The Booklog of Never Letting Go
May. 9th, 2009 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneAlternately: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Booklog, The Girl With the Booklog Tattoo, St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Booklogs... There were so many options this time!
41. Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, Jane Hamilton — A fairly dull little sex comedy, in which wannabe romance novelist Laura Rider sorta kinda engineers an affair between her husband, Charlie, and Jenna Faroli, a local radio personality. Despite the possibility of some Cyrano-like shenanigans (Laura writes or co-writes many of Charlie's amorous emails to Jenna), the relationships between all three parties (um, and Jenna's husband, I suppose) remain pretty tame. Barely a thing is made of Laura's obvious attraction—whether sexual or just worshipful—to Jenna. And all the characters remain unlikeable and even vaguely unpleasant; there are only two types of people in the world, Hamilton seems to think: unbearably pretentious sophisticate snobs (Jenna, hubby, and friends—one a poet laureate, no less!) or uncultured hicks who believe in alien abduction and think they know literature if they've seen the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice (Charlie and Laura). There's the occasional flash of wit, but there are also a number of so-bizarre-it-throws-you similes—Charlie finds Jenna attractive because she's "a woman like a bowl of dough"? Huh? I'll go with the obvious joke: this certainly isn't Jane Hamilton's masterpiece.
42. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness — YA space western that just really didn’t work for me. I think a lot of this was due to the POV: the book is narrated by Todd Hewitt, the last (preadolescent) boy in his colonist village. Todd is not very well educated, so his narration is peppered with irregular grammar and even more irregular spelling. This can work—see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for an example of it really working—but it seemed sort of arbitrary here, and I found it grating. Further, Ness kept having Todd discover important pieces of information and then withhold them from the reader. I hate that. I think in general, if you’re inside a character’s head you should know what they know. Being kept in the dark about these things did not build suspense for me; it just irritated me.
I also frankly found the pacing slow and what actually occurs monotonous. Todd & Co. spent most of the book running away, and when they finally reach where they’re going, it’s just in time to be slapped with a cliffhanger. This did not make me want to rush to find the next book; it made me wonder why I had bothered to read this one.
I also found the emphasis on the idea that you must NEVER KILL bad guys who are trying to kill you—that to do so would corrupt you utterly—fundamentally ridiculous. Todd repeatedly fights off and injures—but doesn’t kill!—the same character, who then comes back, Jason-style, to threaten him again and again. JUST KILL THE BASTARD. Maybe I’m just a heartless, corrupted person, but Jesus. ICE HIM ALREADY.
So I guess this just wasn’t the right book for me. I love a lot of the elements at play—space westerns! Man—but not how they hang together in this narrative.
43. The Myriad, R.M. Meluch — Based on the cover art and cover copy, there's nothing to distinguish this book from the 40 metric tons of mediocre-to-bad sci-fi out there. If I hadn't read Brownbetty's review, I never would have picked it up. But luckily I did, and now it's my duty to pass the news along: this is some fantastically fun space opera, right here. Not quite Lois McMaster Bujold good, but close—full of interesting characters, a believable first contact story, and insect-like space predators that are much scarier than the Wraith. Oh, and slashiness. Did I mention there is awesome yummy slashiness, too?
It's not a perfect book—I'm kind of bummed out, for example, that hundreds of years in the future, men who sleep around continue to be studly while women who like to get it on are still considered sluts--but it was still a blast to read, with a killer ending that will leave you racing to find the next volume. New space opera series to devour FTW!
44. Wastelands, Ed. by John Joseph Adams — Above-average collection of short stories, which benefits from a wonderful focus and tightness of theme: it’s the apocalypse, baby! This assortment of post-apocalyptic worlds gets a boost from some truly stellar contributions from Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow, and Octavia Butler. Other entries are less joy- and more WTF-inducing (WTF, Orson Scott Card?), and rather too many focus on post-apocalyptic traveling carnivals (um, obviously, right?). But in general, this is one of the rare anthologies I’d eagerly recommend.
45. Little Bee, Chris Cleave — Urgh. I have no idea how I am going to explain my complex, somewhat contradictory feelings about this novel. I guess I’ll just try to lay it out there:
1. My bosses LOVE this novel. They think it is just about the greatest novel ever. Their enthusiasm is contagious, even though:
2. I think it’s only okay. The narrative voice is great, especially at the beginning, and it’s really about something, which I appreciate. It kind of loses steam about halfway through, however—once the big secret is revealed—and there are a couple of bits of sloppy plotting that bugged me. It’s one of those books where the first chapter is the best chapter in the whole thing.
3. I’m also, maybe just intrinsically, uncomfortable at the fact that this is yet another book by a white dude from the perspective of a black woman. It may just have been that there were a lot of discussions about cultural appropriation going on at the time I read it, but I could never quite shake my awareness of that fact.
4. Major props to the author, however, who when I heard him speak, brought up this issue himself and talked about it in a really frank and honest way: he was worried about it himself, but decided this was a story he really wanted to tell and this was the best way to tell it. I really respected his thoughtfulness.
5. He was also one of those incredibly cute and enthusiastic British men that I just swoon over, and he gave an amazingly delightful reading, and, okay, in person (though not in his very generic author photo) he looks rather a lot like Rodney McKay in “I just discovered a personal shield! I’m in-vul-ner-able!” mode. HE MADE ME WANT TO PUSH HIS BOOK ON LOTS OF PEOPLE OKAY.
6. Um. The cover’s very pretty?
Anyway. Draw your own conclusions.
46. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley — A historical mystery, set in England, narrated by a precocious 11-year-old girl. I feel like I should have loved this, but mostly it just bored me. Flavia’s narration, designed to show off how brilliant she is, lacked the necessary wit and charm, and her investigation into a couple of murders and some missing stamps was full of weird leaps of logic and sideways-step conclusions. I never felt involved or like any part of the story was real or mattered.
47. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson — Easily my favorite book of the year so far, which I certainly didn’t expect it to be during the first 25 pages, which are all about the Swedish financial system. But once you get through that, this becomes a fantastic, can’t-put-it-down thriller grounded in great characters. The way I always describe this book to customers (I sell the crap out of this baby) is: “A disgraced financial reporter and a female private investigator team up to solve the mystery of a young girl who disappeared off an island in the ’60s,” and then I ramble on until they buy it about how awesome these characters are. THEY ARE REALLY AWESOME. Lisbeth Salander, the aforementioned P.I., has already become one of my favorite fictional characters ever, and I am very impressed with Larsson for creating such a complex, fascinating woman. Not to mention that amazing rarity: a novel—and a thriller, no less!—in which the women not only rescue themselves, they rescue the men.
48. Wolf Star, R.M. Meluch — Less fun than its predecessor, but still strangely captivating. In a weird way, this book feels oddly unnecessary—it kind of just resets the universe back to where it was at the beginning of The Myriad, so reading the first two volumes of this series makes you feel like you’ve simply come full circle. There’s also not nearly enough Augustus in this one (though still way too much weird gender fail). And yet, despite these flaws, I still really want to read the next book in the series. These are like the Chewy Chips Ahoy! of reading material—obviously really not very good on a fundamental level, and yet once you start eating, you just cannot stop stuffing your cake hole with the little bastards.
49. St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, Karen Russell — Confession time: I think Kelly Link’s and Aimee Bender’s short stories are only okay. Occasionally one of their tales will astound me, but mostly I’m a bit “meh” on them—especially compared to how much many readers I respect love them. (Personally, I prefer Stacey Richter.) So when I say that Karen Russell’s short stories read like Link or Bender rejects, I hope you can see how faint an endorsement that is coming from me. Most of the stories in this collection feature young first person narrators, and almost all end abruptly, without any real resolution, which I find very frustrating. What’s the point? Some of Russell’s imagery is nice—especially in “Haunting Olivia” and “The City of Shells”—but the collection quickly begins to feel samey and unfulfilling. I’d recommend reading one of Richter’s collections—or even one of Link’s or Bender’s—instead.
50. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow — Terrifying and brilliantly presented alternate future in which a terrorist attack on San Francisco follows 9/11 and the Bay Area is taken over by Homeland Security and turned into a police state. This was chilling even reading it in February of this year, in the relative comfort and safety of Obamaland; I can’t imagine how much more strongly it would have affected me if I’d read it when it first came out the year before. Suffice to say, I’m glad this now feels like an averted future instead of a looming one.
Anyway, Doctorow does a great job presenting the voices of his various teen hacker rebels; for the most part, the novel feels incredibly, and at times brutally, real, in part because Doctorow really knows his tech stuff and is good at elucidating exactly what bit of geek wizardry his characters are up to. The novel’s available online for free, and I really hope lots of people—YA and adult readers alike—take advantage of that to check it out. If 1984 bugged you because it felt too hopeless, here’s a alternative that’s no less frightening, but which is all about not giving up and fighting back.
Total Reviews: 50/92
41. Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, Jane Hamilton — A fairly dull little sex comedy, in which wannabe romance novelist Laura Rider sorta kinda engineers an affair between her husband, Charlie, and Jenna Faroli, a local radio personality. Despite the possibility of some Cyrano-like shenanigans (Laura writes or co-writes many of Charlie's amorous emails to Jenna), the relationships between all three parties (um, and Jenna's husband, I suppose) remain pretty tame. Barely a thing is made of Laura's obvious attraction—whether sexual or just worshipful—to Jenna. And all the characters remain unlikeable and even vaguely unpleasant; there are only two types of people in the world, Hamilton seems to think: unbearably pretentious sophisticate snobs (Jenna, hubby, and friends—one a poet laureate, no less!) or uncultured hicks who believe in alien abduction and think they know literature if they've seen the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice (Charlie and Laura). There's the occasional flash of wit, but there are also a number of so-bizarre-it-throws-you similes—Charlie finds Jenna attractive because she's "a woman like a bowl of dough"? Huh? I'll go with the obvious joke: this certainly isn't Jane Hamilton's masterpiece.
42. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness — YA space western that just really didn’t work for me. I think a lot of this was due to the POV: the book is narrated by Todd Hewitt, the last (preadolescent) boy in his colonist village. Todd is not very well educated, so his narration is peppered with irregular grammar and even more irregular spelling. This can work—see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for an example of it really working—but it seemed sort of arbitrary here, and I found it grating. Further, Ness kept having Todd discover important pieces of information and then withhold them from the reader. I hate that. I think in general, if you’re inside a character’s head you should know what they know. Being kept in the dark about these things did not build suspense for me; it just irritated me.
I also frankly found the pacing slow and what actually occurs monotonous. Todd & Co. spent most of the book running away, and when they finally reach where they’re going, it’s just in time to be slapped with a cliffhanger. This did not make me want to rush to find the next book; it made me wonder why I had bothered to read this one.
I also found the emphasis on the idea that you must NEVER KILL bad guys who are trying to kill you—that to do so would corrupt you utterly—fundamentally ridiculous. Todd repeatedly fights off and injures—but doesn’t kill!—the same character, who then comes back, Jason-style, to threaten him again and again. JUST KILL THE BASTARD. Maybe I’m just a heartless, corrupted person, but Jesus. ICE HIM ALREADY.
So I guess this just wasn’t the right book for me. I love a lot of the elements at play—space westerns! Man—but not how they hang together in this narrative.
43. The Myriad, R.M. Meluch — Based on the cover art and cover copy, there's nothing to distinguish this book from the 40 metric tons of mediocre-to-bad sci-fi out there. If I hadn't read Brownbetty's review, I never would have picked it up. But luckily I did, and now it's my duty to pass the news along: this is some fantastically fun space opera, right here. Not quite Lois McMaster Bujold good, but close—full of interesting characters, a believable first contact story, and insect-like space predators that are much scarier than the Wraith. Oh, and slashiness. Did I mention there is awesome yummy slashiness, too?
It's not a perfect book—I'm kind of bummed out, for example, that hundreds of years in the future, men who sleep around continue to be studly while women who like to get it on are still considered sluts--but it was still a blast to read, with a killer ending that will leave you racing to find the next volume. New space opera series to devour FTW!
44. Wastelands, Ed. by John Joseph Adams — Above-average collection of short stories, which benefits from a wonderful focus and tightness of theme: it’s the apocalypse, baby! This assortment of post-apocalyptic worlds gets a boost from some truly stellar contributions from Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow, and Octavia Butler. Other entries are less joy- and more WTF-inducing (WTF, Orson Scott Card?), and rather too many focus on post-apocalyptic traveling carnivals (um, obviously, right?). But in general, this is one of the rare anthologies I’d eagerly recommend.
45. Little Bee, Chris Cleave — Urgh. I have no idea how I am going to explain my complex, somewhat contradictory feelings about this novel. I guess I’ll just try to lay it out there:
1. My bosses LOVE this novel. They think it is just about the greatest novel ever. Their enthusiasm is contagious, even though:
2. I think it’s only okay. The narrative voice is great, especially at the beginning, and it’s really about something, which I appreciate. It kind of loses steam about halfway through, however—once the big secret is revealed—and there are a couple of bits of sloppy plotting that bugged me. It’s one of those books where the first chapter is the best chapter in the whole thing.
3. I’m also, maybe just intrinsically, uncomfortable at the fact that this is yet another book by a white dude from the perspective of a black woman. It may just have been that there were a lot of discussions about cultural appropriation going on at the time I read it, but I could never quite shake my awareness of that fact.
4. Major props to the author, however, who when I heard him speak, brought up this issue himself and talked about it in a really frank and honest way: he was worried about it himself, but decided this was a story he really wanted to tell and this was the best way to tell it. I really respected his thoughtfulness.
5. He was also one of those incredibly cute and enthusiastic British men that I just swoon over, and he gave an amazingly delightful reading, and, okay, in person (though not in his very generic author photo) he looks rather a lot like Rodney McKay in “I just discovered a personal shield! I’m in-vul-ner-able!” mode. HE MADE ME WANT TO PUSH HIS BOOK ON LOTS OF PEOPLE OKAY.
6. Um. The cover’s very pretty?
Anyway. Draw your own conclusions.
46. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley — A historical mystery, set in England, narrated by a precocious 11-year-old girl. I feel like I should have loved this, but mostly it just bored me. Flavia’s narration, designed to show off how brilliant she is, lacked the necessary wit and charm, and her investigation into a couple of murders and some missing stamps was full of weird leaps of logic and sideways-step conclusions. I never felt involved or like any part of the story was real or mattered.
47. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson — Easily my favorite book of the year so far, which I certainly didn’t expect it to be during the first 25 pages, which are all about the Swedish financial system. But once you get through that, this becomes a fantastic, can’t-put-it-down thriller grounded in great characters. The way I always describe this book to customers (I sell the crap out of this baby) is: “A disgraced financial reporter and a female private investigator team up to solve the mystery of a young girl who disappeared off an island in the ’60s,” and then I ramble on until they buy it about how awesome these characters are. THEY ARE REALLY AWESOME. Lisbeth Salander, the aforementioned P.I., has already become one of my favorite fictional characters ever, and I am very impressed with Larsson for creating such a complex, fascinating woman. Not to mention that amazing rarity: a novel—and a thriller, no less!—in which the women not only rescue themselves, they rescue the men.
48. Wolf Star, R.M. Meluch — Less fun than its predecessor, but still strangely captivating. In a weird way, this book feels oddly unnecessary—it kind of just resets the universe back to where it was at the beginning of The Myriad, so reading the first two volumes of this series makes you feel like you’ve simply come full circle. There’s also not nearly enough Augustus in this one (though still way too much weird gender fail). And yet, despite these flaws, I still really want to read the next book in the series. These are like the Chewy Chips Ahoy! of reading material—obviously really not very good on a fundamental level, and yet once you start eating, you just cannot stop stuffing your cake hole with the little bastards.
49. St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, Karen Russell — Confession time: I think Kelly Link’s and Aimee Bender’s short stories are only okay. Occasionally one of their tales will astound me, but mostly I’m a bit “meh” on them—especially compared to how much many readers I respect love them. (Personally, I prefer Stacey Richter.) So when I say that Karen Russell’s short stories read like Link or Bender rejects, I hope you can see how faint an endorsement that is coming from me. Most of the stories in this collection feature young first person narrators, and almost all end abruptly, without any real resolution, which I find very frustrating. What’s the point? Some of Russell’s imagery is nice—especially in “Haunting Olivia” and “The City of Shells”—but the collection quickly begins to feel samey and unfulfilling. I’d recommend reading one of Richter’s collections—or even one of Link’s or Bender’s—instead.
50. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow — Terrifying and brilliantly presented alternate future in which a terrorist attack on San Francisco follows 9/11 and the Bay Area is taken over by Homeland Security and turned into a police state. This was chilling even reading it in February of this year, in the relative comfort and safety of Obamaland; I can’t imagine how much more strongly it would have affected me if I’d read it when it first came out the year before. Suffice to say, I’m glad this now feels like an averted future instead of a looming one.
Anyway, Doctorow does a great job presenting the voices of his various teen hacker rebels; for the most part, the novel feels incredibly, and at times brutally, real, in part because Doctorow really knows his tech stuff and is good at elucidating exactly what bit of geek wizardry his characters are up to. The novel’s available online for free, and I really hope lots of people—YA and adult readers alike—take advantage of that to check it out. If 1984 bugged you because it felt too hopeless, here’s a alternative that’s no less frightening, but which is all about not giving up and fighting back.
Total Reviews: 50/92
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Date: 2009-05-11 12:38 am (UTC)