Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' - November 2013

Cafe Society
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I’ve recently discovered my local library has the Sandman series of graphic novels by Neil Gaiman, and I’ve been working my way through them. So far, I’m not as impressed as I was hoping to be, given their vast popularity. A lot of stuff happens (often horrible stuff), but very little ever seems to get resolved. It’s all very well to be transcending the genre and everything, but it would help to also tell a satisfying story with some kind of point to it. I’m thinking of starting a separate thread to discuss my feelings about the series, but I may have finish it up first.

But to summarize:

  Book 1 Preludes and Nocturnes:   Starts out reasonably well -- figure of myth and legend is imprisoned, escapes and has to retrieve his items of power.   The first two items are vaguely interesting (although the duel with the demon was lame).  The last quest has some truly disturbing imagery -- I'm not sure I enjoy my comics with quite that much torture porn.    It was after this section that I decided I wasn't going to pay for the rest of the series and put it down for 10 years or so.

Book 2:  A Doll's House.    More gruesome imagery, but with a bit more black humor behind it.     But at the end, a fundamentally unsatisfying story.   Which I'm beginning to think all the Sandman stories must be, because they're resolved by an almost literal deus ex machina.

Book 3: Dream Country: Utterly forgettable short stories. I could only remember two out of the four without looking them up.

Book 4: Season of Mists: A really cool epic idea that goes nowhere. Because, again, it’s all resolved by a literal dues ex machina.

Book 5: A Game of You: This one really pissed me off, because it started off with a imaginative concept, there’s a really crowning moment of awesome from a character at the halfway mark, and then some stuff happens and the book ends and it was all pretty pointless. Actually, worse than pointless in the whole Raiders of the Lost Ark sense that it would have been totally better if everyone had stayed home and done nothing.

As I said, I think I have to start a new thread about this.

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The one-off stories, or the “stories-within-stories” are generally a lot better then the over-arching plots, which as you say, tend to wrap up kinda abruptly. The whole point of the series is Dream’s struggle against his lack of personal agency, so there is a point to the early plots ending without him doing anything, but it does feel like kind of a let down at the end of some of the collections.

I’d go ahead and read #6, since that’s the best of the short-story collections, and then leave it if that doesn’t grab you.

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A lot to report on!

The Goldfinch, the new Donna Tartt, was awesome. I would say it’s very much like The Secret History in that if you liked her first book, you will like this one, and if you found it maddening, you will hate this one. She’s smart, she’s intellectual, and this is a story about a series of sad and dramatic and weird coincidences and the point isn’t to create a realistic story (because it’s not), but rather to use that as a framework to write about the way people experience things – loss, change, art.

I will also add that in a pleasant coincidence, there is a visiting art exhibit currently at the Frick in NYC which includes the Fabritius painting of the title. If you get a chance to go, it’s terrific. It’s a small exhibit, and the Frick is not a cheap museum, but you get a very high art experience per dollar because nearly every single piece is amazing, and it’s still cheaper than going to the Netherlands to see them. I hope they are selling the heck out of this book at the gift shop.

Republic of Thieves, the third of Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards, was a fun time, although maybe not my favorite of the series so far. There could have maybe been more adventures and less brooding.

Sad Desk Salad was, eh. It’s a short novel about a young woman writing for a for-profit blog aimed at woman (the author is a former Jezebel writer). It was okay, but nothing revolutionary.

Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link, is a collection of YA short stories that all have a supernatural slant to some extent. A lot of them were cute, teen girls who are slightly geeky would probably love this.

Red Shift by Alan Garner … I wanted to like this but I ended up putting it down. Science fiction from the 1970s, I think there was supposed to be a time travel element, but I could not get into it because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. This is something I might come back to in the future. Is this a beloved book for anyone? Is it worth it to duke it out?

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The second book (Supervolcano: All Fall Down) was better than the first one. It was like Harry was watching tv while he was writing the first one or something; like his attention just wasn’t on it.

On to my current book - Slow Apocalypse by John Varley. The world’s supply of oil has been turned solid by a sabotaged virus; hijinks ensue. :slight_smile:

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I’m about 75% through with Sycamore Row by John Grisham. Pretty good, but you have to admit that his writing is very formulaic in many ways. His small town southern lawyer protagonist’s personality is never well-developed, so who cares about a few lines here and there about how the guy went out to dinner with his wife or got his daughter a puppy or whatever? So he has a lovely but thoroughly uninteresting family. Good for him.

For being as good a writer as Grisham is in some ways, he’s kind of remarkably bad at character development. I guess that’s why that Christmas book he wrote was so laughably bad, because it wasn’t a legal thriller.

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Ah, thanks for mentioning this, delphica. I’ve been wanting to check this series out for a while, so this reminded me to pick up The Lies of Locke Lamora and give it a shot. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to have to seriously reconsider reading fiction at all, I fear. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Currently reading The Luminaries.

Just started it - it’s pretty gripping so far.

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I hope you like it! I think if you enjoyed The Rook, and Jonathan Strange, there is a good chance this will be a match for you.

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I didn’t like it either. Will the next installment be the last? I’ll miss Temeraire, but thank heaven for Wiki summaries.

Finished When I’m Gone, the new one by Laura Lippman (not a Tess Monaghan). If you like Lippman, you’ll like this one. The flashbacks/forwards were unusually crazy. A guy skips the country to avoid prison. Ten years later, his mistress disappears. Several years after that, her remains are found. Skip ahead a few more years and the murder is being investigated as a cold case. Then skip around between 1959 and 2012 to see what happened with the guy’s wife and children, and the mistress. Oh, and solve the murder in the last few pages.

This was one of those books where you want to re-read to see if it all holds together. I never do that. I suppose it does. That’s what editors are for.

Next up is a second try at More Than This by Patrick Ness. It didn’t grab me the first time.

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Did you get an advance copy?

I’ll definitely read that when it comes out. I’m glad it’s not a Tess Monaghan book because I like her other books *much *better. TM is annoying.

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Yes, it’s an ARC.

I haven’t read any of the Tess Monaghan books. Apparently I’m not missing much. :slight_smile:

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Just finished the latest Robert Charles Wilson book, Burning Paradise.
It’s an altenate history, set in a world without WW1 or WW2 or most of the other conflicts of the 20th C. In return, progress has been at a more leisurely pace, with jet engines only now starting to replace propellors on aeroplanes and computers still vast machines using punchcards to run payrolls…
The reason for this is that Earth has been invaded, but not by BEMs or Martian war machines, but my microscopic organisms inhabiting the upper atmosphere!
I’ve not read much of his work since Darwinia, which it reminded me of somewhat.
I liked it.

Now onto On My Way To Samarkand, an autobiography by Gary Douglas Kilworth, the British sf, military and children’s book author. He isn’t actually going to Samarkand in the book, it’s just somewhere he’s wanted to go all his life and, hopefully, he’ll make it one day.
He was an infant during the Blitz and grew up in poverty near London with shared outside toilets, chickens in the back yard, etc. before travelling widely with his parents to various military postings around the world. Currently he’s an unruly teenager in Aden in the 1950s, well before the UK’s withdrawal.
Fascinating stuff.

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Uh, could you call them off or talk to them or something? That’d be super. Thanks.

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I hope you like this better than I did - I’m a big Varley fan, but this wasn’t very representative of his work, IMHO. I read another review (possibly here?) comparing it to a Niven/Pournelle disaster story & that’s pretty spot on - you also get a nearly turn-by-turn navigated tour of the Los Angeles area that was bordering on tl;dr. I’d recommend James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand as a better example of “slow apocalypse”.

LawMonkey & AuntiePam - I was also disappointed by the latest Temeraire book; the whole amnesia plot was :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:, but I did enjoy Novik’s portrayal of the Japanese dragon culture. I’ve got a re-read of the series planned for sometime soon. And I hope More Than This goes better for you this time around, AP, as I really enjoyed it.

Once again, I’ve gotten quite behind in my reviews, but here’s a few quickies:

Found Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories by Kevin Wilson while browsing the Indiana Digital Media library consortium site - the description of the first selection sucked me in. It’s the story of an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain unpleasant grandparents. The other stories are equally offbeat - someone who works at the Scrabble factory, mining for “Q”'s in a vast pile of tiles, the titular story about 3 college graduates who spend the summer digging under their small town, and a young man who works as a sort of actuary, plotting out actual worst-case scenarios “a field agent in ‘what could happen’”. GoodReads classifies it as Southern Gothic, but I didn’t get much of a Southern feel from it; in some ways it felt like magical realism without the magic - hard to categorize, but captivating. I really enjoyed Wilson’s story ideas and execution, as well as the actual writing and character development. It looks like most of his stuff is military non-fiction, but I may have to try & find his novel The Family Fang.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer was another library read, recommended here by Alba. It was an interesting blend of pop-science/sociology and personal experience. Foer explored the history of memorization, including the “memory palace” technique first used by the Romans. Foer also touched on at the neuroscience of memory, and visited with a man suffering from one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever documented; he forgets who you are during the course of the conversation. Foer became intrigued by the world of competitive memory training after covering the World Memory Championships, and starts training in order to compete the following year.
Foer’s writing is engaging, and the science is solid, tho if you’ve read Oliver Sachs, you’ve seen some of this before. I appreciated the detail he went into on the memory palace and PAO (person, action object) techniques, and can see where they would come in handy in certain circumstances; however, as someone who misplaces her keys regularly and has terrible trouble with names, I found this book to be more of a diversion than a self-help manual.

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Incidentally, I read an amazon review that said the book wasn’t half bad, outside of the amnesia plot. Is it maybe worth skipping that and reading the rest?

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You can’t do that with Temeraire novels, because of the way Novik writes. She’s all over the place with points of view. I’m afraid if I try to skip sections with Lawrence not remembering the past eight years, I’ll miss stuff that actually advances the story.

I didn’t finish the book, so I don’t know if Lawrence is cured halfway through or at the end. And then I tossed it. It was a review copy, so couldn’t be donated. :frowning:

Poli, I’m liking More Than This a bit better. My problem was padding – Ness is really driving the point home that Seth is all by himself, where’d everybody go?. But I’m at the part where he discovers the “coffin”, and that’s intriguing. It reminds me a bit of To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but I don’t know why, because in Bodies, the main character was surrounded by other people. Must be the resurrection angle.

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I forgot that book even had an amnesia plot.

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Oops! Will do.

Varley’s Slow Apocalypse really needs the reader to have a much better knowledge of Los Angeles than I have. Much of it is tedious descriptions of taking specific streets, etc. around and across the city. A map might have helped; as it is, I ended up using Google Earth and Streetview to figure just what was going on. Which also showed me the full extent of their journey, which was a lot shorter than the characters hoped! Insterad of reaching Oregon(?), they made it from the north of the city to some minor commuter town to the south east…
As mentioned by Politzania, I enjoyed James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand much more although some of the religious aspects were a bit strange! There’s a sequel I haven’t read yet.

Actually, another title I liked more than the Varley was the Harry Turtledove someone didn’t like some posts back. Supervolcano: Eruption, in which Yellowstone erupts and blankets much of North America in thick ash. I gave up on Turtledove years ago but this one appealed to me. (Partly because it wasn’t yet another recycling of Civil War/WW1/WW2 history.)
It’s much more about how ordinary people are coping with disaster than any governmental response to it; one of them’s an expert on how Yellowstone was, but it’s radically changed, and changed the world; the main character is a Californian police detective, his daughter’s a refugee, one son is stranded in Maine, etc.
No high-powered meetings with the President, or the Chiefs of Staff, etc. to give the bigger picture, just what they can figure from censored news reports, gossip, hearsay, and so on. More of a soap opera than a thriller!
I also enjoyed #2 and will read #3 when it comes out next month. Which will be more Turtledove I’ve read than in the previous dozen years.

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I find I’m kind of glossing over the overly detailed Los Angeles descriptions at this point - I don’t much care that the area is bordered by blah blah to the north, and blah blah to the north east, and blah blah blahdidiblah. I’m going to have to look into your recommendation as well. :slight_smile:

That was me. :slight_smile:

I did like the Turtledove books for the content, but I just found his writing surprisingly off in the first book. Like, how did this guy ever win any awards with this level of writing off.

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Thank you! I was thinking about this (I saw the movie when it first came out, then read the book) the other day, but couldn’t remember the title. I see the local library has a copy of it…