Things I Read in an Arbitrary Interval

[roadrunnertwice]

Things I Read Since the Last Thing

Encompassing the remainder of 2011 and a little crescent moon of 2012.

Yellow Tanabe – Kekkaishi #28

October 23

Aaaaaa holy shit, Shiguma! This was the big reveal on Yoshimori’s “manager,” and AAAAAAAAA. (Managers: the idea here is that to operate at your maximum magical potential, you need an empty mind and inhuman focus, which can sometimes leave you in a psychically vulnerable or unstable state, so you get around that by splitting off part of your mind and letting it physically manifest itself. This semi-autonomous semi-self can then protect your flank and direct your focus, remembering your priorities for you so you can just act without thought. This mechanic also hits some of the same buttons that the personified zanpakutou/hollow-selves from Bleach or the daemons from His Dark Materials did, what with that “other self” frisson.)

Okay, so I’ve gone off before about how great the magic design in this series is, right? With the more organized and refined forms of kekkai magic being drawn as clean geometric prisms and the older and dirtier and wilder forms being drawn circular and jagged? Well, Yoshimori’s manager starts out as a cube with ruler-straight black and white stripes on it… and then it extrudes this snake-like form, which then branches out crude appendages, which then branch out into proper hands and feet (and a jester-cap head shape), and aaaaa, it’s totally working this organic fractal growth motif out from the orderly base form, which A: is completely left-field compared to the other managers we’ve seen so far, B: is creepy-looking as hell (which makes it a fantastic visual foil to Yoshimori’s everyboy look) (no seriously, it looks like one of those mind-controlling snail flukes), C: has a thematic resonance of worryingly explosive and unpredictable power growth (which is a must in shōnen manga but which I have never seen represented like this before), and D: is weird and unsettling and just a fantastic piece of character design. Man I love this series.

Oh, and also, I love that instead of grounding and stabilizing Yoshimori like Sen thought a manager would, it basically just constantly eggs Yoshimori on! (Reminds me of when Vimes described Carcer as having a devil on both shoulders.) And everyone is freaked out by its appearance and personality except Yoshimori. Awesome.

Terry Pratchett – Snuff

December 21

Speaking of Vimes.

I have conflicting thoughts about this one! Although it’s a very good Discworld book, I think.

The minuses:

• A little formula going on here. One or another of the remaining Always Chaotic Evil fantasy races is being exploited or brutalized and it turns out they’re People Just Like Us, Albeit Kinda Weird, etc. That story works great, it’s just that that’s been the last several Discworld books.
• Sam Vimes is basically unstoppable at this point. Not only is he wilier than anyone he’s up against and able to call down enviable reinforcements, he actually has honest-to-god demonic superpowers now courtesy of the events of Thud and is no longer afraid to use them, and it makes plot something of an exercise in inevitability.

On the other hand: I think this might actually be the first time Lady Sybil has gotten fair billing (actually, I never read Guards, Guards, where I think she first appeared, but she’s been an offscreen Mrs. Columbo for many many books now), and Pratchett got her right. She works, she’s everything I hoped she’d end up being, it’s kind of amazing. Willikins is on deck too, and he might actually be a little over-the-top these days, but I could also see that as a natural development of his character now that Sam is fully aware that he’s lawful evil and doesn’t seem to mind.

I still have thoughts to think about the way the latter-day Vimes vs. Class arc is playing out, but I think this segment of it was more sophisticated than what’s come before, and I think I liked that. Also, there was this mid-book scene where Angua finally acknowledged a really troublesome bit of subtext that’s been hovering around the City Watch books, musing out loud about how “the melting pot only melts one way,” and all the various creatures in the city become human over time rather than vice-versa. And I really appreciated that. And this played interestingly with that business with Nobby Nobbs near the end.

Oh, and Young Sam has a personality now, in the way that kids you haven’t seen for a while will suddenly do, and that’s a thing to see all by itself. I like him.

And Pratchett still has a deft hand with a gag.

Karen Healey – The Shattering

December 27

A YA supernatural murder mystery. This was all right; I read it in the entirely wrong mental state, though, and it ended up being a slog. (There are several available failure states when trying to read while nuts-deep in one’s own novel, and I hit several of them. Anyway, upshot is that I can’t tell whether this was entertaining, but I noticed several ways in which it was technically sweet. Pardon the lack of a real review.)

Yellow Tanabe – Kekkaishi #29

December 29?

Shichiro is one weird duck.

2012

Brenna bzedan Zedan – The Audacity Gambit

January 13

A short serial novel about a suburban girl going on an adventure in Faerie. Sort of! Not quite. Actually, not at all.

This version is an early public draft, and it’s still a bit uneven, but it did some things I’m really excited about. It’s sort of an origin story, but the place where it ends leaves you very unsure of what she’ll do next, and does so in a really evocative way. It has a really solid and horrid reversal of expectations in it, and the central gimmick (the chosen one thing) is rigged such that it seems cute and entertaining at first, and then on later inspection gets more and more disturbing.

I’m interested to see what happens to it in revision, and to see what happens next. Worth a read.

Martha Wells – The Serpent Sea

January 18

I am completely digging Wells’ Raksura books, and am greatly looking forward to the third one; both of these have been a joy. This is the second in the series that started with The Cloud Roads, and it’s as good or better. The leviathan city in particular is a creepy and amazing setting, combining a blighted de-industrialized milieu with a staggeringly sick act of pointless cruelty that everyone is now stuck living with, and a pervasive and palpable sense of rot and stink, and the endless grinding entropy of the sea. Wild shit.

Mostly though, I just really enjoyed getting to hang out with Moon and Stone and Jade and Chime again. And I totally admit to wanting to live in that tree they have.

Note: Since Wells is with a small press (Night Shade) now instead of a major, you can get a DRM-free version if you feel like doing the ebook thing instead of the TPB thing. It’s cheaper than the Amazon or B&N versions, too!

Tangent: Is there a word for that warm fuzzy feeling you get when two artists whose work you love discover each others’ stuff and get really into it? Because I jumped for joy a little at the marthawells1/nkjemisin lovefest that sprang up on Twitter. (Books 2 and 3 of NKJ’s Inheritance trilogy are near the top of my queue, but I couldn’t get to them for a while on account of their being packed in a box while I renovated my bedroom.)

Jo Walton – Among Others

January 30

This was very good, I enjoyed it greatly, and you should consider checking it out. I don’t really feel like introducing the story of it, though, mostly because there are reviews talking about that everywhere. Read one of them! I read perhaps too many of them (because they were everywhere), as well as reading (and hearing in person a week or two ago*) a great deal about what the author herself was thinking, and as a consequence I’m not completely sure how thoroughly my reactions to the book are my own.

Which is actually quite funny, given that this is a story about reading books and the protagonist lives in an era/context/personal space where one simply picks up books and reads them and reacts more or less nakedly based on what one has read to date, sans any of that extended internet/fandom/critical-apparatus context and expectation.

Which was how I learned to be a reader, as I expect was the case for most of you. For me, that stage must have ended somewhere in the early 2000s; I’m not sure precisely when. I was still deep in it through high school, I know that, as evinced by how I ended up finding Infinite Jest that first time in senior year. (Go to library’s contemporary fiction shelves, find thickest checked-in hardcover, check out just for the sheer fuck of it.) I often have a hard time really recapturing how that kind of unsaturated infosphere felt, being in a place where it would sort of make sense to do something like read the whole SF section alphabetically (as the protagonist of Among Others does), but I certainly remember how precious personal recommendations were, and how notable books would spread through a group of friends like a cold virus. And I can vaguely remember a sense of scarcity, too, an unjustifiable worry that you have no idea where your next good read is coming from.

Anyway, this book is about that sort of thing, and also boarding school and demon-mothers and the fae. End of review!

_____

* She was on a paperback tour and hit Powell’s. She’s very personable, and her accent makes her a somewhat hypnotic reader. Also, "week or two ago" is relative to when I finished the book, not the post-date here.

Shorts of Note

(NB: I can’t recover the link trails that led me to most of these.)

• Jo Nubian – Pinto Beans, Wallstreet and Me
• Peter Savodnik – Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma – Yeahhhhh creepy numbers station stories.
• Cary Gabriel Costello – Intersex Fertility – Wow this was a cool and informative article. (“My daughter was not of woman born.”)
• Evan Hughes – The Cordial Enmity Of Joan Didion And Pauline Kael – Mmm, beef.
• Brenna Zedan – It’s The Little Things – This delighted me.
• Adam Sternbergh – Up With Grups – I have so many raging misgivings about this kind of fluff piece and the fundamentally sketchy generational thinking that inevitably underpins it. And yet, I a: can’t in good conscience deny that I do not, at age 30, see myself becoming anything I would have recognized as a grown-up at age 8, and frankly neither do I see many of my friends doing so, and b: think Sternbergh may have made at least one and possibly two really convincing observations about the changing definitions of work and career and the way the repercussions of that have filtered down into our conceptions of what family and responsibility mean. I don’t know. I went in wanting to hate the article, but ultimately really didn’t.
• Kip Manley – What we talk about when we talk about what we’re pointing to – Part of an ongoing conversation.
• Matt Taibbi – A Christmas Message From America’s Rich (“What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls.”)
• rushthatspeaks – Rome, Italy, November 28th: I hate that bus but I do love the rest of the city and St. Peter’s et al. – I greatly enjoyed rushthatspeaks’ trip-to-Florence journals. Here’s a representative excerpt, which is actually from their side-jaunt to Rome.
• Daniel Abraham – 100 Aspects of Genre: Learning from the Dead and the Dying – Part of an ongoing conversation.
• William Deresiewicz – Solitude and Leadership – Another essay I was very leery of going in. It’s truly good, and gave me quite a bit to chew on.
• Jason Tanz – The Curse of Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire Became a Videogame Hit – If you hang out with me regularly, I may have already told you the abbreviated story of Cow Clicker, just because I love it so. But even if you know the outline, you should totally read the full account, because it is wonderful.
• Steve Denning – The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value – Well, this is actually a review of a book that contains the ideas he’s talking about, but which I haven’t read yet, so the review/summary will have to stand in for now.
• Eliza Gauger – Welcome to the Doll House: the Sexual Deconstruction of TF2’s Toy Soldiers, part one and part two – Best TF2 porn artist ethnography I’ve read this year.
• Dave Gardetta – Between the Lines
• Peter Frase – The Conservative Leftist and the Radical Longshoreman
• Tara Parker-Pope – The Fat Trap – An update on some things we’ve only learned recently about what makes weight manageable or unmanageable. (Sidenote on the topic of fat-acceptance: Let us be real — I’m thin because those are the dice I rolled. I could absolutely not live like that Janice Bridge woman they talk to halfway through the article. If fatness and thinness were real reflections of personal virtue, I don’t think either of us would look like we do, and so I have little patience these days for people who play like fatness is some kind of moral failing.)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Messenger (“I have heard this reasoning before.”)
• Nicloa Twilley – Spaces of Banana Control – Oh my god I love this kind of article. Are you ready to journey into the beating heart of NYC’s banana infrastructure? TOO BAD MOTHERFUCKER, BUCKLE UP.
• John Davidson – Burgled in Philly – Department of truly great first sentences for a true story.
• Adrian Chen – The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers – Like everyone else, I love that straight-off-the-TV “take your medicine” line.
• Martha Wells – My Last Year – An unpleasant glimpse into the career death spiral that all midlist writers dread. Wells is one of my favorite writers, and it’s eerie and baffling to see how close she came to that edge. PS, buy her latest book, it’s really good, maybe I mentioned that already.
• lionpyh – Fifty Years in the Virtuous City – From a recommendation by deepad. It’s wonderful on its own, but I also recommend reading the original source material and the wider context from her recommendation.
• Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah – Don’t let the green grass fool you: The Roots are one of the most respected hip-hop acts in the world; why can’t they leave the sad stuff alone? – I am going to assume Ghansah didn’t choose that title, ugh. Anyway, this is a really thoughtful and interesting profile piece on The Roots, and it got me to check out Undun (which by the way is amazingly good, both track-by-track and in its classical-tragedy-in-reverse schema), and Jesus fuck, Tariq Trotter’s anecdotes about the crack era are hair-raising. You’ll know the one I’m especially talking about when you get to it.
• Cat Valente – #shitsiskosays – A meditation on the oddly Victorian sense of hour-to-hour time in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
• Katie Baker – The Confessions of a Former Adolescent Puck Tease: I was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait
• K. J. Parker – A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong – Ringing some tricksy changes on the Mozart/Salieri trope. Loved it.
• N.K. Jemisin – Dreaming Awake
• Autumn Whitefield-Madrano – Thoughts on a Word: Glamour – (Although the follow-up post didn’t do anything for me, this one performed its trick and stuck its landing.)