Books: Sabriel, Distrust, Wolf

Garth Nix — Sabriel (re-read)

Aug 17, 2014

This book is pretty great. It’s about a young necromancer trying to rescue her father and save the kingdom from a very nasty piece of exhumed ex-humanity. (This one’s been around for a while and there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it before.)

Anyway, it’s a lean and well-paced fantasy adventure, and Sabriel is a cool heroine — she’s a teenager, but she’s also a professional who’s been training for a decade to take over the family business (of destroying the unquiet dead), and she’s brave and tough without being brash or flamboyant. Actually, now that I think of it, Tokine from Kekkaishi resembles her a lot.

So as you can guess, the book does that thing where you establish the protag as a competent badass and then throw her against something that’s still way out of her league. (I am a sucker for that thing.)

The setting is awesome too: Sabriel and her dad hail from a magic-rich fantasy land, but she’s been going to school in a low-magic country that resembles early/mid-20th century England. You can cross between the worlds on foot, though the border’s militarized and trying it without the appropriate visa is a good way to get your ass shot.

The way the border works makes a certain internal sense, but is never fully explained, which is the case with much of the world here. It’s an excellent approach: systematic, but with a great deal of the system obscured, both to the reader and the characters. Careful choice of key names does a lot of heavy lifting, too. For example: “Charter Magic.” Consider for a moment how much info is packed in there: there has been some sort of agreement made, and accordingly Rules to be Followed. And when the name “Free Magic” arrives — a name that would normally be neutral or positive — the reader is instead like, “ruh-roh.”

Anyway, I’m not going to go much further with this, but this book does enough things right that it’s worth taking apart and understanding. It’s well-assembled.

(Well, mostly. The language is fine for the first long chunk, but once there’s another major character who sticks around for more than a scene or two, it settles into some frustratingly bad head-hop narration. People: please don’t do this with your close-in 3rd. It’s so bogus to read.)

William Gibson — Distrust That Particular Flavor

Sept 27, 2014

A mixed bag of odd old stuff. Some of these essays and magazine pieces and speeches were slight and no longer relevant, and some of them were straight-up fascinating. I enjoyed reading them all, though.

I liked the decision to disarrange everything out of any conceivable order.

John Darnielle — Wolf in White Van

Oct 14, 2014

This was a really good book, and I’m still chewing on pieces of it.

John Darnielle has made a bunch of my favorite records as The Mountain Goats, but he also used to write a zine called Last Plane to Jakarta, and his Twitter and Tumblr skills are excellent — he’s really good about approaching new media as they are, instead of how the last one was. And he’s a hell of a storyteller in general. So I was pretty excited about this from the get-go, without the usual “that singer you like is writing a book” trepidation.

Anyway: he’s not writing as The Mountain Goats here, but the M.O. is familiar. Sort of. Do you remember that thing he did with the Alpha cycle, that spiraling approach where he obliquely walls off possibilities one by one until you’re left with only the way things had to go?

Well, this isn’t that. But it sort of smells the same.