Star

A truck carrying a load of thesauri collided with a train full of commas, killing 115 people. However, you don't care about any of them because all you read in the first hundred pages is flavor text and irrelevant tangential fantasies.

There are twenty commas on the first half-page of the novel (six sentences). Let me choose a page at random... page 170. Okay. Counting. 28 commas on this page (and four semi-colons). It's fucking ridiculous.

After the first hundred pages of this novel all I knew was that Geoffrey Firmin (The Consul) was an alcoholic who was going to die, and his wife (Yvonne) had left and returned for reasons unknown. THAT'S IT. Two minor details about two characters. No plot, no story, nothing. They say "write what you know." Thus, John Grisham, a lawyer, writes law thrillers. Malcolm Lowry, a drunk, wrote about a drunk. BUT HE FORGOT TO INCLUDE A FUCKING STORY.

I've been bored to tears after a hundred pages of a story, but never have I been so angry and felt like I've completely wasted my time. And this on a supposed "great novel" of the 20th Century.

At least Hemingway could still write decently when he was soused. Fuck you, Lowry, you fucking drunk asshole.

Mendoza in Hollywood

2008-09-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

MENDOZA IN HOLLYWOOD (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

Mendoza in Hollywood wasn't quite at the level of the first two books in "The Company" series, but it wasn't too far behind. The characters/concept still fascinate me, and if the narration in this story had been a little less repetitive this novel would have been four stars, too.

The novel is told in past-tense and, evidently, as part of a criminal interrogation. Mendoza is the narrator, and she recounts the life and times of early 1860s southern California. Most of this is amusing, but after a while it becomes a little tedious. The main heart of the novel doesn't happen until Mendoza meets a spitting image of her long-dead lover from In the Garden of Iden (which occurred 300 years prior); but this doesn't happen until page 250. Then begins a short but fascinating plot arc about the supposed strategic importance of Catalina Island of the California coast, and how (supposedly) the United States and Britain were engaged in a cloak-and-dagger game for the island for hundreds of years. The last 80 pages were some of the most interesting in the book, and I think this section deserved to be expanded in much greater detail (Mendoza's fugue, in particular, deserved a bit more than a paragraph; although leaving it up to the reader's imagination was pretty effective, too).

At the end of the novel, Mendoza has been subjected to a rather unique punishment, and of course I'll be getting the next novel in the series to see what happens.

House of Sand and Fog

2008-08-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (Andre Dubus III) - Four Stars

They don't come much more tragic than this.

From very early on in the novel you know things are not going to end well, and it becomes excruciating reading this novel and waiting for that dark cloud to materialize. The story is effective because the characters are effective, and you care (where it's pure sympathy or merely feeling sorry) for all of them.

Kathy Lazaro (nee Nicolo) is a clinically depressed, recovering alcoholic whose husband left her months ago and who is having increasing difficulty maintaining appearances. She is viewed as a failure and a fuck-up by her family, and the house that she inherited from her deceased father is the only item that can help prove her stability and responsibility to her family. Massoud Behrani is a former Iranian military officer who, after being forced to flee Iran years ago, is having great difficulty maintaining the lifestyle his family is accustomed to. Kathy loses her home due to unpaid business taxes for that location. She does not run a business out of her home—the taxes are a clerical error—and, after dealing with the county and believing the issue to be resolved, she ignores further mailings on the subject and winds up evicted. She is a relatively blameless victim of an American bureaucracy that is fast to act but slow to admit and correct mistakes. Only days after being evicted, the county auctions off the house to pay the back taxes, and the man who buys it is Massoud Behrani. He invests the entirety of his dwindling savings in the purchase of the house, hoping to flip it for a profit so that his family can live comfortably and his son can have a college education.

These two blameless protagonists with all of their eggs in the same basket are thus placed on a collision course with one another. Kathy refuses to let the house go for fear of familial repercussion and because it's all she has left. Behrani refuses to sell back without making a significant profit because his family's livelihood and future is literally at stake. Neither side refuses to yield, and the situation spirals out of control. Lester Burdon, one of the police officers who evicts Kathy, because both sympathetic and infatuated with her and willingly becomes entangled in her battle to regain possession of her house.

It's still easier for me to be sympathetic to the Behranis than Kathy. Their battle is almost one of emotion versus logic: Behrani stands on the logical facts and is not swayed by sentimentality or tears (thinking without feeling); Kathy lets her heart rule her and rarely makes good choices (feeling without thinking). Indeed, the book makes it fairly demanding to remain sympathetic to Kathy and Lester: they continue to make bad decision after bad decision, acting rashly and never stopping for even a moment to THINK about what they are doing and the possible outcomes. But the book also offers good insight into their thought processes, who they are and what makes them tick, and it makes sense and works with the characters' actions. When they both hit bottom it is heartbreaking.

The movie, I think, might even be slightly better than the book. It's very faithful to the story, and moves quicker so the characters stay fresher and remain more sympathetic. Ben Kingsley was so spot-on as Behrani it's impossible for me to even imagine another person in the role. Jennifer Connelly does a very good job as Kathy, and I'm even more impressed with her performance now that I've read the novel and realize how badly she was miscast. Kathy is a frail, small, sympathetically pathetic and almost mousy character, and Jennifer Connelly naturally possesses too much glamour and dignity to be 100% perfect in the role. The ending of the novel is even more brutal than that of the movie.

This is not a light read, but it's a well-told, believable story about well-crafted, if sadly flawed, characters.

Once again Lester had felt nauseated with shame. He went back inside the house, lay on his bed, and for hours imagined an entirely different scene, him taking Pablo's hand, crushing it in his own, then punching Munoz so hard in the face he'd be unconscious for days and wake up in mortal fear of Lester Burdon. Or he imagined himself sidestepping Pablo's arm only to grab it, jerk it behind his back, and break it. And these pictures in his head were not new. He had them for ever boy he ever had to fight at Chula Vista High. Maybe because he was tall and quiet and thin he called more attention to himself than the other anglos at school. But alyways it was the same—"Burdone maricon! Burdone maricon!"—and Lester would try to avoid the fight as long as possible. First he would deny to himself that that was where this name-calling was really going; he would try to smile off whatever insult was coming his way, and only when he felt the push of hands on his chest would he push back, hoping that would be enough, which it never was, and he would hold up fists he had no faith in only to be knocked to the ground, where he would stay curled up waiting for a teacher or someone to break it up or for the bully to lose interest and disappear. But they rarely did. Even when you arrested them, they showed up in your sleep, determined to unmask you, and show you to be the coward you really were.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

2008-06-22T17:54:00.000-07:00

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE (Shirley Jackson) - Four Stars

(This review has spoilers. Since this novel hinges more on atmosphere and personality than plot twists, I do not feel that disclosing them will ruin the experience for those who have yet to read the novel. However, it's your call to make.)

Mary Katherine (Merricat), her sister Constance, and their Uncle Julian live on the Blackwood Estates. The rest of the wealthy Blackwood family all perished at a family dinner laced with arsenic. Merricat, who had been sent to bed without supper, escaped their fate. Constance, who cooked the meal, was arrested, charged, and eventually acquitted of the murders (this last part earned her the everlasting enmity of the town's public, leading her to become acutely agoraphobic). Uncle Julian was the only person to survive the poisoning, though it left him physically and mentally crippled.

My first impulse was to classify this as a novel with an unreliable narrator. I don't think that's quite accurate, though: NO ONE in the novel is reliable. Part of the fun in reading this short novel is trying to catch the nuggets of truth that drift by in rivers of fantasy and dementia. The narrator is eighteen-year old Merricat, a flighty young girl with a vivid imagination and a rather shocking psychopathic streak. Kind of a twisted amalgamation of Alice (in Wonderland) and Wednesday Addams. The novel isn't scary but rather creepy, and the creepiness comes in no small part from Merricat, who one moment will be mulling over nature and her belief in sympathetic magic and the next moment wishing death upon someone with chilling casualness.

The other fun thing about this book is that it asks (or rather, implies) far more questions than it answers. When it's finally revealed that it was Merricat, not Constance, that murdered their entire family (a twist that is visible from miles away), one must ask why Constance felt compelled to take the fall for her sister. And what was Merricat's motive, if there was one? During Constance's trial, with the rest of the family dead, Merricat was sent to an orphanage. This, I feel, is a key point in the story (not just because it is brought up time and time again), but even still Ms. Jackson doesn't elaborate. What happened in the orphanage? Because something obviously did. Despite talking directly to her many times throughout the story, during one meal Uncle Julian shouts out that Constance is his only niece, that his other niece died in an orphanage. Merricat quite obviously isn't a ghost; does this signify that Julian is well aware of who really poisoned every one, a way of "disowning" Merricat? Or is it simply a dementia-spurred outburst from an arsenic-addled mind? On the other hand, the crippling agoraphobia of Constance and Merricat isn't really addressed at all: just accepted as part of reality.

In the end, I suppose it's irrelevant to the story. The point of the novel is not to unravel the mystery of the Blackwoods, but to witness how the Blackwood sisters cope with the aftermath.

You Suck

2008-06-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

YOU SUCK (Christopher Moore) - Three Stars

I really wanted to give the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends four stars, because I like Moore's writing and the book was very funny and tremendously entertaining, but...

Well, one of the main problems in creating wonderful characters is that readers get annoyed when you under-utilize them. Part of Moore's problem here is that he tries to wedge a cast of thousands into a 328-page book: Jody, Tommy, Elijah, Blue, Abby, Jared, Steven, Rivera, Cavuto, William, the Emperor, the Animals (what, 5-6 of them)... that's, what, eighteen people with the better part of at least one chapter dedicated to them. The book comes across as a little unfocused, and the ensemble play doesn't quite work.

The best new character, by far, is "Abby Normal," a brilliantly written stereotype of a teenage goth. Even still, she kind of usurps the main character duties from Jody and Tommy in the last several chapters and becomes a bit overused. I was disappointed that the two most interesting characters in the book, Jody and Elijah (not Tommy, who is whiny and never knows what to do, but always conveniently makes a bad snap-judgment when the plot needs it), did not get even more face time.

The ending to the book was tremendously disappointing, but it did leave the door wide open for another sequel (which, hopefully, will be written).

Finally, this book was a bit of a let-down for its change of tone from its predecessor. Bloodsucking Fiends was first and foremost a vampire novel, with detailed, quirky characters that I found great affection for. Vampirism, a concept that has been done and overdone a million times in literary circles, was given a little twist and treated in a fairly novel, interesting fashion. Comedy was thrown in on top of that in large quantities, but it was still only icing on the cake. The formula worked marvelously. You Suck is simply a comedy; all of the atmosphere and creativity of the first novel is disdainfully abandoned for an overdose of wacky hijinks, and vampirism is no longer treated as a complicated aspect of a character's personality but rather as a clothesline upon which to hang cheap gags.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

2008-05-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY (Michael Chabon) - Three Stars

Czech Jew Josef Kavalier escapes Europe in the face of Hitler's onslaught and flees to the United States to live with his cousin, Sammy Klayman. Sam, a somewhat spacey young man with a vivid imagination, notices Josef's skill at drawing and two go on to leave an indelible mark on the history of American comic books.

Michael Chabon's writing style is immensely frustrating, because he offers glimpses of greatness without any consistency. He writes like he was the offspring of Vladimir Nabokov and V.C. Andrews. One section of the novel will be written so beautifully you have to pause and savor it immediately after reading, and the passage right after that will make you wrinkle your nose in disgust. Half this novel belongs in the Library of Congress, the other half in San Jose State University's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Another frustrating aspect is the inconsistent creativity. Chabon has many very original sections in the novel (the sequence of events in Antarctica, the story of the Escapist in Chapter 8, aside from that execrable first half-paragraph), but there are times when this drops off and his literary influences are very clear (E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime had more than a little influence on this novel).

But, now that I've thought more about it, I think my main problem with the novel was that one of the main characters, Sam Clay, was a boring character. Josef Kavalier was an interesting character (and, quite obviously, the "prime" character from page one onward) and Rosa Saks was a VERY interesting character—I think there was far more material that could have been plumbed from the interaction between those two—but Sam Clay really was not. In many ways, he seemed a bit of a cliché to me, and his many secrets and neuroses were pretty easy to figure out (e.g., the Tracy Bacon sub-plot). "The Amazing Adventures of Josef Kavalier" would have been a better novel.

Howards End

2008-03-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

HOWARDS END (E.M. Forster) - One Star

Howards End is now the fourth book to fail the 100-page test (After The Power and The Glory, A House for Mr. Biswas and American Pastoral).

Every book I start I insist upon reading at least 100 pages before giving it a rating. I figure that, if after 100 pages I still don't have the slightest interest in the story or the characters, I stop reading and give it a one-star rating. Sometimes I trudge through and read the whole novel anyway (Lolita, Under the Glacier).

Not this one. Mind-numbingly dull characters, a paper-thin (and boring) plot arc, some unusual story structure choices (why a whole chapter on Leonard Bast so early in the novel? I understand he becomes a major character later in the story, but he's a peripheral character in ONE SCENE in the first hundred pages: we do not need a chapter devoted to setting up his character that early in the novel), and some excessively florid writing are the four major flaws I had with the book.

That, and the first 100 pages was nothing but social faux pas and the awkwardness of cross-class relations in early twentieth century England. Which I'm sure was riveting at the time it was written, but now it's like trying to choke down drywall.

Sky Coyote

2008-03-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

SKY COYOTE (Kage Baker) - Four Stars

The second of Kage Baker's "Company" series, and my review of it is pretty much the same: a three or four-star plot with a five-star concept and five-star characters. For the concept behind "The Company," please refer to the second paragraph of my earlier review of In the Garden of Iden.

This novel follows Joseph more than Mendoza, though she does have a supporting role. Joseph, Mendoza, and other top notch agents of the Company are sent to California circa 1700 to preserve an entire Chumash Native American village before the Spaniards and English spread into the state and wipe them out. Joseph, a Facilitator Grade I (i.e., a guy who can talk anybody into almost anything) is selected to portray "Sky Coyote," one of the Chumash gods, and convince them that he's taking them to Paradise. I get a feeling (though I don't know for certain) that Baker put a modicum of historical accuracy into the novel; regardless, I enjoyed the way she presented turn-of-the-18th century Native Americans as semi-modern capitalists.

Religion again plays a large role in Baker's story. I greatly approve of the way she praises and criticizes the various aspects of religion and faith in general without singling out any particular religion. She also weaves in a nice dichotomy when a Native American from a different tribe comes to the Chumash to convert them; Joseph/Sky Coyote has to debunk the missionary's claims and point out the holes in the other faith without compromising his own faith-based mission.

Kage Baker's writing is conversational and engaging, in a style similar to a Stephen King. The literary merits might be debatable, but she connects with the reader with tremendous ease and is a wonderful storyteller.

PS: This entire novel is worth reading if only for the Chumash celebration, where the Chumash tribe puts on an elaborate and utterly hilarious pantomime, replete with puppetry and ventriloquism, all about Sky Coyote's penis.

I Capture the Castle

2008-02-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE (Dodie Smith) - Four Stars

Cassandra Mortmain and her family live in penniless poverty in a dilapidated castle in between-the-wars England. Her father is a famous author who released one sensational book (which, we are led to imagine, is something of a stylistic cross between Finnegan's Wake and Pale Fire) and then came down with an all-time case of writer's block. Her stepmother is an artist's model who loves being naked. Her older sister is a reclusive beauty who daydreams about becoming high society. Cassandra herself is an aspiring author who starts writing journals to become a better writer (the book is presented as a series of journals). A wealthy American family with two eligible bachelor sons becomes their new landlords and the scheming commences.

If you can make it through the first hundred pages of this novel, you've got it made. The book starts off terribly slowly, with rough character sketches and lots of descriptions of scenery (tangent... Descriptions of scenery do not bother me like they do Mo, but I'm finally beginning to understand her viewpoint: scenery seems to be a default "fall-back" for lesser authors when they can't think of anything better to write, excepting those stories where the scenery is so important to the plot that it can practically be considered an additional character, such as in the "Lord of the Rings" series). Once the Cotton family moves into Scoatney Hall, the book picks up steam and becomes very good (sometimes great) all the way to the end. In retrospect, I see that this was just another of Smith's numerous clever subtleties: the "writing" in the book gets better and better as the book progresses because it's supposed to reflect Cassandra's improving skill from practicing in her journals.

The book is very good because the characters are great. The characters are all very well-defined, with separate and distinct personalities. The plot requires no suspensions of disbelief: the characters act as people would act; the complexities of human relationships aren't always logical and rarely finish "neatly." The book is a must read for Anglophiles, full of British personality and particularly the dry, "arched eyebrows" style of British humor (which Smith occasionally deviates from with pointed bluntness, usually to surprising and humorous effect). In the end, however (and this is not meant to be a sexist comment), I think female readers will get more out of it than male readers. It does, after all, deal with a teenage girl's coming of age (complicated family life, first love or loves, etc.); and, even with as well I would consider myself at empathizing with women, there were several passages where I couldn't help but think I was missing out on some of the impact simply because I was male.

Ivy had on a pale grey suit, tight white gloves, and the brightest blue hat I ever saw, which accentuated the red in her cheeks. She is a good-looking girl. Enormous feet, though.

Ubik

2008-02-03T23:16:00.000-08:00

UBIK (Philip K. Dick) - Three Stars

I was expecting the Dick to be more... substantial.

Pardon my pompous comedy—I've already been accused once of being a sci-fi hating elitist—but I still have yet to read a fantasy writer that can actually WRITE. Write, like a Rushdie or an Irving (Kage Baker and Mary Doria Russell have come closest). When I saw Ubik on Time's list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the past 100 years, I was expecting a brilliantly executed novel. Instead, I found a moderately intriguing, well-conceived, but poorly-executed book that was much like any other sci-fi novel I've ever read, only with a bit more ingenuity and fatalism.

Ubik is almost a murder mystery: Dick does a good job of making reality diaphanous and confusing the reader. Who died in the explosion on Luna? Who was behind it? And what's going on with time? The book did keep my interest, trying to unravel just what the fuck was going on here. The creativity of the plot carried me through the sections of sub-standard prose.

In the end, the book was kept from greatness for me by a few issues. Dick has too many throw-away sections that don't serve the main purpose of the story. The protagonist is really a whiny jerk for much of the novel. Dick shows a bit of a misogynistic bent towards his female characters. The left-turn at the end was "shocking" (though I figured it out a few pages before it was revealed), but what purpose did it serve? All of the plot-twists were fairly haphazard, nothing was wrapped up: sure, it's great to throw in a bunch of twists and turns that confuse the reader, but it's even better if all those twists and turns share a unifying greater theme.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***
(Sure, the ending's not a cheat per se, but it basically says "Haha, everything that happened in this book was bullshit and everyone's fucked." Okay, great, why'd I read this again?)

So, yeah: Dick was very clever and quite ingenious, but he was a pretty average writer and this is a good, not great book.

The Satanic Verses

2008-01-29T21:50:00.000-08:00

THE SATANIC VERSES (Salman Rushdie) - Four Stars

I think I will now go on record as stating that Salman Rushdie is the greatest living author on the planet. His use of magical realism is less confusing and more (for lack of a better term) believable than other authors (Marquez included). Plus, he's one of the best I've ever read at weaving plot threads and ideas together. There's so little that's "throw-away" in his work: even the most minor, humorous asides add to the purpose of the novel and have a cumulative effect on the reader.

How to sum up such a (typically complex) novel like The Satanic Verses? I don't think I can. I've been thinking about the book for two days and can't figure out a simple outline for it: there's too much ground to cover. A hijacked airliner explodes over Britain. Two survivors plummet to Earth, one an India actor disillusioned with his Bollywood fame, the other a successful English voice-over actor disillusioned with his attempts to meld into English society. After a miraculous (safe) landing, one begins to transform into an angel (halo and all), while the other grows hairy legs, hooves and horns. But so much more follows that.

The novel is partially a study on the duality of good and evil. Far from portraying them as opposites, Rushdie portrays them as two sides of the same coin: with good capable of evil acts, evil capable of good acts, and the propensity of both in every living person. Even the omniscient narrator, at different parts of the novel, comes across as (is implied to be) both God and Satan. Are they the same entity?

The novel is partially a study on faith. Largely pessimistic, Rushdie makes some harsh comments against the origin of Islam (basically retelling the story of the Prophet Mohammed from a different angle than the Quran) but, surprisingly, leaves his thoughts on the validity of faith fairly open-ended.

The novel is primarily a study on alienation, and the lives of outsiders. From immigrants trying to form a new life in a foreign country, to people trying to form a new religion, even believers trying to live amongst non-believers (and vice versa) in both the religious and the political senses.

And yet, on top of all this, Rushdie still layers a poignant commentary on the nature of a person's hopes and dreams, and of the envy that arises from watching another live your dream. The capability of good and evil in two wonderfully developed characters, and the actions and interactions that bring those passions to the fore is, to me, the heart of the novel.

Question: What is the opposite of faith?
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.
Doubt.

Bloodsucking Fiends

2008-01-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

BLOODSUCKING FIENDS (Christopher Moore) - Four Stars

Chris Moore books are like candy. They are breezy, quick, delightful reads. They don't kid themselves (or the reader) by trying to delve very deeply into matters of great importance. The plotlines aren't terribly complicated or convoluted, though there's usually one or two surprising plot-twists towards the end. But, in both of Moore's books that I've read so far, they've kept me very entertained (in part by being quite funny) and I've come to care for the characters very much. That's what makes the books a success. His novels are little more than clotheslines upon which are hung one set piece after another, but it works because I care for the characters and am interested in finding out what happens to them next.

Moore's take on the vampire mythos covers some old ground, but makes a few interesting changes while good-naturedly ribbing some of its forebearers (like Bram Stoker and Anne Rice). One of Moore's earlier novels (his third, first published in 1995), his writing style isn't quite as refined as in A Dirty Job: the absurdist wit isn't as sharp, although the humanist elements are still present. I'm glad he wrote a sequel to this novel (You Suck, 2007) as I enjoyed Jody and Tommy even more than Charlie in A Dirty Job.

This book also has the best author bio line I've even seen...

Christopher Moore is the author of seven novels, including this one. He began writing at age six and became the oldest known child prodigy when, in his early thirties, he published his first novel. His turn-ons are the ocean, playing the toad lotto, and talking animals on TV. His turn-offs are salmonella, traffic, and rude people. Chris enjoys cheese crackers, acid jazz, and otter scrubbing. He lives in an inaccessible island fortress in the Pacific.

The House on Mango Street

2007-12-24T18:11:00.000-08:00

THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET (Sandra Cisneros) - Three Stars

Esperanza, we hardly knew ye.

Unlike many stories, which drag on far too long and lose novelty and freshness by the time the final page comes around, The House on Mango Street is one of those rare books that is exactly opposite: just when the book feels like it's hitting its stride and you have formed a rapport with the main character, the book is over.

The House on Mango Street details the trials and tribulations of Esperanza Cordero, a young pre-teen (and then teenage) latina girl growing up in an ethnic Chicago neighborhood. The novel is kind of a hodge-podge of angsty childhood and teenage themes: alienation, dissatisfaction with the present, "coming-of-age", etc. It's told in a truly original style, a series of twenty or thirty vignettes, some only a hundred words long, that read almost like diary entries. However, considering the book is barely a hundred pages to begin with, this stylistic device means there's really only 75-80 "true" pages of material (making it a very fast read; I wasn't really keeping track, but I'm sure it only took me 60-90 minutes from start to finish).

Some of the writing is very striking, and Cisneros has a good voice. She does tend to harp on two points in particular ("poverty sucks" and "men suck"; I agree—and?) a little too frequently for a book of such brevity, and some of her other vignettes practically beg for more elaboration and depth. The House on Mango Street is a literary dégustation that leaves the reader wanting more, which, I suppose, is the sign of a good book.

In the Garden of Iden

2007-12-23T12:47:00.000-08:00

IN THE GARDEN OF IDEN (Kage Baker) - Four Stars

In the Garden of Iden is the first of Kage Baker's "Company" novels (of which I will be reading all of at some point). I suppose it's really a three or three-and-a-half star story, but it's a five star concept with five star characters. It's a sci-fi story set in 16th-century England.

Without giving too much a way, the concept is as follows... in the twenty-fourth century, the human race has created both time travel and immortality, but each has a catch. Time travel can only occur into the past and back to the present, not forward into the future, cannot change history even if you try to, and is risky. And immortality is achievable only by medical and technical intervention, i.e., by turning people into cyborgs. "The Company" that invents both of these technologies (Dr. Zeus, Inc.) begins sending agents back into the past to rescue extinct species of flora and fauna. The Company realizes another thing: while you can't assassinate Hitler or otherwise change the course of events of World War II, you CAN send agents back in time to rescue/steal priceless artifacts and works of art from Nazi hands. Soon the Company becomes an all-knowing, seemingly unstoppable entity, both altruistic and profiteering.

But I get ahead of myself. All of this is told to the reader (or implied) in the first book, but the main story revolves around the recruitment and first mission of a new agent, "Mendoza." Mendoza is a young Spanish girl who is captured and tortured by the Inquisition before being rescued/recruited by "Joseph." It's worth noting that The Company usually recruits children, often from dire situations like that, and doesn't give them a choice in the matter. Mendoza spends years being taught and trained in The Company's secret fortress (evidently, underground in Australia), and eventually is transformed into a cyborg to preserve her for all time at the barely adult age of eighteen.

Trained as a botanist, she is then sent to England to preserve several now-lost species of plants from the elaborate gardens of Sir Walter Iden. Easier said than done, as Mendoza (along with mentor Joseph and fellow operative Nef) lands right in the middle of pre-Elizabethan England's great religious and political upheavals. This is, of course, further complicated when Mendoza falls for Iden's secretary, a free-thinker (for the times) and also a religious fanatic (just not of the particular religious flavors favored at the time). Baker refuses to take the easy way out (immortal, technologically advanced beings would have not difficulty using brute-force to get out of many sticky situations), instead requiring her characters to use wit and guile to disentangle themselves from various messes.

The plot itself is old hat, but Baker does a good job of foreshadowing impending disaster without completely giving away the store. The book at first comes across as a scathing indictment against religion, but the more you read the more you realize its more a scathing indictment against fanaticism for any cause. And, as I mentioned before, but the end of the book I was more invested in Mendoza and Joseph than in the actual novel itself. Not a bad story, though, (I liked it better than most of the "pure" sci-fi I've read) and I'll definitely purchase more "Company" novels in the future to read the further adventures of Mendoza.

"The Lollard statutes were voted in today," I told him angrily.

"The what?" he said, and did a fast scan. "Oh. The anti-Protestant laws, huh? Say, have either of you had any ideas about a Christmas masque I can write?"

"They aren't just anti-Protestant laws," I fumed. "They're special statutes that put bishops above the law. They can arrest people, judge them, condemn them, and execute them—and the civil courts can't interfere! The Parliament just voted them in!"

"Did you think it couldn't happen here?" Joseph grinned briefly.

"For God's sake, it's crazy! These people are giving up their civil rights! It's a step back into the Middle Ages!"

"Funny thing about those Middle Ages," said Joseph. "They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they're in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there's an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can't deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking."

A Dirty Job

2007-11-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

A DIRTY JOB (Christopher Moore) - Five Stars

Christopher Moore is part Kurt Vonnegut, part Elmore Leonard, part Douglas Adams; and, really, if you need more than that to convince you to read him, there's something wrong with you.

I don't think I've ever laughed aloud while reading a novel as frequently as I did with A Dirty Job. Not when reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Not when reading the travails of Kilgore Trout or Bertie Wooster or Yossarian. Moore finds the pulse of society and wraps all manner of outlandish events around it, but the key to the book is that everything remains at least "in the line of sight" of reality. The humor is not quite as absurd as Adams', the social satire not quite as sharp as Vonnegut's, the ear for dialogue not quite as pitch-perfect as Leonard's; but Moore is above-average in all three respects and, woven together, has a writing style refreshingly unique.

A Dirty Job revolves around Charlie Asher, a second-hand goods salesman who loses his wife shortly after child-birth and then is appalled to find out that he has been recruited as one of Death's minions. As Charlie races around San Francisco trying to both understand his new position in the world and fend off the coming apocalypse, Moore surrounds him with a potpurri of vivid characters that are all the more funny because I guarantee you've probably met each of their "types" at least once in your life.

To reveal more would be criminal, but suffice to say the book includes an asian neighbor with wide culinary tastes, a tormented goth store-clerk, humongous supernatural dogs that eat bread, soap, and kitchen appliances, an ex-cop with a penchant for internet brides, a fourteen-inch tall, alligator-headed assassin, a hand-job in an alleyway from a demon, an army of squirrel people and numerous people being slain by the word "kitty."

The book is not without its flaws. The protagonist is mind-numbingly stupid at certain crucial junctures and, considering he has all the information the reader does, his immunity to logical thinking becomes frustrating. Also, the book never really "peaks" at the denouement: it just kinda rolls on into the finish. And the true identity of the Luminatus (which is written like it's supposed to be a grand revelation at the end) is not only predictable several hundred pages from the end of the book but is also given away for free on the book's cover.

I considered giving the book four stars. But, in the end, I realized my rankings are more about how much I enjoyed a particular book, and I can't recall the last time I enjoyed a book as much as A Dirty Job.

Quotes from A Dirty Job...

Charlie popped the toast up manually. It was a little rare, but if he pushed it down again it would burn, unless he watched it every second and popped it up manually again. So now he'd probably be infected with some rare and debilitating undercooked toast pathogen. Mad toast diesease! Fucking toaster people...The can opener slipped again, spurting tuna juice on his shirt and sending his toast scooting to the floor, and now there was fuzz on it. Fuzz on his toast! Fuzz on the toast of Death. What the hell good was it to be Lord of the Underworld if there was fuzz on your under-done toast. "Fuck!"

"What happened?" he asked.

There followed a barrage of Chinese and Russian mixed with the odd English word: bird, window, broken, black, and make shit on myself.

"Her neighbor told the uniforms as soon as they arrived. Come on, it's our case. We need to roll. Cut this guy loose. Ray Macy and some Goth-chef chick are waiting for him downstairs."

"Ray Macy is the one who called me, he thought Asher was going to kill her."

"I know. Right crime, wrong guy. Let's go."

"We still have him on the concealed-weapon charge."

"A cane with a sword in it? What, you want to go before a judge and tell him that you arrested this guy on suspicion of being a serial killer, but he plea-bargained it down to being a huge fucking nerd?"

"Mama," Sophie said.

The first time she had said "Mama" had brought Charlie to tears. He had been looking over her little shoulder at a picture of Rachel. The second time she said it, it was less emotional. She was in her high chair at the breakfast bar and was talking to the toaster.

"That's not Mommy, Soph, that's the toaster."

"Mama," Sophie insisted, reaching out for the toaster.

"You're just trying to fuck with me, aren't you?" Charlie said.

"Mama," Sophie said to the fridge.

"Swell," Charlie said.

Operation Shylock

2007-10-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

OPERATION SHYLOCK (Philip Roth) - Two Stars

Jews.

Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews.

Jews?

Jews.

That pretty much sums up the book.

The first Philip Roth novel I read was Portnoy's Complaint, and I absolutely loved it. I loved the neurotic, tortured narrative voice. I loved the rapier wit and bluntly crass and adult language in the book. Completely naive to the autobiographical seasoning that flavors all of Roth's work, I laughed at Portnoy and his travails. I very nearly gave the novel five stars.

Then I moved on to American Pastoral. I had very high hopes, based equally on how much I had loved Portnoy and the fact that the book was in Time's Top 100 list. So I read about Swede Levov, and I read some more about Swede Levov, and I read some more about Swede Levov, and I said oh my god is he ever going to introduce a story in this book and then, after approximately 100 pages of nothing but literary fellatio on the main character, I threw the book across the room and gave it one star.

So it was with some trepidation that I finally moved on to Operation Shylock. Would it be as neurotically hilarious as Portnoy's Complaint? Or would it be as mind-numbingly self-involved as American Pastoral? The answer is a little of both, and neither at the same time. It's as neurotic as Portnoy without being as funny, and it's certainly self-involved, though not quite as much as Pastoral.

There isn't so much of a plot as there is a clothesline upon which to hang wacky hijinx and wacky hijinx. Briefly, the American Jewish author Philip Roth discovers that there is a person in Israel who is impersonating him in the name of Diasporism (which is the concept that the Jewish culture can only be saved by abandoning Israel and reintegrating back into Europe). Hilarity ensues.

Possibly my biggest problem with the book is that Roth provides nearly all the possible answers to every question he asks. At first it is entertaining to watch the looping, rambling logic of the neurotic narrator (Roth) talking himself into one thing and then out of another and then back again. But the trick gets stale fast because it's always the same, and eventually you realize that the story isn't going to progress more than three or four pages without him veering off on some rambling tangent. There are numerous pro-con arguments in the novel, most of them in the form of lengthy soliloquies from Roth or another character and, while it's great to read such a passioned argument from both sides of issue "X", I couldn't help but get the feeling that this was becoming a zero-sum novel. Almost everything said in it is cancelled out at some other point.

Then there are the characters: so many of them extraneous! So many of them simply present to further the plot along without serving real purpose or adding to the story; characters that are road signs instead of people. And the plot arc (or arcs): never lasting very long, and not a one that carries all the way through the story. The final confrontation with the Roth impersonator is over by page 238 (out of 400)! After that: more wacky hijinx, more "this is a fine mess you've gotten us into, Ollie!" But no overwhelming theme, no paramount point other than Jews, Jews, Jews. What it's like to be a Jew, anti-semitism, the barbarism of the Israeli state, etc.

Which is a shame, because Roth does make some good points and provides good insight into the "neurosis of being a Jew" (for lack of a better term) for us gentiles. And at the beginning of the book, when I thought for a moment he was going to take the whole thing seriously, Roth offers up some very powerful passages, like the one below about seeing accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk for the first time at trial.

In the end, the book came across as a rambling, unfocused work, drawn out way too long, with a few good passages stuck on a fairly silly plot.

There he was. There he was. Once upon a time, drove two, three hundred of them into a room barely big enough for fifty, wedged them in every which way, bolted the doors shut, and started up the engine. Pumped out carbon monoxide for half an hour, waited to hear the screams die down, then sent in the live ones to pry out the dead ones and clean up the place for the next big load. "Get that shit out of there," he told them. Back when the transports were really rolling, did this ten, fifteen times a day, sometimes sober, sometimes not, but always with plenty of gusto. Vigorous, healthy boy. Good worker. Never sick. Not even drink slowed him down. Just the opposite. Bludgeoned the bastards with an iron pipe, tore open the pregnant women with his sword, gouged out their eyes, whipped their flesh, drove nails through their ears, once took a drill and bored a hole right in someone's buttocks—felt like it that day, so he did it. Screaming in Ukrainian, shouting in Ukrainian, and when they didn't understand Ukrainian, shot them in the head. What a time! Nothing like it ever again! A mere twenty-two and he owned the place—could do to any of them whatever he wished. To wield a whip and a pistol and a sword and a club, to be young and healthy and strong and drunk and powerful, boundlessly powerful, like a god! Nearly a million of them, a million, and on every one a Jewish face in which he could read the terror. Of him. Of him! Of a peasant boy of twenty-two! In the history of the entire world, had the opportunity ever been given to anyone anywhere to kill so many people all by himself, one by one? What a job! A sensational blowout every day! One continuous party! Blood! Vodka! Women! Death! Power! And the screams! Those unending screams! And all of it work, good, hard work and yet wild, wild, untainted joy—the joy most people only get to dream of, nothing short of ecstasy! A year, year and a half of that is just about enough to satisfy a man forever; after that a man need never complain that life had passed him by...

The Sirens of Titan

2007-10-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

THE SIRENS OF TITAN (Kurt Vonnegut) - Four Stars

The brilliance of Vonnegut, to me, was his mastery at writing very, very serious stories using an extremely casual, friendly, conversational narrative voice. It was evident in Slaughterhouse-Five, it was evident in Mother Night, and it's certainly evident in The Sirens of Titan.

Sirens... uses a common Vonnegut hook, in that the novel superficially appears to have a fantastical science-fiction plot. The richest, most depraved man on Earth is offered a trip into deep space with a beautiful woman. What he doesn't know is that his entire future has already been planned out, and he can only follow the path that his been set for him like a rat in a maze.

In reality, the book is a cynical condemnation at the ease with which human beings can be manipulated: by commercialism, the military, and (most importantly in the novel) religion. The book questions the very concept of free will, and poses the idea that maybe the entire purpose of the human race is to fulfill a minor task for a third party (one that is still unknown to humanity). (The influence of Vonnegut's idea can be found, most notably, in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, where the Earth was nothing more than a computer an alien race was using to solve a problem.) In addition, the book points out how readily human beings will sacrifice one another to make a point or achieve a goal.

And of course, Vonnegut wields a sharp, ironic blade. In the middle of a story about manipulation, the religion that gets founded on Earth is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent: a church that claims that God absolutely does not care in the least about the actions of man, and that most of man's efforts are inconsequential. And through this Vonnegut's humanist beliefs are exposed: if mankind weren't so worried about what happens after we die, we could probably be a lot more decent to each other while we're alive.

Wizards

2007-09-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

WIZARDS (various) - Three Stars

The problem with sci-fi/fantasy novels is that, with a few exceptions, most sci-fi/fantasy authors are inferior writers compared with other fiction genres. This might sound like a harsh indictment, but look at it honestly: can you really make an argument that Philip K. Dick, Neil Gaiman, and Anne Rice are superior to John Irving, Salman Rushdie, and Ernest Hemingway? Of course not. Dick was a uniquely above-average sci-fi author, Gaiman is very good (though I'm not wholly sold on his "greatness"), and Rice is a stereotypical fantasy author: not especially deft or skilled at handling the English language, but supported nonetheless by a rabid fan base which idolizes her characters.

That is the key to successful sci-fi/fantasy writing, in my view: fantastic characters. Since the writing is, 90% of the time, inferior to most of mainstream fiction, a fantasy story lives or dies with the bond forged between the protagonist(s) and the reader. Wow, this sounds mean. Really, I do like the genre, I just think that most of the output of the genre is not worth the effort of reading. That it is why short-story compilations are perfect for the sci-fi/fantasy world.

Wizard... is a compilation of eighteen short-stories by eighteen different authors. The eighteen stories combined for 56 stars, which averages out to a little over three for the book entire. I will provide ratings for every story, and brief reviews for the very good (4/5 stars) or very bad (1 star)...

FIVE STARS
"The Ruby Incomparable" (Kage Baker)

FOUR STARS
"Holly and Iron" (Garth Nix)
"Barrens Dance" (Peter S. Beagle)
"Zinder" (Tanith Lee)
"Billy and the Wizard" (Terry Bisson)
"Stonefather" (Orson Scott Card)

THREE STARS
"The Witch's Headstone" (Neil Gaiman)
"Color Vision" (Mary Rosenblum)
"The Stranger's Hands" (Tad Williams)
"Naming Day" (Patricia A. McKillip)
"Winter's Wife" (Elizabeth Hand)
"A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or The Devil's Ninth Question" (Andy Duncan)
"The Manticore Spell" (Jeffrey Ford)
"The Magikkers" (Terry Dowling)

TWO STARS
"A Fowl Tale" (Eoin Colfer)
"Slipping Sideways Through Eternity" (Jane Yolen)
"The Magic Animal" (Gene Wolfe)

ONE STAR
"Stone Man" (Nancy Kress)

"Stone Man" is a story about a modern-day teen miscreant who discovers that magic does exist, that mages are in a war against the industrialists, and that he has the power to control stones. A tired premise is the least of this story's troubles: Kress seems to think that tossing out a bunch of skater lingo and sanitized tough-talk ("forget you!" and "crap" appear incessantly) every paragraph will make the story seem "legit," but she mishandles it badly and the story instead seems forced and incredibly phony. This story is a face-plant on the sidewalk of fantasy literature.
"Holly and Iron" at first seems like a mundane "nature magic versus metal magic" story (another well-worn fantasy concept) but instead turns into a fairly fresh and original retelling of "The Sword in the Stone." Nix does a good job in keeping the story just fresh enough every time it seems to be drifting into "been there, done that" territory.
"Barrens Dance" is a delightful read, a story about an evil wizard (who casts his malicious spells via dancing) and his doomed lust for a nomadic animal trainer in a rural wasteland. It is a variation on the "love conquers all" theme, although the telling of the story is fresh and Beagle makes sure to point out that while love might be able to conquer, sometimes a heavy sacrifice is required.
"Zinder" is one of the more original stories in the book, an almost Christ-like parable about a very powerful and benevolent wizard who is partially trapped within a surprising and unexpected carapace.
"Billy and the Wizard" tells the story of a little boy who can talk with dolls and has to protect a wizard hiding in a magazine in his garage. It's a very short, sassy little story with more style than substance, but a fun read nonetheless.
"Stonefather," easily the longest story in the book at nearly 75 pages, brings to us Runnel, a young boy trying to find his lot in life who gets caught up in an ancient war between the stonemages and wetwizards. But Runnel has a few abilities of his own that will be a surprise to everyone involved.
Finally, the best story in the book, the wonderful "The Ruby Incomparable" by Kage Baker, details the life of Svnae, the offspring of an omnipotent, evil God of a father (The Master of the Mountain) and an all-powerful, benevolent Goddess of a mother (The Saint of the World). It would be pointless to try and conjure up adversaries for an invincible daughter of the gods, so Baker cleverly makes it a coming of age story. "The Ruby Incomparable" chronicles Svnae's thirst for knowledge, and her growth from a precocious toddler to a desired and powerful young woman. It's written with terrific wit and insight (including a few nods and winks towards fantasy cliches), and the only "obstacles" Svnae face are the same challenges life throws at everyone, mortal or not, as they grow up. And, as Baker presents it, these can be puzzling to even the most powerful of entities.

The Yendri in their forest villages groaned when they learned of the first boy. Even in his cradle, his fiendish tendencies were evident. He was beautiful as a little angel except in his screaming tempers, when he would morph himself into giant larvae, wolf cubs, or pools of bubbling slime.

The Yendri in their villages and the Children of the Sun in their stone cities all rejoiced when they heard of the second boy. He too was beautiful, but clearly good. A star was seen to shine from his brow on occasion. He was reported to have cured a nurse's toothache with a mere touch, and he never so much as cried while teething.

And the shamans of the Yendri, and the priests in the temples of the Children of the Sun, all nodded their heads and said, "Well, at least we have balance now. The two boys will obviously grow up, oppose each other, and fight to the death, because that's what generally happens."

Having decided all this, and settled down confidently to wait, imagine how shocked they were to hear that the Saint of the World had borne a third child! And a girl, at that. It threw all their calculations off and annoyed them a great deal.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

2007-09-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

INFINITY WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS (Grant Naylor) - Three Stars

Having just completed a week-plus vacation, I have several reviews to write, so look for a new one each day or two for the next few days.

Those of you familiar with the British TV series "Red Dwarf" will probably recognize the title of this novel; those who aren't should probably skip this review entirely. Infinity... is the novelization of the first two seasons of "Red Dwarf." The novelization is by the series creators, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. They use this opportunity to go into a bit more detail behind the characters and plot-lines, such as the exact circumstances that lead to Lister joining the crew of the mining ship "Red Dwarf."

They do take a few liberties, however, and the book is not an exact match for the TV show. This is a plus, because at times the TV show (at least in the first two seasons) seemed stripped down to be solely a comedic vehicle, while the book is a bit more multi-dimensional. The book maintains the series' deliciously warped sense of humor and dry wit (Rimmer heard what sounded like a nuclear wind rushing down the corridor to meet him. It was, in fact, a nuclear wind rushing down the corridor to meet him.) while adding bucket-loads more character depth and not just a little bit of darkness.

That (to me, as a "Red Dwarf" fan) is the highlight of reading the book. Lister comes across as a bit more (albeit not much more) than a shiftless, alcoholic loser. Rimmer is just as loathsome and unlikeable as ever, but perhaps a bit more sympathetic as more details are shed on his truly pathetic existence. There are more musings on the psychological aspects of the characters, stuff that can be difficult to portray on a half-hour TV comedy. I get the feeling that this is what Rob Grant and Doug Naylor truly intended for the series. It's still largely a comedy, still slightly sci-fi, but it does have a bit of a sharp edge to it and (as the ambiguous and surprisingly ominous ending to the book displays) more than hints at the darkness that can lurk inside the human psyche.

Ragtime

2007-08-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

RAGTIME (E.L. Doctorow) - Three Stars

About 200-pages into the novel, despite Doctorow's unsettling, choppy writing style and a fairly pretentious concept, I had to smile with the realization that Ragtime had made me like it. It's not a masterpiece by any means, but it is a decent little story that paints a vivid portrait of early 20th-century America.

The story details the lives of three families during this time period, and how their lives are interwoven thanks largely to chance encounters or detailings with famous people like Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Jacob Riis, Stanford White, Robert Peary, and others. It's a little bit of a contrived premise, but thankfully skirts just this side of "Crash-itis" (named after the truly horrible film whose forced and manipulative connections fairly raped one's suspension of disbelief).

Ragtime is nearly void of complex sentence structure, and Doctorow's almost perfunctory style of prose takes some getting used to. Sentences are short and to the point, fired off almost like bullets: "Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." At first I found this writing style made it difficult to find a "flow" to the novel, which is probably why it took me a month to read the under-300 page novel (as fast as a glacier!).

Two aspects of Ragtime I feel are particularly noteworthy. The first of these is the unusual narration, which bounces back and forth between third-person omniscient and first-person plural (the editorial "we," as The Dude might say). This leads me to believe that the narrator is actually two narrators (specifically, The Little Boy from Family #1 and The Little Girl from Family #2, telling the story in retrospect as grown-ups), though the narration continuously passes between the voices without revealing the "who" behind them.

The second aspect I found noteworthy is the fact that, of the three main protagonist families in the book, only the black family receives actual names (Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Sarah, and Coalhouse Walker III). The two white families are referred to only as Father, Mother, (Mother's) Younger Brother, Grandfather and Little Boy (Family #1); and Tateh, Mameh, and Little Girl (Family #2). In a book where two of the main themes are loss of personal identity and race relations, I found this an especially poignant touch.

The Great Gatsby

2007-07-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT GATSBY (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - Four Stars

I had originally read The Great Gatsby in high school. Now, some fifteen or so years later, I decided to sit down and reread the novel—because I wanted to, not because I had to. I understand, now, why I remembered so little of the book from my high school years.

The Great Gatsby is deceptively simple to an enormous extent. Despite being less than 200 pages and superficially a rather simple love story, I would consider it more of a college-level book in the analysis of all the symbols and meanings. Certainly, my teenage self missed quite a lot the first time through (or, perhaps, I have just forgotten it over the years). Amongst the things that really stood out to me this time...

(1) The drunken revelry. A little too young to fully understand it the first time I read the novel, Fitzgerald quite amusingly details the drunkenness at these high society parties. It's probably because he was an alcoholic himself, but Fitzgerald's portrayal of social inebriation is spot-on in the book.

(2) The sociology of wealth. The "class battles" between "new rich" and "old wealth" in The Great Gatsby, but I was rather intrigued at how much of a rebuke the novel was against pointless wealth in general. Far from being a new idea in the Reaganomics-era, Fitzgerald in the 1920s makes some astute and disapproving comments about the general soullessness vast amounts of money can bring to people ("new rich" or "old wealth") who are incapable of utilizing it productively (Gatsby's largesse, the Buchanan's general aloofness, etc.).

(3) Gatsby's character and how it pertains to the title. The title, The Great Gatsby, is almost sarcastic: one feels the word "Great" should have quotation marks around it. How is he great, and to whom? Gatsby is a wonderfully paradoxical character. He was a war hero in WWI and performed many acts of valor, but barely seems proud of any of that. He is, at heart one believes, a generally good person, but he had no compunction in making his fortune in illicit activities like bootlegging (and maybe more: the fact that his name is a play on "gat"/gun is not coincidental). And, of course, the entire goal for amassing his fortune: Daisy Buchanan (or rather, Gatsby's idealized memory of Daisy Buchanan)—an "old wealth" girl from Kentucky that Gatsby is obsessed with and certain that the only way he can impress her/win her heart is with wealth (in one of the many, many cynical observations made in the book, Gatsby is mostly correct in this regard). And yet, his love and loyalty to Daisy remains so absolute (even after she spurns him) that he takes the blame for a vehicular manslaughter that was her fault.

(4) The enormity of the shallowness most of the characters possess. Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are the only two characters in the novel that seem to possess any wide-range of feeling. Daisy, the girl Gatsby is infatuated with, is actually a shockingly soulless and cold individual (name one scene in the novel, apart from the climatic confrontation between Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby in the New York City hotel room, where Daisy displays any "true" emotion; there isn't one, for all her emotion is portrayed as just a "show" for social purposes, like jewelry). After the aforementioned vehicular manslaughter, after running over and killing someone (I won't spoil who, but it certainly didn't seem "accidental" to me), Daisy lets Gatsby take the blame for it and goes on vacation. Even Nick's slight love affair with Jordan dissolves due to Nick's disgust at these shallow, idle rich people.

But possibly my favorite part of The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's skewering of American society's obsession with symbols and symbolism. His points on the general uselessness of symbols in the characters lives, and the fact those symbols only hold the individual meaning each person gives to them resonated greatly with me. America is and always has been a fairly jingoistic society with an unhealthy obsession with symbolism (as evidenced by the thousands of "patriotic" jackasses willing to beat the shit out of you for burning a woven piece of fabric with fifty white stars on a blue background and thirteen red and white stripes). Perhaps the best part came at the end, when the faded billboard eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg are revealed to be the condemning eyes of God (but only to a grief-mad, broken down, suicidal man).

Wide Sargasso Sea

2007-07-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

WIDE SARGASSO SEA (Jean Rhys) - One Star

Life Sucks. Because.

There's the entire novel for you, in three short little words. I'm glad I didn't waste a lot of time reading it (a mercifully short 160 pages), because I found the book to be wholly without merit.

A hypothetical "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Rhys's novel supposedly relates the hard-luck life story of Edward Rochester's hidden/insane first wife Bertha Mason. It is supposed to be a masterpiece of postmodern and postcolonial literature, but I found it soul-crushingly bitter and mean-spirited. Nearly all the characters presented in Wide Sargasso Sea are loathesome individuals (or, perhaps, simply have their worst traits emphasized), and the misery and bad tidings are heaped upon them with sadistic remorselessness. I can assure you that nothing good happens to ANYONE in the entire course of the novel.

I understand that Jean Rhys had a rather rough life herself. Perhaps Sargasso's matter-of-fact but pessimistic portrayal of life displays that. I also have read that Rhys (originally from the West Indies herself) took exception with the rather slanted portrayal of Creole women in Brontë's Victorian text. However, all of Rhys's attempts to explore themes of isolation, cultural alienation, and loss of identity fell flat with me because I could never sympathize with the main character.

The book is whiny and angsty, even through the narrative voice-changes; far from a great novel, for me it read more like a teenager's livejournal put to paper.

Death on the Nile

2007-07-11T12:42:00.000-07:00

DEATH ON THE NILE (Agatha Christie) - Three Stars

There's really not much from my Murder on the Orient Express review that doesn't also apply here. Christie's books are light, breezy reads: slightly mentally challenging without being brain-busting, and highly entertaining. I also appreciate that Christie maintains objectivity with her main character: a lesser author might have fallen too in love with Hercule Poirot, but Christie doesn't hesitate in portraying Poirot as the smugly pompous ass he can be at times (although these passages are written with tongue pretty firmly in cheek).

Death... receives only three stars because it was a little too easy to figure out. I had "who" and the "why" figured out long in advance. Christie still weaves in several wonderful, inconsequential sub-plots, and even those are a delight to figure out; and, like in Murder..., there's a twist in the last couple of pages that is both shocking and entertaining.

I'm sure there will be more Christie novels in my future, and I'm sure their reviews will be equally brief. All I can do is recommend that you check her books out if you haven't already.

Snow Falling on Cedars

2007-06-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS (David Guterson) - Three Stars

Against the background of a 1950s murder trial, Snow Falling on Cedars tells the story of a small Puget Sound isle, the Japanese-American relocation during WWII, and the code of the solitary salmon fisherman who comprise the majority of the island's economy. Unfortunately, the novel never quite decides what it wants to be its main focus: the central murder mystery, analysis of human prejudice, the psychological casualties of war, or the everyday casualties of love. Guterson has crafted an enjoyable novel that is not epic because it attempts to tackle too much.

The book is also, at times, cloyingly nostalgic. Much of the novel is told in flashbacks, but after establishing a nice structure of past and present in alternating chapters Guterson abandons this with almost 100 pages of backstory (roughly pages 150-250) that introduces a lot of turbulence into the flow of the novel. On the plus side, the three main characters (Ishmael, Hatsue, and Kabuo) are wonderfully fleshed out, detailed characters. There were a few instances where Snow... lapses into repetition, detailing the same aspects of a character's personality, but this doesn't happen too often.

I think my biggest problem with the book was that everything wraps up a little too neatly at the end. After a largely dark and serious novel, the damaged character grows a conscience and moves on, justice is served, etc. After a mostly bracing, no-holds-barred look at human flaws, the ending was a little too "Hollywood" to leave a good aftertaste.

Murder on the Orient Express

2007-06-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Agatha Christie) - Four Stars

Believe it or not, I had never read Christie before. Yes, I know, I was missing out. I'm quite aware of that now, and I'm certain there will be more Agatha in my future.

Murder on the Orient Express is, while perhaps not the best of Christie's novels (I'm not qualified to say either way), probably the most famous. The famed Orient Express train is stuck in a snowbank in Yugoslavia. One of the passengers is murdered in the middle of the night in the elite Istanbul-Calais first-class coach. All the other passengers are not only total strangers to one another but have unshakable alibis: everyone's location at the time of the murder can be supported by the eyewitness testimony of another total stranger! And so, famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot must solve an apparently unsolvable case...

To detail any more of the plot would be a sin, so I'll have to find meat for my review elsewhere.

Murder... is a light and breezy read. If one is the sort of person to just sit around and read for a few hours on the weekend, one could easily dispatch the novel in a single sitting (the novel is only 210 pages). I was also surprised by the wit and humor sprinkled throughout the book. Christie had a quintessential British sense of humor: dry and sly, with sparkling intelligence and subdued understatement. Some of her choicest quips literally made me laugh aloud.

Some small bits seemed a little cheesy. Christie's habit of overemphasizing dramatic revelations in italics, for instance: The call came from inside the house! That sort of thing. But then I realized, all those old mystery-story clichés probably originated with Christie and have been carried down through the years. Indeed, far from aging poorly, I think Christie's mysteries might be even more effective as the years go by: she's is smarter than the clichés. Forget every "standard" you use when solving a mystery novel, because they won't help you with Christie. She is masterful at never letting her narrative voice waver: extremely important clues pass with nary a moment of being dwelt upon. Indeed, while I caught a fair number of legitimate clues, I also bit on almost an equal number of non-clues (I hestitate using the term "red herring" because they aren't intentionally misleading, in my opinion: Christie's ambiguity and neutral tone simply aid the reader in over-thinking some parts and leaping to conclusions on others).

Lastly, while the final revelation of whodunit is somewhat surprising (it's a very slow revelation, and the reader should start to have the idea dawn on them several pages prior), Christie saves the biggest stunner for the last hundred words (so don't read ahead). Or, as Poirot says in the last sentence of the novel...

"Then," said Poirot, "having placed my solution before you, I have the honour to retire from the case..."

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

2007-06-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (John le Carré) - Four Stars

This novel has been called by many the ultimate spy novel, and I can see why. It's free of the dapper tuxedo and martini bullshit of the James Bond world: there's no hot scientist babes in bikinis, no nuclear missile aimed at the Queen's head (or other similar hyperbolic plot device) and negligible gunplay (spies are not Rambo: their whole objective is to stay hidden and avoid attention-drawing firefights). The spies in ...Cold are grim, disillusioned, ruthless men in old trenchcoats. Men addicted to vices like booze and strippers and run down by the constant strain of pushing their brains to overdrive trying to conceive and cover every possible angle. I cannot detail the plot, because it would be a crime to spoil the great mysteries of the book. I will say that the reader should be on alert from page one, as even seemingly innocuous moments of exposition often come back into play further into the novel. Just about every detail provided to the reader is a necessary detail.

...Cold is painted in broad strokes, and the characters (with the exception of Leamas and maybe one or two others) are not delved into with great detail. The pace of the story is brisk and the plot complications numerous for such a short novel. One of ...Cold's crowning achievements is that it leads the reader along without patronizing or condescending. The astute reader will be able to unravel the plot twists, but the brilliance in the novel lies in the fact that whenever the reader unravels a particular plot twist the story itself is already two more plot twists ahead.

The book is not flawless. Stephen King has stated that "the road to hell is paved with adverbs," and John le Carre skips right along down that road. Almost all of the dialogue is graced with unnecessary adverbs (he replied cryptically, she added vaguely, he shouted angrily, she continued thoughtfully, etc.); it really only proved a minor annoyance to me, but I know it bothers some other people a great deal. Also, the coda of the book seemed a little rushed and almost haphazardly tacked on to the end of the book. The last chapter (#25 - The Wall), while perfectly in line with the realism of the novel, is a misstep in tone—a hurried, almost careless rush to the finish that doesn't flow with the clockwork precision of the rest of the novel. It should be noted that the specific details of the end didn't bother me, just the way they were set down on the page.

I wonder how well this book will age. It depicts wonderfully the animosity and cold-war tensions that gripped the world for forty years. However, I think my generation will be the last to truly understand it, as we lived through its sunset hours. The experience of living through, at the very least, the early-to-mid 1980s (or prior) is necessary to fully appreciate the novel, I think.

"What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs?"

Absurdistan

2007-05-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

ABSURDISTAN (Gary Shteyngart) - Four Stars

Absurdistan is funny and sad in equal amounts for exactly the same reason.

The story is fantasy, so utterly preposterous it could never happen, and yet it remains so grounded in reality and garnished with such witty observations about international politics that it can be accepted as wholly credible. Misha Vainberg doesn't exist, the country of Absurdsvanï (Absurdistan) doesn't exist, and Vainberg's Keystone Kops adventures with American defense contractors and international politics never happened. That makes the story funny. However, people exactly like Misha Vainberg do exist, countries exactly like Absurdsvanï do exist, and (having first-hand experience with the first and reasonable knowledge of the second) I can assure you that American defense contracting and international politics operate pretty much exactly as they are portrayed in the novel. That is what makes the story sad.

Shteyngart's writing style is bold and brash; his pen equally humorous and caustic. He writes with biting sarcasm, grim observational skill and a rude crassness that will make even the most jaded and worldly reader chuckle at his graphic narration. He's at his best when lampooning/satirizing the very very serious: he makes the wry obersvation that the "American Express" logo is widely more respected and feared than the U.N. logo (and see also the quote from the novel that I've included at the end of this entry detailing an idea for one wing of a Holocaust museum). There were several spots in the novel that reminded me of Vonnegut, both for their razor-sharp observations of the world at large and their despairing attitude towards the future of humanity. Shteyngart also weaves into the novel interesting threads dealing with father-son relationships, religious/cultural adaptation and rationalization, and (in true Vonnegut fashion) even writes a parody of himself into the novel.

The protagonist, the morbidly obese, pityingly naïve and fairly wealthy Misha Vainberg (son of the 1,238th-richest man in all of Russia!), seems equal parts Winston Smith and Don Quixote: he's desperate to "do something important" with both his life and his money and yet is also a powerless pawn swept up in the cultural and international events that surround him. He falls in love too easily (both with women and with ideas) and cares too much when no one around him cares at all. Far from being an uplifting, "Schindler's List" sort of story, Absurdistan shows just how powerless the invidual is (even a wealthy individual) when powerful companies and powerful countries hatch hare-brained schemes in the utterly absurd arena of international politics.

Holocaust for Kidz
Studies have shown that it's never too early to frighten a child with images of skeletal remains and naked women being chased by dogs across the Polish snow. Holocaust for Kidz will deliver a carefully tailored miasma of fear, rage, impotence, and guilt in children as young as ten. Through the magic of Animatronics, Claymation, and Jurassic technology, the inane ramblings of underqualified American Hebrew day school teachers on the subject of the Holocaust will be condensed into a concise forty-minute bloodbath. Young participants will leave feeling alienated and profoundly depressed, feelings that will be partly redeemed and partly thwarted by the ice-cream truck awaiting them at the end of the exhibit.

Never Let Me Go

2007-05-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

NEVER LET ME GO (Kazuo Ishiguro) - Four Stars

What a clever little story.

From very early in the novel the reader gets the impression that something's just not quite right about the students of Hailsham. Ishiguro writes with a narrative voice that assumes the reader already knows all about Hailsham, and the result is a mini-mystery that he makes no effort to conceal but reveals itself slowly and piece by piece.

You can't pigeonhole Never Let Me Go into any one genre, I think. It flirts with aspects of science fiction, mystery, romance, and dystopian society novels, but none of those aspects are ever really the main focus. They're colorful bangles the story wears with an innocent lack of self-consciousness. The novel is so matter-of-fact about what's going on that is lacks the fantastical and awe-struck tones of most science fiction novels. The two "mysteries" that the reader anticipates will be built up throughout the novel are instead revealed casually, almost second-hand, in the course of narration in Part I (that the "students" of Hailsham are actually being raised solely for the purpose of harvesting their organs) and Part II (that the "students" of Hailsham are actually human clones, created for the sole purpose of manufacturing human organs). In some ways, the novel is even a moral debate, questioning what type of society it takes to create and sustain injustice, whether overt or obfuscated.

If anything, I suppose, Never Let Me Go would qualify as something of an existentialist novel. It's an engrossing story, tinged with grey drops of melancholy, about the existence (and/or effect) of free will. The students of Hailsham appear to have been raised without any notion of the concept, and they accept their destinies with the lucid calmness of people who can't comprehend a better fate for themselves as a legitimate possibility.

Lolita

2007-05-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

LOLITA (Vladimir Nabokov) - One Star

My perception of a "Lolita" is of a sexually precocious and savvy young teen girl, one who is jaded (perhaps) beyond her years and is already well-versed at using her feminine wiles to seduce helpless (hopeless) older men. I think of "Iris" from "Taxi Driver," perhaps, or one of the young neighborhood hoochies-in-training I see walking to school each morning on my way to work. I do not think of Dolores Haze from Lolita.

Let's be frank: Nabokov's Lolita is not a story about a devious young girl seducing an infatuated older man. The story is of an infatuated older man who kidnaps a young girl on the brink of pubescense and drives across the country, raping her repeatedly and plying her with gifts in change for sexual favors. I assure you that any of the harsh things I say in this review are not due to any sense of offended morals or outrage. If Nabokov wants to write a story about a mentally ill pervert ruining the life of a young girl, that's fine with me as a literary topic (everything is fair game as a literary topic, in my book: taboo only applies to certain aspects of reality, not literary fantasy).

My problem with Lolita is that it's boring.

I mean boring, boring, boring, BORING, BORING!

It is possibly the dullest, most repetitious, uninteresting story I've ever trudged through.

A huge problem with the story is that I never became sympathetic towards either of the main characters. Humbert, despite his educated loquaciousness, is a loathsome individual; I feel no pity for his mental anguish in light of the harm he causes the people around him. Dolores Haze, the young Lolita, you never really get to know: the story is told from Humbert's point of view, so every image of Lolita is filtered through his warped obsession. You glean enough to realize that she is (mostly) miserably unhappy with Humbert but trying to make the best of it. She is clever, and partially aware of her burgeoning sexuality; which she uses half-heartedly in various clumsy attempts, much like any other young teen who is just discovering the powers of beauty and seduction. In the early stages of the novel, she has a pre-teen crush on the handsome Humbert and does submit willingly. (I don't think it's fair to say she "seduces" him; how do you seduce someone who's already lusting after you like wildfire?) She is not a twelve-year-old nymphet, she is just an ordinary girl. But other than some fairly basic adolescent interests and mood swings, you never really get into her mind.

Nabokov's play with the English language is entertaining enough to carry the novel through Part I and into Part II (his skill with English is especailly astonishing when you read his lament in the afterword that his "secondhand" English is vastly inferior to his skill with his native Russian tongue). Eventually, however, it just seems like Nabokov is playing a game called "never use the same adjective twice," and the long-windedness and inability to make even the smallest points in short order get increasingly frustrating to the reader.

Here's a prime example: on page 264 there's the last half of a paragraph. I've cut out all the extraneous descriptions to give you the point of the paragraph, which is as follows:

I used to be misled by a window [where I] would make out a half-naked nymphet combing her hair. [Then] the image would move, and there would be nothing in the window but a man reading the paper.

Not very eloquent, admitted, but that's the base point of the thought.

See now, how burdened down it is with description, as a simple 40-word thought is bloated by Nabokov into several hundred words:

I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the grat promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenêtres! Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take off—whereupon the lighted image would move and Eve would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper.

Beautifully written, yes, but get to the fuckin' point already!! Every paragraph, for 300+ pages, is written like this. And yes, even gorgeous prose like this gets old when there's only a threadbare story supporting it.

It's worth noting that in the afterword Nabokov relates that the "first" version of Lolita was a thirty page short story written circa 1940 in Paris (and discarded), but that the full novel version wasn't started until some ten years later. Indeed, Lolita feels like a thirty page short story that has put on every coat in the closet until it looks like a three hundred page novel, and a tedious one at that.

Cell

2007-04-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

CELL (Stephen King) - Two Stars

By page six in this novel, one character is ripping another's throat out using only her teeth.

Stephen King wastes little time with exposition in Cell, kind of a cross between The Stand, 28 Days Later and maybe Night of the Living Dead. In Cell, a mysterious cell phone "pulse" drives everyone using a cell phone into a state of mindless, homocidal violence. You never really know exactly what's going on in the book, as your only knowledge comes from the character's reflective supposition. I enjoy King's fables because many of them keep just their fingertips on reality: they aren't believeable, per se, but they aren't wholly unbelieveable, either.

King has just enough original material in the book to keep it from seeming like a rehash of known sci-fi concepts, but borrows just enough material to prevent the book from seeming entirely original. He still throws a few good curveballs into the story (nothing I'll spoil here: suffice to say that the development of the "phone-crazies" and the dawning realization that there's more to them than meets the eye is probably the foremost pleasure of the novel), but it remains just an average novel, not one of King's best, and probably only suited for King fans (which I would consider myself).

A couple of minor gripes: I understand that (main character) Clay's motivation to find his son (Johnny) is a reasonable one, but that doesn't mean that I want to read two paragraphs of him pining over his boy ever other page. King really goes overboard on Clay's fondness and worry for his son. And the resolution of the Clay-Johnny sub-plot I found unstatisfying, as it required just a bit too much of a suspension of disbelief for my tastes.

I've got Nabokov, Grass, and Ishiguro next up on my reading list, so we'll be getting back to the "high-brow" stuff on this page soon enough.

Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way

2007-04-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

MAKE LOVE! THE BRUCE CAMPBELL WAY (Bruce Campbell) - Two Stars

How do you review a book like this?

Make Love... is, supposedly, Bruce Campbell's first person insight on the behind the scenes chaos of an "A-list" movie. In this case, that movie is "Let's Make Love," a supposed Mike Nichols-directed remake of a 1960s Marilyn Monroe movie, this time starring Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger. Bruce gets the minor part of Foyl, a doorman, and hilarity ensues... hilarity involving multiple run-ins with Colin Powell and the Secret Service, monster-truck shopping, kung-fu stunts with Richard Gere, infiltrating a Southern gentleman's club, wedding planning, impersonating studio executives, maddeningly slow dial-up, prison, and much much more.

Whereas Campbell's first book, If Chins Could Kill, was a non-fiction account of trying to make it in the movie business, Make Love... is fictional novel, and I think it suffers for it. If you found "Evil Dead" or "Army of Darkness" stupid, you'll probably feel the same about this book. Truly, a book for fans, it's an enjoyable, but throwaway read.

The white shirts is ass holes.
--B. Dawg Campbell, Chino Prison Bitch #22987

Son of a Witch

2007-04-01T22:38:00.000-07:00

SON OF A WITCH (Gregory Maguire) - Three Stars

This was another book I had a real hard time rating. This sequel to Wicked (a book I gave four stars) isn't quite as good as that book. Indeed, I would rate most of my four-star books above Son of a Witch. On the other hand, the book does have its moments, and I'd rate it above most of my three-star books.

The story, involving the Wicked Witch's maybe-son Liir after her death, was less engaging than that of Wicked. This is mostly compensated for by Maguire's growth and improvement as an author: his writing style is much tighter and better sculpted in this novel. The use of heavy-handed metaphors (which plagued Wicked) is completely gone, and the florid intellectual musings of the first book have now been suitably toned down to a much more subtle, insinuating nature.

The biggest problem I had with Son of a Witch was that it ended just as soon as it was beginning. The novel is only 334 pages, and I didn't think it really hit its stride until about page 250. Maguire introduces numerous characters and plot threads, as if he's working this up to be an epic novel; indeed, I would've been fine with another 250 pages, because the pacing of the novel is exceptional and held my interest. Instead, it ends in sort of a rush and many of the subplots are left hanging. Indeed several of the subplots I thought vital to the story (the fate of the maunts of the Cloister of Saint Glinda, Trism and Liir's relationship, Candle and Liir's relationship and, the driving plot of the entire story, the quest for Nor) are left hanging in thin air when the book ends, and of the three subplots that are wrapped up, one is satisfying (the fate of Princess Nastoya), one is completely and utterly worthless (the Council of the Birds; seriously, what purpose did that whole subplot serve?), and one should not have been wrapped up at all (the truth about Elphaba and Liir, an aspect that I felt would have served the story better if it had been left an open-ended mystery).

This is half of a great novel that should have been twice as long as it is.

"These times," she continued, "so righteous! Everyone so much more moral! Put some clothes on your nakedness, girl, or the vice squad'll be down our throats. Or down your throat, anyway, if you look at 'em like that..."

"You got to hold on to your values, if you can still reach them," said the chanteuse. "Buy some values, rent 'em, steal 'em if you have to. Sell 'em for a profit when tastes change. Whatever works. Is this a crock, or what?"

Nineteen Eighty-Four

2007-03-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (George Orwell) - Four Stars

Far from being a polemic against the Soviet-style of socialism the empire of Oceania is so obviously based on, I prefer to interpret Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as his concerned rumination on the nature of power. The existence of a nation like the Soviet Union is not Orwell's primary concern, but rather the fact that human beings could even invent such a system in the first place. On the surface, a story about the individual being crushed by a tyrannic government; underneath, a sad treatise on the extremes Orwell feels people are capable of going to in order to oppress their fellow man. The novel is a condemnation, a plausible fable on the lengths to which people in power—in any country, in every empire—will go to stay in power.

Orwell's pessimistic book argues that the more advanced humanity's technology becomes, the more regressed we become in our nature; an argument I must say contains more than a spark of validity. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Idi Amin Dada, Robert Mugabe, Islam Karimov... it's no coincidence that the tyrants of the 20th and 21st centuries make the tyrants of ancient times look like boy scouts. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Cuba, North Korea and other countries have all maintained policies and performed actions reminiscent of the Oceanian government in the novel. Now, only a fool would assert that America is becoming Oceania, but only a fool would deny that passing resemblances exist. For example, how well does the quote at the end of this entry, a passage from a novel written nearly sixty years ago, apply to the administration of George WPE Bush and their justification for the war on terror?

The book itself is surprisingly compact and linear. There are precious few characters of note in the novel, and even though the conclusion of the novel is foregone (even speculated on throughout the book) it still contains noteworthy impact. Parts of the book have not aged well (pneumatic tubes for interoffice mail?), but other parts were eerily prescient (the "telescreens" of the book exist, of a sort, in modern-day North Korea: every home is required to have a specially-made radio that cannot be turned off and broadcasts propoganda 24/7).

The main episode in the novel to support my interpretation is the climactic scene in Room 101. As cheesy and cliche as my words might seem, Orwell eloquently details how, when someone finally creates a way to efficiently force people to stop loving one another, mankind is doomed.

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.

On the Road

2007-02-17T17:30:00.000-08:00

ON THE ROAD (Jack Kerouac) - Three Stars

So I finally sat down and read "the legend," the book that has shaped the minds and lives of millions of artistes and pseudo-intellectuals over the past 50 years. Going into On the Road, I assumed a book so legendary could only be one of two things: it was either going to be a five-star masterpiece, a life-changing book of indescribable beauty—or it was going to be a disaster, a wreck of over-wrought, pointless ramblings.

I wasn't expecting it to be both at the same time.

How can I describe On the Road? Have you ever been to a party where everyone is drinking and getting high, smoking weed and maybe doing a few other illicit drugs, and you're the only sober person? Do you remember how wildly entertaining all the other chemically-altered people are, how funny and silly and strange they are that first hour? And do you remember how, in the second hour or so, they started seeming less and less funny, and indeed even started to get on your nerves a little? And how, after two or three hours, you couldn't help but be thoroughly irritated at how LAME and STUPID everyone is, and GOD why didn't they realize it? That, in a nutshell, is On the Road.

There's no point to this novel, beatniks be damned. It's just a series of stories about Sal Paradise (aka Jack Kerouac) and his journeys back and forth across the country with assorted friends, primarily his best friend Dean Moriarty (aka Neal Cassady). The characters never develop, they're the same people at the end of the book they are in the beginning, and no "goals" or "achievements" are ever realized (primarily because few are ever set). Indeed, there are a few passages where Kerouac almost seems to be needling the beat generation this novel both named and inspired. There are moments where he hints at how pointless and silly the characters' lives are, but never really delves too far into that thought.

The psychology behind the book is interesting, to me. There's more than a hint of self-loathing in some of the passages, and the way Sal Paradise self-sabotages his personal relationships is kind of sad (particularly his relationship with Teresa in the California farmlands). He is not a suave character, and has a knack for innocently saying exactly the wrong things.

Sal's idolatry of Dean is fascinating, too. Dean is a free-spirit, yes, but he's also basically a scum-bag: a serial philanderer, he stays with women only long enough to knock them up and start cheating on them; in one scene he seems particularly okay with the idea of smashing some guy on the head and stealing his money; and there are several parts in the book that display a latent pedophilia, his fascination with girls as young as nine, ten or eleven and his friends warning him not to touch them. Dean is portrayed both as a well-hung lout who can bed a woman in the time it takes most men to utter a pick-up line, but also as a "deep-thinker" fascinated with the mystical and unexplainable. He comes off, intentionally, as a madman, and his psychosis only seems to deepen as the novel progresses. But Sal's narrator-voice continuously paints him in adoring, nearly religious tones, literally referring to him as a metaphorical seraphim and even, one time, god.

The book is at its finest when it is dealing with people OTHER than the main characters in Sal's life. Passages dealing with the random people Sal encounters on the roads across America are the most brilliant in the book. These mini-portraits of Americana are terrific writing, aided greatly by Kerouac skill with metaphors which he unrolls in long, unforced, breathless takes. Kerouac's writing style is quite good, and when he's observing the lives of these strangers the novel is a breezy, easy read. Unfortunately, he's far too enthralled with his friends—sad, directionless friends, one-trick-ponies who never change and whose actions become predictable by their very unpredictability—and by the end of the novel you're left wishing everyone would've just sobered up and gone home.

"[Dean] was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him."

Red Harvest

2007-01-30T13:48:00.000-08:00

RED HARVEST (Dashiell Hammett) - Four Stars

Red Harvest, Hammett's first full-length novel, is not only a shining example of the crime fiction that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s but also a textbook on economical writing.

Hammett launches into the story with aplomb, and relates his tale with a delightful impatience for exposition and great skill for describing people and places with a few short, precise phrases. The story barely pauses to breathe, with plot twists, switchbacks, and misdirections occurring every couple of pages. What starts out as a tale about a murdered newspaper editor quickly becomes a labrynthine puzzle involving bootleggers, corrupt cops, a manipulative femme fatale and an abrasive, wealthy, elderly man who uses his fortune to pull a lot of strings. There's gun fights and car chases and lots of hard drinking. The body count is in the dozens (maybe over a hundred). It's what an action-movie script would look like transferred to fine literary form. Barely 140 pages, Red Harvest has enough action, excitement, and events for a standard 500-page novel. (All five of Hammett's novels—the others being The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man; you might have heard of one or two of them—are of equal brevity, around 140-150 pages.)

The cast of characters is enormous for such a short book, and Hammett has no compunction rotating major character in and out of the plotlines for dozens of pages at a time. Somewhat amusingly, minor characters are tossed into the fray like skeet, showing up at intermittent intervals to reveal an important clue, before just as quickly embarking on their unknown quest for certain death. (One of the most smirk-worthy: a slimy lawyer is introduced to the story on page 114, says his final words on page 118, and is found dead on page 120—Hammett spares no time for dawdling!)

My biggest reservation going into the book was the fear that the 1920s gangster slang would seem trite and cliche by modern standards. Even though this was one of the ORIGINATORS of that very cliche, I was still worried that the language would not have aged well. My fears were unfounded. The story moves at such a break-neck pace, and Hammett's no-name Continental Op narrates the story with such a casual, conversational air that the slang terms seem fresh and new, as if they had never been used before. The book carries itself with a swagger, with a sort of "who gives a fuck what you think?" attitude directed towards the audience. It's here to tell a tale; too bad for you if you don't like it.

So why four-stars and not five? Well, Red Harvest just tells a tale. There's no deep meaning here, nothing to reflect on after you close the cover. The book, for all its dizzying plot-twists, is as shallow as a bowl of soup. But it's a great tale, told very well.

"Then you'll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again. If you don't do it, I'm going to turn these love letters of yours over to the newspaper buzzards, and I don't mean your Herald crew—the press associations. I got the letters from Dawn. You'll have a lot of fun proving that you didn't hire him to recover them, and that he didn't kill the girl doing it. But the fun you'll have is nothing to the fun people will have reading these letters. They're hot. I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother."

Of Love and Other Demons

2007-01-20T22:46:00.000-08:00

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS (Gabriel García Márquez) - Three Stars

It is the sign of a good author, I think, when the ending to a story can be so obvious, so telegraphed, such a foregone conclusion and yet still pack a punch. Especially when the punch follows a more-or-less cliché "tragic love story" plot of a story that is only average.

Marquez is a good author, and despite its brevity Of Love and Other Demons makes an impression. It's a breezy read too, despite some serious subject matter, thanks both to its short duration (not quite 150 pages) and to Marquez's use of a "standard" prose style (the dizzying, run-on, magical realism style of One Hundred Years of Solitude is absent). Of Love... is a great story to become familiar with Marquez's florid, weighty use of language, and his fantastical imagination and skill at creating and populating ancient urban environments.

The problem is that Marquez approaches the story as if he's writing a 500+ page epic novel. Of Love... contains probably close to 40 characters, and probably 30 of them are on the fringes of being superfluous. The amount of time Marquez spends going into great detail about many of the characters is disproportionate to the role those characters play in the story. Indeed, the two main characters of the 141-page novella don't even meet each other until the end of page 81!

Of Love... makes some interesting commentary on the nature of disease, love, and religion; indeed, it even implies that those three are much closer to being the same thing than most people might admit. Indeed, by the end of the story one might wonder if Sierva Maria really was possessed, or rabid, or just love-struck mad.

Abrenuncio understood. He had always thought that ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget. What did seem inconceivable to him was subjecting one's child to the castigation of exorcism.

"There is not much difference between that and the witchcraft of blacks," he said. "In fact, it is even worse, because blacks only sacrifice roosters to their gods, while the Holy Office is happy to break innocents on the rack or burn them alive in a public spectacle."

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

2007-01-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM (David Sedaris) - Three Stars

For the past, oh, I don't know, two or three weeks—from the week before Christmas to the present—I have been largely in a mood that could only be described as "dour." Depressed isn't quite accurate. I've just been overly sick of people (indeed, the world in general) and there was even more "Bah" in my "Humbug" than usual. I needed more wit and funny, so instead of diving into Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men I picked up David Sedaris.

The fact that I come to you today in the same dour mood as has been the norm recently only serves to prove that this book is not likely to cheer you up.

Oh, it was an enjoyable (if throwaway) read. Sedaris's writing style is light and breezy, his wit is sharp, and if he doesn't delve into any grand philosophical territory with any of anecdotes, he at least makes up for it with entertainment value. But Dress... has a consistent (and somewhat unsettling) dark streak to it: a bleakness that I don't remember seeing in his previous stories. They're funny, yes, but it's funny in that "full of knowing and slightly bitter smirks at reality" sort of way. I think only two or three of the twenty-two essays in Dress... actually made me laugh aloud. It just seems to me that in Naked his family was made to seem more silly and eccentric; in Dress... life is portrayed as more tragic. Many of the essays, from the pubescent, basement card game "Full House" to the fascinating-yet-despairing "Put a Lid on It" have very little humor and never really rise out of the darkness that permeates the book.

Again, this isn't to imply they're poorly written or somehow disappointing. I was merely surprised. There are certainly four-star passages of writing in here. But it seemed like Sedaris tried to temper the grimness of some of the essays with slightly more light-hearted ones, and most of those come across as diaphanous and forgettable. There's probably eight-ten essays that are transfixing in their unflinching look towards the dark side, two or three that are really quite funny , and maybe ten more that you won't remember at all once you've finished the book. But if you're looking for a laugh-a-minute read, this isn't it.

Usually when I was forced to compete, it was my tactic to simply give up. To try and win in any way was to announce your ambition, which only made you more vulnerable. The person who wanted to win but failed was a loser, while the person who didn't really care was just a weirdo—a title I had learned to live with.

The Blind Assassin

2006-12-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

THE BLIND ASSASSIN (Margaret Atwood) - Three Stars

I'm beginning to think the joke's on me.

I keep hearing from all these people about what an amazing author Margaret Atwood is; then I read her books, am partially satisfied and marginally unimpressed, and wonder what all the fuss is about.

It's not that she's BAD, it's that she's not GREAT. Perhaps my expectations were set too high.

Right, The Blind Assassin. What can I write about this book that won't give away THE BIG SECRETS (tm) at the end that pretend they are more clever than they actually are? I suppose I should use a management tactic here and treat it like a performance review: I'll point out the problems I had with the book and try to finish on a more positive note.

As this novel is a reflection, a gradual re-telling of events, the ending is supposed to cast the entire novel in a new light. As such, it's beyond my skills (read: effort) to write a review that keeps these secrets.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

First and foremost, Atwood's stories are not dizzingly complicated: they are modest and linear, but laden down with so many bells and whistles and red herrings that they give the illusion of being complex. Her stories move from A to B, and 300 pages of the main character waxing metaphoric on points C, D, E, F and G does not change this fact. I wrote in my review of Oryx and Crake that Atwood's "symbolism is generally hackneyed and trite," and that unfortunately holds true here. She cannot play with the English language with the skill of a Nabokov or Rushdie, and there were numerous spots where metaphors felt as if they were a club being wielded by a cavewoman.

The novel-within-a-novel initially throws the reader for a loop, but once you keep the two stories separately defined in your head it becomes pretty obvious that they're both telling the same story in different fashions (or rather, two different aspects of the same plot). By page 250 or so it was pretty obvious that the novel-within-a-novel dealt with IRIS'S illicit romance with Alex Thomas and not Laura's (fashion plays a big role in the novel and is the biggest tip-off: Laura never was concerned with wearing the elaborate clothing the woman in "The Blind Assassin" is wearing during her trysts), and I also began to suspect Iris was the actual author. Then I got to sit back and trudge through 200 superfluous pages of mild tragedy and pseudo-Machiavellian themes before Atwood finally got around to confirming my expectation. The two big bombshells at the end of the story were terribly disappointing: (1) that Iris had written "The Blind Assassin" novel-within-a-novel, not Laura, was something I figured out 250 pages before it was revealed; (2) that Laura had been sleeping with/molested by Iris's husband Richard was not a total shock—as heavily foreshadowed as that plot element had been (from the teacher molesting her to her "delusions" of being pregnant), I certainly had my suspicions.

I also had problems with the denouement, when you finally discover what pushed Laura over the edge and prompted her suicide. Iris reveals her affair with Alex to Laura and informs her of his death in WWII, and a despondent Laura drives her car off a bridge. It doesn't work for me on two levels: (1) the entire novel has painted Laura as an unusually astute and precocious young woman; I find it difficult to believe she was completely unaware of her sister Iris's trysts with Alex Thomas; (2) once the novel-within-a-novel is revealed to be the story of Iris's affair with Alex, the only connection between Laura and Alex is the factory picnic from the beginning of the book; this is not to assert that Laura did not have relations with Alex, simply that any depth of feeling between the two of them is erased from the story when the truth of "The Blind Assassin" is revealed, making it more difficult (for me) to accept that his death would be a crushing enough blow to push her to suicide.

Aside from an unnecessary long-windedness and a surprise twist that I felt hamstrung part of the plot, The Blind Assassin has some good points. Despite her narrator's tendency to dally too much, Atwood is a good story-teller, and The Blind Assassin is a good story. It's paints an excellent portrait of the extremes the wealthy will go to in order to control their world. It also portrays how women were treated not as people but as possessions well into the 20th century (consider Laura's and Iris's father, the industrialist: did he really have their "best interests" at heart? Or was shipping them off more a "business" decision?). The acid-tongued narrator convincingly portrays a woman who gained her savvy and worldly knowledge far too late for it to do any good.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

The Shostakovich Symphonies

2006-09-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

Dmitri Shostakovich
09/25/1906 - 08/09/1975

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the 20th Century's greatest composers and the last great symphonist.

Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on this day in 1906. Despite showing no initial interest in music, when his mother started him on piano lessons at the age of nine his talent was quickly apparent and he became a child prodigy at both piano performance and musical composition. Nearly 70 years later, Shostakovich left behind a mind-bogglingly enormous oeuvre of music for all arenas.

He's most well known for his fifteen symphonies, many of which are standard repetoire for orchestras around the world, but he also wrote fifteen string quartets (very highly regarded), a set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano (also very highly regarded), seven operas, five ballets, multiple concertos, and almost 50 film scores and incidental music for plays.

Throughout his life he worked under the spectre of Stalin, with the threat of persecution and even execution never far away. Shostakovich's relationship with the Soviet regime he lived under defines both his life and his music. As a result, his music veers wildly from the openly "socialist" to the subversively revolutionary.

I won't go into a large biography of Shostakovich here (there's always wikipedia for that), but instead will try to convey why I like his music so much. Primarily, it's emotion. Shostakovich packs more emotion into music than any composer I've ever heard. Several of his contemporaries may have been more technically gifted at composition (Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev), but they rarely reached the level of passion that Shostakovich achieved on such a regular basis. Stravinsky's pieces might have the craftmanship of a swiss watch-maker, but with the exception of his three major ballets (The Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Rite of Spring) his music often comes across as coldly analytical and impersonal. Stravinsky's intellectual music is perfect for the musicologist, Shostakovich's empathic music is better for the audiophile.

In honor of Shostakovich's 100th anniversary, I am going on a brief detour for this page. Instead of reviewing books, I will review all fifteen of his symphonies.

Symphony #1 in f minor, Op. 10 (1925) - Three Stars
Written as a graduation piece (from the Petrograd Conservatory where he was a student), Shostakovich's First Symphony was an instant success. A year after it's first performance in 1926, Shostakovich met conductor Bruno Walter at the Warsaw International Piano Competition. Walter was so impressed with the work that he premiered in in Berlin later in 1927. By 1930, Shostakovich's name was known from New York to London as famous conductors like Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Artur Rodzinski, and Arturo Toscanini performed the First Symphony with the world's best orchestras. The work is still today considered one of Shostakovich's best symphonies by most conductors and critics, and was a personal favorite of Shostakovich.

It is an accomplished work for a nineteen year old, but I'm not as enamored with it as many other Shostakovich fans. The orchestration is very thin, especially in contrast with his later symphonies. But the second movement is a lively scherzo with some virtuoso piano work and the finale is strong.

The piece was dedicated to Shostakovich's friend Misha Kvadri. Setting the tone for much of Shostakovich's life, in 1929 Kvadri was arrested and executed by the NKVD.

Symphony #2 in B-flat Major "To October," Op. 14 (1927)
Symphony #3 in E-flat Major "The First of May," Op. 20 (1929) - One Star
These two symphonies will always and should be grouped together. They are both experimental works, some of Shostakovich's first major attempts at writing for full orchestra with chorus. They are both short symphonies (20 and 30 minutes, respectively), almost tone poems, played in one movement (Symphony #3 is technically in four movements with no breaks in between, but I have yet to find a recording that breaks the work down into multiple tracks). They are also quite unsuccessful, and Shostakovich himself expressed dissatisfaction with them. These "proletariat" symphonies dealing with the Russian Revolution are not abominable, merely completely forgettable.

Symphony #4 in c minor, Op. 43 (1936) - Four Stars
In the early 1930s, close friend Ivan Sollertinsky introduced Shostakovich to the symphonies of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler's works would go on to have tremendous influence on Shostakovich, and with Symphony #4 the "old" Shostakovich disappears for good.

Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony is only three movements, but the first and third movements are both nearly a half-hour in length and the entire piece runs close to 70 minutes (second only to Symphony #7 in terms of length). The work is a juggernaut in every way, shape and form. Shostakovich requires an immense orchestra of over 100 musicians for this work, and the technical and emotional demands of the music are extreme. Partially because of this, the work is among his least-performed scores, but there are other reasons, too.

1936 was the beginning of Stalin's "Great Terror," and over the course of the next decade and a half millions of Russians would be imprisoned, enslaved, tortured and/or killed by the government (including several of Shostakovich's close friends and relatives). Shostakovich, as an artist, was one of the first targets: Pravda issued a scathing condemnation of his heretofore successful opera "Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District," and, rightfully fearing for his life, Shostakovich pulled "Lady MacBeth" off the stage. As a result of this "First Denunciation," commissions began to dry up and Shostakovich's income dropped 75%. Realizing the Germanic-influenced Symphony #4 would be catastrophic in the present political climate, Shostakovich withdrew that, too, from rehearsals, and the symphony would not be premiered for another 25 years.

From the severe, almost march-like opening, to the whirlwind string figures in the middle of the first movement, to the solemn processional at the start of the third movement, Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has a bunch of his greatest musical highlights.

Symphony #5 in d minor, Op. 47 (1937) - Five Stars
Shostakovich's magnum opus, and very possibly the greatest symphony of the 20th Century, was his Fifth Symphony. Accused of being "too formalist" but Stalin's regime, and quite literally facing exile or execution, Shostakovich presented this multi-layered masterwork, traditional and conformist on the surface, heartbroken and subversive underneath.

The approximately 45-minute work was composed quickly, in only four months in the middle of 1937, and is structure in the most traditional symphonic format there is: four movements, with an introduction of themes, a slow movement, a lively scherzo, and a grand finale. That Shostakovich switched the placements of the scherzo and the slow movement, so that the lively, happy scherzo came second and the dark, sad, slow movement came third, is only one of his tricks.

Throughout the whole symphony one gets an atmosphere of almost crushing despair. Despite supposedly being a redeeming, traditionalist, optimistic work, the piece is largely dark and sombre, even while being active and loud. The first movement foreshadows numerous horror movie film scores from the 70s and 80s. The second movement, the "lively" scherzo, is still rendered somewhat grim by way of the melody centering on the bassoon and lower strings. The third movement, what close friend and famed conductor Mstislav Rostropovich calls "the central movement to the entire symphony," is a soft, anguished piece of writing that barely utilizes half the orchestra. The finale, possibly the most famous section, starts of with a blaze of brass and strings, but the supposedly "triumphant" finale contains a lot of hidden messages. Sometimes criticized as being "shrill," the finale is in fact intentionally, mockingly shrill: a send-up of the so-called "triumphant" finale that sits on the surface of the music. The upper voices repeat an ostinato eighth-note pattern to the point of absurdity, and while the brass blazes away in the key of D Major, the other winds (very UN-triumphantly) modulate away to the keys of g and b-flat minor.

The finale also includes a musical quotation from the composer's song "Rebirth," accompanying the words "a barbarian painter" who "blackens the genius's painting". In the song, the barbarian's paint falls away and the original painting is reborn. It has been suggested that the barbarian and the genius are Stalin and Shostakovich respectively.

The premiere of Symphony #5 (11/21/37) was a colossal success. (The standing ovation lasted nearly an hour—longer than the symphony itself!) The establishment subtitled the work "the creative reply of a Soviet artist to justified criticism" and hailed the finale as a celebration of Socialist Realism (and thus missing the point entirely: Shostakovich himself would go on to state that the Fifth's finale was "as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing...'"). With the regime's approval, Shostakovich was once again hailed as one of the foremost Soviet artists.

The piece is nearly flawless, with nary a misplaced note. Every minute of every movement is eminently listenable, with too many "highlights" to note here. Any and every fan of classical music should have a recording of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony in their CD library (look for one conducted by Rostropovich).

Symphony #6 in b minor, Op. 54 (1939) - Two Stars
This symphony provides a perfect example of what Shostakovich did his entire life: he toed the party line when he could, buying political capital with works like Symphony #5, then would immediately turn around and spend that capital by writing unpopular works (unpopular with the regime, if not the populace) often critical of the Soviet government. Symphony #5 bought the capital spent on #6, the success of #7 allowed him to ignore government expectations for symphonies #8 and #9, the very Soviet #12 was followed by the hugely condemned #13, etc.

The Sixth Symphony premiered on 11/21/39, exactly two years after the première of the Symphony No. 5. The premiere was a success, and the finale was encored (Shostakovich: "It's the first time I ever wrote such a successful finale. I think even the most fastidious critic won't have anything to pick at."), but it received little notice from Stalin's campaign and would later be roundly criticized.

The Sixth Symphony, like the Fourth, is set in three movements. Shostakovich takes the unusual step of leading off the symphony with a long and extended slow movement. This is followed by an unimaginative scherzo. The only real success in the work is the finale, described by the composer as a "full-blooded and debauched music-hall galop." This movement is the highlight of the work; Shostakovich would later state that it was a parody of Socialist bureaucracy.

Symphony #7 in C Major "Leningrad," Op. 60 (1941) - Four Stars
Where exactly is Shostakovich's Symphony #7's place in history? Contrary to American composer Virgil Thomson's criticism that "It seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not very musical and the distracted," I feel the symphony is wonderfully musical and contains some of Shostakovich's best themes. Indeed, Thomson's criticism makes little sense: at over 70 minutes long, far from being for "the distracted," the symphony is fairly demanding of the listener (the first movement, at nearly a half-hour in length, is nearly as long as Shostakovich's Third Symphony in its entirety).

While having a very complicated relationship with Stalin's regime, Shostakovich *was* a through and through Russian patriot. When the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941 Shostakovich rushed out to enlist. Due to poor eyesight and a history of health problems he was rejected; undaunted, he signed up with the Leningrad Fire Brigade (a rendering of Shostakovich in his fire brigade uniform was the cover of the July 20th, 1942 issue of Time magazine. Shostakovich had started work on the Symphony the year before (contrary to the initial proclamation by the Soviet government), but revised and completed the first two movements while trapped in the Siege of Leningrad by the Nazis. He then completed the third movement only two days before he and his family were evacuated from the city to Moscow. Less than a month later Shostakovich fled even further, to Samara, where the symphony was completed two days after Christmas in 1941. Shostakovich dedicated the symphony to the city still under siege.

After the Seventh's premiere in March of 1942, Soviet agents copied the score to microfilm, flew it to Teheran and turned it over to British agents, and from there the score made its way to London and New York. The symphony received its broadcast premiere in Europe by Henry Wood and the London Philharmonic Orchestra on June 22, 1942 in London, and an American premiere on July 19, 1942, by New York's NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini in a studio concert that was broadcast nationwide. The symphony was a tremendous success around the world, and was seen as a shining example of the Russian spirit holding off the Nazi horde.

The Leningrad premiere was given on August 9, 1942 by the Leningrad Radio Orchestra (the only symphony orchestra remaining in Leningrad) under Karl Eliasberg. The city was still blockaded at that time, so the score was flown in secretly one night in early July for rehearsal, and a team of copyists worked around the clock to prepare the instrumental parts despite shortages of ink and paper. Members of the orchestra were given special rations to help them through the concert and extra players were drafted in to replace those fighting, evacuated or dead. At the concert, loudspeakers broadcast the performance throughout the city and, in psychological warfare, to the besieging German forces, who had been bombarded in advance by artillery to ensure their silence during the performance of the symphony.

The symphony is most famous for the Invasion Theme of the first movement: a lyrical, 18-bar march that is repeated twelve times, and lasts over ten minutes. The melody never changes; in a manner similar to Ravel's Bolero the music slowly grows louder and progresses from serenity to aggressiveness based solely on changing instrumentation. The theme was widely thought to represent the Nazi invaders, and it did... but in another one of Shostakovich's multiple-meanings, the melody is a variation of a Russian folk-song, and also represents the increasing aggression against the Russian people by Stalin's regime.

In the years immediately following WWII the symphony fell out of favor in the West, as it was soon interpreted as an overt piece of Soviet propaganda. But the symphony has regained popularity in the past 15-20 years (it's not coincidental, I feel, that as soon as the Cold War ended it became an "acceptable" work again), as the wonderful thematic material and the grandiose ending have appealed to symphony orchestras around the world. Highly recommended, but avoid recordings under 70 minutes (too rushed) or over 80 (too drawn out).

Symphony #8 in c minor, Op. 65 (1943) - Four Stars
By 1943, the tide had started to turn. The Soviets had just scored a decisive victory in the Battle of Stalingrad, and that bloodiest battle in human history would be the first big wound in the downfall of the Third Reich. The Allies were starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Not Shostakovich. He takes the patriotic optimism of the Seventh Symphony and drops it a half-step, and the resulting Eighth Symphony in c minor is an overwhelmingly bleak outlook on the nature of war and the Soviet state. Shostakovich was aware that the regime would be expecting another patriotic, uplifting juggernaut, and anticipated their criticism with heavy sarcasm: "The freedom-loving Peoples will at long last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism, and peace will reign throughout the world under the sunny rays of Stalin's Constitution." The government initially gave no response to the work, being too busy with the war, one can assume, but the Symphony was later banned after the second denunciation of Shostakovich in 1948.

The Eighth Symphony is very much the darkness to the Seventh's light. The Eighth is also a tremendously long symphony (over an hour), and it too begins with an extended opening movement of nearly a half-hour in length. The Eighth has five movements instead of four (though the last two movements are basically one movement that has been split-up), and what interesting movements they are. After the extended, tragic opener that seems to memorialize the war's dead, the second movement is a grim, heavy-handed scherzo: a dance that seems to be intentionally dark and trying to put forth an "act" of happiness. The third movement is a strange toccata: set in cut-time, the movement begins with three minutes of non-stop quarter notes, a kind of perpetual motion rhythm-melody combo that gets passed from the strings to the low brass. This perpetual motion figure ends in another up-tempo dance section, and while in a lighter mood than the second movement there's still something phony or hollow to the joy.

The last two movements slide back down to the pessimistic outlook, and the finale of the symphony (a soft, detached flute melody over subdued strings) clearly communicates Shostakovich's verdict on the war: everybody loses.

Symphony #9 in E-flat Major, Op. 70 (1945) - Two Stars
World War II was over, and the world was in celebration. Based on the vast, dramatic scale of his previous symphonies, the public (and, it should be noted, Stalin's government) expected a grand ode to victory, a celebratory work like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (even the numbering was perfect!). Indeed, in late 1944 when victory was becoming obvious, Shostakovich declared, "Undoubtedly like every Soviet artist, I harbor the tremulous dream of a large-scale work in which the overpowering feelings ruling us today would find expression. I think the epigraph to all our work in the coming years will be the single word 'Victory'." As late as April 1945, Shostakovich was working on a large-scale symphony for full orchestra and chorus. But then Shostakovich pulled a bait and switch. Without telling anybody, he scrapped his large scale idea and started over, and by the end of the summer he had finished a Ninth Symphony that no one saw coming.

The Ninth is in five short movements (not even totalling 30 minutes all together) for a very subdued orchestra (and no chorus). All of the symphony's music is light, playful, and classical period in nature (earning comparisons to Mozart and Haydn in nature and inspiration), very unlike much of Shostakovich's other music. His peers generally approved of the work and admired the composer's ingenuity, but critics lambasted the work both in the Soviet Union (Soviet critics censured the symphony for its "ideological weakness" and its failure to "reflect the true spirit of the people of the Soviet Union") and in the West ("The Russian composer should not have expressed his feelings about the defeat of Nazism in such a childish manner" -- New York World-Telegram, 27 July 1946). After the second denunciation of 1948, the Ninth Symphony was banned and Shostakovich was forced to submit a retraction and apologize for its creation.

I respect the genius of the work (ironically, what could possibly more fitting for celebrating the end of WWII than a light-hearted, jovial dose of pure musical relief?), but at the same time the symphony holds little to interest me. I'm not a fan of the 18th Century classical style that Shostakovich emulates here, and the lack of dramatic contrast in the work leads my mind to wandering.

Symphony #10 in e minor, Op. 93 (1953) - Five Stars
Symphony #5 might be Shostakovich's *best* work, but the Tenth is by far my favorite.

After the second denunciation of 1948, Shostakovich kept a low profile to avoid drawing the ire of Stalin. In March of 1953 Stalin died, and Shostakovich immediately assembled some previously composed sketches and began working on his first major symphonic work in five years. Composition progressed quickly, and the symphony was premiered shortly before Christmas and was a huge success (in this, the Tenth somewhat parallels the Fifth's huge success after the first denunciation of 1936).

The symphony is intensely personal: the long, solemn first movement is Shostakovich's interpretation of life under Stalin. What follows is one of Shostakovich's most unique creations: a high-speed, violent scherzo movement that has the orchestra practically bursting at the seams, supposedly a portrait of Stalin himself.

The third movement is a waltzy nocturne that contains coded notation to Elmira Nazirova, a student of his that Shostakovich developed a crush on (while he was married three times, Shostakovich was prone to infatuations and crushes). The Elmira motif is called out twelve times on the horn, and always seems distant and unattainable.

The fourth movement is for Shostakovich himself: his DSCH theme [his initials, corresponding to notes in Germanic notation: D, Ess (E flat), C and H (B)] keeps prominently appearing the finale. The Stalin theme returns from the second movement and is overcome by the DSCH theme, which is repeated with increasing excitement towards the end of the symphony, one of the liveliest and most exciting finishes I've ever heard. Not a lot of hidden messages here: Stalin's dead, Shostakovich lives. He has survived.

Symphony #11 in g minor "The Year 1905," Op. 93 (1957) - Four Stars
More multi-layed ambiguity from Shostakovich: supposedly a historical portrait of the first Russian Revolution of 1905, the work was composed immediately after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 that had been ruthlessly crushed by Soviet forces, and most close acquaintances of Shostakovich have stated that current events had more than a little importance in interpreting the work.

Another massive symphony of nearly 70 minutes, the work was blasted in the West as "overblown film music without a film," but was praised by the Soviet government (once again, missing the message beneath the music) and was awarded a Lenin prize.

I like the work, and while "film music" it may be, film music can still be very engaging. From the cold Russian winter of the first movement to the march of the Palace Square and the troops firing on the crowd in the second; from the funeral lament of the third to the decalamatory aggression of the revolution in the finale, the Eleventh is extremely listenable. While it never really approaches greatness, it is solidly above average throughout, a tremendously difficult achievement when you're putting forth over an hour's worth of music.

Symphony #12 in d minor "The Year 1917," Op. 112 (1961) - Three Stars
In 1960, Shostakovich joined the Communist Party. Shostakovich's relationship with the Soviet government has always been difficult to figure out, and this act only deepens the puzzle. Was it commitment? Cowardice? Or even political extortion? On one hand, the government was far less strict than it had been under Stalin, and Shostakovich was riding one of his "popular" waves with the powers that be after Symphony #11. Then again, son Maxim recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears, close friend Lev Lebedinsky was concerned that he was suicidal after the event, and Shostakovich himself later confided to third wife Irina Supinskaya that he had been blackmailed. (All of this is consistent with Shostakovich's personality: one friend remarked that he was "completely incapable of saying 'No' to anybody.")

Symphony #12 was more political capital, written to celebrate the second Russian revolution. It is widely considered to be a pandering work below Shostakovich's usual standards (which it is), but it is not wholly without redemption: a terrifically original third movement is the highlight of the piece, and there's some wonderful music in the finale (though it goes on and on and on; Shostakovich uses about six "false" codas and seems unsure of how exactly to end the piece). I like listening to the last two movements quite regularly, and as a result don't find the piece to be as repugnant as many critics, but it's a "low" three star rating, and by no means one of Shostakovich's best works.

Symphony #13 in b-flat minor "Babi Yar," Op. 113 (1962) - Three Stars
The close proximity of Symphonies #12 and #13 (composed back to back) make me wonder if the pandering Twelfth wasn't wholly intentional, because Symphony #13 was possibly the most controversial thing Shostakovich ever composed.

Based of off five poems by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko that are highly critical of the Soviet government and deal with anti-semitism, oppressive regimes, and xenophobia, the symphony is dark and severe (written for full orchestra, bass chorus and bass soloist). The subtitle of the work, "Babi Yar," is also the name of the first poem/movement, and refers to a ravine outside of Kiev where Nazi's mass executed 34,000 Jews during their invasion of Russia in WWII.

Even during the relatively calm censorship phase in post-Stalinist Soviet Union, this work provoked a strong antagonistic response from the government. Khrushchev himself criticized the work and threatened to stop the premiere. The work also led to a permanent rift between Shostakovich and conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky (who had premiered Shostakovich's Symphonies #5, #6, #8, #9, #10 and #12) who flatly refused to conduct the controversial piece.

The piece has retained popularity today as it is one of the finest works for bass soloist in the classical repertoire. The first movement has a gripping beginning and some of Shostakovich's best writing, and the conclusion of the work (a jewish folk-song on strings fading off to solemn notes on the bells) is heart-breaking, but the middle three movements are merely average.

Symphony #14, Op. 135 (1969) - Two Stars
Never exceptionally hale, Shostakovich had numerous health problems towards the end of his life. In 1958 he began having pains in his right hand that eventually forced him to quit playing piano (eventually diagnosed as polio), suffered several falls in which he broke both legs, and had heart attacks in 1966 and 1971 (this was complicated by his very Russian vices, cigarettes and vodka, of which he partook liberally all his life). As a result, many of his later works are exceptionally preoccupied with death and human mortality [though he did maintain his dry sense of humor, writing in a letter: "Target achieved so far: 75% (right leg broken, left leg broken, right hand defective. All I need to do now is wreck the left hand and then 100% of my extremities will be out of order.)"].

Symphony #14 was one of his most death-centric works: based off of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker and Rainer Maria Rilke that deal with death (specifically unjust or premature death). The composer himself was initially unsure what to call the work, eventually designating it a symphony rather than a song cycle to emphasise the unity of the work musically and philosophically (he rejected the title oratorio because the work lacks a chorus). The symphony is scored for an awkward Frankenstein's monster sort of chamber orchestra: soprano and bass soloists, ten violins, four violas, three cellos, two double basses, no brass or woodwinds, and a large percussion section that includes parts for wood block, castanets, whip, tri-toms, xylophone, campane, vibraphone and celesta (but, oddly, not common percussion instruments like bass drum, timpani, or cymbals).

Reviews were mixed: some criticized the work as overly pessimistic, another argued that "through careful ordering of the texts [he] conveys a specific message of protest at the arbitrary power exercised by dictators in sending the innocent to their deaths." I find the work unique in structure, but only two or three of the eleven poems are set to music that really thrills me (Mvt. II, "Malaguena" by Federico Garcia Lorca, is the best).

Symphony #15 in A Major, Op. 141 (1971) - Four Stars
What to make of Shostakovich's last symphony? It's a large work (45 minutes) but was composed in only one month. It's scored for a large orchestra which is then used sparingly, with each section only playing bits and pieces. Shostakovich listed it as being in A Major (a "happy" key signature), but the work doesn't sniff A Major until the fourth movement (the first three are in minor key signatures) and seems overwhelmingly resigned and has several immensely tragic passages.

Shostakovich was very fond of parody and musical quotation, and Symphony #15 is rife with them. Rossini ("William Tell Overture"), Wagner (fate motif from The Ring Cylce), Glinka, Mahler, and Shostakovich's own earlier works are all quoted, twisted and sent-up in the symphony (Shostakovich: "I don't myself quite know why the quotations are there, but I could not, could not, not include them"). In a way, this is the summation of Shostakovich's musical life: all he wrote and was inspired by. But it also seems to be a last frustrated cry against the Soviet regime that gave him so much grief his whole life long.

The symphony ends with one of the most unusual finishes of any work I've heard: a ghostly coda on a sustained pedal point in the strings beneath a bizarre storm of percussion: snare drum, castanets, triangle, wood block, xylophone and timpani. The symphony ends with the bells and celesta playing a single sustained mediant (C#, the middle note of the A-major chord).

How to interpret the ending? Peaceful? Resigned? Defeated?

Another multi-layered enigma from a composer who had a life full of creating them.

FIVE STARS
Symphony #5 (1937)
Symphony #10 (1953)

FOUR STARS
Symphony #4 (1936)
Symphony #7 (1941)
Symphony #8 (1943)
Symphony #11 (1957)
Symphony #15 (1971)

THREE STARS
Symphony #1 (1925)
Symphony #12 (1961)
Symphony #13 (1962)

TWO STARS
Symphony #6 (1939)
Symphony #9 (1945)
Symphony #14 (1969)

ONE STAR
Symphony #2 (1927)
Symphony #3 (1929)

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

2006-09-03T17:29:00.000-07:00

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD (Peter Matthiessen) - Two Stars

Long and tedious (it lasts a little over three hours, but seems much longer than that), the primary problem with this movie is that it never really seems to decide what it wants to be or where it wants to go. Is this a story about the struggle of missionaries to adjust to their lives in the Amazon? Is it about Catholic/Protestant rivalry? Is it about rediscovering one's roots? Is it about giving us a glimpse of native culture? Is it about the effort to drive the natives off their land? It tries to be about all of these, and the end result is that it doesn't do any of them particularly well. Had the movie chosen to focus on one or two of those storylines (and if it had been cut by at least an hour) it might have made a decent film. As it is, it's very disappointing.

The above is a quote from a user review at IMDB.com of the movie version of "At Play in the Fields of the Lord." Judging by the reviewer's quote, I can only assume the movie was meticulously faithful to the book.

The book isn't overly long (only 373 pages) but the first half of that is mind-numbingly tedious because it never commits itself in any one direction. The novel, much like the characters in it, wanders around aimlessly in the inescapable hell of the Amazon jungle. At Play... brings forth numerous interesting and thought-provoking story threads, but they all eventually fade away, unresolved, into the graveyard of forgotten memory. For example, by page 35 it is obvious that the two mercenary characters will be used to bomb a nearby Indian village. 300 pages and many story-months later, the (now abandoned) village is duly bombed, even though by this point that story thread has long since become inconsequential and does absolutely nothing to further the story along.

The IMDB reviewer really hit the nail on the head. At Play... never decides what direction it wants to go. The only constants in the novel are the harsh, implacable nature of the jungle and the author's steadfast, seemingly condescending approach towards faith in general. The devout are painted as foolish, stupid and naive, in increasingly bold strokes, and the act of having faith at all is made to seem like a pointless exercise. And maybe in the unforgiving jungles of the Amazon it is, but the attack on it in the pages of this book just turns into another droning, single-note melody that never develops.

"I'll bet you've asked yourself that very thing quite a few times. Let me ask you something else. Did you earn your faith, or were you stuffed with it, like a big turkey?"

Shalimar the Clown

2006-08-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

SHALIMAR THE CLOWN (Salman Rushdie) - Four Stars

Whoever coined the phrase "time heals all wounds" really got it wrong. Time erases all wounds, as people, empires, and ages come and go, but it doesn't heal them. A person who dies of cancer isn't "healed" by it.

Nearly twenty years passed between the writing of Midnight's Children and Shalimar the Clown, and Rushdie's sardonic, grim outlook on the world from twenty years ago has metastasized into a severely bitter, vitriolic mixture of anger and despair. Rushdie always generates several passages of extreme beauty in his novels; here he seems to build them up for the sole purpose of violating and destroying them in the most horrific ways.

Shalimar the Clown is, supposedly, about the title character, his history, and what leads him from being a circus performer in Kashmir to an international assassin. In reality, the title character is never really delved into that much: the book is more about the events of the world around him that shaped him into what he is. The book focuses heavily on the people of Shalimar's hometown, his wife, an American ambassador and the ambassador's illegimate daughter, and through them, through their actions you kind of get the idea of who Shalimar the Clown really is.

In reality, the book is primarily about the rape of Kashmir by Islamic militants and the Indian army (Rushdie has a lot of issues with the Indian government). The magical fantasy of Midnight's Children makes only muted appearances in Shalimar the Clown: this book is far more about brutal reality, about man's inhumanity towards man (both on the personal and political levels).

This book progresses slowly and was tough to read. It's not a book you can pick up and breeze through. There's very little dialogue in the book, and Rushdie too often indulges in a very florid writing style (there were a few points where I felt like I was having a thesaurus thrown at my head instead of reading a novel). Indeed, four stars almost seems a little high for a ranking, but Rushdie is capable of writing passages of such staggering impact they're impossible to forget. In reality, this is a three-star book with a handful of five-star sections. It is angry and bitter and sad. It is a teary-eyed castigation of mankind.

Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old man's nose? Who broke that young girl's heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his fiancée? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughterd the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?

Wicked

2006-08-06T22:46:00.000-07:00

WICKED (Gregory Maguire) - Four Stars

Really, what an ingenious concept: take a well-known and well-loved fantasy story and "photo-negative" it. The idyllic countryside becomes home to a frightening, almost Orwellian government. Expose the hidden dark (and dirty) sides of the good and virtuous. And, of course, tell the villain's story. As someone once postulated, god might not be any more virtuous than satan, he's just got better P.R.

But Wicked, thankfully, is far more than a gimmicky twist on an old story. The novel rises above that to become a truly engrossing story in its own right, and perhaps its most satisfying achievement is showing how evil doesn't always coming storming from the depths with fire and brimstone. Sometimes evil arises from the most mundane sources: misunderstandings, missed intentions, even the unsuccessful fulfillment of goals and dreams.

For those of you sitting in the "Osama" section, Wicked is both the biography of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and a prequel to said novel. Wicked traces the arc of Elphaba's (a.k.a, the Wicked Witch of the West's) life from her humble beginnings as a preacher's daughter in Munchkinland to her schooling in science (not sorcery) at the well-known academy in Shiz where she's the roommate of Glinda (the "Good" Witch); from her disgust at the prejudice and other nastier aspects of society in Oz to her birth as a counter-revolutionary in the Emerald City. And beyond, of course, detailing the history of the ruby slippers and how Dorothy (unintentionally) runs afoul of Elphaba, and more retelling of The Wizard of Oz from this new perspective. Maguire does a terrific job at developing Elphaba into a complicated and multi-layered character, deserving equal parts sympathy and scorn for her actions.

While a solid and enjoyable book, there are parts where Maguire makes a few bad missteps. His use of metaphors can be incredibly heavy-handed, particularly in some of the novel's existentialist musings. I really would've liked more development of Frex (Elphaba's father) in the first 50-75 pages, particularly since he's an important recurring character and his feelings about his daughter (and her feelings about him) are vital to novel's development and impact. And particularly bothersome was the hastiness of Elphaba's deterioration from paranoid insurgent to homicidal lunatic. The reasons for this are certainly well-established, but her mental collapse, her final encounter with Dorothy, and indeed the entire denouement seem uncomfortably rushed.

Fairly minor gripes, though. Wicked remains an original, enjoyable novel that has sufficient parts action, comedy and drama without being overly difficult to read. On an ironic note, having read the book I can't imagine how it could possibly be well-converted to a Broadway musical; but, having not seen the stage version, I can't pass judgment on that yet.

Boq returned the smile, warmly. "Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren't you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us." He sighed. "It's people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of."

Oryx and Crake

2006-07-31T14:13:00.000-07:00

ORYX AND CRAKE (Margaret Atwood) - Three Stars

This was an enjoyable read and, really, that's about all that one can say about it.

Reading the critical acclaims this novel has garnered might lead one to believe that it is some towering masterpiece that will make a profound impression on a person's life, but it's not. Oryx and Crake is as shallow and easy to see through as a tide pool... but that doesn't mean that it's not an enjoyable read.

Atwood does not set out to discover new frontiers here: the "post-apocalyptic future landscape" scenario she utilizes has been done and done and done again. As has the creation and usage of new words/animals/items to populate such a landscape (indeed, Atwood's over-use of these literary creations in the first fifty pages or so starts to grate).

The story is told in flashbacks, as Jimmy ("Snowman") tries to figure out what led up to the catastrophe that wiped humans off the face of the planet. Again, there is no new ground here, in style or content. What exactly happened is presented as somewhat of a mystery, but there aren't any twists or turns, and the eventual revelation of the truth is unsurprising without necessarily being a let down.

The whole reason for reading Oryx and Crake is Atwood's wonderful development of Jimmy and Crake's friendship, and how it affects them and affects the world around them. Jimmy and Crake are the only two characters that matter to the story (even title-character Oryx's role is minimal: mainly to provide an import link between the two and possibly a flashpoint for the plot), and Atwood is smart enough not to waste much time on the extraneous filler characters that populate Jimmy and Crake's world.

The novel has plenty of flaws. The symbolism in it is generally hackneyed and trite. Some of the "deep" dialogue (particularly between Jimmy and Oryx) is not at all meaningful or purposeful and actually quite tiring to read. The overall narrative voice is sardonic without really providing any decent morals from the story (the novel's warnings about genetic engineering, corporate manipulation, and the overall shallowness of the human creature are obvious and should provoke a "well duh!" response from any reader of even moderate intelligence). The pace of the book is slow (Atwood spends a long time saying not a whole lot), but this didn't bother me too much because the pace is even throughout.

But the development of Jimmy and Crake make it all worthwhile. Atwood's most lasting comments on the human condition come not from her extrapolation of modern sciences to their most extreme, nor from her grim, post-apocalyptic future, but from her development of such a simple thing as human friendship... and how easily it can be used for ill purposes.

"Please, oh Snowman, what is toast?"
Another error, Snowman thinks. He should avoid arcane metaphors. "Toast," he says, "is something very, very bad. It's so bad I can't even describe it. Now it's your bedtime. Go away."

East of Eden

2006-07-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

EAST OF EDEN (John Steinbeck) - Three Stars

For an epic novel that has no plot and no specific main character, East of Eden is a pretty good book. It is, however, a maddeningly frustrating novel, as Steinbeck whets your appetite with flashes of brilliance before receding back into chapters full of aimless wanderings.

I had two major problems and a bunch of minor pet peeves with this book. The major problems, of course, I mentioned in my opening sentence...

1) NO PLOT. Really, this book has no real plot. It follows/observes the lives of various interconnected people in turn of the (20th) century Salinas, but there's not a lot of STORY here. This led to some major pacing issues with the story, since Steinbeck would ramble on and on about persons X & Y while persons A & B are more or less forgotten entirely for 50, 75, 100 pages at a time. There's a few amusing anecdotes and set pieces, but for the most part it's just 600-pages of character development. Which might have been more effective if not for...

2) NO MAIN CHARACTER. This book doesn't have one. The arc of the book generally follows the life of Adam Trask, but can you say that at any given point he is the main attention point of the novel? He is the focus around which events revolve, but Steinbeck is always more attentive to the characters around Adam as opposed to Adam himself. The first part of the book is mainly about Cyrus Trask (Adam's dad), Charles Trask (Adam's brother) and Cathy "Kate" Ames; the middle of the book focuses largely on the Hamilton family (Adam's "neighbors" in California; the last sections focus on Lee (Adam's manservant), Kate, and Cal and Aron (Adam's twin sons; moreso on Cal than Aron). This leads to possibly the most adverse effect in the novel: that once a character has finally been developed far enough to make the reader care for him, his time in the story draws to a close and he disappears/dies. Once you finally start caring about Samuel Hamilton, he dies. Once you finally start caring about Kate (and understanding some of what causes her to be who she is), she commits suicide. Once you finally start caring about Cal and Abra and Lee, the book ends.

I think Steinbeck worked better on a smaller canvas. The Grapes of Wrath (nearly 150 pages shorter) was his far better "epic novel," and even short novellas like Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men were able to draw the reader in and tell their stories without as much distraction. Steinbeck obviously had grand plans for East of Eden, but he tries to shove so much content into the novel that very little of it gets the attention it deserves. I think he also hamstrung himself a little in his attempts to shoehorn the story into the form of a (fairly obvious) biblical allegory instead of just letting the story and characters go where they may.

Some of my more minor, but still notable, pet peeves...

1) FORESHADOWING. Steinbeck simply does not do this effectively in East of Eden. He has all the subtlety of a bowling ball dropped on the foot when he foreshadows an event and, to make things even worse, once the event happens the characters usually perform an "event autopsy" which serves no purpose other than to spell things out for the reader. It makes for some mind-numbingly tedious reading the third or fourth time it happens.

2) PANORAMIC DESCRIPTION. Steinbeck's initial description of the Salinas Valley is vivid and vibrant and make the area jump to life. So why does he need to do it four or five more times over the course of the novel? IT'S THE SAME LAND. He's just repeating himself.

3) A WEAK AND FLAT ENDING. Expecting a wind-up to a staggering conclusion, East of Eden just kind of fizzles away and ends with a whimper. Again, Steinbeck failure to focus on one or two main characters throughout the novel led to several "false codas" that sapped momentum away from the conclusion. Indeed, after the relatively unhurried pace of much of the novel, the ending seems more than a little rushed and forced (from Aron unceremonious dumping from the novel, Kate's suicide, Cal and Abra's courtship, Adam's stroke... more events happen in the last 50 pages than in the previous 200+, but they're just kind of glossed over, speed bumps on the road to the finish).

After 1,000 words of criticism, you're probably wondering why I gave East of Eden even three stars. The thing is, Steinbeck was a brilliant writer and still capable of writing passages of heartbreaking genius. East of Eden is peppered with these. That's what makes the inconsistancy, the aimless wandering, the lack of focus so much more frustrating. East of Eden, in a way, is a victim of Steinbeck's success.

East of Eden could have been, SHOULD have been, one of America's all-time greatest novels. It's not. It's just a decent book. And I expected more than that from John Steinbeck.

"The war, at first anyway, was for other people. We, I, my family and friends, had kind of bleacher seats, and it was pretty exciting. And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn't true either. The dreadful telegrams began to sneak sorrowfully in, and it was everybody's brother. Here we were, over six thousand miles from the anger and the noise, and that didn't save us. It wasn't much fun then."

Midnight's Children

2006-07-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN (Salman Rushdie) - Five Stars

The thing that really surprised me about Midnight's Children, by the end of it, was its generally sardonic attitude towards the magical symbolism and omens that are so central to the plot. So much is made of the mystical connections relating to the main character (Saleem Sinai), so much promise is set up in the story, that it's surprising when the abuse starts being heaped on Saleem with almost sadistic relentlessness. By the end of the story Rushdie has portrayed a startlingly pessimistic view of the "potential" of the innocent. And, with the obvious parallels between the life of Saleem Sinai and the development of modern India, Rushdie also exhibits a pessimistic and fairly depressing forecast for the future of one of the world's most populous nations.

But amidst all that is an epic; a collection of stories that seems almost like "A Thousand and One Nights" in its scope. The magical realism style Rushdie employs is far less confusing than that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: where Marquez's rambling, stream of consciousness writing serves largely to (intentionally) disorient the reader, Rushdie (through a liberal use of semi-colons) gently guides the reader through narrative leaps spanning both time and distance. Astonishingly descriptive, Rushdie is almost more a painter than a writer in this book: the near 550 pages pass by with a very economical use of dialogue, and it is the scenes and descriptions that provide the meat and memories of the novel.

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I," every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."

The Bookcase

2006-07-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

Last updated: 05/21/10 - Getting Stoned with Savages

BOOKS I'VE READ, 2004 - present:

FIVE STARS
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)
The Cider House Rules (John Irving)
Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
A Dirty Job (Christopher Moore)
Black Swan Green (David Mitchell)

FOUR STARS
The Plague (Albert Camus)
Cannery Row (John Steinbeck)
Mother Night (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell)
Autumn of the Patriarch (Gabriel García Márquez)
Island (Aldous Huxley)
Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (Stephen King)
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth)
Wicked (Gregory Maguire)
Shalimar the Clown (Salman Rushdie)
Red Harvest (Dashiell Hammett)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Absurdistan (Gary Shteyngart)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré)
Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The Sirens of Titan (Kurt Vonnegut)
In the Garden of Iden (Kage Baker)
Bloodsucking Fiends (Christopher Moore)
The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
Sky Coyote (Kage Baker)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
House of Sand and Fog (Andre Dubus III)
Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen)
Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Christopher Moore)
The Graveyard Game (Kage Baker)
Who Goes There? (John W. Campbell, Jr.)
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide (Douglas Adams)
The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

THREE STARS
Last Chance to See (Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine)
The Moon is Down (John Steinbeck)
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break (Steven Sherrill)
Naked (David Sedaris)
The Sex Lives of Cannibals (J. Maarten Troost)
Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)
Children of God (Mary Doria Russell)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
America (The Book) (Jon Stewart)
How to Breathe Underwater (Julie Orringer)
Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (Stephen King)
The Gun Seller (Hugh Laurie)
Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel García Márquez)
Life With Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse)
Appointment in Samarra (John O'Hara)
The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris)
Of Love and Other Demons (Gabriel García Márquez)
On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
Son of a Witch (Gregory Maguire)
Snow Falling on Cedars (David Guterson)
Death on the Nile (Agatha Christie)
Ragtime (E.L. Doctorow)
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (Grant Naylor)
Wizards (various)
The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)
Ubik (Philip K. Dick)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
You Suck (Christopher Moore)
Mendoza in Hollywood (Kage Baker)
The Life of the World to Come (Kage Baker)
Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer)
The Children of the Company (Kage Baker)
The Machine's Child (Kage Baker)
The Sons of Heaven (Kage Baker)
And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)
Black Projects, White Knights (Kage Baker)
Getting Stoned with Savages (J. Maarten Troost)

TWO STARS
God-Shaped Hole (Tiffanie DeBartolo)
Freaky Deaky (Elmore Leonard)
Prey (Michael Crichton)
Be Cool (Elmore Leonard)
Timequake (Kurt Vonnegut)
On Liberty (John Stuart Mill)
Napalm and Silly-Putty (George Carlin)
Airframe (Michael Crichton)
Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (Stephen King)
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
Thread of Grace (Mary Doria Russell)
At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Peter Matthiessen)
Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way (Bruce Campbell)
Cell (Stephen King)
Operation Shylock (Philip Roth)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
The Secret History of Moscow (Ekaterina Sedia)

ONE STAR
Seduced by Moonlight (Laurell K. Hamilton)
The Power and The Glory (Graham Greene)
A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul)
Under the Glacier (Halldor Laxness)
American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
Howards End (E.M. Forster)
Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

SPECIAL
Shostakovich At 100: The Fifteen Symphonies

Intro

2006-07-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, so...

Not that I read as voracious as other people I know, but it is an activity I'm trying to keep up on. And, well, it's about the only blogging concept that currently holds any interest for me.

"The Bookcase" entry will be my rankings page, utilizing an unimaginative and simple ranking system. Each book I finish (starting now) will get it's own amorphous review, which might cover anything I feel like.

So there you go.