Booklog 2008: Catch-Up Post the First
Apr. 22nd, 2008 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneFor my next trick, I shall attempt the near-impossible task of beginning to catch up on my booklog for 2008. I’m going to try to do about 10 at a time, and hopefully, I will catch up before the year is over. For once, it’s a good thing I’ve been distracted lately and haven’t been reading as much.
Some of these will probably be quite short. If I went with full-length rambles on all of them, I would go insane. So now, from the top:
1. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger — One of those classics I had, embarrassingly, not read. (And they gave me an English degree! *shakes head*) It’s quite deservingly a classic, too: the prose is lovely, full of beautiful, clear descriptions; memorable characters I felt I already knew (they’ve sort of seeped into the collective consciousness through work they’ve inspired—The Royal Tenenbaums, etc.); and philosophical musings that worked as more than just auxiliary cleverness. I should have read this years ago, but I’m glad I finally read it now.
2. Mary Modern, Camille DeAngelis — In which there is time travel via cloning, basically. This starts out slow; I didn’t really get into it until Mary is (re)born. Then Lucy, Mary’s granddaughter whose biogenetics research has given her life, is moved more into the background—a relief, as she’s a rather unsympathetic character. Also, Grey, Lucy’s long-suffering boyfriend, finally comes alive. I loved Grey and Mary’s complex interactions, and while the novel’s final “twist” is—intentionally?—telegraphed from the very beginning, I enjoyed how the story played out.
3. The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, Louise Plummer — Cute meta-romance. I liked it.
4. Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O’Nan — This is a really tiny story, both in length and in scope, but O’Nan takes such beautiful care of all the details that the ultimate effect is far from small. Aristotle would have liked this novel: it all takes place in one day, in pretty much a single location: the Red Lobster which Manny DeLeon manages and which, by corporate decree, is shutting its doors forever after one more shift, just before Christmas. O’Nan makes the work involved in running a restaurant seem fascinating, and lends real, blessed weight to “everyday” human drama. This book is a real gem.
5. & 6. The Innocent Mage & The Awakened Mage, Karen Miller — The first volume gets points for ending with the closest thing to a literal cliffhanger that I’ve lately encountered, but this book is so frustratingly slooooooow. This could have been half as long—in fact, this story really ought to have fit in one volume and be cut down to about a fourth of its total 1,400-page length.
But I didn’t really start having problems (or at least, wasn’t able to grasp how far-reaching the problems I was having were) until I reached book two. As with the first volume, I felt that this was a book full of interesting ideas that are made to play out in an uninteresting manner. The two peoples who inhabit Miller’s Kingdom of Lur, the Doranen and the Olken, could have been used to say some really interesting things about race and racism; those themes are touched upon, but always skitter away from being the focus in any major way. Instead the focus is mainly that Asher, the protagonist, is awesome. He’s a rough country lad with a rude mouth and a big destiny; I should have liked him, but instead I barely cared—probably because everyone else in the books (besides the obvious baddies, of course) are so frickin’ enamored of him. He rises to the top of Dorana society in a remarkably short time; him gaining magical power then becomes almost irrelevant in the face of the other power he’s racked up. Gar, the magicless Doranen prince, has slightly more interesting angst, but he makes too many stupid decisions for me to care much beyond wanting to give him a smack. Miller gets points for Dathne, who’s the type of cold, calculating female good guy one rarely encounters, but since there’s nothing sympathetic or really all that compelling about her, I ultimately didn’t really care about her either, and her romance with Asher was poorly-developed and likewise pretty dull. For most of both books, not much really happens besides the characters arguing for pages, and the events that did occur—with the exception of Gar being briefly gifted with magic—did not surprise or intrigue me very much at all.
So why did I keep reading, through two lengthy volumes? I can’t really say. I guess Miller did pull off the trick of convincing me that something interesting was just about to happen—but it never really did. The basic plot remained: rough country lad comes to city, befriends prince, discovers destiny, defeats evil, saves kingdom. There are a lot of cool variations on that that have and can still be written—versions with dynamic characters, humor (here, sadly lacking), intrigue (paint-by-numbers), romance (Asher/Gar was better set up than Asher/Dathne), tragedy (didn’t care and still don’t). In my opinion, this just isn’t one of them.
7. Candyfreak, Steve Almond — Very enjoyable look at the candy industry, especially its smaller, lesser-known offshoots—all of which are struggling under the Hershey/Nestle stranglehold. Almond also covers the history of candy production, though at its heart, this book is personal, and all about obsession, something I’m sure anyone reading this LJ can relate to. Almond’s nonfiction continues to be way more awesome than his fiction.
8. The New Kings of Nonfiction, Ed. by Ira Glass — Interesting collection of essays, on topics ranging from buying a cow to Saddam Hussein. I liked the goofy ones best, unsurprisingly. There are two major criticisms I’ve read about this collection. The first, the fact that only two female essayists are represented, I agree with—wither the Sarah Vowell, Ira? (And that’s just one example I could provide.) The second is that all the essays collected here are rather old; this may be true, but save the Chuck Klosterman one (on Val Kilmer), they were all new to me, so I enjoyed them. I don’t think this is the best nonfiction writing out there, but it’s still good stuff.
9. The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier — A frustrating blend of brilliance and stupidity. (Which, huh, sounds like both a sequel to and a description of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.) Brockmeier alternates chapters between the POVs of various citizens of the City of the Dead, a sort of limbo where the dead go until there’s no one left alive who remembers them; and Laura Byrd, a researcher stationed in Antarctica who is, without knowing it, the last human being alive on Earth after a catastrophic plague.
Both narratives are incredibly compelling, and I was totally in love with this book until almost the very end. However, the ending is kind of lackluster: the book’s premise is admittedly something that seems to me like it would be virtually impossible to wrap up well, and Brockmeier…well, he doesn’t rise above that assessment. As for my other issues,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
resonant8 sums them up very well in her review on GoodReads, but basically: once you stop being directly under the book’s spell, its inherent implausibilities and gaps in logic become much more apparent. Emotionally, I still want to give it five stars; on the Mr. Spock scale, it’s more like two. However, considering that I’d be a very poor Vulcan, I’d still say it’s an incredibly engrossing read, and well worth the time.
10. The Summer Tree, Guy Gavriel Kay — Five Canadian college students are transported to a magical kingdom, and all of them are pretty blasé about it. Their lack of reaction cued me in pretty early on that I wasn’t going to like this book. None of these characters felt like real people to me; the students are pretty interchangeable (one’s a bit crankier! one has guilt! two possess vaginas!) and they all completely lack one of the most important things, in my opinion, for a successful fantasy novel: a sense of wonder. Nothing about this other, magical realm felt wondrous, so when it was threatened, I couldn’t bring myself to care. Which is a pity, because I felt there were some interesting ideas buried in here: Paul’s story of redemption and self-sacrifice is the type of thing that’s usually right up my alley. But it was stuck under a mountain of overwrought prose and I’m not willing to wade through that.
Plus—FUN BONUS!—there was a brutal rape scene right at the end! *makes cranky face*
Forget total books read, how ’bout:
Total Reviews: 10/66
(And yes, I am very bored at work today. Am also trying very hard not to think about the fact that polls close in less than an hour. *bites nails*)
Some of these will probably be quite short. If I went with full-length rambles on all of them, I would go insane. So now, from the top:
1. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger — One of those classics I had, embarrassingly, not read. (And they gave me an English degree! *shakes head*) It’s quite deservingly a classic, too: the prose is lovely, full of beautiful, clear descriptions; memorable characters I felt I already knew (they’ve sort of seeped into the collective consciousness through work they’ve inspired—The Royal Tenenbaums, etc.); and philosophical musings that worked as more than just auxiliary cleverness. I should have read this years ago, but I’m glad I finally read it now.
2. Mary Modern, Camille DeAngelis — In which there is time travel via cloning, basically. This starts out slow; I didn’t really get into it until Mary is (re)born. Then Lucy, Mary’s granddaughter whose biogenetics research has given her life, is moved more into the background—a relief, as she’s a rather unsympathetic character. Also, Grey, Lucy’s long-suffering boyfriend, finally comes alive. I loved Grey and Mary’s complex interactions, and while the novel’s final “twist” is—intentionally?—telegraphed from the very beginning, I enjoyed how the story played out.
3. The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, Louise Plummer — Cute meta-romance. I liked it.
4. Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O’Nan — This is a really tiny story, both in length and in scope, but O’Nan takes such beautiful care of all the details that the ultimate effect is far from small. Aristotle would have liked this novel: it all takes place in one day, in pretty much a single location: the Red Lobster which Manny DeLeon manages and which, by corporate decree, is shutting its doors forever after one more shift, just before Christmas. O’Nan makes the work involved in running a restaurant seem fascinating, and lends real, blessed weight to “everyday” human drama. This book is a real gem.
5. & 6. The Innocent Mage & The Awakened Mage, Karen Miller — The first volume gets points for ending with the closest thing to a literal cliffhanger that I’ve lately encountered, but this book is so frustratingly slooooooow. This could have been half as long—in fact, this story really ought to have fit in one volume and be cut down to about a fourth of its total 1,400-page length.
But I didn’t really start having problems (or at least, wasn’t able to grasp how far-reaching the problems I was having were) until I reached book two. As with the first volume, I felt that this was a book full of interesting ideas that are made to play out in an uninteresting manner. The two peoples who inhabit Miller’s Kingdom of Lur, the Doranen and the Olken, could have been used to say some really interesting things about race and racism; those themes are touched upon, but always skitter away from being the focus in any major way. Instead the focus is mainly that Asher, the protagonist, is awesome. He’s a rough country lad with a rude mouth and a big destiny; I should have liked him, but instead I barely cared—probably because everyone else in the books (besides the obvious baddies, of course) are so frickin’ enamored of him. He rises to the top of Dorana society in a remarkably short time; him gaining magical power then becomes almost irrelevant in the face of the other power he’s racked up. Gar, the magicless Doranen prince, has slightly more interesting angst, but he makes too many stupid decisions for me to care much beyond wanting to give him a smack. Miller gets points for Dathne, who’s the type of cold, calculating female good guy one rarely encounters, but since there’s nothing sympathetic or really all that compelling about her, I ultimately didn’t really care about her either, and her romance with Asher was poorly-developed and likewise pretty dull. For most of both books, not much really happens besides the characters arguing for pages, and the events that did occur—with the exception of Gar being briefly gifted with magic—did not surprise or intrigue me very much at all.
So why did I keep reading, through two lengthy volumes? I can’t really say. I guess Miller did pull off the trick of convincing me that something interesting was just about to happen—but it never really did. The basic plot remained: rough country lad comes to city, befriends prince, discovers destiny, defeats evil, saves kingdom. There are a lot of cool variations on that that have and can still be written—versions with dynamic characters, humor (here, sadly lacking), intrigue (paint-by-numbers), romance (Asher/Gar was better set up than Asher/Dathne), tragedy (didn’t care and still don’t). In my opinion, this just isn’t one of them.
7. Candyfreak, Steve Almond — Very enjoyable look at the candy industry, especially its smaller, lesser-known offshoots—all of which are struggling under the Hershey/Nestle stranglehold. Almond also covers the history of candy production, though at its heart, this book is personal, and all about obsession, something I’m sure anyone reading this LJ can relate to. Almond’s nonfiction continues to be way more awesome than his fiction.
8. The New Kings of Nonfiction, Ed. by Ira Glass — Interesting collection of essays, on topics ranging from buying a cow to Saddam Hussein. I liked the goofy ones best, unsurprisingly. There are two major criticisms I’ve read about this collection. The first, the fact that only two female essayists are represented, I agree with—wither the Sarah Vowell, Ira? (And that’s just one example I could provide.) The second is that all the essays collected here are rather old; this may be true, but save the Chuck Klosterman one (on Val Kilmer), they were all new to me, so I enjoyed them. I don’t think this is the best nonfiction writing out there, but it’s still good stuff.
9. The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier — A frustrating blend of brilliance and stupidity. (Which, huh, sounds like both a sequel to and a description of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.) Brockmeier alternates chapters between the POVs of various citizens of the City of the Dead, a sort of limbo where the dead go until there’s no one left alive who remembers them; and Laura Byrd, a researcher stationed in Antarctica who is, without knowing it, the last human being alive on Earth after a catastrophic plague.
Both narratives are incredibly compelling, and I was totally in love with this book until almost the very end. However, the ending is kind of lackluster: the book’s premise is admittedly something that seems to me like it would be virtually impossible to wrap up well, and Brockmeier…well, he doesn’t rise above that assessment. As for my other issues,
resonant8 sums them up very well in her review on GoodReads, but basically: once you stop being directly under the book’s spell, its inherent implausibilities and gaps in logic become much more apparent. Emotionally, I still want to give it five stars; on the Mr. Spock scale, it’s more like two. However, considering that I’d be a very poor Vulcan, I’d still say it’s an incredibly engrossing read, and well worth the time.10. The Summer Tree, Guy Gavriel Kay — Five Canadian college students are transported to a magical kingdom, and all of them are pretty blasé about it. Their lack of reaction cued me in pretty early on that I wasn’t going to like this book. None of these characters felt like real people to me; the students are pretty interchangeable (one’s a bit crankier! one has guilt! two possess vaginas!) and they all completely lack one of the most important things, in my opinion, for a successful fantasy novel: a sense of wonder. Nothing about this other, magical realm felt wondrous, so when it was threatened, I couldn’t bring myself to care. Which is a pity, because I felt there were some interesting ideas buried in here: Paul’s story of redemption and self-sacrifice is the type of thing that’s usually right up my alley. But it was stuck under a mountain of overwrought prose and I’m not willing to wade through that.
Plus—FUN BONUS!—there was a brutal rape scene right at the end! *makes cranky face*
Forget total books read, how ’bout:
Total Reviews: 10/66
(And yes, I am very bored at work today. Am also trying very hard not to think about the fact that polls close in less than an hour. *bites nails*)
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Date: 2008-04-23 04:26 am (UTC)But, hmm. I think I may remember some reference to that? Although...it may just be the power of suggestion that's making me think I remember that. We'll have to ask