Things I Read During January

[roadrunnertwice]

Kicking off Things I Read During 2010! Late, as always.

Peter Watts - "The Things" (short story, 1/6)

I went into this totally unfamiliar with the source material, which, uh. I can tell that it's good, but I was clearly expected to show up to the potluck with the other half of the story in hand, and didn't. (N.B.: Yes, I am aware that I should see The Thing. There are a lot of things I should see.)

Peter S. Beagle - The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche

A 1997 collection, borrowed for "Lila the Werewolf." The object itself is gorgeous. What typeface is that? I love it, it seems much older and classier than the pub date would imply. Reminds me of childhood in some ineluctable way. But whatever, no one cares about that; MOVING ON!

"Lila the Werewolf"

Let's call chronographia vindicated; I liked this a lot. Things:

• Very much a fragment of its time. What is this strange setting, where it's possible to discuss someone's "hang-up," and a therapist's presence in one's life is simply assumed? I can't imagine one could just hop a plane and end up in this New York; there is a looking glass involved somewhere between there and here.
• And this isn't a werewolf we meet anymore, either. They've gotten less hairy and more furry, I think. To what extent is that an expression of a more general trend, and to what extent is it a result of individual writers' influence on the form? Fuck if I know, but I find myself curious, so I guess I'll just keep my ears open and my eyes on the copyright dates. Anyway, this was written when werewolves were bad news indeed. (And again, I find myself thinking of monkeys vs. lemurs.)
• And it's very very funny; in a dark way (uh, what with the dog murder spree and all), but also and equally in a really whimsical way. ("I warned you about Bronx girls.")

"Julie's Unicorn"

And here's Joe Farrell again. This one's less good, and more than a little weird, in that I can't entirely tell what project it's a part of and it doesn't stand on its own, quite. I wonder if The Folk of the Air'll enlighten.

"Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros"

Another thing that made "Julie's Unicorn" kinda iffy is that Beagle had already written at least two vastly better and more interesting unicorns, this being one of them. Which is praise more backhanded than this charming Calvin-and-Hobbesish story deserves, so, sorry about that.

"Come Lady Death"

I liked this one, too!

"The Naga"

Didn't read; the first two pages of this were inexplicably missing, and I couldn't be bothered to find a copy with those leaves intact. Didn't read the juvenilia or most of the essays here, either. (Although I did quite enjoy "My Last Heroes," and it made me want to track down some Georges Brassens, or maybe that Patachou record.)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - The Thing Around Your Neck (short story collection, 1/12, 50books_poc: 2)

Adichie first caught my attention with an excellent talk she gave at TED (via deepad). This is a collection of her short stories. (And here is a thing she did for McSweeney's.)

My favorites of these—possibly not the best, but definitely my favorites—were "On Monday of Last Week" and "Tomorrow Is Too Far;" the former for its unexpected familiarity, and the latter for its alien chill.

"The Headstrong Historian" was also pretty grand, and its prose and voice were wrought into this cool jump-to-hyperspace shape where time kept moving faster and faster, which was an awesome trick because structurally it's an origin story, right, which usually have the reverse shape, except that the character who originates in it is, in fact, dedicated to uncompressing the past (or one of the pasts) and giving it room to finally breathe, which, structural and narrative unison, yey!

And "Jumping Monkey Hill" was both depressing and very very funny, and I kind of want to believe it's a roman à clef about Adichie herself, since that would basically turn the story into an infinitely recursing spiral of META. (Incidentally, is it too late to invent Death Meta? Can I start a band where we get up there and sing about singing about mutilation, and between songs we'll talk about the ways in which various other bands downtune their guitars? Seeking bassist.)

There's a bunch more, it was all pretty good.

---

Sidebar: Given the recent religious/ethnic violence in Nigeria, it seems like I should have something to say about "A Private Experience," but I don't, really. I actually didn't like it much. I don't like most stories set in pogroms; they just make me heartsick and exhausted, feeling neither entertained nor enlightened. I don't know.

Philip K. Dick - The Minority Report (1/14)

And so while I was nosing around at the Title Wave, I saw this:

Absolutely too weird. Why in the world would you print a novella that way? Are we bringing scrolls back, next? Chip Kidd, I give you the ol' sideways eyeball. So anyway, I bought it.

Philik K. Dick: WTF. This is the first of his that I've read, and I'm in a superimposed state of unimpressed and impressed. If Minority Report is a representative sample of PKD's work, he wasn't actually a very good writer. I don't mean this in the most commonly used prose-focused litfic-centric sense: I am talking about the whole package. Yes, he's a clunky prose stylist, sure. But his dialogue sucks too! Against both naturalistic and anti-naturalistic standards; it neither hits nor snaps. You can see the corrugation when his characters turn sideways, and their lack of motivation and depth means the plot suffers too, with things mostly just kind of happening 'cause they happen instead of being driven by some internal engine. And as long I'm shoveling abuse, the worldbuilding here is sketched-out and hole-filled.

Does that even leave anything? Well, probably, because he's still widely read and respected, there was a big fat re-issue project a few years back, and he laid down the skeleton of freaking Blade Runner, among other things, and plus I didn't have a half bad time reading this.

I think what's left is pure idea, idea plus a willingness to not waste time on anything else just because you're technically supposed to. Dick's characterization and prose may be weaksauce, but he's not under any delusion that they aren't, so he drives the text at an unsafe speed, gets where he's going in record time, and calls it a day. There's a certain compelling honesty in that--who doesn't appreciate a promise to not waste your time?

I shall now end this review by linking to basically the greatest Minority Report joke. You are welcome.

Peter S. Beagle - A Fine and Private Place (1/15)

This, I did not so much enjoy, skipping past chunks of it in impatience and irritation. Although it's worth saying before I get started on the bitching that the raven is one of my favorite fictional corvids yet. Easily the best part of the book.

So anyway, I was really not grooving on the maudlin sentimentality here. This is only half the dis it sounds like, on account of how enthusiastically I grooved on the maudlin sentimentality of, e.g., The Last Unicorn--he's doing a few of the same things here and reaching for a lot of the same effects, but it just doesn't work nearly as well. And I'm not fully sure why, which itches a bit.

Part of it is that he's not nearly as good a writer at this book. It's a first novel, I should cut the man some slack. But the characters are just dull and irritating, and I don't think there's really much story in here. And the language is, rgh, um, how best to describe this. It's reaching for emotional hits that it hasn't earned, basically. Grumph, hold on while I try and find some examples.

"...maybe you were right about that girl, Michael, because I grabbed him as if I'd been lying in wait for a chance to hold him like that. It felt very nice. I think he even cried a little."

On the street below them a mother screamed at her child in wordless rage and love.

And I was like, "God dammit, no she did not." You know, stuff like that. At no point did I sign up for the book's project, I'm saying, and it's filled up with stuff that won't work unless you're fully on-board. The number of levels it works on is severely limited when compared to the other Beagle I've read.

I dunno. Anyone else have thoughts on this one?

Steven Johnson - The Ghost Map (1/22)

Cholera: Don't drink poop.

I liked this. Pop nonfiction at its finest.

Things I Stopped Reading In January

C.J. Cherryh - Cyteen (1/1 or earlier)

This was intensely interesting, but I really wasn't feeling it and didn't want to keep plodding, nor did I want to power through and possibly miss something. Shelving it until later, when I can give it more of my attention.

Comments

[kiplet]

Yeah, most of the Dick-heads I know always liked to say he wrote the best damn first drafts ever.

And I really need to hook you up with Folk, don't I.

[roadrunnertwice]

Yup yup. Actually! We should totally hang out, because I miss you and have been not-so-social lately and would like to fix both of those. You got any free evenings coming up?

[chronographia]

Hooray! I'm not sure if whatever intangible connection I was making with Link's urban fantasy came across, but you enjoyed it nonetheless which is vindicating enough for me. Vindication!

• What typeface is that? I love it, it seems much older and classier than the pub date would imply. Reminds me of childhood in some ineluctable way. But whatever, no one cares about that

For future reference, do not say shit like that to me. Ok? Because you will be getting an answer, whether you like it or not . . .

The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche is typeset in Adobe Palatino, which is a common enough face but, here's the thing, typeset by Ann Mott really, really well. I suspect that she had the full family of Palatino to play with, since those aren't default/faux small caps. (The rest of Ms. Mott's work shows that she occasionally does some Very Bad Things to unsuspecting typefaces, so I won't heap the praise too highly.)

• I associate the New York Beagle writes about with Simon & Garfunkle's tenure there, or maybe just a bit after. Kind of folksy and as naïve as that city ever could be. But definitely a slice of time before the arrival of cocaine syndicates and the subsequent gritty nastiness.

• Vampires used to be ravenous fiends from beyond the grave, but, once run through the pop culture mill, come out covered in glitter. Which I am still in denial about. Werewolves are going through the same, I expect. (Lemurs ftw though! I will take lemurs over monkeys any day.)

• Come Lady Death is also a very likable story, but I never expect anyone to love it as much as I do. To save myself from outright disappointment in humanity, I point people in the direction of an anthology it's in, and hope they enjoy stumbling across it.

• That copy of Minority Report is seven kinds of O_o. Unfortunately I can pinpoint what's going on in the layout designer's head and it goes like this: "DAMMIT, WHY AM I NOT DAVID CARSON? WHYYYYYYY?? GNRRRRRR." There's sort of a lot of that among designers of a specific age, and some of us take a little longer to come to grips with it.

• I don't actually remember a lot of A Fine and Private Place other than the raven being made of awesome and some very subdued sentimentality. Your reaction to it is not surprising, to say the least.

Aside: Beagle writes short stories well (borderline novellas at times) and he also has a knack for curating other short story collections. I can say that even though The Innkeeper's Song and Giant Bones are equally well-written in a multitude of voices set in the same world, Giant Bones is more enjoyable because it's a bunch of short stories. You might want to steer towards his anthologies in the future, if you want to pursue more of his stuff.

[roadrunnertwice]

Nice. I knew I liked Palatino, but that definitely bumps it in my estimation. (I... I can't really ID typefaces at all. Different fonts make me feel different things, but I don't have much ability to control or analyze their effect.)

---

Yeah, I think I see what you mean, about Beagle and Link and resonance. If not lineage (though I think there IS some lineage), than at least some partial convergence of purpose.

[chronographia]

I used to be much faster at font id, but then it was part of my job. I think my boss and I timed it over instant messenger at one point and it took me an average of sixteen seconds? The five minutes I spent looking for Palatino samples makes me feel a little lame and incompetent—the search parameters are much wider though, so I don't feel too bad.

Beagle and Link have maybe a similar approach to sneaking in fantastical elements into mundane settings and making genuinely odd circumstances seem mundane and matter-of-fact (enough not to question them, at least)?

[nightswatch.livejournal.com]

I picked up Cyteen in high school, made it a little way in, and could go no further. I finally tried again in 2007 and it was awesome. She does this thing where the end of her books is suddenly gripping action and drama that you never would have predicted from the stately pace of the opening. Downbelow Station works the same way. Heavy Time is another one worth reading (which is short, and contained within a volume called Devil to the Belt). And finally her collected short fiction has some sweet stuff in it.

Apologies if these are things you know already.

[roadrunnertwice]

I did not know these things! Though I know you said she was the shit some time back, which was why I started this.

I definitely intend to finish it, but it's not compatible with my current attention span. -_-

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

You're good at this. You should be a pro book reviewer. Those guys, like, all drive Ferraris.

[roadrunnertwice]

...through the parking lot, during their night shift as a valet.

But no really, thank you, I appreciate that.