Just finished ‘Annihilation’ by Jeff Vandermeer. It’s a Lovecraftian tale of four explorers (a biologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor) dropped into a bizarre quarantine zone known as Area-X. They are the 12th expedition. Members of the previous 11 have all vanished, killed themselves or each other, or died of cancer. Their mission is to simply document as much as possible and try to get out alive.
It’s an absolutely fabulous premise. It couldn’t possibly be more to my tastes. Unfortunately, I feel the premise is underserved by Vandermeer’s writing. The story is narrated entirely from the point of view of the biologist, a very dry, introverted, and analytical character who (and I may be reading too much into things here) seems to have some sort of mild Aspergers. As such, her narration isn’t very poetic, and there are relatively few attempts to show us how she really feels. Also, I didn’t find the novel particularly good on a sentence level. There are some real gems, but most sentences contain needless words and unnecessary details and consequently the novel never really flows. A 195 page book that I should have been able to polish off in an evening or two took me about six days.
It’s not a bad book by any means. I just don’t think it’s as good as it could have been. 3 stars.
That’s about how I felt about that series, Tithonus.
I finished *Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer *(a delight, as expected), and have started on David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. A novel about the life of an English boy in 1982; I’m really liking it.
I read that a few weeks ago. Not bad, but not something that’s gonna stick with me.
But guys, GUYS! I just finished a book that’s maybe the best low fantasy novel I’ve read in years, and it looks like there’s no mention of it on the Dope yet, so I’m gonna proselytize at you: The Traitor Baru Cormorant. It’s gonna hit the following buttons, by which you might know whether you’ll have a problem with it:
-Deals pretty head-on with a highly homophobic culture
-Race and eugenics are major plot points
-Imperialist culture is significant
-The main character is an accountant.
If that sounds offensive, leave it, but if it just sounds dreary, it’s not. The writing is beautiful, and the protagonist is a completely fascinating character. Don’t let yourself read any spoilers, find this book! I predict big things for it come award season.
Your enthusiasm has led me to put that on my list.
I just finished Without You There Is No Us, a memoir by a journalist who spent half a year teaching English in North Korea to college students. It was very bleak, and it really drove home for me just how bad things are there. You think you know, from watching the news, but reading more personal stories about individuals was like, wow, it’s really bad and heartbreaking. It’s fairly short, straightforward, and a quick read.
I enjoyed The Fold but yes, it’ll fade fairly quickly. He undercut the whole plot a bit by having the 'recruited by an X-Files type team at the end. They’d seen the exact same stuff before and that made it seem much less serious as they hadn’t bothered to interfere…
And, for UK readers, The Traitor Baru Cormorant is just called The Traitor over here. I guess they thought Baru Cormorant sounded a bit silly as the protagonist’s name!
I’ve read The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, which was really good. Urban fantasy with some very dark scenes, I guess. Probably my favourite fantasy this year so far.
Arkwright by Allen Steele was fun, about the life and legacy of an imagined fourth in a ‘Big Four’ of science fiction, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and ….Arkwright! He makes it work; the first section is very good as his life story is teased out, then the work of his Foundation, and finally the end results are good, but not quite as engaging as the first section.
Dover Beach by Richard Bowker was an old one (1987) which I had read before but remembered little of. It’s set in a post atomic war scenario with one of the worst hit areas being the N.E. USA.
20 years on, in the squalor and near-anarchy of Boston, a guy thinks it’s a good idea to set up as a Private Detective. He gets his first case and finds it’s all a bit different from the pulp detective novels he’s read! His first client thinks that he’s a clone from a secret pre-war government project…
And now on to the new Lisa Goldstein time-travel novel, Weighing Shadows. Good so far, but it’s still early in the first mission.
I finished reading The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. I thought it was a nice mix of funny and tragic. The ending seemed a little abrupt to me, though.
I’m reading Titanic, First Accounts, compiled by Tim Maltin. These are riveting, almost unbelievable stories told by the survivors. They are eerily immediate and put you right there. (I also can’t help noticing the beauty of the prose in the first two accounts.)
To be fair, Didn’t they say they’d been trying to track these dudes down, and it was only with the most recent spike in positron particles or whatever that they’d been able to find them? But yeah, the fact that this was a crisis-of-the-week dealie didn’t help things.
Weird. I think the name is excellent; The Traitor is much more generic sounding, could be a Clive Cussler thriller.
Yeah, I read that one last year. The plot has done nothing to stick with me, but both the protagonist and the murder dude were pretty great. Very dark scenes, but also hilariously funny, in an “oh god, I’m going to hell for laughing at this, aren’t I?” way.
Just finished ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf. It’s a long-form essay about (among other things) the structural limitations imposed on aspiring women writers in the early 20th century. I thought it was very interesting and well-argued. Of course, it was written nearly 100 years ago so all the points seem very obvious today, but it’s still definitely worth reading. 5 stars.
I’m about half-way through Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix. What can I say? It’s Harry Potter. It’s awesome
Still enjoying Ken Follett’s World War II spy thriller The Key to Rebecca, set in Cairo, and Bill Watterson’s OSU comics exhibit catalog Exploring Calvin and Hobbes, which includes a fascinating long interview with him. I’m also rereading a 1976 collection of fan-written stories, Star Trek: The New Voyages, edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath; some great tales in there. Taking a break for the moment from the audiobook of Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Just finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I really enjoyed it. It was much darker than the previous instalments, and a lot more character based. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was:
The revelation that Sirius was basically another Draco Malfoy when he was at Hogwarts. On the one hand, it did make me feel a lot more sympathy for Snape, but on the other hand I wasn’t really all that sorry when Sirius died. I was like “Meh, so the school bully’s dead. Big deal.” which probably wasn’t the reaction Rowling was aiming for
Other than that, I thought it was terrific. I’d say 4 [sup]1/2[/sup] stars.
Next up: Peter Carey’s ‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’.
I’m kind of jealous of how much you liked the book. I thought the synopsis sounded amazing, and I was incredibly disappointed with how much of the story you spend having no idea what’s going on. And I’m even into that whole thing, too! I like those postmodern tales where the author doesn’t tell you everything and you’re filling in some of the blanks with your imagination, but this was an adventure story where eventually you find out that there is one “right theory” about what’s happening, and I just wasn’t a fan of all the disjointed scenes and seemingly random characters.
As for what I’m reading, I’m halfway through The Husband’s Secret. I’d recommend it, but not enthusiastically. It’s an engaging read, and the author is really good at building suspense. But it feels like more of a fun read than, you know, a true work of literature.
Also just got through the first chapter of Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women Into Wives. I have high hopes for this book, as it addresses cultural expectations of wives in the U.S., and as a recently married woman, I do sometimes feel pressure to behave a certain way because of my marital status. I just hope that it doesn’t adopt too much of a victim mentality/tone.
That is a tough book - I don’t mind the occasional ball-breaking novel, but the Ambassadors just emits its own gravitational field of boredom.
Had a quick breeze through Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires - bit average really. I could read Wolfe authoring the telephone directory, so I don’t mind, but not one you’d recommend to others as an introduction to the Great Man.
Have had Stoner recommended to me in strong terms by a few different folk, so need to get on that. The one that was written in the 60s and then re-discovered in recent years and praised to the skies.
Just finished all three! The Key to Rebecca ended somewhat anti-climatically, but it’s a decent spy yarn. Exploring Calvin and Hobbes is a very worthwhile read for any fan of the comic strip. Star Trek: The New Voyages is generally good, with three particular standout stories: “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” “The Enchanted Pool” and “Mind-Sifter.” The first two are funny and well-written; the third is quite touching. All good stuff.
Next up: Conversations with Kennedy by Benjamin C. Bradlee (yes, the All the President’s Men Bradlee, who was a pal of JFK) and The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (a comic novel about the Queen becoming an avid bibliophile).
Much speculation has been made over the “little nameless object” that is made by the protagonist’s factory in Massachusetts. My favorite is that it’s toothpicks. I could well understand why a young buck would prefer the glitter of Paris over becoming master of a toothpick empire. I’ve seen many similar situations by Americans in Thailand.
I finished The Bangkok Asset, by local British author John Burdett. The sixth installment in his Bangkok 8 series featuring Bangkok Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, whose mother is an ex-prostitute-cum-Soi Cowboy bar owner and father a semi-anonymous American GI from the Vietnam War era. This was so-so. Burdett tries too hard to be deep and loses the noir feel in the process. He’s never recaptured the success of his first installment, Bangkok 8. The previous one, Vulture Peak, was heads above this one. But in this one, the CIA’s old Project MKUltra figures large. In the novel, it turns out the project was never really abandoned after all.
Next it’s back to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series with Volume 5: Wolves of the Calla.
I’m getting on really well with The True History of the Kelly Gang. I’m enjoying it so much, in fact, that I’m actually rationing it to make it last. I’ve also finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I didn’t enjoy this one quite so much, but that’s only because I already knew the infamous twist before I started it. It’s still a very inventive and entertaining read, and if I hadn’t already know that…
I finished David Mitchell’s *Black Swan Green *this morning, and awarded it the rare fifth star over at Goodreads. Now, I’m not trying to tell you this is the best damn thing I ever read, or that it’s going to change your life, BUT. I just really enjoyed it so much. I was happy while reading it, thought about it when I wasn’t reading it, and only wished it could be longer.
I loved that book, too, and it took me years to realize the author was the same David Mitchell that everyone raves about how amazing and conceptual The Bone Clocks is. (wow, that was a terrible sentence)
