Things I Read: Gods, Chairs, Stars, Daemons

[roadrunnertwice]

Terry Pratchett — Small Gods (re-read)

Mar 19

It was excellent when I was 20, and it's excellent still. A triumph of handling big ideas in a comedic mode, and also a triumph of handling big ideas in a fantastical mode, never mind the general hardness of the fantasy+comedy row w/r/t any kind of hoeing, much less hoeing at this level and with this material.

Matthew Bogart — The Chairs' Hiatus (comics)

Mar 31

I was drinking beer and texting Ruth about this comic (along with photos, which, y'all can just check out the free online version for visuals), and I think I'll just let two of those texts make up the meat of the review here.

This book has good confidence in its shots. The sort of panel sequence that's secure enough in the usage of the tools at hand that it's easy to read and yet you feel smarter for reading it.

A lack of redundancy, a burly parsimony.

John Green — The Fault in Our Stars

April 12

I found a copy at the Wave, and Ruth encouraged me to move it way up in the stack.

This book has a delicious sour-sweet clarity. It would have been so easy to corrupt a story like this with sentimentality and crud (and I've seen that so many times), and Green managed to keep not doing that right out through the end.

Daniel Suarez — Daemon and Freedom

May 4

Via my sister, who recommended these with caveats.

A two-part technothriller about a mad genius who causes a cyberapocalypse so he can posthumously restructure society. The characters are embarrassing paper dolls, the prose is slack at best, and it gets quite didactic in the back half.

But guess what, I was in the mood for something that didn't ask for a lot of emotional or aesthetic investment, with a relatively interesting plot and not much else. So I enjoyed this just fine!

Also, as far as cyberapocalypse thrillers go, it was actually very clever, showing a much better understanding of current technology than the norm. And, up to a point, a better than normal understanding of social technology. (e.g., your hacking skills don't have to be magical if you can afford to hire insider saboteurs at a generous wage and can punish defection with violence.)

It lost me a bit in the second book. The ongoing cleverness of the central conceit got sacrificed for the political program and the plot, and the centralization necessary to make the daemon's second-stage faction-based social systems work kind of put the lie to the decentralization that helped it survive and consolidate in the first book. And about said political program: once I realized it basically boiled down to "Reddit and WoW save the world," I was kind of out.

But man, how seductive is the idea of being able to just straight-up execute a corporation? I won't lie, I was into that.