Better late than never, right?

Things I Read During September

J.R.R. Tolkien – The Fellowship of the Ring (9/3)

I’m finally embarking on my first adult readthrough of this series! Trying to reclaim the story for myself in this post-Peter-Jackson world, partly; I loved those movies when they first came out, but I’ve gotten more and more dissatisfied with them as time’s gone on.

Anyway, things:

I have much more appreciation for Tolkien the Historian than I did as a kid. Tolkien the Historian is actually pretty awesome.
I’m also loving the language of the book. It’s a finely-made thing, and it still distinguishes Tolkien from all his biters.
Boy, the battle scenes are a lot less tedious here than they were in the movies. (I’m already reading The Two Towers, but it’ll be a while before it shows up in the book-post queue.)
It turns out that fannish writer kate_nepveu is also doing a LotR excursion right around now. It will be better than mine, and I will be using it as an excuse for half-assing this. Thanks, Kate Nepveu!

John Scalzi – “Denise Jones, Super Booker” (9/4)

Heh, “Bryan Garcia.”

Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki – The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, vol. 2

This volume was less with the episodic; most of it was devoted to a single larger storyline, which was a tad freakier and more pulp-lurid than the stories in volume 1. Which is saying something. Still having lots of fun with this series.

(But man, is it just me or was that a LOT of shots of Sasaki gratuitously hanging around in her underwear? WTF.)

Blue Beetle: Shellshocked (vol. 1) (9/?)

Blue Beetle: Road Trip (vol. 2) (9/14)

So here’s the thing: I’ve always been somewhat confused and repelled by superhero comics, but I actually really like reading about them—for whatever reason, the genre tends to inspire some really cool essays about persistent universes and recurrent motifs and exotic storytelling techniques and all that kind of stuff that you know I’m a sucker for. Plus I think the bedrock tropes of superheroics (secret identities, unasked-for power, and the lot) are pretty serviceable, and can do amazing things when handled well. Anyway, the things other people see in the form keep tempting me to try getting into it, but every time I do, the ambient level of suck drives me away; this try was pretty much par for the course.

The new Blue Beetle comics have a lovely slick visual style and relatively snappy writing (no one says “bub,” glory fucking hallelujah), and they’re nominally the starting point for a new character and, um… story domain, for lack of a better term. So that’s why I thought they looked promising. But nope: they were kind of bad.

The worst failure was that hardly any of the action has any weight: everything is always “WE MUST FIGHT TO THE DEATH, wait, no, everything’s cool,” and “I’M CRAZY! Now I’m not.” Many mood reversals that don’t make sense, and a whole lot of no-stakes combat. About the only violence I thought was awesome was the battle with the out-of-control Reach robot; the rest of the flash-bang was more or less unsatisfying. The rigid episodic format of comic pamphlets is probably partly to blame, but there’s something else going on here. (Or rather, failing to go on.)

Another irritant was that the dialogue is actually pretty uneven; most of it is on par with mid-level Hollywood for banter and exposition, but all the characters from other titles talk like they’re from other titles, with the results that you would expect. This made sense in that weird-ass swords and sorcery excursion with dudes from the New Gods, but for people who are all ostensibly from modern-day America it gets a little ridiculous. It’s almost as though the offending characters are basically name-drops shoehorned in there in order to sell comics and/or flatter the people who know who the hell they are, with a mannered and incongruous mode of speech used in lieu of actual characterization!

So yeah, mission failure: I still don’t like superhero comics. Ah well.

Kip Manley – City of Roses: “Anvil” (9/12)

YAY

Maybe I’ve mentioned before how much I like kiplet’s story? I likes it lots.

It’s been a good while since the last episode, and the things I’ve been thinking about in that time mean that I’m seeing stuff I maybe wouldn’t have seen last year. Like the ways in which the thing is well-adapted for serialization, and not just structurally, but stylistically, too. (Am I just imagining that the sentence-level prose is somehow optimized for an episodic format? Well, yeah, maybe.)

David Foster Wallace – Roger Federer as Religious Experience (9/16, essay)

(Via Daring Fireball.)

So David Foster Wallace killed himself this September, and it put me badly out of sorts. It’s fucked up, you know? Gruber was badly out of sorts too, and he linked a bunch of articles and essays written by DFW that were available online. This is one of them; it’s about tennis, and is wonderful.

You know, perhaps the worst part of Wallace killing himself was that he absolutely knew what he was doing. The man wrote Infinite Jest; there did not exist a counter-argument to suicide that he hadn’t clearly thought through and rebutted. He knew what he was doing.

It’s fucked up, is all. It’s just fucked up.

Anyway, enough of all that: you should totally read this essay, because it is hugely entertaining and fucking brilliant and makes the world better simply by existing. (Dep’t of Defining Crucial Terms: “Brilliant” would have been if he’d simply expounded on that central connection between the observation of athletic grace and the realization of divine Grace. “Fucking brilliant” is what happens when you do that AND build something absolutely riveting out of a detailed discussion of incredibly recondite mutations in top-level tennis play within the last several decades. Seriously, it must be read to be believed.)

Dep’t of Morbid Sidenotes: I reckon this proves the wisdom of leaving a portion of a favorite essayist’s oeuvre unread. (Dear Universe: My June comment was supposed to be neurotic, not prophetic; get it right next time.)

Fumiyo Kouno – Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (9/20, comic)

A young woman lives in poverty and is emotionally distant. She tries to overcome her misanthropy and isolation and gets involved with a boy. Then her organs fail, she goes blind, and she dies. Later, her niece deals with staggering emotional issues!

Anyway, it’s a manga about some people from Hiroshima. The bombing isn’t a thing I think about a lot, and it’s been a long time since it even crossed my mind. But while I used to swallow the justifications about it being a “necessary” atrocity, these days I consider it one of the worst things anyone has ever done. Which might have something to do with 9/11, or might just be me growing up. Couldn’t say.

Something interesting I noticed about these stories is that there isn’t much talk of the bomb as a thing that someone did. The idea of culpability shows up in one character’s internal monologue, but for most people most of the time, it’s just a thing that happened, something almost divorced from human agency. Which seems about right. I assume that Kouno has the authority to know how the hibakusha deal with it, and y’know, it’s probably how I’d have to think about it, at least on a day-to-day basis. If I didn’t push that image of the perpetrators to the very back of the head, it would almost certainly dissolve my soul, make my heart go sour. (Did I mention I don’t spend a lot of time actively thinking about the nuke? There’s probably a good reason for that.)

Dep’t of Shameful Admissions: the reason I picked this up in the first place was that I was charmed by the way Kouno draws girls’ feet. Sorry, world.

Terry Pratchett – Monstrous Regiment (9/22)

Not top-of-the-line Discworld, but I liked it.

(What I mean when I say “top of the line Discworld” is a certain union of pathos, cleverness, and rigor, and I think this one was lacking somewhat in the first and the third of that triad. There are a few moments of whoa-aww-shit, but I don’t think the book’s treatment of war is consistent with that of, say, Thud! or Small Gods. The whole deal lacks a certain gravity, which in turn costs it some of its rigor. Pratchett usually has his eyes open to the horror of killing, which makes it weird that so much of it gets swept under the rug here in the name of adventure.)

Garth Nix – Sabriel (9/30)

Wow, that was really good. Totally lived up to its reputation.

Actually, let’s just have that be my review of the book: “Believe the hype.” I’m glad I have the other two books of the trilogy already waiting on the shelf, courtesy (as usual) the MPL Friends Store.

Special kudos for Nix’s descriptions of magic use. Dude did an incredible job describing the sound and feel of necromancy.

I'm aaaaalmost done with another post about Naruto, Bleach, and what makes a junk-food shonen manga good or bad. Soon, soon!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

b-zedan.livejournal.com

I re-read City of Roses to get me in a better place for reading Anvil and damn but it gets better every time. It's true, though, there's a whole 'nother level to it because of the serial structure.

Also, last month was October, just now figured that out.

gyladia.livejournal.com

*!* Which one was Sabriel? Did it have a dark haired guy with a sword? The name is faintly bringing back only an image from early, early high school, part of a series? I'm not entirely sure I actually read that one because I remember very clearly the other book with the teenagers and the golden eyed boy who fight the evil machine things. Well, slightly clear.

I might actually read the Hiroshima one now. I never think about that either, but earlier this week I did. I can't find the exact story I read (which always happens and it's really frustrating) But a Japanese General was fired for denying that Japan was a wartime aggressor in an essay he wrote that won some contest and sort of towards the bottom of the article there was a little blurb about WW2 and the bombing and I felt so guilty and ashamed because it is something I never think about. It was something I sort of forgot. Even when we studied the war in high school and Snodgrass only let us do projects that involved American involvement in the war, the fact that we so casually decimated 120k people wasn't what people were interested in.

roadrunnertwice

Sabriel had a dark-haired guy with a sword and a bandolier of bells on the cover. He was the main character's dad, though. (They were necromancers? And there was a (bastard) prince as the co-hero/love interest, but I can't remember much of what he looked like.)

chronographia.livejournal.com

I'd say that Terry Pratchett didn't sweep wholesale killing under the rug so much as shift the focus to other issues (as you say he's already dealt with the pointless waste that is war, ie Jingo, Small Gods, Thud!). How does gender fit in the world of fighting, how do people under oppressive conditions cope, how does $_large_civic_institution function for great lolz, that sort of thing.

Well, for what it's worth, I loved all the characters in this one (Oh god, especially the sarge? And Polly's kind of my hero), and the jokes were top-notch. It's just that the balance felt off. I get what you're saying about focus, and don't have a ready answer; it just seemed weird to me.

Gender and Pratchett: Huh, interesting! I can't say much about data because, well, I don't actually know many female Pratchett fans (honestly, you're the only one that comes to mind. ...and now we get to watch my whole female flist be surprised that I didn't notice they were Pratchett fans...). But the Witches subseries in particular is VERY different from from the rest of the series. Tone, thematic content, yeah, but most of all, you can't win a Witches story the same way. Rincewind wins by spamming uncontrolled power all over the room and banging his head into things (which is why I find those stories kind of boring); in the City Watch books, the city is a secret extra protagonist, and there're all sorts of interesting interactions between brute force, cleverness, and a cosmopolitan trend as irresistible as gravity; and Moist von Lipwig wins by being the smartest guy in the room. The witches, though, win because they know things that no one else wants to know. They're on the margins, but they understand exactly what will cause the center to fail. I can see how the reaction to that might break along gender lines. Myself, I think they're brilliant.

The pacing on Monsterous Regiment is a little odd and he does juggle a number of concepts and story arcs, so I can see where it might not immediately glue you to the page. We are diy audio bookers in my family (or you could call it storytime with books that have long words) and OH MAN shouting Jack Rum's lines is only second best to Blouse's Daphne. We argue over who gets to read those bits.

Gender & Pratchett: In which case, I reference you here (http://spiralsheep.livejournal.com/240575.html) to this fine discussion. "One of the things I like about Pratchett is his female characters in general, and that they are very self-determined and diverse. (http://spiralsheep.livejournal.com/240575.html?thread=3492031#t3492031)" Whether it's Susan and Tiffany or one-off characters like Polly and Sacharissa or secondary characters like Angua and Adora Belle, Pratchett's really consistent about writing female characters as 'self-determined and diverse.' It doesn't happen a lot in fiction, much less genre fiction—not as much as I'd like to see at any rate—and I think that's part of why female fans are fiercely enthusiastic.

Of course brilliant characters are brilliant characters no matter what.

Roadrunner Twice