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| 0743275063
| 9780743275064
| 0743275063
| 3.94
| 3,241,950
| May 2000
| May 03, 2005
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did not like it
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Right, so, I don't really want to write this review. In fact, re-reading this book was a bad idea, but I chose to do it for reasons that will soon bec
Right, so, I don't really want to write this review. In fact, re-reading this book was a bad idea, but I chose to do it for reasons that will soon become clear (that, and I wanted to give it a more accurate rating on Goodreads). I love to tear into bad books—and make no mistake, Angels & Demons is a very bad book, and not in the naughty sense. But the problem with bad, popular books published ten years ago is that most of the witty deconstructions have been done. Bashing Dan Brown is like bashing that vampire series: yes, I could do it, and I could do it well. But what would be the point? It's passé. I could take my time to detail the many factual errors present in this book, but TV Tropes has already taken care of that for me. Also worthy of note is this blog post, which mentions the absurdity of the claim that Vittoria "disproved one of Einstein's fundamental theories" by observing fish. Say what you will of Angels & Demons; dismiss it as "light entertainment" that should be celebrated because it's a well-paced thriller with a pseudohistorical, pseudoscientific plot and a hot yoga-practising Italian physicist. All those inaccuracies, they're just artistic license, right? It doesn't matter that the facade on St. Peter's Basilica is travertine instead of marble. Who cares about minor details? I'm just being a downer nitpicker! Were it not for the depressing overabundance of nits to pick, I might agree with my straw man opponent. The sheer number of errors and oversights on Dan Brown's part, however, means he is either too lazy to do research or wilfully neglecting the fact-checking. In either case, it sends the message that he doesn't think his readers are worth the time to produce a book that's more accurate. That's condescending, and I don't like condescending. Responsible authors, particularly authors of historical fiction, write historical notes that mention where they've deviated from, you know, actual history. Dan Brown claims it's 99 per cent true. Angels & Demons has a nice little "fact" preface that warns us all about antimatter. I don't know if you've spotted the trend yet, but it turns out the "fact" is not much of a fact. So Dan Brown is portraying his (poorly researched) fiction as non-fiction. And that's not what writers do; that's what politicians do. The whole "science versus religion" debate is a worthy motif for any story. Far better books have done it more justice than Angels & Demons does, mostly because Dan Brown doesn't even try to do the subject any justice. I'm sure there are many people who feel that science is destroying religion much the same way the camerlengo does in this book. Television and the Internet (which may be biased, I guess) inform me that none of them has faked the attempted destruction of a religious site using a new and highly-destructive weapon created by science in order to restore people's faith. I guess they're all waiting on that antimatter. My point is: subtle and nuanced Dan Brown is not. His villains are caricatures of caricatures. His hero . . . well, I feel only pity for Robert Langdon, to be trapped in such a poorly-researched world. And he's played by Tom Hanks in the movies, so he's not all bad. But Angels & Demons is bad. Even if we label the bad writing and incoherent plot as subjective elements, the fact remains that Dan Brown is feeding us a shit sandwich like it's made of edible gold—and charging us for the gold too. It's still better than The Art Thief . My Reviews of the Robert Langdon series: The Da Vinci Code → ...more |
Notes are private!
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3
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Apr 12, 2010
not set
not set
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Apr 15, 2010
not set
not set
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Apr 13, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1596064218
| 9781596064218
| 1596064218
| 3.73
| 722
| Jul 2009
| 2011
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it was amazing
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So after finishing
The Time Traveler’s Wife
I realized that the next book on my shelf was Family Matters. The last Rohinton Mistry book I read cut
So after finishing
The Time Traveler’s Wife
I realized that the next book on my shelf was Family Matters. The last Rohinton Mistry book I read cut me up, so I decided that before I attempted this next one, I would need something I was guaranteed to enjoy. Fortunately, my awesome limited edition of Palimpsest had just arrived from Subterranean Press. I first read Palimpsest when it was a nominee for the Hugo Award for Best Novella. It subsequently won, deservedly, the award, and so when I heard that Subterranean Press was coming out with a hardcover edition, I jumped to pre-order it. Time travel is weird, confusing, and inconsistent. There is no way to avoid that—and embracing this fact is the key to good time-travel fiction. Whether it’s Doctor Who or Primer, the method and mood of this mad embrace can be quite varied, but the end result is the same: a time travel story, when done properly, should blow your mind. Where most authors go wrong in their time travel plots is a desire to make sense. So they go to the trouble of establishing various rules that attempt to compel their non-linear story into a linear box, forgetting all the while that once you break causality, there is no going back. Palimpsest is a refreshing change, because Charles Stross doesn’t try to make sense. He acknowledges and works with the utter insanity that would be a universe where time travel is possible. This allows him to accomplish wonderful things, but it also demands a great deal of tolerance from the reader. I can understand why some would reject this book as too confusing and too brief. The novella opens with Pierce describing, in the second-person narration that Stross uses as an interstitial technique, how he has to kill his own grandfather (TVTropes) as the beginning of his training for the Stasis. The Stasis is a group of time travellers, pledged to manipulate history and reseed humanity each time it goes extinct on Earth. (Humanity, Stross explains, always goes extinct.) They go to incredible lengths to achieve this goal. Stross lyrically describes how they tinker with the ultimate fate of the Earth and solar system on a cosmic scale and literally manipulate the rise and fall of civilization to serve their own ends. Though Stasis’ stated goal is the ultimate good—survival of the human species—they sure do seem authoritarian about it. As he undergoes his two-decade-long training period, Pierce develops a fascination with palimpsests. These are periods of history that have been rewritten so many times that it becomes very difficult to access any given version of history. (The Stasis has a Library that exists at the end of the Earth, which is protected from all changes to the timeline and therefore records various versions of history. This frustrates new agents who haven’t yet learned that the Library lies.) After Pierce survives an assassination attempt, presumably from someone out to prevent something he will do in his own future, he convalesces in a science empire of the far future, marries a native, and has a family. When he makes a quick trip to the Library to sort out an academic dispute, he discovers that period of history has been turned into a palimpsest, and he might never see his family again. Pierce eventually becomes drawn into a much larger plot threatening the existence of Stasis itself. We, along with Pierce, are kept in the dark about the nature of this plot until close to the end of the book. But without going into spoilers, I can fairly succinctly describe the nature of the resistance: the name “Stasis” should be a clue. Though Stasis has humanity’s preservation at heart, it enforces this survival in a draconian and single-minded way. There is no room in Stasis’ agenda for extraterrestrial intelligence, space exploration, or indeed any type of development or growth that does not ultimately support Stasis. This meta-social construct has turned into a kind of symbiotic organism relying on the entirety of human history to exist. Palimpsest isn’t perfect, and if I could wish for one improvement, it would be an extension to novel length. There is just so much going on here, an entire vocabulary and way of life that Stross can only barely explore. The events that take place evoke so many classics of science fiction and of time travel stories—for example, Pierce dies multiple times, even causing his own death at times. What does this mean for the nature of self, for our identity or even, if you believe in such a thing, our souls? These questions all linger in the back of one’s mind, but more so because I am already aware of them and know to apply them to these circumstances. They remain frustratingly unexplored, even somewhat unasked, because there just isn’t enough space. Similarly, Pierce himself is kind of a lacklustre protagonist. Oh, don’t get me wrong. He’s an OK kind of guy, though I would have liked to learn more about him. But for most of the novella he gets dragged along with the plot rather than actually showing much initiative—and when he does show initiative, it tends to backfire! So readers who are waiting for Pierce to step up and own the story might be disappointed—or pleasantly surprised. I can’t say…. And to be fair, Stross acknowledges the powerlessness Pierce feels: when Pierce comes face-to-face with the person running the plot against Stasis, he confesses that he feels just as manipulated as when he was collaborating with the Stasis Internal Affairs department. Both sides are manipulating Pierce, and this becomes key to the novella’s final, profound pages. I won’t deny that this book pushes my buttons in all the right ways, and for that reason, I am more than ready to overlook any flaws. I love Palimpsest so much because I feel like Stross has created a realistic portrayal of time travel, and in so doing demonstrated why time travel shouldn’t be possible. If it were, our universe would be an even crazier place than it already is. Because if it were possible to rewrite history, then everyone would be running around, killing their past selves and grandfathers and Hitler—that, or some form of the Novikov self-consistency principle would result in time travel erasing the timeline where time travel is invented. Confused yet? Good. This is your brain on time travel. Don’t do it! But if time travel were possible, then it would also present us with staggering choice. The very mutability of the continuum would mean that history would never be constant. Foiled plots one moment could be successful coups the next, and vice versa if you work for the other side. You can join the time agency and then, if you tire of the work, go back in time and prevent yourself from joining—or just erase yourself from history altogether! In short, time travel as Stross portrays it in Palimpsest is the ultimate chaotic vector. This is the final message of Palimpsest, and it is simultaneously invigorating and terrifying. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 19, 2011
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Oct 19, 2011
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Oct 19, 2011
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0679311807
| 9780679311805
| 0679311807
| 3.63
| 16,666
| 2002
| Jan 01, 2003
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liked it
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I bought this book as a Christmas gift for someone, attracted to it by its recent accolade of competing on Canada Reads. I have never before read anyt
I bought this book as a Christmas gift for someone, attracted to it by its recent accolade of competing on Canada Reads. I have never before read anything by Carol Shields, and when I buy books that I haven't read before with the intention of giving them to other people, I tend to read them myself first. So I embarked upon Unless not knowing all that much about it, knowing only that it had won a poll entitling it to a spot in a national debate, only that it was some sort of book about a mother in a city near Toronto with a daughter who lives on a street corner in pursuit of "goodness." And I ended up falling in love with Carol Shields' writing, with the way she describes people and feelings and what matters to us, but I didn't fall in love with Unless. I seem to be in the habit of reading meta-fictional fiction lately. Books about writers, books about writers writing. Writing about writing. Reta Winters is a moderately successful writer and translator, content in how she has managed to fuse domestic life with her own goals, except, of course, for what has happened with her nineteen-year-old daughter, Norah. As Unless unspools, Reta reflects on her writing, on how it has shaped her, on how writing shapes others, and especially on the role of women in writing. Later chapters begin with an unsent letter Reta has composed to an author or editor, in which she questions why a book or magazine article cited so many influential male authors and no female authors. Meanwhile, Reta alternates between discussing her life, including the slow, simmering story of how and why Norah came to live on a street corner, and discussing with us her plans for a sequel to her novel, a sequel in which she realizes the emancipation of her female narrator. Rather than confront the whys and wherefores of Norah's societal estrangement directly, Shields has Reta approach the issue sideways. It is as if Reta herself cannot bear to interfere directly; heeding the advice of many, she waits and sees how long Norah can continue this self-imposed homelessness. Instead, she explores what she slowly comes to believe is the reason Norah has chosen to search for goodness on the street corner. She confronts the gender divide in our society, and most notably in how it affects her as a mother and a writer. Reta, and through her, Shields, are right about this, of course. This week I have been following the #MooreandMe trend on Twitter, started by a feminist blogger outraged by insensitive comments made by Michael Moore regarding the allegations against Julian Assange that he raped two women. Moore and Keith Olbermann's initial reactions to this protest movement, not to mention all the trolls on Twitter, made a point abundantly clear, if you weren't already aware of it: this is still a grossly unequal world. Despite our nominally-democratic, Charter-enshrined (in Canada) society, gender is still a minefield and a battleground. Shields takes an interesting way of reminding us of this fact, a way that is simultaneously seductively unique yet frustratingly heavy-handed. I like Reta, both as a person and as a narrator. I like all of the Winters: Tom, Norah, Natalie, Christine, Lois. I even like the overbearing, interrupting Arthur Springer—he does mean well, even if he is an example of a man who has been educated by society with certain notions of power, gender, and what readers want. I like them, because Shields makes these characters people. They have flaws, but they try hard. There are no moustache-twirling villains here, nor are there golden messiahs. At the same time, Shields avoids making any of her main characters a subject of spectacle. I think there is a tendency to hype literary fiction that focuses on the spectacular character, the crack addict or the prostitute, the child soldier or the homeless mother. Unless, among all its other charms, brings us ordinary people who, for the most part, do not have any serious problems with their lives. And it makes me care about them, invest three hundred pages in them. That's pretty cool. Yet I cannot ignore that heavy-handed approach Shields takes to these issues of gender inequity. Maybe it's because I am a man, but there is something alienating it, a fatalistic tone to Reta's melancholic proclamations: Because Tom is a man, because I love him dearly, I haven't told him what I believe: that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lies has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang. That's the problem. "Because Tom is a man…," because he is outside, he is Other, he can never really comprehend. And I say this not to invoke the rather dim lament of "Oh noes, not feminism! What about the poor mens?!" I just have a difficult time accepting or even considering the idea that there are certain mentalities, certain perspectives, forever inaccessible to me by dint of, as Reta puts it, a seemingly random chromosome determinate. I don't know if that is the case. As a writer I certainly hope not; as a reader I strive my best to access that inaccessible perspective through the voices of narrators like Reta Winters. Of course, if you have read the book, you might recall the paragraph that immediately follows the one I quoted above. You might, thus, be preparing to call me out, for I have done the questionable thing of taking a passage out of context. I really do like the passage above, as a piece of writing, even if I find the sentiment rather extreme. So, to correct my temporary omission, I will mention that Shields acknowledges her hyperbole: This cry is overstated; I'm an editor, after all, and recognize purple ink when I see it. The sentiment is excessive, blowsy, loose, womanish. But I am willing to blurt it all out, if only to myself. Blurting is a form of bravery. I'm just catching on to that fact. Arriving late, as always. Additionally, it is clear that Shields' intention is never to alienate nor even to preach. Danielle Westerman is a foil to Reta, a woman whose bitter old age has metamorphosed her feminism into a general kind of misanthropy. It's her class-conscious, power-conflict sentiments that Reta is echoing, and that is only one view of many that surfaces in Unless. For despite having a single first-person narrator, Unless carries within it a symphony of multiple voices. Shields manages to convey, through Reta, the opinions and ideas of the other characters, assembling a multi-dimensional view of the story as it centres around Norah. I am, like with much of this book, ambivalent about Norah and her role. I like that Shields does not pursue the reasons behind Norah's choices directly, because that would have made for a very different type of book, something that would almost be a mystery. Yet I feel a little cheated by the resolution. I feel like the way Shields explains the mystery is careless, because we hear it second-hand through Reta, and Norah remains, as she does for the rest of the book, little more than a name with a sign that says "Goodness" attached to it. That being said, I understand why Shields does it this way, revealing that it is not a careless decision at all. For this is Reta's story, not Norah's, and hence it is important to hear how Reta interprets Norah's actions and Norah's reasons, more important than it is to hear Norah herself discuss them. Thus my ambivalence. I want more than Unless can give, more than it should give. I'm just a greedy reader! The back cover of my edition has two blurbs, one from The Ottawa Citizen and one from The New York Times Book Review, both so glowing and gushing that I'm a little embarrassed, on the book's behalf, by them. These blurbs are falling over themselves to convey to me, with adjectives and adverbs and exclamation points, how much they love Unless. I won't do that. I try, for one thing, to limit the number and type of adverbs and adjectives I expend on any one book. And I fast approach my quota. Moreover, I obviously do not share these blurbs' sentiments when it comes to this book. I liked Unless, and as my unabated intention to give it as a Christmas present attests, this is a book worth reading. Is it a book Canada should read? Not having read any of its contenders, I will withhold my judgement of that. So I'm not going to tell you that this is "a signal novel, profound and resonant." Let me be clear in the way only stumbling, awkward prose can be: Unless more than doesn't suck, and it is in fact quite good. It has a simplicity that truly makes it a serious, thoughtful work of art. And it deserves accolades and attention. At the risk of sounding trite, I will conclude with a quotation: "Goodness, not greatness," as Reta echoes Danielle Westerman, is what Unless and Carol Shields achieve. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 18, 2010
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Dec 21, 2010
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Dec 18, 2010
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1453600973
| 9781453600979
| 1453600973
| 3.47
| 90
| Apr 16, 2010
| Apr 16, 2010
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did not like it
|
Disclaimer: I won this in a Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. Loves me the free books. In her biography, Tracey Alley confesses her love of Dungeons & Dr Disclaimer: I won this in a Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. Loves me the free books. In her biography, Tracey Alley confesses her love of Dungeons & Dragons—and it shows. From beginning to end, Erich's Plea reads like a D&D adventure. And that's not a good thing. I'm going to start by nitpicking the editing here. This book could have benefited from an editor (or if it had one, a better editor), both a copy-editor and a story editor. I am sure there is an adequate story somewhere inside this book, but it is buried beneath awkward, ungrammatical constructions and exposition-heavy dialogue. Alley has trouble with both commas and semi-colons: not enough of the former, and oddly enough, she seems to use the latter correctly sometimes and randomly at other times. There are plenty of comma splices; then suddenly I will rejoice to see a semi-colon correctly joining together two independent clauses. It's like the clouds have parted and a beam of light is shining down from the heavens! Nevertheless, it's that first issue, the dearth of commas, that really hurts Erich's Plea. In fact, as someone who has historically tended to go the other way and overuse our tiny curly friends, reading this book has reminded me of their importance in joining phrases and subordinate clauses. I don't talk about it very much in reviews, because it kind of goes without saying: punctuations is serious business. If I have to translate a book from English to English in order to read it, that will definitely detract from my enjoyment, even if the story beyond that grammatical obstacle is brilliant. Unfortunately, this is where Erich's Plea needs that second type of editor. As much as it needs a good line-by-line dissection by a trained wielder of the red pen, this book also needs a serious big-picture editor who knows how to tweak for success. For example, at one point the main characters are trapped in a series of tunnels, and one of them unleashes a fireball that causes everything to catch on fire. Including several of his party trapped at ground zero. After they have been pulled from the flames, the narrator describes the situation thusly: "Despite the fact that the flames had lasted merely minutes Wulfstan, Trunk and Nikolai had all been severely burned." There's some questionable physics going on here. I myself have never been set on fire, but I have a feeling that if I were on fire for "merely minutes," there would be no "despite" about it. And I don't want to be pedantic about this. It is obvious what Alley meant with that passage, but it just takes some editing to realize that the line should be changed to make more sense. These things tend to get away from a writer during the actual writing, and even during subsequent drafts. That is understandable, and that's what editors are for. I get the feeling that Alley has the general narrative worked out, but she gets lost in conveying the mechanics and details of that narrative (don't we all?). This results in some sloppy and otherwise unappealing habits. Earlier in the book, as the characters are skulking around a level of the terrify Zeaburg Prison, they encounter some orcs. Alley feels the need to describe, in detail, the glacial thought processes of these thick prison guards, and throughout the battle, remind us that the orcs are slow-witted indeed. The icing on this cake of repetition occurs when the annoying halfing Lara decides to take on the guards single-handedly: Thinking far more quickly than the slow-witted orc guards, Lara knew that the doorway would admit only one of them at a time. Orcs were not known for their slender physiques, that fact and the corridor itself presented her with plenty of opportunities to take out the guards. I will acknowledge the welcome and proper use of a comma to offset that initial subordinate clause. This does not happen often enough. Note, however, the unfortunate comma splice in the second sentence. So on net balance, grammar points here are zero. But I digress. What I want to point out is the way in which this passage is written from Lara's perspective. Lara is "thinking," Lara "knows" that orcs are slow-witted. This is a classic case of telling when one should be showing—wait, on the next page, Alley does: Two guards reached the doorway at the same time, their broad shoulders connecting as they each tried to get through the door first. The two orcs pushed and shoved at each other trying to get through the door, while grunting at each other in their native tongue. So that first passage is completely unnecessary, because Alley conveys the same thing half a page later. And because here she is showing us, not telling us, what is happening, it makes for much better reading. Incidentally, most of this book is centred around the escape from Zeaburg Prison. Apparently the governor of the prison had set up the escape so these prisoners could be assassinated; their deaths would just look like they had been killed trying to escape. That is actually rather clever. Unfortunately, this literal dungeon part of the Dungeons & Dragons motif is a drag. The characters spend the entire book escaping from the prison, travelling through an escape tunnel, and then they end up in the middle of the city controlled by the Big Bad (more on him in a moment). None of this is very interesting. Beyond the initial escape and that confrontation with the slow-witted orcs, these characters get into very little danger. There are some icky spiders, some ill-advised fire magic, and the problem of what to wear to the dark festival, of course. But these problems are smoke and mirrors that distract from a critical flaw, which is that this main plotline has no real plot. Most of what happens in Erich's Plea is exposition. There are essentially three plots happening here: Slade et al escaping from Zeaburg, Michael's visits with Lord Nexus and Ulrich, and Ursula's escape from Ulrich's clutches. In the first part, as I mentioned, there are no real conflicts relevant to the overarching story and villain. It's all just prison escape and bickering between characters with stock attributes and relationships. Michael's story can be divided into two sets of dialogue: his conversation with Lord Nexus, which is just a history of Kaynos and some explanation of Alley's magical systems; and his confrontation with Ulrich and subsequent exile. Again, not much going on that really changes the status quo. Finally, we briefly meet Ursula. And again, her sole purpose is to tell us how Ulrich came to power and became such a naughty king. From golden ages to war and witchcraft, most of Erich's Plea is backstory. Backstory is all well and good, and it is nice to see that Alley has put considerable thought into her fictional universe. The only missing component is that crucial binding element: the story to which the backstory is backstory. How can I tell? It is very simple: none of the antagonists actually do anything in this story. We hear about them. We hear what terrible things they have done and what terrible things they intend to do. Not so much on the doing. The Big Bad of Erich's Plea, by the way, is called the Dark One. No, I am not making that up. Yes, "the Dark One." At first I thought this was merely laughable. Seriously, what self-respecting storyteller names his or her villain "the Dark One"? Turns out Robert Jordan does. Not being a Wheel of Time reader, this escaped my notice at first (thank you, TVTropes). Smugly, of course, this discovery is a good demonstration of why I eschew Wheel of Time, but that is neither here nor there. My point is that calling one's villain "the Dark One" does no one favours. Nor does Alley's portrayal of this Dark One ameliorate his melodramatic title. Instead of remaining an enigma whom the protagonist only confronts during the climax, we meet the Dark One and learn that he is only human. To be fair, we learned quite early that the Dark One is a human, or rumoured to be human. But when we meet him, it seems like he is just human. He's not even that smart; at least, he doesn't notice that his right-hand man has betrayed him. And he has allied himself with a witch who seeks to rival the gods in her powers. I shall take one guess about the fate of that alliance.… Unfortunately, we only meet the Dark One once, and not for long. So we know almost nothing about him, and after destroying his precious evil mystique and supervillain street cred, Alley frustratingly keeps him an abstraction as a character. So "the Dark One" is the "bad guy" because he hates non-humans. So it goes. Speaking of abstractions, I couldn't help but notice that some of the characters aren't … always … there. By which I mean, sometimes it seems like Alley has forgotten that certain characters are with Slade's party; they just fade away and then rematerialize when they have a line to contribute. This happens in particular to Darzan and Trunk, who often drop away for tens of pages even when there is some action happening to which both could contribute (why does the halfling have to slay all the orcs?!). Yet another sign here that Erich's Plea needs an editor. In the case of someone like Darzan, it makes me wonder if she is all that necessary to the story; her role is mostly extraneous, so she could probably be cut. Considering Trunk's relation to a reveal at the end of the book, not to mention his role in Slade's vision, his lack of participation is a little more problematic but no less noticeable. So I conclude by reiterating what is, perhaps, the most serious offense of Erich's Plea, which is its frustrating lack of story. The egregious grammar and poor editing wound me to my core, and they certainly do nothing to predispose me to the book. Nevertheless, they are meta-narrative problems, technical problems, and thus all the more easily corrected. Lacking a story is a huge problem. I know Alley has a story to tell, because her meticulous explanation of the political climate of Kaynos, the way its kingdoms and states and magic are set up, reveals to me the direction she wants to pursue with this series. I just wish she had gone much further along that path than she does, because as far as I am concerned, Erich's Plea is not Book One of the Withcraft Wars; it is Book Zero. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 16, 2010
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Dec 16, 2010
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Oct 05, 2010
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 045146365X
| 9780451463654
| 045146365X
| 4.25
| 55,445
| Oct 26, 2010
| Oct 26, 2010
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really liked it
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This review contains spoilers for the ending of Changes and possibly other books in the Dresden Files series. It does not, however, contain spoilers f
This review contains spoilers for the ending of Changes and possibly other books in the Dresden Files series. It does not, however, contain spoilers for the short stories themselves in Side Jobs, so I have not marked the review with a spoiler alert. This is how much I love the Dresden Files: not only will I buy every book as it is released, a practice I eschew for a great many other authors I still adore, but I will go to great lengths to buy that book on release day if at all possible. My experience buying Side Jobs testifies to this determination. It was a stormy Tuesday morning when I woke up and realized it was the release day for this book. By stormy, I mean torrential rain and wind that managed to knock down power lines in several places throughout the city. So not only did I make a special trip to Chapters in the rain for Side Jobs, but I negotiated around closed off streets and braved intersections where the traffic lights had no power. That is how much faith I put in Jim Butcher and Harry Dresden. When I sit down with one of these books, I know I'm going to enjoy it, and that is a nice type of anticipation to have once in a while. So the question with Side Jobs, as it is with every Dresden Files book, is not if I like it, but how much. And let's be honest with ourselves: if you are a Dresden Files fangirl or fanboy as I am, you're going to buy this book even if it sucks. Fortunately for you, this book is a must-have for any collector of the Dresden Files, be ye fanatic or simply a casual connoisseur of the Dresden. A few of the stories—particularly the first two, "A Restoration of Faith" and "Vignette"—are not that good, and I'm not going to talk about them. Instead, let me discuss some of the stories I liked, the story I loved, and that final novella, "Aftermath," in which we learn what Murphy goes through immediately following the events of Changes. Some of these stories are funny. Not just snarky and entertaining in Harry's trademark, sarcastic way, but outright comedic. Part of this comes from the reasons Butcher wrote each story, such as the comedic sci-fi/fantasy anthology for which he wrote "Day Off." Yet I think it's also a side effect of Butcher writing Harry for a shorter length of story. Humour is a nice route to exploring a character, and character studies can make for great short stories, especially when paired with fantastic action sequences or descriptions, as we see in "Day Off" and "Last Call." Despite the often serious consequences in his adventures, Harry is still a very funny guy. The stories that really shine, however, are those where Harry displays his heroism in the face of those serious consequences, even if it's sometimes chivalrous to the point of chauvinism. Two of the stories collected here, "Something Borrowed" and "Heorot," involve a fiancée or wife, respectively, being kidnapped by a monster. The monsters have different motivations (one has revenge on the mind, while the other wants to breed), and the resolutions are different as well (I loved seeing Harry team up with Gard, and I loved the action sequence in "Heorot.") But I can see how this concentrated dose of chivalry might make one uncomfortable with Harry or with Butcher; why does the wizard always have to rescue damsels in distress? Recall that even when Butcher seems to be yielding to one trope, he's subverting or averting another. Almost all of the female characters in the series are strong, either physically, emotionally, or both. You've got metaphorical Valkyries like Murphy, who shines in "Love Hurts" and "Aftermath," and literal Valkyries like Gard, who kicks ass in the same "Heorot" that pulls a damsel-in-distress on us. One way in which the short stories deviate from the novel formula is in their perspective, which isn't always Harry's. There are two such stories in Side Jobs: "Aftermath" is one, and the other is "Backup," a novelette from Thomas' point of view. The latter is interesting for two reasons: for Thomas' viewpoint, naturally, but also because it adds to the mythology of the Dresdenverse in a way a Harry Dresden story cannot. As Butcher explains in the preface, Harry can't know about the Oblivion War, but it's a plot point that fits perfectly with other Dresdenverse lore (and tickles that part of my brain dedicated to speculating about the Outsiders, such as He Who Walks Behind, who seems to have a plan in mind for Harry). I love the mythology around the Dresdenverse, which is both creative and enduring in a way that only makes me want more. Speaking of more, the cliffhanger in Changes definitely left me wanting more, and Side Jobs teases us with a new story set forty-five minutes after the end of Changes. The appropriately named "Aftermath," however, doesn't quite live up to the hype. This is completely understandable, because "Aftermath" is a story about Murphy and her role in Harry's life, not a story about Harry told from Murphy's point of view. So what we get is much better, actually: we get to see Murphy snap into action when she realizes there is a possibility that Harry won't be coming back from this one. And her reaction demonstrates how much Murphy has changed over twelve Dresden Files novels, how much she has grown as a character. Even as she refuses to admit Harry is dead—"There's this voice inside me that keeps pointing out that we haven't seen a body. Until I have …"—she steps into to take his place, to carry the torch, as it were, "Until Dresden gets back." And I can think of no way more fitting to celebrate Harry Dresden and his life than that. To see so clearly how Harry has affected so many people's lives, to see Murphy and the Alphas step up and say, "It's on us now," is so moving. We have come such a long way from Storm Front , when Murphy was a detective who tolerated Harry and certainly didn't trust him. In the last ten years, they have formed a bond that is deeper than friendship (even if, as we see in "Love Hurts," it can never quite be more than that on the surface). And to see her honour and remember Harry by fighting the good fight, despite all she's been through, is awesome. Still, "Aftermath" pales in comparison to the single best story in Side Jobs, one which surprised me. Damn you, Jim Butcher, for making me laugh and cry at the same time. When I began reading "The Warrior," I actually thought I would dislike it. Firstly, Michael has always grated on me as a character, and it's not just his constant faith in God. I love him for giving us Molly, who is one of my favourite characters, but he never quite seemed as round or complex. And then Butcher hits me with "The Warrior," which not only made me love Michael and laugh at Harry but, despite being an atheist, choke up at Uriel's homily about how Harry's actions have made the world a better place and Michael is still fighting the good fight: I just stared at him for a moment. "But … I didn't actually mean to do any of that." That's not all that's great about "The Warrior." There are intriguing tidbits in Uriel and Harry's conversation, doors opened that I hope are later explored more thoroughly: Jake shrugged. "But if you hadn't, you'd have died in that harness, and he'd have died on that island." Finally, we have what may be my favourite moment in Side Jobs. Harry has come to the park, where Michael is coaching his daughter's softball team. And one of the girls has gone off by herself, upset because she doesn't think she's a good enough player. Harry suggests that no one can be perfect, that you can't just retreat into your house and live in Bubble Wrap. And he explains why: I snorted. "They still make you read Dickens in school? Great Expectations?' I'm pretty sure there are English teachers who would kill to hear a student say that, and to watch Harry cause that to happen was both pleasant and sensational. Side Jobs isn't perfect. It is hard for an anthology to be perfect. Still, as I said before, if you are a Dresden Files fan, you should read this. If you are a collector, you should buy this. It's a wonderful addition to the series, with some truly great stories you might not have had a chance to read, particularly "The Warrior." Although "Aftermath" might not have any of the resolution you were hoping for after Changes, I think it's an excellent story about how Murphy deals with the shock of losing one of the most important people in her life. And it's a foreshadowing of how difficulty the days are going to become—for Harry, and for those left behind. I can't believe I have to wait until April for Ghost Story! My Review of the Dresden Files: ← Changes | Ghost Story → [image] ...more |
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| 0984442502
| 9780984442508
| 0984442502
| 3.98
| 3,154
| May 04, 2010
| May 04, 2010
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liked it
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I am very excited for HTML5. My experience with web design began in March 2004. I was young(er than I am now), and I decided to make a personal websit
I am very excited for HTML5. My experience with web design began in March 2004. I was young(er than I am now), and I decided to make a personal website on GeoCities. It was a gaudy affair that reflected my lack of design skills and made use of notorious elements like <marquee>. In the years that followed, I learned about web standards and accessibility. Now my websites still reflect a lack of design skills, but at least they're accessible! So I'm happy that HTML5's specifications are being developed with accessibility and web standards in mind, as well as a healthy dose of realism when it comes to browser implementation. We're never going to get a pure and perfect Web. Let's see how close we can come though. Jeremy Keith is also excited for HTML5, and that excitement is evident in HTML5 for Web Designers. From page 1 to page 85, Keith succinctly communicates the good, the bad, and the unfortunate about the HTML5 specification. He touches on almost every important part of HTML5, including what may be the most pertinent question right now: can we use HTML5 today? (The answer is yes. I am using it on my site.) Almost every review I've read comments on this book's length. Its length is a selling point, as the A Book Apart website advertises it, and it is also a weakness. Owing to the book's brevity, I can easily review each chapter, and then I'll conclude with an explanation of why, on balance, the quality in these pages truly does exceed their quantity. The first chapter is the "brief history of markup" chapter that seems obligatory for every book on HTML. Every author gets to put his or her spin on the rise of the Web, the browser wars, the arrival of AJAX and Web 2.0, etc. That's not a bad thing, and for those of us who are familiar with that history, it is always good to review. When discussing HTML5, a good knowledge of where we have been is essential. HTML5 is an attempt to create a markup language for the Web that puts our past behind us while embracing the legacy it has left. Hence, in designing HTML5, WHATWG wants to curtail future "browser wars" by involving browser developers in the process. At the same time, we can't just ignore what we already have in HTML 4.01. It's a delicate balancing act, and the opening chapter reminds us of the challenges involved. In chapter 2, "The Design of HTML5," Keith focuses on how HTML5 differs from HTML 4.01, XHTML 1, and XHTML 2. He throws out a lot of the catchphrases making the rounds in the development community ("pave the cowpaths"). Aside from that, the changes he notes are fascinating examples of immediate relevance to web designers, e.g., the irrelevance of doctypes, the new rules regarding the anchor element, and the hooks into JavaScript APIs. That last one is really cool, because it is the change about which I've heard the last. And then Keith admits that these are "completely over [his:] head," so he won't be covering him! Not that I blame him. They sound over my head as well. Chapter 3, "Rich Media," covers three new elements in HTML5 that are making waves: <canvas>, <audio>, and <video>. Keith looks at each in turn, exploring the advantages, disadvantages, and state of implementation with major browsers. Since my web design seldom involves multimedia, I haven't tried out these elements for myself. It's great to see demonstrations like Detexify, which shows off the power of <canvas>. I like that Keith addresses the shortcomings of the implementations of these elements thus far, e.g., <audio>'s inconsistent format support. HTML5 for Web Designers is effusive about HTML5 but also realistic. I was really looking forward to the chapter on "Web Forms 2.0." Indeed, this was one of the reasons I bought the book. I haven't worked with forms in HTML5 yet, and the improvements to form controls look pretty cool. Keith once again does an adequate job summarizing the changes to forms. I was somehow expecting . . . more, so chapter 4 left me feeling underwhelmed. However, I think this is the result of a misunderstanding on my part about what HTML5 offers for forms rather than a flaw in this book. The last two chapters, "Semantics" and "Using HTML5 Today," are similar in content and significance, so I will address them together. These chapters are perhaps the most important in the book, but they are also the most redundant. There are many great online resources on HTML5 already; indeed, Keith links to a lot of them, including the fantastic HTML5 Doctor. So what Keith does in these chapters is little more than reiteration of what I've already read. I learned a few new things, but most of the content in these chapters is covered in more depth on sites like HTML5 Doctor. That is the trade-off to having a brief book. HTML5 for Web Designers is just a summary of what HTML5 offers. It doesn't claim to be anything more, and for designers who are unfamiliar with HTML5, this will probably be enough. As someone familiar with some of HTML5 and unclear on other parts, I found this book useful but not quite as enlightening as I had hoped. Should you buy it? You can definitely learn everything you'd learn from this book elsewhere, and perhaps just as quickly, for free. That being said, sometimes it is useful to have a reference book nearby. HTML5 for Web Designers is a beautifully-designed reference book, and it obviously won't take up much shelf space. Keith's writing is clear and entertaining. So the book's quality ultimately comes down to your expectations. Be realistic about what you will get from an 85-page book, and you will find this satisfactory. [image] ...more |
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| 9781892391841
| 1892391848
| 3.63
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it was amazing
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I have a confession (my reviews often start with confessions because reviews are as much about the reviewer as they are about the book): I don't much
I have a confession (my reviews often start with confessions because reviews are as much about the reviewer as they are about the book): I don't much like monster movies. Unlike many film buffs, I do not revel in the campiness of 1940s and 1950s costuming; I do not drool over stop-motion animation or long for the good-old days when the monster was some guy in a suit, not a tennis ball married to a motion-capture unit. Boris Karloff film festivals hold no magic for me. Whether it's Frankenstein's monster or Dracula, this area of speculative fiction has never gripped me as much as, say, space opera. So I approached Shambling Towards Hiroshima with some scepticism. Could a story so steeped in this subculture hold my interest? The narrator, Syms J. Thorley, is a has-been monster movie actor recounting his involvement in the New Amsterdam Project, also known as the Knickerbocker Project. As an alternative to the Manhattan Project, the Navy and a biologist bred giant fire-breathing lizards that could be towed to the shore of Japan by submarine and unleashed to wreak devastation on the island nation. But they needed a scale-model monster to destroy their scale-model of Japan in front of representatives of the Japanese government. Enter Thorley, professional monster man. The only real science fiction in this book is its premise. While essential to the plot, it never steals the stage from Thorley's voice as a harried old man or his story about balancing his movie obligations with his duty to his country. At first, the idea that the Navy might be breeding Godzilla-like monsters to defeat Japan may sound outrageous to a reader—it did to me! Then I stopped and considered what the public must have thought in the aftermath of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Atom bomb" sounds like something out of science fiction—indeed, until the Manhattan Project reified it, it was something out of science fiction. Yet nuclear weapons, while not commonplace (thankfully) like toasters or computers are a matter of common parlance, part of our technological canon, if you will. If we can harness the power of nuclear fission for destructive purposes, surely breeding fire-breathing lizards is not that crazy. And what about duping the Japanese with a guy in a suit? Well, that is just one of the many levels of satire in which James Morrow engages. In a commentary on both the United States military and the Hollywood film industry, Morrow looks at the relationship film has with deception. The government is no stranger to deception as a negotiating tactic. When they need to deceive the Japanese delegation about the veracity of their scaled-down monster, it makes perfect sense to turn to a professional industry practised in such deception. With the proper costuming, lighting, and acting, anything is possible in the movie industry. Shambling Towards Hiroshima is rife with satire of the movie industry; much of it, owing to my unfamiliarity with 1940s American cinema, went over my head. I knew enough to gather that James Whale and Willis O'Brien, hired to direct Thorley's performance and manage special effects, respectively, were real people in the movie industry. Morrow gives Thorley an over-the-top rival, who also plays a somewhat antagonistic role in both Thorley's life and the plot. Siegfried Dagover is enjoyable because he is a caricature of the jealous actor rather than despite this fact. Similarly, the rough characters of Thorley's director and producer on his movie project hearken back to the coarser era of American cinema. By no means do I subscribe to a view that American cinema was ever "innocent", but this was an era where radio was still the dominant communications medium. The cult of celebrity around movie actors, especially those who specialized in the monster movie industry, manifested differently than it does today. Morrow displays the differences, both celebrates them and mocks them, as is evident from Thorley and Darlene's interrupted adventures on Santa Monica beach with Thorley's monster costume. . . . Moving further into meta-fictional territory, Morrow comments on the monster movie form itself. He (ironically, I think) has Thorley insist that, "the writers repeatedly employed a conceit that, in retrospect, seems to strike a blow for feminism." The necessity for a romantic interest for the male protagonist would often lead to his association with a lonely female scientist. Lo and behold, the biologists working on the Knickerbocker Project are Dr. Ivan Groelish and his daughter, Joy. Joy's relationship with Thorley is more short-lived and platonic than it is romantic, but it's clear Morrow is not aiming for a one-to-one correspondence. In fact, the biologists play a surprisingly small role considering the monstrous premise—again, because this is a story about Thorley and his role in a deception that failed to end a war, not a story about monsters invading Japan. Any satire spared the monster movie industry Morrow saves for the United States military. Admirals Yordan and Strickland, like Dagover, are caricatures of stereotypes. And because everything about Shambling Towards Hiroshima is a caricature of a stereotype, that works. Yordan acts like an atheist attached to a religious event, forced to oversee a project he doesn't understand implemented by people who, not being military personnel, he does not trust. Of course, the situation is not helped by Thorley's irreverent attitude. Like all satire, however, Shambling Toward Hiroshima has a serious point, embodied by the frame story. Thorley has eleventh hour encounters with a sympathetic hooker, a friendly hotel steward, and a fan stuck in a costume model after Thorley's famous monster. These characters serve as windows into the mind of the older, more experienced Syms Thorley, one haunted by his role in the war. More than just a failure to end the war, Thorley's mere involvement in the war has rendered the rest of his life in a darker shade of grey. He's continued to shuffle as a mummy, to howl as a werewolf . . . but that profession that he loved so much has been tainted for him. And all the awards and accolades that he has accumulated, the money and the cult recognition, if not fame, is a hollow victory compared to what could have been. War is hell. This a theme oft-repeated, and to do something truly innovative with it is a formidable challenge for a writer. Simlarly, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are some of the most controversial events of the twentieth century, events that marked the beginning of the "Atomic Age" of humanity, and all the good and ill it would bring. I suppose it is possible to interpret this book as a pro-bomb statement. Simply read, this is a story of the military trying to persuade Japan to surrender through a mock demonstration of a superweapon. If that were the case, however, why not write about a mock demonstration of the atomic bomb? Instead Morrow chose to portray a fictitious alternative to the Manhattan Project. In doing so, he decouples the nearly indelible link between the mechanics of the atomic superweapon and the morality. More than just a story about dropping the bomb, Shambling Towards Hiroshima is a story about the mindset of those working so hard to end the war. It's all there in the title, which is so perfect. "Shambling" is reminiscent of zombies—but, more topically, it refers to all the various monsters of the 1940s cinema. It also conjures the image of an inexorable but by no means smooth path toward the dropping of the atomic bomb, a weighty spectre of fate. Morrow gave me, someone who has no context for Hiroshima, an idea of the zeitgeist of 1940s America. As the war in the Pacific drew ever on, the prospect of ending it with one fell swoop grew ever more appealing. Each successive event compounded on the last, making the deployment of the bomb more likely. And so the world lurched and shambled, one step at a time, toward the beginning of the Atomic Age. [image] ...more |
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| 1604504552
| 9781604504552
| 1604504552
| 3.64
| 135
| Mar 03, 2010
| Mar 09, 2010
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it was amazing
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Few authors have won my heart as quickly as Nancy Kress. Two years ago, I had never heard of her. Suddenly I have seven of her books on my shelf, only
Few authors have won my heart as quickly as Nancy Kress. Two years ago, I had never heard of her. Suddenly I have seven of her books on my shelf, only one of which I've read. Like Octavia E. Butler does in
Lilith's Brood
, Nancy Kress uses genetic engineering to comment on what we consider human. With Nothing Human, Kress looks at humanity through posthuman eyes, asking where we draw the line between human and inhuman—when we can cut down the chromosomal level, what criteria are we using to decide what is human and what isn't? "Act One" is set even closer to the present day. An actor is preparing for her role in a movie about "Arlen's children," girls who have been genetically engineered at birth to be more empathic. The novella opens with the actor and her achondroplastic manager (our narrator) meeting with representatives of the Group, a radical organization that advocates genetic engineering by any and all means. Jane Snow just wants to be prepared for her role, but she finds herself an unwitting participant in an act of bioterrorism. Engineering children to be more empathic seems innocuous, right? Or, as Jane's manager, Barry, puts it: "Prospective clients loved the promise of kids who actually understood how parents felt." As creepy children Bridget and Belinda Barrington demonstrate, however, super-empathy is not all it's cracked up to be. Nurture is as important as nature, and from Belinda's sociopathic behaviour it's clear that her super-empathy does not mitigate her spoilt, emotionally-distant relationship with her mother. The Arlen's Syndrome children plot, while central to the story, did not affect me as much as Barry's relationship with Jane and his relationship with his ex-wife, Leila, and his son, Ethan. As a dwarf, Barry knows his share of genetic woes. He is the product of a genetic disorder, a mutation that, while not a disease, carries its share of disadvantages and drawbacks, both physiological and social. When genetic screening indicates his unborn son will not be a dwarf, Barry decides to use genetic engineering to change this. But something went wrong. The retrovirus that was the delivery vector mutated, or the splicing caused other genes to jump (they will do that, or maybe God just wanted an evil joke that day. The soma-gene correction spawned side effects, with one gene turning on another that in turn affected another, a cascade of creation run amok. And we got Ethan. Barry and Leila fall out, and Barry meets Ethan for the first time when he is forced to flee with Jane and the Barringtons to his mountain-side cabin. Ethan's reaction is . . . less than warm, at first. But soon we see there is a glimmer of hope. Children . . . such enigmas, such complicated bundles of information. Intrinsically innocent, yet blatant reminders of past mistakes or triumphs. And that is the point: when we dabble in our genes, we dabble in the future of our species. We are changing our children, arguably our most precious assets. It behoves us to think long and hard about any such changes before we make them. Barry is also hopelessly in love with Jane. Jane knows this, but it's an unbroached topic between them—at least, until Belinda broaches it: Something unnamed could, just barely, be ignored. Could be kept out of daily interaction, could almost be pretended away. What had been "given words" could not. Jane's serial marriages to very attractive men combined with Barry's dwarfism, not to mention their professional relationship, seems to make anything more than friendship impossible. It's more than that, of course. As Belinda points out, Jane recoils from Barry's accidental touch: It wasn’t the words Belinda had said. Yes, I loved Jane and yes, that love was hopeless. I already knew that and so must Jane. How could she not? I was with her nearly every day; she was a woman sensitive to nuance. I knew she hated my accidental touch, and hated herself for that, and could help none of it. On a visceral level Jane's body rebels and displays a bigotry that disgusts her. As enlightened as we like to think we are, sometimes our involuntary reactions bely that and surprise us. I'll admit to having such reactions before. And so Kress explores not only the consequences of genetic engineering but the motives as well. She goes deeper than the stock reasons of eliminating disease or, for those of a sinister bent, breeding a master race. To some extent, those visceral reactions we find so shameful make us human, and they contribute to our desire to give our children better futures. Although genetic engineering is in its infancy (no pun intended), it is real. We have sequenced the human genome, and we can screen for genetic disorders. Gene therapy is a reality. It is only a matter of time before we are able to choose the sex of our children, and from there, even more complex traits. With the shadow of World War II looming over the last century, and the spectre of biological determinism always waiting in the wings, there is no area of science for which the phrase "playing God" is more apt. Our ability to alter individuals and our species at the most fundamental level raises hard questions for which there are no easy answers. Kress and other authors like her are using science fiction to show us thought experiments, potentialities inherent in our future capabilities. "Act One" is a powerful reminder that advancements in science and technology bring with them challenges to morality and ethics that must not be ignored. This is, as the title of Kress' novella says, only the beginning of the show. [image] ...more |
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| 0615377548
| 9780615377544
| 0615377548
| 4.02
| 7,141
| Jun 14, 2010
| Jun 14, 2010
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liked it
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Disclaimer: I won this in a Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. Loves me the free books. There is really no question about it: adolescents and superpowers Disclaimer: I won this in a Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. Loves me the free books. There is really no question about it: adolescents and superpowers just go well together. After all, teenagers just want to be normal, and superheroes often just want to be normal. Can you guess what a teenager with superpowers wants? Kelly Oram does not break any new ground with Being Jamie Baker, which hews very closely to all of its tropes. Oram none-too-subtly uses Jamie's superpowers to parallel the social awkwardness of high school. From page 3 onward, we are reminded that Jamie Baker is a "freak," both because she is a social outcast, an "ice queen," and because she . . . well, she has superpowers. So when the hottest, nicest guy in school starts courting her, Jamie has to decide whether to reject him and remain the ice queen or embrace him—which, if done literally, may end up killing him. However, in a nice inversion of the "bad boy, nice girl" trope, we have the "nice boy, bad girl" attraction going on—Jamie is not exactly rebellious, but she is antisocial, and she does have a lot of baggage. Her eventual catharsis with respect to this last point is the true highlight of this novel instead of her climactic attempt to rescue Ryan from the clutch of a mad scientist (I kid you not). Being Jamie Baker is amazing if only because it brings back memories of my childhood, which has mostly dissolved into a faded blur of colour and Lego. This book reminds me a good deal of The Secret World of Alex Mack , a show I recall watching when I was very young. In both cases, you've got a teenage girl who gains powers as a result of a chemical spill. She discovers that having superpowers is not all it's cracked up to be, especially because it makes having a "normal" high school life practically impossible. Also, she must conceal her powers at all costs, lest shady government or business interests cut her up. Again, obvious allegory for adolescent self-discovery happening here. But having taken all these tools out of the box, how does Oram use them to construct a compelling story? There are three major plots here: Jamie's relationship with Ryan, Jamie's need to reconcile herself with having powers (including the fear of discovery), and Jamie's desire to be accepted in the society of Rocklin High. Each of these plots works well with the other two separately, but all three never really come together as one. Jamie's relationship with Ryan is annoying. Firstly, Ryan's self-assuredness did not endear me to him. His constant attempts to push past Jamie's barriers are supposed to show that he cares, yet they mostly make him a jerk. Secondly, Jamie's not that much better in this area. She vacillates between, "I can't be with him; I might kill him!" to "I want him. Want now." And every time she overhears Ryan laughing about her to his Popular friends, it never occurs to her to think that he's just pretending. She immediately decides he's a jerk and she hates him. I know that these fluctuations of affection are the hallmark of a hormonal teenage girl, but in fiction they need to be married to useful developments in plot. And that does happen sometimes; for instance, Jamie is understandably taken aback when a kiss with Ryan results in supercharging her powers, glowing eyes, and a lightning blast that knocks over a tree. Even less successful, however, is the superhero story in this superhero story. A reporter, whose articles about Jamie's accident prompted her family to move in the first place, has re-entered Jamie's life. This time he claims her only hope is to go public with her powers before the evil Visticorp decides to capture her. The final twist turns out to be the identity of a former Visticorp employee who has essentially gone rogue because Visticorp didn't believe him about Jamie. He kidnaps Ryan on the night of the Big Football Game, luring Jamie up to the deserted high school for a creepy confession about how he will "keep her safe." I was waiting for this moment forever. I mean, that's the expected payoff when the hero reveals his or her secret identity to a loved one. The problem was that, for the first part of the book, there was no sign of any supervillain or nemesis of that calibre. (Carter, the reporter, doesn't count. He's an idiot.) In general, Being Jamie Baker's pacing is so abysmally slow that when this payoff finally arrives, it is more a relief than a gratification. The villain, once he is revealed, is unimposing to the point of being laughable. There is no suspense and very little tension as Jamie goes about rescuing Ryan and disabling the villain. About the best thing that comes from the climax is Jamie's own confrontation with her moral event horizon (guess the outcome of that one). But that's not plot; that's characterization. Despite my reservations about the story, Oram really impressed me with her portrayal of Jamie's voice. In particular, the following exchange is hilarious. Jamie has just beat the bad guy, and now Carter has shown up with her parents, who just finished planting evidence in the villain's home that frames him as a stalker: "What things did you leave there?" I demanded, trying to make myself calm down. Jamie's repeated protestations of "Mom!" feel so accurate, as does her embarrassment (not to mention her father's!) of this discussion about planting her panties at some guy's apartment. With Jamie, Ryan, Mike, Paige, et al., Oram duplicates the diction of adolescents, with "like" inserted in all the right places. I'm less convinced of the veracity of the parents' voices (does anyone really say, "I'm putting my foot down" these days?) but that's a minor quibble. Beyond voice, many of the secondary characters, although not as well-developed, are less stock than I expected. For example, Mike Driscoll is Ryan's crony and not a nice guy at all. He's harsh to Jamie, and his attitude toward women in general is, at best, macho-ly misogynistic. Yet when Carter first darkens Jamie's door (by which I mean he shows up at Rocklin High), he is the first one to intervene. It is an act of solidarity with the ice queen that leaves both her and the reader a little bewildered, and I love that. Then there is Jamie's back story, including her origin story and the true fate of her late boyfriend, Derek. Oram does not focus on this too much, probably wisely, choosing instead to reveal only salient portions. Once the whole story is out, you realize Jamie really is messed up and not just overdramatic (I had to admit I had some doubts until that point). This makes her confrontation with the villain much more fulfilling than it otherwise would be. We can understand on a visceral level, if not a literal one, how tempted Jamie is to use her powers to remove this person. As I mentioned above, it's not a very tense moment, because the outcome is predictable. However, it demonstrates how far Jamie has come from the beginning of the story, where she's an aloof ice queen trying to ignore her powers as much as possible. There is really no question about it: adolescents and superpowers just go well together. Being Jamie Baker has some problems with plot and pacing that threaten to consign it to mediocrity. Jamie's voice, and Oram's characterization, rescues it—mostly. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 28, 2010
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Aug 29, 2010
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Jul 31, 2010
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Paperback
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| 077108546X
| 9780771085468
| 077108546X
| 3.38
| 1,321
| Jan 01, 2009
| Aug 25, 2009
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really liked it
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Last month I reviewed Galileo's Dream, in which I waxed philosophical about the attraction of certain historical individuals. Like Galileo, Christophe
Last month I reviewed Galileo's Dream, in which I waxed philosophical about the attraction of certain historical individuals. Like Galileo, Christopher Columbus is another giant who captures our imaginations. Although he did not "discover" North America, Columbus did spearhead expeditions that brought the utility of North America to the attention of European powers. And the rest is, as they say, history. Columbus helped to change the world, but what we know about Columbus the person is not always clear. Unlike Galileo's Dream, Waiting for Columbus presents not a historical figure but a personality based on facts known about Columbus' life. A history professor who undergoes a traumatic event adopts the identity of Columbus. His intriguing story contains the clues needed to unlock his real identity. Waiting for Columbus shares a lot in common with a mystery. The main characters (even Columbus, although he would deny it at first) are all fixated on discovering Columbus' true identity. There is even an Interpol investigator on the trail of a missing man, and his search eventually leads him to Columbus. Yet make no mistake: this is not a mystery. It is instead a romance, in the sweeping, historical sense of the word. Columbus repeats throughout the book, "Trust the teller, not the tale." This refers to the shifting nature of his narrative's landscape. Mixed in with references to 15th-century Spain are anachronisms like laptops, handguns, telephones, and Starbucks. Actually, I enjoyed these anachronisms more than I expected: they made me wonder what historical events would be like if we transposed the people to a modern day setting. I love it when books push me down a tangent. But I digress. Columbus is an unreliable narrator, and we must follow Consuela as she tries to puzzle out some sort of meaning from his stories. When he asks us to trust him, if not his story, Columbus means that his stories might not be accurate, but what he is saying with the stories is important to his state of mind. As Emile discovers, some of the characters and locations in Columbus' story are real people and places he visited prior to arriving at the institute. Others, as Balderas deduces, are composites of several people or fragments of a single person. Trofimuk nicely balances what we learn about Columbus from his story with what we learn from Consuela and Emile's private investigations. Again, this is not a mystery, but it has elements of mystery to it. Like Consuela, I couldn't help but fall a little in love with "Columbus." Trofimuk's portrayal of Columbus the historical figure is indubitably sympathetic, but he can get away with this because it's precisely not a historical work; rather, this Columbus is one man's appropriation of the Columbus mythos, which he then revises to fit his own psychology. The Columbus we see is the brilliant dreamer, as passionate about discovery as he is about women, driven to explore and find a western route to India and China. We feel the blow that is every setback, every delay, every naysayer. And parts of the Columbus mythos that are not generally considered fact—such as the misconception that Columbus was some sort of revolutionary for thinking the Earth round—suddenly become important, symbolic. This marriage of symbolism and history says a lot about storytelling, and that is the principle attraction of Waiting for Columbus. Trofimuk consciously and deliberately plays with metaphor and character in a transparent manner. One of my favourite elements of the story is the unconsummated love between Columbus and Isabella. It reminded me of a short story I read back in my first university English course: "Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship (Santa Fe, A. D. 1492)," by Salman Rushdie. That story was my first exposure to Rushdie and impressed me enough to seek out more of his work. It was also a very postmodern narrative, with different perspectives and a style that is almost verse instead of prose. In both cases, Isabella's love for Columbus plays a pivotal role in getting him funding and ships. "I need to put an ocean between this queen and that foolish navigator. I needed to stop this lust in me. It was the only way," Isabella says in Waiting for Columbus. And in "Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella," Columbus dreams, Yes! She knows it now! She must must must give him the money, the ships, anything, and he must must must carry her flag and her favour beyond the end of the end of the earth, into exaltation and immortality, linking her to him for ever with bonds far harder to dissolve than those of any mortal love, the harsh and deifying ties of history. Both stories play with the Columbus mythos in a way that highlights how we view and romanticize history and historical figures. Regardless of the true nature of their relationship, history has inexorably linked Columbus and Isabella, just as he dreams she desires in Rushdie's story. We will never know whether she does this out of love, as Waiting for Columbus depicts, or simple recognition of the advantages a successful expedition would bring to Spain. But really, it is better that way, is it not? We like the ambiguity, the ability to envision different reasons for history. It's these moments of playful storytelling that catch Waiting for Columbus at its best. Trofimuk infuses the book with the atmosphere of a lazy day in August. The sky is always tinged with the orange of sunset, and there's plenty of wine to go around . . . that is how reading this book feels. He has a great capacity for description; of particular note is his attention to the sense of smell. Writers often neglect smell, either using it only sparsely or when it's pertinent to the plot or just forgetting it entirely. So I like when an author like Trofimuk comes along and makes smell a seamless part of the scene. It really does add another dimension of sense to the story. Also, I appreciate the positive portrayal of a psychiatric institution. So much fiction involving institutions focuses on the negative, on the abuse by other patients and staff, on the ineffective or misguided treatments. There's no doubt such problems exist and should be written about, whether in fiction or non-fiction. But I like seeing the other side too, the positive, successful side. In the beginning of Waiting for Columbus, the director of the institute is Dr. Fuentes. He is the stereotypical disinterested psychiatrist who has no time for indulging Columbus' stories. However, halfway through the book Fuentes gets written off, and Trofimuk introduces the more personable and sympathetic Dr. Balderas, as if to say, "That's enough of that: here's how we'll do things from now on." There is never any doubt that this man only thinks he is Columbus; there is no hint of a plot or conspiracy on the part of the institute. And this certainty gives Trofimuk the freedom to tell the story of "Columbus" however he wants. I cannot specify when I became immersed in this story. At first I had trouble reading more than a chapter or two at a time; it was interesting but not engrossing. At some point, however, the story clicked, and I needed to learn what happened to Columbus. The ending, alas, did not live up to my sudden increase in expectation. After waiting so long to learn about "Columbus'" identity and watch him recover, the book tails off, finishing the story very abruptly. We get no coda that tells us what happens to Consuela or to Emile, and Trofimuk speeds through an overview of how "Columbus" reintegrates with his new self. It is not a disaster, just a discordant note in the symphony. Waiting for Columbus surprised me, because I did not think I would like it quite as much as I did. I picked it off the New Books shelf at my library on a whim. What I thought would be an OK story about a patient in a mental institution turned out to be a complex, poetic exploration of story and history. It is a wonderful tale of a Christopher Columbus who never was. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 12, 2010
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Aug 14, 2010
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Jul 13, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 1594744424
| 9781594744426
| 1594744424
| 3.28
| 12,077
| Sep 15, 2009
| Sep 15, 2009
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did not like it
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**spoiler alert** Jane Austen and I have had a rocky relationship. I respect her as a writer and believe she deserves a place in the canon of great En
**spoiler alert** Jane Austen and I have had a rocky relationship. I respect her as a writer and believe she deserves a place in the canon of great English authors, but I sometimes wonder if she is overhyped. When it comes to
Sense and Sensibility
, it has a lot of Austen's trademark wit, but as a first novel it also has the immaturity and inexperience of a writer learning the craft. So with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Ben H. Winters has an opportunity to take a promising tale of two sisters and ameliorate it with his marine menaces. Indeed, this is probably the intention, but as I'm going to emphasize over and over again, it did not work out that way. Before I launch into my main criticism, I want to note two errors that jumped out at me while I read. The first is excusable, or at least explainable. The second, not so much. Both are good examples of the carelessness that plagues this book. The first error is in the first paragraph of Chapter 9. The Dashwoods have arrived at Pestilence Isle and are settling into their new home. As part of these activities, "they had strung the encircling fence with garlands of dried kelp and lamb's blood, which Sir John Middleton had proscribed as the surest method to ward off" sea monsters. Rather than proscribed, which means forbidden, I think the word Winters intends is prescribed. The two words are antonyms in meaning but only one letter apart. Hence, this is probably just a rather unfortunate typo. Copy editors are human too. (Well, most of them.) I cannot quite as easily dismiss the second error. Later in the book (Chapter 46), Marianne is planning her new life without Willoughby: "I shall learn engineering; I shall study hydrology and biology and aeronautics; I shall endeavour to understand Mendel's principles and comparative zoology." Managing that last resolution would be quite an accomplishment, because Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk known for his experiments with heredity and generally credited for discovering genetics, won't be born until five years after Austen dies. So the Marianne of Sense and Sensibility wouldn't know about Mendel. To be fair, Winters never specifies when this book takes place. Maybe it takes place in a later part of the nineteenth century, after Mendel starts his experiments. Yet this explanation is unsatisfactory for two reasons: firstly, Mendel's work didn't garner much attention until the early twentieth century; secondly, even if the Alteration changed that and led to an earlier realization of genetics, moving the time period forward even by fifty years would place Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters into the Victorian era. And I think that would make for a different tone of book. No, the easiest explanation seems to be that Mendel's mention is an anachronism. It only took me a few seconds to check Mendel's birth date on Wikipedia. What is Winters' excuse? That question, while pertinent, probably will not bear much fruit. Instead, let's consider two complementary questions. Does the sea monsters story need Sense and Sensibility or could it have worked on its own? Conversely, is Sense and Sensibility helped or improved in any way by the addition of sea monsters? Spoiler alert: the answer to both questions is "no." Prior to reading this book, I was under the impression that the eponymous sea monsters were anomalies. They are actually much more than that. Some time prior to the story's start, the Earth's oceans experienced an "Alteration," and all marine life became hostile toward humankind. Ocean voyages now hold great peril; even living near a lake is dangerous. Forget Sense and Sensibility for a moment: the Alteration is a great starting point for an alternate history novel set in Regency England! Considering Britain's status as a naval power, a far-flung empire, and an island, there would be plenty of interesting developments as a result of the Alteration. So many questions to explore, characters to create . . . . . . and it's all wasted on Jane Austen. No offense meant to Austen, of course. But in trying—and I do emphasize that word, trying—to graft the plot and characters of Sense and Sensibility onto his Altered England, Winters misses the mark. Instead of creating a story truly worthy of such a fantastic setting, he tries to stretch a story that wasn't made to fit this canvas—and oh, how it shows. Take, for example, the cause of the Alteration. Winters throws out some half-hearted speculation. Henry Dashwood dies pursuing the source of a poison stream he believes the cause. Sir John Middleton believes the Alteration is a curse upon England by one of the victims of British imperialism; he has devoted his life to finding the primitive tribe responsible, with no success. Edward Ferrars favours a theory that blames Henry VIII's split with Catholicism. All these sound interesting, but under scrutiny they all fall apart. The Alteration's name (indeed, the very fact that it has a Name) suggests that the oceans were not always like this. So there should be a simple way to test, say, Edward's theory about Henry VIII: what do written records say about ocean voyages prior to Henry's reign? Surely a calamity as great as the Alteration would be recorded: "June 7, waters calm. June 8, the dolphins killed my first mate. God help us all!" I find it very difficult to believe no one knows when the Alteration began. The poison stream and tribal curse theories are also rather silly, but slightly less so, and I suppose the latter works well as a background for Sir John. It just galls me that Winters takes such an off-handed approach to what may be the most important question in his universe. There's also something suspect about the number of people who spend their time near or on the ocean, considering its dangers. Let's start with Pestilence Isle. Sir John lives on an archipelago off of Devonshire, specifically on Deadwind Island, and he lets a cottage on Pestilence Isle to the Dashwood women. It makes sense that Sir John would live on a tiny island. He's an adventurer, and he likes danger. But why would he put women needlessly in danger by giving them a cottage on a smaller island where he doesn't live? Why would the Dashwoods ever agree to live there? As the frequent sea monster attacks show, the decision is practically suicidal. And don't get me started—yet—about what happens to Margaret. Moving on: Sub-Marine Station Beta. Actually, I kind of see how this one makes sense. It may be—nay, it is—stupid to build a gigantic dome habitation at the bottom of the ocean off the British coast and then invite all the upper class people to spend the winter there. If this were a James Bond movie, Sub-Marine Station Beta would be part of a trap by the villain. (It would also feature an awesome underwater fight scene, in which Bond dispatches several baddies and a couple of sharks. But I digress.) However, Sub-Marine Station Beta is consistent with the British attitude of stalwart arrogance in the face of adversity. In a time of war, which this is, the British keep those upper lips stiff and like to show that they remain steadfast. How better to show that you do not fear the enemy than building a stronghold in the middle of his or her territory? Sub-Marine Station Beta is an exercise in nationalism and a display of bravado. It's also rather stupid. The icing on the implausibility cake, however, are the pirates. Are we supposed to believe that there are outlaws who subsist by taking some of the few ships that survive sea monster attacks? And that these ships themselves somehow avoid succumbing to those same attacks? I love reading about pirates, but they are the most obvious example of something included in this book because it's cool instead of its potential contributions to the plot. No, when I look at it this way, it is a shame that Winters had even to try to follow an outline of Sense and Sensibility in writing this book. It is a waste of a world that could have been so much more. And all of these flaws read like they are the result of carelessness, of unintentional neglect caused by starting with the idea of "it's Sense and Sensibility, but with sea monsters" and then throwing everything at the book to see what sticks. I kind of feel sorry for the setting. Having determined that the sea monsters suffer at the hands of Sense and Sensibility, can we say the same in reverse? Yes, indubitably. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters does not merely besmirch its source material's good name; it follows Sense and Sensibility down a dark alleyway, beats it senseless, and then slinks away to commit more crimes against Austen's oeuvre. Harsh much? I thought so too, at first. I wanted to find this book amusing. I wanted to chuckle at how Winters cleverly transposes the class humour and familial squabbles of Austen's characters into this Altered England. The more I read, however, the more I realized that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters does not just fail to live up to its source. I could handle that. But no, it's much worse. This book actively dismantles everything that makes Sense and Sensibility great English literature. Nineteenth-century English society holds our interest in part because its class system is very different from the way contemporary society is stratified. But it's not enough merely to mock or to belittle this difference. To successfully satirize Regency England, one must deconstruct its customs and culture and examine why our contemporary society finds it humorous. Otherwise, all you're doing is pointing and laughing; on a scale of sophistication, that is barely above toilet humour. As its title specifies, Sense and Sensibility is about the balance between reason and emotionalism. Elinor, with her calculating and practical ways, embodies sense; Marianne, the emotional and impulsive one, sensibility. Winters pays lip service to these differences as he develops the plot along the same lines as the original novel. While the developments in relations between characters, sea monster attacks aside, are the same, the emotional and thematic significance of these relationships are mangled in translation. For instance, I never feel the angst of Elinor's realization that Edward, whatever their feelings for one another, is unavailable. Winters develops this, cashes in on the irony, and even makes Lucy Steele a sea-witch. But all the window dressing gets in the way of the nuances at play among Elinor, Edward, and Lucy. Similarly, Marianne's obsession with Colonel Brandon's face adds nothing to the character's obsession in the original novel with his age. The revelation of Lucy's identity as a sea-witch also bothered me. Specifically, Sir John explains why sea-witches must take human form: . . . the only certain way for a sea witch to prolong its foul existence is by consuming human bone marrow, which is therefore, to them, the most precious of elixirs. Hence their occasional appearance, in the guise of attractive human women, among the terrestrial world—where they make love to an unknowing man, marry him unawares, and then, when the opportunity presents itself, kill him and suck out his marrow. It is the last sentence that presents a problem: why bother marrying the man before feeding upon him? Surely it would be more effective to jump his bones (literally) and skip the tiresome courtship. In fact, why bother with a man at all? Why not just subdue some children and feed off of them? It might seem like I'm nitpicking, but I think these are reasonable questions about something that involves the motivations and actions of an important character. At about the point where the situation at Sub-Marine Station Beta becomes dire, it dawned on me that the scope of Winters' narrative is entirely unsuited to Austen's original story. Sense and Sensibility is, like all of Austen's work, an intimate novel that uses a few families to portray all of English society in microcosm. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is about a couple of girls crying about guys, kicking sea monster ass, escaping a doomed underwater city, and then witnessing the rise of an apocalyptic Leviathan. The plot has suddenly become much bigger than the original story, dwarfing the characters and their problems, which are supposed to be centre stage. And . . . Margaret. What the hell? I have no idea what Winters was trying to do with Margaret's—I can only call it a "seduction" by the island. The whole subplot of Margaret discovering an entire species of subhumans who have existed "since the dawn of time" and worship the Leviathan is unnecessary and, frankly, uninteresting. Once again, like Lucy the sea-witch and the cause of the Alteration, Winters has included something that probably seemed like a good idea but, taken together with the entire work, just adds clutter and confusion. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters promises that it "blends Jane Austen's biting social commentary with ultraviolent depictions of sea monsters biting." An examination of this very blend belies this claim. I do not doubt the sincerity of the claim; it's clear that Winters and Quirks Classics have tried very hard to do justice to Austen's novel. In some ways, it would be better for everyone if this were some pernicious attempt to mock the source material—as it is, I feel a little pity for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Its mistakes are made in a labour of love, but they are born from carelessness that could easily have been avoided. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 14, 2010
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Aug 14, 2010
|
Jul 13, 2010
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0771051530
| 9780771051531
| 0771051530
| 4.01
| 13,909
| Aug 21, 2006
| Mar 03, 2009
|
it was ok
|
This may not be evident, but I tend to avoid historical fiction set during World War II. I'm not sure why: it's an obvious (perhaps too obvious) sourc
This may not be evident, but I tend to avoid historical fiction set during World War II. I'm not sure why: it's an obvious (perhaps too obvious) source of material for exploring the human condition. I'm not squeamish about the details of the Holocaust. Maybe it's just that a lot of World War II fiction focuses on the battles, the military strategy and tactics, and it's military fiction that I'm avoiding. In the last month, however, I read
Time's Arrow
and The Kindly Ones, both of which are memoirs to an extent; now I'm reading
A Thread of Grace
. Compared to Martin Amis, Jonathan Littell gets at least one thing right: he tells the story in roughly chronological order. And you know what, Amis? It works better that way. Unfortunately, The Kindly Ones eludes the masterpiece status being accorded to it by some reviewers. Maybe it deserves more credit than I'm willing to give it, but some of the critical acclaim it has received is just . . . silly. The back cover of my edition has a blurb from Kirkus Reviews: "Littell's apocalyptic ending is like nothing else in the literature. . . . The closing is a tour de force. But so is the entire book . . . with not a wasted word." That is serious hyperbole for any book, and it's outright preposterous for this ponderous 983-page novel. A book this thick does not get the benefit of a doubt. And the page count is only the beginning, for The Kindly Ones shelters monstrous multi-page paragraphs—in fact, I think no paragraph is under one page in length, and I counted one as long as seven pages. If the scope of this novel is broad enough to stretch from occupied France to the Russian front, the level of detail dives down toward the infinitesimal. This book is a prime example of why I have a "literary pretentious" shelf at all. Of course, pretentiousness and ponderousness are not ipso facto bad. Still, there is a reason that all fiction must elide certain parts of the narrative; it's simply impractical to include every detail about every event from the beginning to the end of the story. An author chisels a good narrative from a block of wild, untamed story, wrapping it in perspectives and limitations until we can comprehend the tale. The skill requires knowing which parts to remove as well as which parts to keep (and a good editor helps too). As with any rule of writing, it's permissible to bend or break this one. But I'm sceptical The Kindly Ones earns such permission. It's obvious that Littell has done his research, and this results in an immersive depiction of Nazi Europe I have not often encountered. Nevertheless, for every harrowing description of the treatment of prisoners or the twisted veneer of civilization in Berlin, there is a passage submerged in a quagmire of impenetrable military jargon from which the glossary at the end provides no relief. Reading this book is a little bit like going to war against it. Though the book itself may sometimes forget this fact, The Kindly Ones is a memoir. Maximilien Aue is an officer in the SS, but he is not a soldier, not in the classical, warrior sense. He is a bureaucrat, a legal scholar—an intellectual, which is always an interesting and controversial word. There is plenty of violence, death, and bloodshed, but this is not a book about the battles or the strategy. Aue himself, when quizzed on these subjects, reminds people that strategy isn't his department: he's a paper-pusher who, for some reason, often ends up too close to the firing line, whether literal or metaphorical. Most importantly, Aue offers us—or seems to offer us—the perspective of a Nazi soldier who does not unreservedly hate all Jews and want to wipe them from the face of the Earth. Yes, he works toward this goal, but only because it's a logistical necessity toward winning the war—or so he claims. Whether or not Aue's apathy toward anti-Semitism is genuine, Littell does manage to create a complex picture of German attitudes toward the Holocaust. He emphasizes that the Nazi treatment of Jews extended to other demographics as well. Most importantly, amid the rabid and stereotypical Jew-hating Nazis he includes soldiers and citizens who, far from hating Jews, regret and lament the Führer's Final Solution. In a way, these people's existence is even more terrifying than the existence of villains like Hitler and Himmler—they are a reminder that supposedly rational and reasonable individuals recognized how wrong the Holocaust was and still did nothing about it. Sure, we can demonize every SS man and claim that they were all pure evil. Yet that, in my opinion, diminishes the sincerity with which we remember the Holocaust. It is a manufacturing of an Other where there is none, an attempt to distance ourselves from those who committed these atrocities. Rightly horrified by the Holocaust, we declare, "Only Others could have done this, only monsters," because it reassures us that we do not possess any such darkness within ourselves. This conceit Aue seeks to refute. Almost immediately he explains that, regardless of his flaws (and there are oh so many) he is still a human being: But I don't think I'm a devil. There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don't know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that's what's terrible. The tragedy is not that extremist bigots exist but that ordinary people will, given the proper motivation, follow those bigots and participate in disasters like the Holocaust. War is terrible precisely because it is not a natural disaster, an act of God that we can neither prevent nor mitigate. War is a human action, an evil perpetrated on humans by humans. And few humans can ever say that they will never kill, regardless of the circumstance: You can never say: I shall never kill, that's impossible; the most you can say is: I hope I shall never kill. I too hoped so, I too wanted to live a good and useful life, to be a man among men, equal to others, I too wanted to add my brick to our common house. But my hopes were dashed, and my sincerity was betrayed and placed at the services of an ultimately evil and corrupt work, and I crossed over to the dark shores, and all this evil entered my own life, and none of this can be made whole, ever. This passage affected me the most. It's a reminder of the uncomfortable truth of my own humanity. I'm not saying I'd sign up for the SS and start marching and saluting the Führer. But maybe I wouldn't be brave enough to stand against it. And certainly, given the right circumstances, I could be driven to kill. So Littell reaches into the core of my being . . . on page 24, barely 2 per cent of the way through this epic. Yes, everything after this point is downhill (although not evenly so; there are various crests and troughs along the way). There are several reasons for this decline, but one in particular relates to Littell's theme of ordinary people participating in extraordinary atrocities. Aue insists that he is "a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!" Except he isn't. At the extreme end, Littell has decided to rehash the Oresteia with Nazis. Aue is a psychopath. He murders his mother and stepfather, and later, several more people in cold blood. I'm willing to attribute these over-the-top actions to the bullet he takes through the brain while in Stalingrad. Still, he was having fantasies about his sister long before he joined the SS; they just intensify as the war goes on and Aue becomes increasingly unhinged and unpredictable. I don't begrudge Littell his Greek allusions or Aue's psychological baggage—but they do bely any claim that Aue is somehow "like us." Honestly, though, I didn't get the point of Aue's baggage. If we want to get Freudian, we're supposed to believe it all stems from animosity toward a harsh, and later absentee, father. He resents his mother for not breastfeeding him (he was allergic to her milk). And his frustrated, unrequited desire for his sister has fouled any notion of heterosexual intimacy; rather, he seeks sodomy with other men in an attempt to feel closer to his sister through the act of penetration. But what's the point of the hallucinatory, unreliable flashbacks and memories that Aue recounts to us? Is this Littell's way of justifying Aue's solitary nature (why does this need to be justified)? Or does Littell include this out of the sheer disturbing fascination it provokes? This part of the story culminates in Aue's complete surrender to his fantasies while occupying his sister's empty house in Pomerania. Aue has spent the last week wandering his sister's house while naked, masturbating in the woods, and experiencing . . . scatological perturbations. Thomas, arguably his only friend, comes to retrieve him. The Russians have advanced almost past this point, and their return to Berlin becomes a flight from the encroaching enemy. But by this point in the novel, I'm skimming, and I've lost any sense of sympathy or empathy for Aue. If Maximilien Aue were the only thing The Kindly Ones had to offer, it would be a sorry excuse for a novel. Fortunately, Littell's prose supplies solutions as well as problems. Aue shows us aspects of the war that, if not undocumented in fiction, certainly escape the history books. In school, I learned about World War II as a series of episodic battles, culminating in V-E and V-J days. Perhaps necessarily simplistic, this presentation ignores the quotidian operations behind the front. The two most captivating parts of this slow-paced story were Stalingrad and the latter half of Berlin. In both cases, Aue was involved in administrative work. Normally that would be dull, but in this case it provides a perspective on the war effort to which I am unaccustomed. Also, there are some serious ruminations on ideology and methodology in this book. Aue has a nice conversation with a Communist prisoner, who compares National Socialism to Communism: both are deterministic and assert the existence of an objective enemy. These philosophical digressions are a welcome interlude from the jargon-laden descriptions of military activity. Now if only the dialogue was separated by paragraphs . . . ugh. And while Aue did not impress me, and Thomas was very transparently opportunistic, there were two characters who found a place in my heart. Both met untimely ends. Voss, a linguist who befriends Aue, is the least evil Nazi I've ever seen. He's a specialist in Indo-Germanic languages, but he's using the war as an excuse to plunder rare texts from the libraries of occupied countries. (OK, this might be an evil act, but when you're up against "killing all the Jews," even the destruction of cultural heritage pales in comparison.) Piontek, Aue's driver, is loyal and competent. He reminds me a little of another character, Ivan, who protects Aue while he's in Stalingrad. Piontek is a grunt, and thus doesn't have much personality of his own, but along with Thomas and Helene he is one of the few people with whom Aue has any sort of healthy comradeship. The emphasis there is on "healthy." Aue's experiences during wartime are, for the most part, distinctly unhealthy. And he's right to blame the war—after all, what is it good for? Yet the war can't be entirely to blame, and Aue never does seem contrite, just crazy. The Kindly Ones consists of many serious, worthwhile ideas suspended in a robust but tasteless broth of prose. Is it too long? Well, it does itself no favours by being this length, and a shorter book would probably earn more leniency (I'm not saying the system is fair). To condemn it on length alone is a shallow assessment, though. The Kindly Ones isn't just overly long; it's messy, so merely cutting out material isn't going to remedy much. There are fascinating and moving parts to this book, enough so that it's not a total loss. But I can't be much more enthusiastic than that, nor can I really recommend it to others. And that's where the length becomes the true issue: pages are investments, and for all of Littell's obvious research and effort, The Kindly Ones is an investment that provides little return. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 30, 2010
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Sep 06, 2010
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Jul 13, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0375501843
| 9780375501845
| 0375501843
| 4.01
| 14,763
| Feb 01, 2005
| Feb 01, 2005
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liked it
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**spoiler alert** Damn it, Mary Doria Russell made me cry again! Culture class is once again the culprit, although this time it's Nazi anti-Semitism ve **spoiler alert** Damn it, Mary Doria Russell made me cry again! Culture class is once again the culprit, although this time it's Nazi anti-Semitism versus the Italian resistance instead of Jesuits and scientists versus aliens on Alpha Centauri. A Thread of Grace begins with Italy's surrender to the Allies, and from the Jewish perspective of the book, this is one of history's great ironies. It's a relief that Italy has surrendered; to be sure, this is a turning point in the war. Jews in the Italian-occupied territories were safe from the Nazis, but now the Italian army is going home. Many Jewish families choose to accompany it over the mountains, but when they arrive in Italy, they find the Germans are there too. So much for the war being over. Irony is recurrent in A Thread of Grace, often as the companion of macabre humour. Most of this book is obvious and predictable. It's easy to guess that Claudette and Santino will fall in love; it's obvious that Stefania is the missing Steffi; when Renzo and his elderly mother team up to free Iacopo, is it really a surprise when she doesn't make it out alive? Tragedy meets the main characters at every turn, and the attrition rate is incredibly high, even for a war novel. But this irony and predictability work in tandem to ramp up the pathos. It's called foreshadowing. We know bad things will happen, because that's a given for any story, doubly so for WWII novels. But we start having an inkling of what specific fates await these characters, all of our characters. As the story draws toward a close, these foreshadowed fates tighten their grasp around our hearts, refusing to let go. Claudette, the stalwart widow; Renzo, embracing irony to the end; Osvaldo, a flawed priest with so much courage. These are all characters worth our time and empathy. I'll admit, sometimes they seemed to blend together. (This might be a result of every character having about seven different names and endearments; now I understand why we get a dramatis personae.) But it's worth the effort to distinguish between the characters and understand their individual sorrows. Claudette is, as I mentioned before, a widow. Well, she starts as a precocious fourteen-year-old, marries young, and becomes a widow. The war takes from her all her family, beginning with her mother (though she doesn't acknowledge it for a long time), then her father, and finally her newfound husband. Before he leaves her to turn himself in for the "crime" of killing several Nazis who were gang-raping a young woman, he and Claudette conceive a child. Lest you accuse MDR of any false sentimentality, however, I'll disabuse you right now: the child is prematurely born and dies soon after. This is not a book about miracles; it is a book about humility in the face of great catastrophe. Renzo is one of my favourite characters. He is the trickster of the group, always ready with a confidence game or deception to trip up the Germans. In particular, he loves disguises, to the point of establishing an alternative Aryan identity of "Ugo Messner." This leads him to an unfortunate and ironic end at the hands of his fellow countrymen, who recognize him only as Ugo and not Renzo when the time comes to punish the Germans who don't manage to retreat. But it's not all fun and games for Renzo. There is a deeper sadness about him, a melancholy made evident by his attachment to alcohol. He is literally and deliberately drinking himself to death over his guilt for bombing a Red Cross hospital in Abyssinia. The action continues to haunt him as he helps coordinate the resistance. Renzo is a man for whom happiness comes only in the momentary joy that accompanies children playing; long-lasting contentment and peace, he knows, is forever beyond his reach. Schramm is less likable, in that he is a former Nazi and readily confesses to sharing some of their ideology. It's not clear how much of that ideology he has renounced; certainly he struggles with long-held views on the mercifulness of euthanizing the mentally ill and weak. His most memorable scene is a confrontation with Mirella. First he reassures her that malnutrition was not the cause of her second child's Down's syndrome. Then he goes on, unfortunately, to mention that the child's accidental death was a blessing, for no one with Down's syndrome could live a fulfilling life, and children with such conditions just drive families apart. Mirella fumes at such an assertion. Schramm doesn't mean to upset her or to proselytize Nazism. He's just internalized, through his medical training, these beliefs, to the point that they are present and on the tip of his tongue. I could go on at length about other characters, but the above three were my favourites. It's a shame that MDR did not extend their complexity and depth to her antagonists. The Germans representing the occupying forces are a joke. Von Thadden is the intelligent but oblivious general who moves for mysterious reasons and ends up dead because of it. Reinecke is the competent but unimaginative aide. And Arthur Huppenkothen (AH!) is the caricature of an uptight Gestapo who takes his loyalty to the Führer and the Vaterland entirely too seriously. Even the tone in which these characters are written is bumbling and supercilious. This is something that could work well in another type of WWII novel, but it really undermines the emotional chord that MDR maintains throughout the rest of the book. I just can't take von Thadden or Huppenkothen seriously, even if they are villains who order reprisals against civilians. Likewise, the Italians and Jews we meet are reluctant heroes or neutral to the partisan cause. Just once I would have liked to see a collaborator, someone who sided with the Germans out of fascist solidarity. Battista comes close, being a fascist and somewhat temperamental, but it's clear he's closer in allegiance to the partisans than to the Nazis. This is a peculiar omission in an otherwise well-rounded story. The plot, you'll notice, I've largely avoided discussing, because it's not at all remarkable. It's just the minutiae of these characters' struggles to survive under German occupation and repel the Germans from Italy. There are a few memorable scenes, such as Schramm's aforementioned confrontation with Mirella and the subsequent scare with the undetonated bomb. For the most part, however, they are generic misfortunes. This seems to be an artifact of how MDR wrote the characters to stand for all refugees and all partisans; A Thread of Grace is an unapologetic microcosm for the humanity and succour the Italians extended to the Jews. I just wish the characters were more reified, less archetypal. Yet I found myself tearing up at the end of the book. It's not sappy, and it isn't even very sentimental. MDR does her best to pull out all the stops; the protagonists lose family, friends, and fortune. This unrelenting commitment to the worst possible scenario makes the book work, preserves the eponymous "thread of grace" as an act of compassion, limited in its abilities rather than a panacea. It's not going to work out all right, and pretending otherwise would be insulting. A Thread of Grace is moving precisely because it acknowledges this part of the tragedy of World War II. It is a reminder that when big gestures fail and fixing the problem isn't possible, sometimes you just have to do what you can. Sometimes it won't be enough. But once in a while, you make a difference. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 05, 2010
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Sep 08, 2010
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Jul 13, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0140259198
| 9780140259193
| 0140259198
| 3.49
| 15,769
| Sep 1994
| Nov 1996
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really liked it
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Reading a book by Umberto Eco has become a yearly tradition since I joined Goodreads, and for 2010 I just managed to squeeze The Island of the Day Bef
Reading a book by Umberto Eco has become a yearly tradition since I joined Goodreads, and for 2010 I just managed to squeeze The Island of the Day Before under the wire. For the past two years, each Eco book has also made its respective year's list of the best ten books I read that year. If The Island does not join them in this honour, it is only because I have been lucky enough to read so many other great books in 2010. However, this is not a retrospective on my reading over the entire year; this is a book review. The reason I read one and only one Umberto Eco book is that Eco, more than any other author I have ever encountered, makes me think. His books are not transparent and not easy to read, but they are so good. The Name of the Rose was a fascinating medieval mystery that fanned the flames of my interest in medieval rhetoric. And do not get me started about Foucault's Pendulum , which remains one of my favourite books. Eco is erudite and eloquent in his style. He shows off his knowledge of history, but it's not done solely to impress the reader or display how much more he knows of the seventeenth century. Instead, Eco invites us to share in that knowledge through this narrative. In so doing, not only do we learn about this period, but we get exposed to Baroque ways of thinking and reasoning through the use of metaphor, allegory, and syllogism. At first, The Island of the Day Before seemed like it would employ the same meta-fictional ambiguity present in Foucault's Pendulum. When Roberto, himself the sole survivor of the shipwrecked Amaryllis arrives on the anchored yet abandoned Daphne, he soon discovers he is not alone. Someone else is stealing eggs from the hens, rummaging through the letters he writes to his lost, unrequited love: in short, there is an Intruder aboard. Roberto spends several chapters exploring the Daphne and trying to discover the nature of this Intruder. Who could it be? Another survivor from the Amaryllis? More likely, someone left aboard from the Daphne. Except the way that the narrator presents Roberto's search for this Intruder, interspersed with more flashbacks to his life growing up in La Griva, his coming-of-age at Casale, and his itinerant adventures in France, I started wondering if the Intruder was even real. It seemed more likely that the Intruder was like Ferrante, Roberto's imagined older brother banished for crimes unknown. One person cautioned me not to see too many similarities between these two books. He is right: for one thing, the Intruder turned out to be real. That disappointed me at first, but I quickly adapted. After all, Eco's style is just so enchanting that it is impossible to stay mad at him for long, even when his narratives do not take the turns you want or expect. Plus, the metamorphosis of the Intruder into Father Caspar gives Roberto a welcome companion on the Daphne and provides us with numerous interesting conversations and debates. Eco gives us a crash course in Baroque methods of argument and reasoning as Caspar and Roberto debate heliocentrism and physics. I love the way Eco captures the modes of thinking of the time. We and the narrator both know about John Harrison and that Galileo and Copernicus were indeed correct. But Eco is so good at portraying an authentic seventeenth-century mindset. I loved the flashbacks too. Eco reminds me why I tend to prefer British historical fiction: continental European history is so damn convoluted! You have all these little city-states, republics, kingdoms related through marriage and blood and empires that may or may not have control over their protectorates. It is not at all unified, often confusing, and very chaotic. But I loved reading about Roberto's involvement at Casale, his suspicions that Ferrante was the traitor, and his subsequent troubles in Paris. Roberto is an interesting character: not all that smart, but very educated and, above all, imaginative. This last quality proves essential for helping him survive, although it is also rather dangerous. Imagination is the quintessential ingredient to The Island of the Day Before. It allows Roberto to conjure up his brother, Ferrante, and later create an entire Romance in which he is the hero, Ferrante the villain, and Lilia the love interest. Also, imagination allows the narrator to construct this story we're reading from the extant papers written by Roberto. It is important to remember that the story does not come directly from Roberto. Roberto begins by writing several letters to Lilia, whom our narrator first calls "the Lady." Later, after the Intruder has been introduced as Father Caspar, those letters stop, but Roberto continues to record his observations and his actions. Yet he did not record everything, and not everything he recorded survived and made its way to our narrator's hands intact. And how do we know our narrator does not have some sort of bias or agenda? So there is a necessary amount of interpolation and extrapolation happening here, resulting from not one but two unreliable narrators. This hearkens back to Foucault's Pendulum. More than anything, I think Eco loves to experiment with the substance of stories as vehicles of thought. He isn't experimenting with story structure in the sense of how one tells a story but in the sense of how the story conveys his impressions of the Baroque period. The result are arguments and conversations between Roberto and people like Cardinal Mazarin or Father Caspar about longitude and the heliocentric theory. And then there is Padre Emanuele's Aristotelian Telescope, a machine made to construct metaphors! The most obvious way to experiment with this particular story lies in its resolution. The Island of the Day Before is, at its core, a castaway story. Indeed, I was wary when I began reading, because with castaway stories, you basically have two options: either the castaway gets rescued, or he dies. So I was interested to see which route Eco would take with Roberto's shipwreck aboard the Daphne. At some point, I reasoned, Roberto would have to visit the island. But Eco dangled this goal in front of me like a carrot, drawing out Roberto's eventual departure across the hundred-eightieth meridian and into the "day before" for the length of the entire book. And it was worth the wait. The Island of the Day Before did not impress me quite as much as the two other books I have read. I lay the blame for this squarely at Roberto's feet, because as a protagonist he is quite different from Adso and Casaubon, who were both learned and literary fellows. Roberto, while educated and literate, is nobility. Despite his presence at Casale, he knows little of real war and has spent a good amount of his time carousing through the less reputable streets of Paris. He is endearing more for his helplessness and his predicament than out of any true empathy he inspires; I want him to succeed and survive more because no one deserves to be shipwrecked on a ship. But if I were shipwrecked on a ship, I hope it's because I'm in an Umberto Eco novel. I hope I would get to stare longingly at an island trapped one day in my past and construct a romance of my own devising for my lost love, who has been seduced by my evil yet fictitious older brother. I hope I would get to converse with a rather odd Jesuit who probably meets an untimely end trying to reach the island. Although, truth be told, I would much rather be the narrator, who seems the best off of any Eco's characters. The Island of the Day Before is delectable. It is not my favourite book by Umberto Eco, but it has all the hallmarks that make him one of my favourite authors—and in fact, I think I would recommend this book to people who are interested in Eco but not sure if they could make it through The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum. This is the same, yet different. Even though it is not quite as impressive, it is no less wonderful. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 26, 2010
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Dec 29, 2010
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Jul 11, 2010
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Paperback
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| 0446561320
| 9780446561327
| 0446561320
| 3.84
| 374
| Aug 05, 2009
| Aug 05, 2010
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it was ok
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I won this in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway, because I did not read the description closely enough to realize it is historical romance rather than
I won this in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway, because I did not read the description closely enough to realize it is historical romance rather than mere historical fiction. I tend not to read romance, but as far as my experience with them goes, Tempted by a Warrior is not that bad. The story (if not the characters or the romance) held my interest, and the historical in "historical romance" helps a lot. Nevertheless, there are flaws in this book that are difficult to dismiss. Tempted by a Warrior is told in a limited third-person perspective, alternating between Fiona and Kirkhill. Unfortunately for the narrator, neither of these two characters are particularly interesting. I have misgivings about Fiona's psyche, whereas Kirkhill is just annoying in his insipid competence. In the prologue, we witness Fiona's husband, Will, beating her. She is nine-months pregnant. A few weeks later, Will is missing (presumed dead) and Kirkhill shows up as Will's father lies on his deathbed. Fiona falls in love with Kirkhill, as we knew she would, in a few weeks, and as their romance blossoms, so too does their adversarial relationship. Remove the first sentence from the preceding paragraph, and everything would be fine. However, Fiona has been married to Will for two years, and presumably he has been abusing her for about that long. Suddenly, her husband is gone, and she just falls in love with the next man who enters her life? Where are the trust issues? Why is Fiona not fucked up from being a seventeen-year-old battered woman? Oh, sure, she puts up a token resistance and displays her "temper" when Kirkhill infringes on what she considers her decisions to make. And there is some tension about the mystery of what happened to Will—perhaps he is still alive! Nevertheless, once conflict brings Kirkhill and Fiona together and the whole Will issue is hand-waved away, Fiona dismisses the psychological impact of the last two years of her life without so much as a "by your leave." This irks me in its own right, but it also bothers me because Fiona is an otherwise well-written character. She is young, but her two years of hell have clearly matured her. While she and Nan, Kirkhill's kid sister, share a hot-headed nature, Fiona is closer to Kirkhill when it comes to matters of practicality and frugality. Nan only wants dresses that will make the boys look at her; she is about as vapid and spoilt as 14th-century Scotswomen come. Fiona, on the other hand, knows what is like to live in a sort of enforced state of poverty—neither her husband nor her father-in-law had the means or desire to provide her with many gifts. Scott depicts Fiona's sense of relief over being "freed" by the death of her father-in-law very well, and aside from the evaporation of that whole abuse issue, Fiona's attraction and eventual trust in Kirkhill makes sense. Or, about as much sense as any attraction to Kirkhill makes, considering he is bland. While Kirkhill, like Fiona, has his share of personal challenges to overcome, his always seem trivial, because he is overly-competent at life. I can't think of a single obstacle he faces that presents much difficulty. To be sure, sometimes he expresses aggravation over having to deal with a bratty kid sister and a truculent ward. But those are just the ebb and flow of everyday life. Kirkhill manages to banish any major conflict, even Fiona's abduction at the hands of English forces, merely by looking at it sternly (and shouting, "the Douglas!" a couple of times on his horse). I never feel like there's any question of the outcome; worse, I never feel like Kirkhill's challenges result in any real character growth. He is as bland, boring, and good at everything at the end as he is at the beginning. He doesn't deserve Fiona. One of the plot threads running through Tempted by a Warrior is the disappearance of Will Jardine. Fiona wonders if she killed him; Kirkhill needs to find out of he is still alive to settle matters of inheritance—not to mention, you know, so he can marry Fiona in good conscience. Once they find Will's corpse, the nature of the threat shifts slightly: now it's possible that an unlikable sheriff, related to Fiona's sister by marriage, will swing by and hang Fiona for Will's murder. Oh no! Except the threat never materializes. The sheriff never shows up; he is a character in name only. After building it up as a significant concern, Scott dismisses Will's death. We learn whodunnit, and Kirkhill decides the person does not need to face justice—after all, Will was a Bad Man. I cannot actually fault Kirkhill's decision, since this is 14th-century Scotland, and I'm sure it is a realistic depiction of lord exercising his will to confound justice. It's not like Fiona had any legal way of appealing Will's abuse, so his death is justice in its own way. What I cannot countenance, however, is the way Scott teases us. It is emblematic of Tempted by a Warrior in general: lots of drama without any real conflict. It is a shame, too, because the characters (aside from Kirkhill) have the potential to do so much more. They just want for a good plot, something that will re-shape them. Similarly, Scott's historical setting is detailed and obviously well-research—but wasted on a story that fails to leave a lasting impression. Tempted by a Warrior is exactly what it says on the tin: many temptations, few of them very fulfilling. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 18, 2010
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Jul 20, 2010
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Jun 20, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 045146317X
| 9780451463173
| 045146317X
| 4.50
| 117,426
| Apr 06, 2010
| Apr 06, 2010
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really liked it
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**spoiler alert** The title of this book, breaking as it does Jim Butcher's pattern of two words of equal length for each previous title in the Dresde
**spoiler alert** The title of this book, breaking as it does Jim Butcher's pattern of two words of equal length for each previous title in the Dresden Files, says it all. There are definitely changes; as such, the spoiler warning here is not to be taken lightly. If you haven't read the book and at all plan to read it, turn back now. So it's just me, the people who have read it, and the people who won't read it (apathetic people and haters alike), yes? Well come closer, and I shall tell you a tale of one man against a universe that, while humourless, has a fitting sense of irony. Come closer, and I will tell you how the blackest, bleakest, bitterest moments of life reveal the best—and the worst—of humanity. Butcher alters the Dresdenverse in a legion of ways with Changes; I won't waste time enumerating them here—after all, if you care, you've already read the book, yes? Besides, we'll come to them in due time as we discuss what they mean for Harry and those closest to him. For the past few reviews, I've riffed a lot on the sweeping themes I see beneath the arc of the Dresden Files. Part of that is pragmatic; re-reading the first eleven books in quick succession depletes the number of ways I know how to say, "Good story! Great characters! Go Harry!" But I do feel that the Dresden Files is more than just formula urban fantasy/mystery. More than delivering a plot, Butcher tells a story, which means there's a theme to accompany it. Reading the dismissive reviews of Changes, I'm seeing a lot of disappointment over the changes. Complaints that they feel random and unexpected, that the characters are inconsistent, that there are never any big consequences to Harry's mistakes . . . and I can't help but feel like they've missed something. I think all fans feel that way about reviewers who dislike a book. Yet I didn't see the changes in Changes as all that surprising. Almost everything here has been foreshadowed, to some degree or another, much of it for a very long time. Take one of the major changes, Harry becoming the Winter Knight. (I warned you not to continue reading if you haven't read the book! This is what you get!) Mab has been cackling in that chilly eldritch way ever since the position opened back in book four. Every time she extended her offer to Harry, he would refuse. She would say, "One day," and he would reply, "Not today." And there was a reason for that exchange. Mab, chilly eldrbitch that she is, knew this day would come. She's untold millennia old and has far more experience dealing with mortals than Harry has dealing with faerie queens. She can afford to be patient; in the end, she was right. All it took was the proper motivation to have Harry seek out a deal. So, while I can't say I was happy that Harry chose to become the Winter Knight, I am not surprised. Likewise, I'm not surprised at Susan's return—and while Harry's child might have been a surprise until I read the dust jacket, it's a sensible development in the series. One of the best ways to escalate conflict is to make it more personal; you can't get much more personal than a child in danger. That's called cranking the conflict up to eleven, and it will have serious consequences. When a child's life—your child's life—is on the line, the gloves come off, and rules get broken. In my review of Small Favor, I compared Harry Dresden to John Crichton, from Farscape. I'm going to do that again, because the parallels are really striking in Changes. Like Crichton in The Peacekeeper Wars, Harry finds himself in an utterly FUBAR situation. With chaos just a couple steps away, Harry is fighting for the life of his child, and he realizes that everything he's done before, everything he can do alone, is not enough, won't be enough. Consider this exchange from The Peacekeeper Wars: Aeryn: This is what you want. This is what you want. Like Crichton, Harry realizes that he has to do more than beat the bad guys this time, and it will take more than one rag-tag wizard and his band of merry men (and women!) to do it. So he makes the classical tragic choice of the hero, sacrifices his purity to save someone he loves. And even though the genre is urban fantasy and the plot is often more like a hardboiled mystery than an epic quest, Changes feels more like epic fantasy because of this tragic, Shakespearean element. Butcher has not consistently impressed me with his writing style, but I remain impressed by his writing ability. Despite my regard for Changes' theme and consequences for the Dresdenverse, I can't call it an excellent Dresden Files novel. The last portion of the book, including the climactic battle, was amazing. However, the first part was unfocused, messier than the tight plots enforced by the more mystery-oriented books earlier in the series. And this is where the critics do get it right: Harry is literally all over the place, and the one-two action-sequence-then-dialogue-scene formula doesn't hold up under the stress of constant new threats coming out of the woodwork. For example, at one point Harry is on the run from the Eebs, a crazy Red Court vampire husband-wife hit team. He stumbles into the stronghold of the Erlking, lord of the goblins and leader of the Wild Hunt. If you recall, Harry got on the Erlking's bad side in Dead Beat . The subsequent dialogue was entertaining, but it was followed by a rather dull battle sequence that didn't seem necessary. While Thomas is involved in the story, we don't see much development in his relationship with Harry after the events in Turn Coat. Aside from the resolution to Harry's relationship with Susan, about the only thing we do see is Harry finally making a move on Murphy. About time! As I'm firmly Team Murphy, I was happy with this turn of events—and should have known what would happen on the next page. Just when I thought Butcher had delivered every twist he had prepared, he slapped down the ultimate change. Harry Dresden is dead, but the Dresden Files are not over, and this isn't the last we've seen of Chicago's only professional wizard. Changes is not perfect, but for its tapestry of human behaviour, it is emblematic of why I so adore the Dresden Files. My Reviews of the Dresden Files: ← Turn Coat | Side Jobs → (anthology) [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 17, 2010
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Jun 18, 2010
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Jun 17, 2010
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 006012573X
| 9780060125738
| 006012573X
| 3.54
| 3,396
| Feb 1980
| Jan 01, 1980
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it was ok
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Damn you, Ursula K. Le Guin, for managing to move me even when I think your book sucks. Many of the poor reviews on Goodreads here can be summed up lik Damn you, Ursula K. Le Guin, for managing to move me even when I think your book sucks. Many of the poor reviews on Goodreads here can be summed up like so: "Le Guin is a great writer, but this isn't her best." Both of these statements are true. However, I'm not willing to leave it at that. I refuse to accept that a writer of such skill as Le Guin can have an "off" novel, that she somehow misses her mark here. Other writers might have books like that, but not Le Guin. So while it is true that I think this is far from Le Guin's best work, and it is true that I did not enjoy The Beginning Place as much as I had hoped, considering its author, there is definitely something going on here. Let's start with the two main characters. We first meet Hugh, self-described as "fat" and otherwise unhappy in his dead-end job as a checker at a supermarket. (I'm not sure if the term has just not aged well in the thirty years since this book was published, but I at first didn't understand what a "checker" was. I thought it meant he was a "price checker," but from Le Guin's descriptions, it sounds more like he was the cashier. And I kept picturing him using terminals or, as a price checker, a little infrared scanning device. Bad, anachronistic reader!) Hugh's secret ambition is to go to night school so he can become a librarian. His obstacle is his unhealthy relationship with his mother, who is too dependent on him and far too controlling of his life. Hugh seems to have no real friends and no other solace—until he finds the Beginning Place, or whatever you want to call it. Irena is a twenty-something girl with chips on her shoulders, because her stepdad is a lecherous, abusive husband and her mother is too "loyal" to him to get help. She's stuck in a terrible in-between where she wants to help her mom, but she can't bear the thought of going back to stay with them and be subjected to the leers—or worse—of the stepfather. She found the Beginning Place, and the world of Tembreabrezi, before Hugh. But it's Hugh that the inhabitants of this world (village?) want to go fight the monster. Or something. I was never entirely clear on that part—or, I should say, Le Guin never fully explains the nature of the quest Hugh undertakes. The villagers are deliberately vague about the whole endeavour, although it seems like they don't expect Hugh and Irena to return. I was rather disappointed when the threat turned out to be physical (albeit with a side of psychological terror). I was hoping for a much more intellectual obstacle for Hugh to overcome; after all that dallying in the village, that was a very disappointing climax. The Beginning Place begins somewhat strangely, in that I was not predisposed to feel much sympathy for Hugh. He seemed like a loser—and not the lovable kind. As the book progresses, it becomes apparent that he is a lovable loser—sort of—just as it becomes obvious that he and Irena are destined to hook up by the end. What remains to be seen, then, are the lessons each of them learn and the resolution Le Guin provides when it comes to their respective family troubles. It is this part of The Beginning Place that most intrigues me. Le Guin does not spend much time exploring either of the worlds she depicts. This is perhaps a reflection that Hugh and Irena do not fully belong in either world—at least not until the ending. Compared to her other books, however, this makes for a very unusual experience. Even her prose style feels different, much less engaging and detailed than I would expect from her. Yet it is still noticeably Le Guinish. Even at its most descriptive, her prose is not straightforward, not meant to be too literal. As a work of magical realism, The Beginning Place speaks volumes with its juxtaposition of "real life" with the surreal Tembreabrezi. Both Hugh and Irena need to do some growing up, and that's what the adventure in this story is about. Like a lot of escapist fantasy, Tembreabrezi and the woods that lead to it begin as a place of refuge, a sanctuary from the parts of their lives from which Hugh and Irena want to escape. Then it presents its own challenge, manifesting as a sort of quest that Hugh and Irena must complete to come of age. And true to form, Le Guin does not deliver the expected epic quest and its equally epic resolution. Instead, Hugh and Irena succeed, but it is success tinged with a sense of regret and confusion. It is more about their journey home, and finding solace in each other rather than in their place or their time. Hugh and Irena finally forge what they have needed all along: a connection with someone else. It sounds trite, and that may be true. The ending is predictable, but in a reassuring sort of way. From the beginning of The Beginning Place to the end, Le Guin seems to alternate between fulfilling our expectations and defying them. What does not work for me is the drabness of the worlds she describes. Neither our world nor Tembreabrezi ever feels very alive or interesting, and at the beginning Hugh is not a sympathetic character. Though this changes, it develops very slowly, and that makes The Beginning Place unappealing, especially at first. So yes, this is not Le Guin at her best. She brings all of her skill as a writer and a storyteller, and it shows in the themes and the development of the characters. But the setting isn't quite there, and I couldn't get that off my mind no matter how much I tried. The Beginning Place never really began, for me, and that's why I can't say I liked it all that much. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 23, 2010
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Dec 2010
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May 10, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 1594202613
| 9781594202612
| 1594202613
| 4.09
| 525
| 2010
| Apr 15, 2010
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really liked it
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I saw Dave Isay on The Colbert Report and decided to buy this book as a Mother's Day gift. The idea of StoryCorps itself appeals to me, so a book cons
I saw Dave Isay on The Colbert Report and decided to buy this book as a Mother's Day gift. The idea of StoryCorps itself appeals to me, so a book consisting of interviews about motherhood sounded interesting. I was not wrong. The stories in Mom are moving in a way I suspect many people would dismiss as a case of reality being unrealistic, though I'm sure Isay chose these particular stories for their emotional impact. In other words, there's nothing dull about Mom. The people telling these stories talk very openly about memories of their mothers or their own experiences of being a mother; in so doing, they provide perspectives that most of us will never have. I certainly won't ever be a mother, and while I'm lucky enough to have a mother, I only have one, so my pool of memories is necessarily limited. Mom is storytelling at its most basic, the sharing of experiences that are uncommon yet knowable. Most of us are aware of the significance of being a mother—we do have a day to celebrate it, after all—but few of us have the time or inclination to ponder truly the meaning of motherhood. Which is where books come into play. The stories here are varied enough that they don't give a single, overwhelming definition of motherhood. They allow you to judge, to form your own idea of what it means to be "mom." There are several similar stories, some from people who were adopted and found their biological mothers, others from women whose relationship with their mothers was different than their relationship with their daughters. The former belies the traditional "nuclear family" ideal that has been fracturing for decades, reminding us that whom we label family has more to do with blood or with birth. The latter again testifies to the diversity of opinions on parenting and motherhood. There is no one correct way to be "mom." Not that I'm trying to make Mom sound like some sort of parenting tips magazine. It's not an instruction manual, but more like a serious and intimate form of YouTube. The stories here are powerful because they're genuine, and that makes them both enjoyable to read and thought-provoking. I'd recommend Mom as a gift to mothers, but it's not just for mothers. It's for everyone, because we all had, if not have, a mother somewhere. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 07, 2010
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May 08, 2010
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May 07, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0441018726
| 9780441018727
| 0441018726
| 4.07
| 3,523
| Apr 27, 2010
| Apr 27, 2010
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liked it
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There are many ways to make it easier on oneself when constructing a protagonist. For example, a kickass, wise-cracking female heroine with magic and
There are many ways to make it easier on oneself when constructing a protagonist. For example, a kickass, wise-cracking female heroine with magic and not one but two interested men is a good start. Couple that to a magical soul-sucking stone coveted by a mighty and nefarious goblin sorcerer on the lam, and you have both character and plot. Not that I'm trying to suggest that these books are formulaic. Lisa Shearin, like all good authors, borrows from the fantasy tropes, but the Raine Benares series is creative and complex. Bewitched & Betrayed is no exception. Nevertheless, as much as I admire this series, I have to admit that this book didn't fulfil my high expectations. My main problem with Bewitched & Betrayed is that it does very little in the way of advancing the main story arc. Yes, there was lots of character development, and the plot did move forward somewhat. It's for these reasons, especially for the character development, that I still enjoyed the book and think it's a good one, if not as good as The Trouble with Demons , which is now my "Raine Benares gold standard." A lot has happened to Raine in the past three books, which span weeks. We learned about the Saghred, we learned that it could be opened with the right dagger, we saw Raine reunited with her father (who has a fancy new meat suit), and doubt on Raine's ability to resist the temptation of the Saghred remains a running theme. Bewitched & Betrayed gives us deception, body-switching, and explosions (from the bad guys), and scheming, erect nipples, and explosions (from the good guys). What we don't get is a lot of time with the Saghred. With no one specific inside clamouring to get out, it's been reduced from setting to plot device. Sarad Nukpana once again takes centre stage as the Big Bad. While he's an OK villain as far as they go, his threat-level is still predicated on what he could do instead of what he has done. We've yet to see Nukpana do something that makes us go, "Oh shit" and realize that this guy is bad news. Yes, he kills people and sucks out their souls. Forgive me for having high standards when it comes to sinister fantasy villains. Still, Nukpana is a credible villain if not a satisfying one. Soul-sucking really is impressive. Bureaucratic whining, on the other hand, not so much. Carnades Silvanus' role in Bewitched & Betrayed is much reduced from his role in the previous book, his threat level having been downgraded from, "jockeying for position of archmagus" to "being a nuisance while Raine & co. try to hunt down body-hopping sorcerers." The Trouble with Demons proved that Silvanus can be a great antagonist, but he didn't get the chapters needed to show us that potential again. I'm sure, however, this will be rectified in future books. Annoying mages on the Seat of Twelve don't go away, especially not after the Paladin of the Conclave Guardians steals their coach from them. . . . With the two major antagonists more distant than present for most of the book, Bewitched & Betrayed's story becomes very linear. Reduced to a series of events punctuated by explosions (of various kinds) and plenty of quips from all parties involved, the best parts of the book come from the dialogue and the characters speaking it. Raine learns more about Mychael's past (as well as his present), and they learn to work together on a new level, as partners, instead of protector and protected. Similarly, Tam trains Raine to fight goblin-style—i.e., dirty. There are great bits of foreshadowing here that become important during the climax. As far as the writing goes, Bewitched & Betrayed retains the consistent style of the Raine Benares series that made me a fan. Raine's voice is snarky without being too smug, confident yet vulnerable—in other words, she's a heroine, but she's well aware of her flaws. She's surrounded by people who care about her. And the people who don't care about her mostly don't want her dead or in goblin custody. In having Raine stumble into her role as bond servant to the soul-sucking Saghred, Shearin manages to avert the Chosen One trope even as she plays true to some of its consequences. It's on this strength, and on the strength of its characters, that the Raine Benares series continues to entertain. I just wish this particular instalment had a more profound sense of progress. Although not everything is status quo at the end—far from it—and the stage is set for yet more awesomeness, the game itself remains the same: find Sarad Nukpana, kill him, and then find a way to destroy the Saghred or unlink Raine from it. After four books (really after only three), Shearin has sold me on the concept. It's time to go further, beyond goblin-hunting and soul-sucking, and take the next step. My Reviews of the Raine Benares series: ← The Trouble with Demons | Con & Conjure → ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 11, 2010
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May 12, 2010
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Apr 27, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0007304463
| 9780007304462
| 0007304463
| 4.15
| 30,125
| 2008
| May 22, 2009
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liked it
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This is the first Bernard Cornwell book I've reviewed on Goodreads, which means it is entirely too long since I have read a Bernard Cornwell book! I'm
This is the first Bernard Cornwell book I've reviewed on Goodreads, which means it is entirely too long since I have read a Bernard Cornwell book! I'm a casual fan of Cornwell, having read some of his books—I'm particularly fond of his Arthurian trilogy, and I like his Hundred Years' War stuff—and eschewing others—like the Sharpe series, or the Starbuck series, because those two historical periods appeal less to me. That is the most enduring and endearing thing about Cornwell: his remarkable versatility as a writer of historical fiction. Give him a time period, any time period, and a battle, and he will find a character and a story that fits. Azincourt demonstrates this skill perfectly with the character of Nicolas Hook, an archer who finds himself at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. I rather liked Nicolas, and that surprises me, because he seems like a rapscallion and—sometimes—a coward. After all, it takes the voices of saints to urge him on to commit noble deeds! But Nicolas is just so earnest, especially toward the end of the book, that he won me over almost without Cornwell's help. He begins the story as a young, very naive forester who becomes an outlaw and gets exiled to France. By the time we reach the Battle of Agincourt, he is a leader of men, a husband, and a true warrior. And Nicolas recognizes these changes, especially the last one, for he meditates on what it means to be a warrior and why he fights for king and country. Cornwell captures the spirit of the battle, particularly among the common soldiers present at Agincourt. I think it is easy to project our own contemporary, 20th-century nationalism back onto these soldiers, and that creates a rather inaccurate view of why these men were fighting. Yes, there was plenty of nationalism to go around, because the English hated the French, so if you were an Englishman, you sure didn't mind helping a few Frenchmen die. Sure, Henry V had a claim to the French throne. But it was a dubious claim, and these men-at-arms and archers are not scholars. They don't care about the legitimacy of claims, and they aren't necessarily fighting for Henry because he's an awesome guy or because he's their king. Many of the nobles, and a good deal of the common soldiers, are fighting for gold and glory. And many of them fight because they think God is on their side. So it all comes down to gold, God, and glory, as my grade 11 history teacher liked to say. The nobility could capture noble prisoners for ransom, and the common folk could always acquire some nice armour, weapons, or trinkets from the corpses. Spoils of war. And if you survive to return to England, you return a war hero. The ladies like that. Despite its place in history as a celebrated victory of underdogs, the Battle of Agincourt was not some great triumph of the good English over the bad French, and it wasn't even a very good idea. It was a stupid move by Henry to march his forces to Calais. But he too was motivated by gold, God, and glory; he had creditors he couldn't disappoint, not to mention nobility who were always eager to see a succession crisis of their own. Agincourt is not about nobility and political intrigue, however much I like that sort of story. And that's fine. Nicolas instead gives us the commoner's perspective: he's fighting because, as an outlaw, living in England is rather dangerous, and he does need money. Plus, he has a personal connection with this campaign against the French. Since the sacking of Soissons by the French army, and Nicolas' rescue of his eventual wife, Melisande, Nicolas has been hearing the voices of St. Crispin and St. Crispinian. They want him to be their avenging angel for the tragedy at Soissons. So Nicolas marches off to war, but Cornwell doesn't get around to the Battle of Agincourt until much later in the story. In fact, most of the book isn't about Agincourt at all. And that's fine too. I don't see how Cornwell could have sustained interest for a reasonable length of novel just focusing on Agincourt; although the siege of Harfleur is more drawn-out and perhaps less dramatic, it has its own kind of suspense that makes it no less interesting. In his descriptions of the siege preparations and execution, from Nicolas' role as an archer to the Welsh diggers and the horrible living conditions, Cornwell shows us that he knows his stuff. And thanks to his vivid depictions of the gory carnage of war and the battlefield, Cornwell shows us that he knows how to show that he knows his stuff. Dry exposition Agincourt is not. There is a lot of frank gore and violence in this book, and I think that's worth noting for people who would be hesitant to read such things. Cornwell does not gloss over the details of battle: he loves the skull-bashing of the pole-axe, the slopping of entrails over one's feet, etc. And I respect this kind of writing, even if it isn't my favourite thing to read, because it goes a long way to depicting the horrors of war. This is not a game, and if you are not a hardened veteran like Nicolas has become, then you are out of luck. Like Nicolas' poor brother, Michael, you may be eaten, chewed up, and spit out if you are too faint of heart. It is a good reminder not to over-romanticize this part of the past: sure, they had cool weapons, but I definitely would not want to live back then. So Azincourt is more than just a single battle, even if it is not quite an entire war. It is a gradual, wending narrative that intersects with Henry V's campaign against France, told from the point of view of an archer who finds he needs to put to rest the demons of his past: the ghost of Sarah, whom he couldn't save, and the honour of Melisande, whom he did. He takes solace from the fact that saints talk to him, even though it also weirds him out. This was not my favourite part of the book either. We never get an explanation for why Crispin and Crispinian are talking to Nicolas (or if he's just hallucinating). Considering the very pious, credulous nature of the time, I think that is OK—but it still seemed out of place amidst the rest of Cornwell's hyperreal narrative. And juxtaposed with Father Christopher's accurate observations about both sides, English and French, invoking the name of God in their fight against the enemy, the presence of two saints pulling for an English archer is a little weird, and it undermines that otherwise very valid point. I don't want to say "read this book" with all the certainty of a hearty recommendation, because I know it isn't for everyone. Meticulously researched but very well-written, Azincourt is something you might like if you are into military historical fiction, or even if that time period just fascinates you. As far its place in Cornwell's oeuvre goes, it definitely isn't close to being my favourite, but it is certainly a competently-executed novel that has a flair for dramatic but believable battle sequences. And it helps that it is based on a true underdog story. Archery has always been cool; archery at Agincourt pretty much set the standard against which all other archery coolness is measured. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 03, 2010
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Dec 06, 2010
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Apr 20, 2010
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Paperback
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my rating |
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| 3.94
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did not like it
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Apr 15, 2010
not set
not set
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Apr 13, 2024
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| 3.73
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it was amazing
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Oct 19, 2011
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Oct 19, 2011
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| 3.63
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liked it
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Dec 21, 2010
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Dec 18, 2010
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| 3.47
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did not like it
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Dec 16, 2010
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Oct 05, 2010
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| 4.25
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really liked it
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Oct 30, 2010
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Aug 25, 2010
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| 3.98
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liked it
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Aug 14, 2010
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Aug 14, 2010
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| 3.63
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it was amazing
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Jul 31, 2010
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Jul 31, 2010
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| 3.64
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it was amazing
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Jul 31, 2010
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Jul 31, 2010
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| 4.02
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liked it
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Aug 29, 2010
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Jul 31, 2010
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| 3.38
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really liked it
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Aug 14, 2010
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Jul 13, 2010
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| 3.28
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did not like it
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Aug 14, 2010
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Jul 13, 2010
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| 4.01
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it was ok
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Sep 06, 2010
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Jul 13, 2010
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| 4.01
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liked it
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Sep 08, 2010
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Jul 13, 2010
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| 3.49
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really liked it
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Dec 29, 2010
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Jul 11, 2010
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| 3.84
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it was ok
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Jul 20, 2010
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Jun 20, 2010
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| 4.50
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really liked it
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Jun 18, 2010
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Jun 17, 2010
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| 3.54
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it was ok
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Dec 2010
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May 10, 2010
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| 4.09
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really liked it
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May 08, 2010
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May 07, 2010
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| 4.07
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liked it
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May 12, 2010
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Apr 27, 2010
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| 4.15
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liked it
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Dec 06, 2010
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Apr 20, 2010
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