Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓

When I was a young 'un I read quite a bit of fantasy fiction. I devoured Tolkien,¹ Susan Cooper and Victor Kelleher, but I also read Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks and whatever other high-volume fantasy I could find on the shelves of my school library.

Somewhere along the line, as I read more "literature" and grew addicted to well-wrought language and compelling ideas, I realised that an awful lot of what I was reading was neither well-written nor interesting. Never one for moderation, I concluded that fantasy was generally terrible and stopped reading it altogether. Well-meaning attempts by friends and loved ones to lure me back into the fold with Terry Pratchett or Janny Wurtz failed miserably.

In the last few years I have discovered a handful of authors who have restored my belief in Fantasy Fiction That Does Not Suck. Most of the credit belongs to George R. R. Martin, Robin Hobb, and the subject of todays post:² Steven Erikson.

There are a few things that make Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series stand out for me:

• It is (or will be) ten books long, and he has been publishing them at a rate of about one per year. He only has one to go. (Compare and contrast: Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin.) And these are substantial books, not something to knock out in a spare weekend.
• Erikson has created his own world/universe from scratch, and it isn't drawn from the Tolkienesque elves/dwarves/dragons/wizards memepool at all. This means that the process of discovery is ongoing — and because he has created a deep, interesting world, it is also fascinating.
• This is some of the least racist/classist/sexist/homophobic/etc fiction I have read. (More on that in a moment.)
• The reader is dropped in the middle of a time of upheaval, with all sorts of factions and interests in play, and shown how events unfold. There are almost no good guys and almost no bad guys.
• Erikson does not pull any punches. Important, beloved characters can have just about anything happen to them; a medieval-type world is not presented as a bucolic, honorable sort of place; heroes have skeletons in their closets, and not the kind that can be nobly overcome.

One of the things I love most about this series is Erikson's egalitarian approach. There are male and female characters who are violent, lethal soldiers, or charming seducers, or brilliant mages. Characters of all colours - brown, black, white, grey, pink, bronze, blue - are important political and military figures, everyday folks the reader can identify with, and everybody in between. Same-sex attraction is fairly uncommon but not stigmatised or remarkable. Characters from "barbarian" cultures are not simply savages (noble or otherwise), and all sorts of body types are represented without being stereotyped.

It is so rare that I read fantasy that makes me cringe so little.

I recently read two books in the series back to back, a not insignificant undertaking. Here is what I thought about them:

Memories of Ice ★★★★☆ 
The third book in the series sees things take a turn for the epic. Considering what has already happened in Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates this hardly seems possible, but as the world's system of gods, ascendants and other powers is slowly revealed we discover just how little we have seen until now. If I have a gripe about this book, it's that the unrelenting significance of everything that happens can cause what I will term epicity fatigue, and the down-to-earth characters that kept things grounded in the first couple of books are suddenly rocketing out of reach of the hapless reader.

Erikson's treatment of his snarled mess of intrigue and his unfamiliar, foreign world is pretty great. Rather than spoon-feeding us, or resorting to having characters explain things they already know to each other, he leaves us to flounder in confusion and pick things up as we go along. The moments of revelation when something falls into place is much more rewarding as a result. He also turns the notion of dramatic irony on its head, frequently having characters bring each other up to speed offstage and then carrying on with the story. This is frustrating at times, but I can only salute its effrontery (and effectiveness).

Finally, I must mention that this book affected me emotionally in a way I never expected. I think it was largely because the character of Itkovian resonated with me more than any other fictional character I can remember;³ this is not something I expect from fantasy at all. An extended scene near the end of the book made me more or less fall apart, and I had tears pouring down my face for several pages even after I managed to read on.

Perhaps it is abnormal of me, but saying that it gives rise to uncontrollable emotional expression is just about the highest praise I can give a book.

House of Chains ★★★☆☆ 
Memories of Ice was a hard act to follow, but I think House of Chains would have been a bit of a letdown anyway. The focus is mainly on characters I find entirely unsympathetic and not especially interesting, and a very large chunk at the start of the book was really not enjoyable to read at all.

That being said, there were yet more revelations about the way Erikson's world is held together, and I appreciated the return of the story to a more mundane footing. There are also new sides revealed to old, supposedly-familiar characters, and some wonderfully subtle nods to events from previous books. And just when you thought Erikson must have run out of atrocities and taboos, he shoves a big handful of new ones into your face.

House of Chains is my least favourite book in the series so far, but that only dissuaded me from reading the next immediately. I am not really disappointed by it in any meaningful way, and still have high hopes for the rest of the series.

1. Including the Silmarillion, for which I have a deep and abiding love to this day. [↩]
2. I knew I'd get to the point eventually. [↩]
3. Incidentally, the gradual reveal of what Itkovian stood for was handled brilliantly. [↩]

There is no way I am going to keep up with myself if I try to write a separate post about each book I read, so here are the books I have read since last time I wrote about books:

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Michael Azerrad ★★★☆☆ 

An interesting overview of some interesting stuff that happened while I was much too young to notice. I've never gotten into hardcore or punk music in any meaningful way, but the anecdotes and (disarmingly frank) first-person accounts of various local scenes in the 1980s made for great reading. It also turned me onto some music I'd never been motivated to check out before, Mission of Burma's Vs. being a particular highlight.¹

The writing was not outstanding, often destabilised by Azzerad's habit of inserting fannish blurbs into his historical overviews. In a way it added to the book's charm, I suppose, in that the stories of a bunch of DIY-loving amateurs who wrote fanzines and started their own record labels is related in the style of an over-excited but knowledgeable fan. Sometimes he wanders well away from his stated topic - for instance, each chapter is titled for the band it focuses on, but the Mudhoney chapter is really about Sub Pop, Mudhoney being a conveniently-placed band from which to hang the story.

Overall, not a great book, but a good enough book about great things, and that is often sufficient for non-fiction.

Black Coffee Blues, Henry Rollins ★☆☆☆☆ 

Henry Rollins' writing has something in common with Chuck Palahniuk's. There is an immature or at least arrested quality to it, with cynicism and aggression being celebrated and, in Rollins' case, clung to. Rollins seems to insinuate that anyone smart, anyone who really thinks, would be as alienated and angry as he is; I think that is a cop-out.² Instead of aiming for an improved future, he turns pain into his identity and proceeds to defend it at all costs. The monotonous cocktail of violence, anger and fear that propels Black Coffee Blues almost completely drowns out Rollins' moments of insight and humanity.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy. ★★★★½ 

This book is amazing. Anybody who says otherwise is crazy or lying.

And yet I didn't give it five stars! There are only two reasons for this: I found the ending slightly unsatisfying (possibly because I had been bracing myself for something quite different since approximately page three), and dialogue of any length, while rare, was difficult to follow (probably because both of the main characters were "he" and there were no quotation marks).

Everything else about this book is amazing. It is bleak and realistic like nothing I have ever read before, and so unobtrusively written that it's possible to completely forget that one is reading at all. I read it on the train and before work and in my lunch break, and despite the piecemeal consumption and the public, emotionally-neutral locations I found myself wanting to cry, or crawl under something and hide away for hours, or both. It hits hard.

I am extremely skeptical about the upcoming film adaptation. I seriously doubt that any filmmaker could capture McCarthy's world on film, especially with a live-action adaptation. At the same time, though, I am a bit excited about it. Maybe it, too, will be amazing.

On Writing, Stephen King. ★★★☆☆ 

I had been resisting On Writing for a long time. Anything recommended so highly by people I admired and people whose tastes I often shared couldn't possibly be any good, right?

Right?

In the end it was a mixed bag. I liked the personal-memoir "CV" section, found the "Toolbox" section interesting despite King's avowed love of Strunk & White³, and could take or leave much of the "On Writing" section. Interestingly, that was the part that King mentioned struggling with in the last section, "On Living", which was by far my favourite.

I think my problem with much of the writing advice was that I had already either received it second-hand from King's many acolytes, or figured it out for myself. That is hardly an objective basis for criticism of the book, but I have never pretended that my opinions about these things are anything but subjective.

Against the Stream, Noah Levine. ★★☆☆☆ 

The subtitle of this book is "A Buddhist manual for spiritual revolutionaries", which really makes me cringe, but I read the thing anyway. The subtitle is a good indication of why I dislike the book as a whole. Levine spends a lot more time playing up to his his militaristic theme than he spends on actual ideas, which makes me think I am just not his target audience. He is also glibly literal about reincarnation and prone to using a lot of buzzwords, but he does have some interesting things to say about celibacy and equanimity (the latter being something I struggle with, and the main reason I picked up Against the Stream to begin with).

1. I still don't like Henry Rollins or Black Flag, though, so there. [↩]
2. In fact, any variation on "Happy people are either unintelligent or in denial" gets my goat. [↩]
3. I am going to have to read The Elements of Style so that I can make such dismissive remarks legitimately. Damn it. [↩]

Books I've finished reading this month:

1. The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom, Alexander McCall Smith. ★★½☆☆ 
   Lent to me by a co-worker, this is an omnibus edition containing three books about a ridiculous German professor of Romance phililogy . It was the first bit of purely comic writing¹ I had read in a long time, so although it took me a while to realise that each book was just a collection of little stories (and so none of the isolated weird occurrences were setups for eventual, devastating punchlines) it was fairly enjoyable.
2. Non-Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk. ★★½☆☆ 
   Disclaimer: aside from Fight Club, I am yet to like any of Palahniuk's novels. I suspect that he only has one real thing to say, and Fight Club allowed him to express it most purely; puerility and an unpleasantly overplayed cynicism drag down his other excursions into fiction. In Non-Fiction I found more or less the same thing to be true, in that the most compelling pieces examined human (and especially masculine) isolation and alienation, while the rest tended to rely on shock value or simply fail to be anything but dull.
3. Hunters in the Snow, Tobias Wolff. ★★½☆☆ 
   A random selection from my housemates' bookshelf because I hadn't gotten around to getting a library card yet, this collection of short stories was affecting but somewhat unrewarding. I can't love a collection of stories about people being selfish and hypocritical without redemption or consequence. I just don't understand the point of it, unless it is to depress the reader.
4. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon. ★★★★★ 
   This book was recommended to me by the co-worker who lent me The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom, and it completely exceeded my expectations. There was not a single thing about it I didn't like², and there was so much to love. Note-perfect dialogue, noir-flavoured humour amongst drama with real emotional weight, all against a fascinating backdrop of Jewish culture. And beautifully written - sometimes great writing is great because it gets out of the way and you never notice it's there, but I loved the way The Yiddish Policemen's Union kept making me stop and think "Wow".
5. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami. ★★★½☆ 
   This was my third attempt at reading Murakami, and if it didn't work out I was going to give up on him altogether. Unfortunately, I am still undecided; I feel a strange mix of interest and repulsion when I read his work, and while Hard-Boiled Wonderland was by far the most interesting instance so far I would still hesitate to recommend it to anybody. His dialogue never rings true for me³ and his characters have no emotional life that I can discern, but on the other hand he takes bizarre fantasy worlds and integrates them perfectly into stories that are matter-of-fact and down-to-earth. I blame postmodernism.

I have also been reading a great many non-book things, as usual, but would like to make particular note of Who Sent The Sentinels? by Andrew Rilstone, which would probably be even more interesting to anybody who knows more than zero about comics.

I would also like to note that I have reached my self-imposed target of 52 books for the year (just a little bit early). I think I will use that as an excuse to abandon this monthly-ordered-list format, which I don't like as much as I did in the beginning, but I will continue to write at least something about each book I read. It feels like a valuable exercise and I enjoy doing it even when I don't enjoy doing it.⁴

1. That being said, one chapter early on made me thoroughly, pathetically sad and that took quite a while to wear off. [↩]
2. A rarity. I even liked the way it ended, which almost never happens. [↩]
3. To be fair, it's hard to know whether to lay the blame for that at the feet of the author, the translator, or simply my lack of familiarity with the way Japanese people talk to one another. [↩]
4. If you know what I mean. [↩]

Books I've finished reading this month:

1. Art and Lies, Jeanette Wintersen. ★★★☆☆ 
   Sometimes Art and Lies was breathtaking. Sometimes it was utterly opaque and alienating. I suspect it would reward re-reading; I also suspect that my recent Jeanette-Winterson-binge made it impossible for me to appreciate it for itself. Instead, I was alternately repulsed by repetitive self-indulgence and overwhelmed by resonance. I appreciated Handel, loved Picasso a little bit, and rather disliked Sappho - and then I was devastated by the way it all came together in the end.
2. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger. ★★½☆☆ 
   Lacking the intensity and charisma of a Holden Caulfield, Franney and Zooey came across as self-absorbed and arrogant even as it appeared to ridicule the self-absorbed and arrogant. Salinger's style was still quite contagious (my internal monologue was full of Salinger-esque tics for days after reading this book and the next), but without any soul to animate it this time.
3. For Esmé - with Love and Squalor, J.D. Salinger. ★★★½☆ 
   This collection caught my eye mainly because I have desperately loved the phrase "with love and squalor" since We Are Scientists used it for an album title. The contents were a mixed bag; I loved A Perfect Day for Bananafish¹ and the title story, while some of the others were emotionally vacant tales of terrible people.
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore. ★★★★★ 
   I waited until after seeing the film to read Watchmen, a decision now entirely vindicated. My relative illiteracy when it comes to comics and graphic novels was alleviated by my familiarity with the story, and my likely crushing disappointment had I read the book first was entirely avoided.² Watchmen is, quite simply, brilliant. A kind lender enabled me to read it this time, but I will be buying my own copy.
1. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I adored it, thinking about it invariably invokes both ecstasy and despair, and I consider it to be a perfect story. [↩]
2. At the same time, I am newly impressed with some aspects of the adaptation, and newly equipped to disagree with some criticisms that were levelled at it. [↩]

Books I've finished reading this month:

1. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard. ★★★★½ 
   Read this in anticipation of showing a friend the movie for the first time. That viewing has been delayed by various factors, but I was glad of the excuse anyway. Also, plays always seem easier to read if I have seen them on stage or on film previously.
2. The Passion, Jeanette Winterson. ★★★★½ 
   Stranger than Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and sufficiently unlike an ordinary novel to leave me feeling as though I hadn't just read anything, perhaps just listened to a symphony or walked through an art gallery. Often grotesque, always poetic.
3. Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad Warner. ★★★★☆ 
   While Warner's schtick wears a bit thin sometimes, I really enjoyed this re-read (possibly my third or fourth?) and anticipate many repeats in the future. The content beind the schtick never gets old, and is always worth reminding myself of.
4. Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson. ★★★½☆ 
   I didn't write anything about Sexing the Cherry right after I finished reading it, which was a mistake; 1.5 Winterson books later, it has mostly receded into the foggy depths of my mind, obscured by intricate clusters of Winterson's recurring themes and motifs.
   The grotesquerie ¹ is more obtrusive and gratuitous than in The Passion, and there is only the most tenuous of narrative threads to hold on to, but the book is strewn with nuggets of insight, beauty and delight. I like much of it, and I love the way it folds in on itself towards the end (which added half a star to my rating, in the end).
5. Boating for Beginners, Jeanette Winterson. ★★★½☆ 
   This was much lighter going, and although I became weary of humorous and/or pointed anachronism in fiction some time ago I rather liked it. Irreverent and sometimes very funny, while still having Things To Say about life and identity and how weird we human creatures are.

1. What a great word. Grotesquerie. [↩]