Belated book post

[roadrunnertwice]

People like me are the people that people get ideas about: Things I Read During August

It’s that time of the month again! Actually, it’s almost a month late, but whatever.

Jasper Fforde – Thursday Next: First Among Sequels: A Novel (8/5)

This started out rocky. Fforde’s prose is not his strong point, and the saidbookisms and adverb abuse in the first chapter caused a minor allergic reaction. Also, I was still feeling a bit of the sting from Something Rotten, and the initial segments of Sequels seemed a return to the vaguely irritating mode that most of said previous volume was spent in.

Fortunately, things shortly picked up. Plotting IS Fforde’s strong point (along with exposition and meta), and I was well and truly gripped by the end of chapter 4.* It’s good shit, not least because Fforde is unafraid to just spew red herrings all over the room and leave some of the cleanup for a later volume—I’m convinced that part of what sank Something Rotten was a desire to cleanly wrap everything up, when a Thursday Next book really ought to be noisy as hell and unworried about minor plot holes.

Also, this volume had several illustrations and one major non-textual sequence by mudron and quirkybird, and that’s never a bad decision.

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* Out of 39, so yeah, fast.

Jerome K. Jerome – Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (8/6)

Had one brief reminder that everybody in the past was appallingly racist, which still always throws me for a loop. Otherwise a nice little sojurn of good-natured self-delusion. Mostly not quite as funny as I was hoping it would be—since this was written, it’s been repurposed as the backstory for several much better jokes, so experiencing the original was a bit of a letdown.

Elizabeth Bear – The Stratford Man (Ink and Steel (7/27) and Hell and Earth (8/17))

I did not like this book as much as I liked Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water, and have been trying to figure out why.

In certain respects, it’s simply better. It’s more intricate and carefully put together. It’s got a better grip on what its themes are and how to manifest them. The dialogue snaps, and the rest of the prose is likewise improved. It’s a lot more ambitious. Buuuuuut…. I just didn’t really connect with it.

So, here’s what the other two Promethian Age books gave me that I couldn’t get out of The Stratford Man:

• Intensity and urgency. I think B&I and W&W both took place over the course of days or weeks, and The Stratford Man spanned decades. Okay, I’m not saying that I want all my stories to be that limited in scope, but part of the fun of those two books in particular was that there were centuries of backstory all coming to a head right now, and no one involved in the situation had anything approaching a perfect grip on any of it.
• Hugeness of vision. Paradoxically, TSM’s larger scope made it feel more constrained, because there wasn’t as much stuff existing out-of-frame. If it’s the least bit important, it’s happening on-page and in the main threads of the story.
• American-ness and eclecticism. The other Promethian books so far have spent most of their focus on the sidhe, true, but the beauty of having them happen in a land of immigrants was that just about anything could butt its ugly head in and complicate things. (Werewolves and bunyips and bears, oh my.) But this is England and the stories are all English, and it feels like less.
• Unpredictability. It’s the curse of prequels and the curse of historical fiction, all in one package: Will Shakespeare will inevitably live out his life as described in the historical record, and Kit Marley will be alive and quite healthy when he shows up in 2004 to throw down on the current Archmage. And anyone who’s taken from history and not conveniently raised from the dead is ultimately inviolate. Yeah, most of this stuff is going on in the shadows and the interstices where it couldn’t have been seen, and any fact is at least up for reinterpretation, but contrast that with the first two Promethian Age books where literally anyone could die (or at least get badly maimed) at any time and it comes up short.

It may or may not be useful to ask how much of the problem is just in my head: two books is a small sample size, and maybe I jumped the gun on deciding what I want from a book in the Promethian Age series. But whether I read it the wrong way or not, it remains that I just didn’t find TSM as compelling as its predecessors, nor as compelling as the cumulative four chapters or so that I’ve read of One Eyed Jack & the Suicide King.

Which isn’t to say it wasn’t smart as hell and a good book, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. But fair or not, that vague disappointment comes first in my measure of it.

Kelly Link – “Origin Story” and “Light” (8/19)

Hey, two new Kelly Link stories! Supposedly, the new collection comes out in October, so yay for that.

I liked these both. “Origin Story” is a tighter tale with a better idea of what it’s about, and “Light” is a Kelly Link and Her Kitchen Sink story. One is about love and sex and identity in small towns, and the other is about siblings and expectations and inertia. Neither has the clockwork perfection of “Magic for Beginners” or “Lull,” but they’re at least on par with “The Hortlak” or “The Girl Detective.” So check ‘em out.

Eric Frank Russell – “Allamagoosa” (8/19)

Jo Walton declared that one ought to get in touch with one’s inner 12-year-old and read some Russell. So I did! That was fun.

Raccoona Sheldon AKA Alice Sheldon AKA James Tiptree – “The Screwfly Solution” (8/19)

This one got stuck in my brain crevices and is refusing to go away. I think I need to get ahold of a good Tiptree collection, because the lady is AWESOME.

I rather think I’ll twitch upon hearing the word “screwfly” for the rest of my life. Well, for reasons besides the obvious zoological ones, I mean.

(Hey, I thought the Sci Fiction archives got nuked? I’m not complaining, mind you, just confused.)

M.T. Anderson – The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation—Volume I: The Pox Party (8/24)

When bryantpaul speak, Nick listen, so I hit up the library for a copy of this.

In broad genre terms, it’s a slave story, but it’s a consummately weird one that flickers in and out of other genres and spheres of influence, the most notable encroachments being on the Gothic novel* and the heroic literature of the American Revolution. The idea I keep turning around in my head is that it’s in a complicated and fairly aggressive dialogue with some long-term trends in YA—correct me if you remember differently, but didn’t most of the Revolutionary War novels largely ignore the question of slavery, and didn’t most of the slave novels stay fairly isolated within the plantation atmosphere, and weren’t the Gothic-influenced novels pretty much separated from historical context altogether? Anderson’s seems to be aiming to pollute every part of historical YA fiction with… everything else. (And I want to briefly mention another thing he’s doing, at least with the first part of the story: I think Octavian’s early life is set up in such a way as to isolate and distill the horror of slavery itself. By having the protagonist raised in comfort and relative ease, and withholding until later the gross physical degradations of slavery as practiced in the Americas—that is, by removing the other types of horror that might confuse the issue—Anderson leaves only the existential horror of slavery: the horror of being owned, of being something other than a person. And, okay, that’s right there in the title, and every other evil of slavery does come crashing back in in the second half the book, but still, I think the method is worth acknowledging.)

Anyway, right, the story itself. I liked it. Octavian is an interesting character and a weird-ass narrator: an unreliable one who desires, above nearly all else, to be reliable (and is caught, furthermore, between incompatible definitions of reliability). The pathos is intense, the plotting is actually pretty brilliant, and I really do find myself wondering what Octavian will ultimately do and what his reasons will be. I think Anderson’s doing a good job at asking questions that aren’t, in any conventional way, answerable.

(Also, like Bryant says, the book is quite technically sophisticated: the prose style is simultaneously period-appropriate and idiosyncratic as hell, the narrative sections are occasionally interrupted with corroborating documents and competing epistolary accounts (very po-mo), and even the font it’s printed in has been deliberately damaged and mis-kerned to emulate 18th-century cold metal type. The attention to detail is impressive.)

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* Yes, the slave novel is intrinsically quite gothic in the first place, but Octavian is raised in 1. a wealthy and well-appointed house, which is 2. largely isolated from the outside world, with 3. murky relationships of power and sex between all its adults, in which there is 4. a secret room where he is forbidden to go. So… Gothic, instead of just gothic. You know what I’m saying.

Charles Stross – “Down on the Farm” (8/25)

Hey, a new Laundry story!

You know, the action scenes in this series aren’t generally all that fabulous, nor is the characterization; my attraction to it starts and ends with the worldbuilding and prose style. The plain fact is, I could read Bob Howard’s ridiculous infodumps about computational demonology until the cows come home. (Cows, “farm…” see how I brought that all back around? That’s the professional service you’ll only find at Roadrunner Twice industries!)

Sarah Vowell – The Partly Cloudy Patriot (audiobook, 8/30)

You may have already guessed this, but I like Sarah Vowell a whole lot. In an odd way, she’s my role model for toughness—I think her writing has a lot to say about how to endure an emotional setback. And about Mounties. And Tom Cruise.

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I also read one more thing during August, and you will soon learn aaaaallll about it.

Comments

[kiplet.livejournal.com]

Christ, "Screwfly." —I don't agree with Tiptree that men are men and women are women, but unlike my disagreements with most on that score with her it's provisional, defensive, uncertain, and anyway the very fact that I disagree with her on that score is due in no small part to what she said and wrote. The men that women don't see is much less of a problem, really, than the women the men didn't see. (As for the men that the men don't see, or the women etc., well.)

[roadrunnertwice]

Well said.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Yay for more stuff from Link!

That is exactly how I felt about Down on the Farm, only I'd never read any of this "Laundry" stuff before, so the poor boy didn't hook me to his work.

[kiplet.livejournal.com]

I can hook you up with the Laundry next time you're here if you're curious.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Ooh, maybe. I am a sucker for world building, however much the setup for that short story didn't grab me.