Weasel Words

August 23, 2011

So the Hugo was just awarded, which means that a roundup of the nominees now is absolutely timely and not at all a bit belated. I already talked about Cryoburn , but I actually did read all the nominees this year, for the first time in the history of ever, so let’s go over the rest of them.

First up is the winner, Connie Willis’ Blackout and All Clear . This is, as my italicizing indicates, two books, so it’s a little weird that they won as a single book, but hey.

There’s been a lot of complaining about these books, mostly centered around historical inaccuracy and ridiculously farcical plotting. The first complaint goes right past me because I wasn’t in England in the ‘40s (or indeed, ever), so have no way to catch any inaccuracies. They felt like a plausible depiction of wartime London, and I suspect the inaccuracies are matters of detail, like whether particular train lines existed or how long it takes to get to a particular place, so find myself unable to really care about that.

The second complaint, though, yeah. In To Say Nothing of the Dog, Willis was writing an explicit farce, which meant that she had lots of the common tropes of farces, including people running around frantically and just barely missing each other and not getting crucial pieces of information and jumping to incorrect conclusions. In the service of comedy, that works well, and To Say Nothing of the Dog was a great book. But here, she’s using the same tropes in the service of weighty tragedy, and it works horribly. The book is madly frustrating, as you just want to sit each character down and slap them until they tell everything they know to the other characters. This is by far the biggest flaw of the book, and when it’s the main plot driver for 800 pages, the feeling of pointless bloat is hard to escape.

But: The book did have a satisfying ending, and it’s atmospheric throughout, and most of the individual scenes work well even if the cumulative effect is frustrating. It’s not a great book, but it’s not the unreadable monstrosity it’s being made out to be.

And speaking of unreadable monstrosities, Mira Grant’s Feed took second place. This is a book set 25 years after a zombie apocalypse, focusing on the role of bloggers in a Presidential election. It is bad. I mean, really bad. The characters are implausible, poorly drawn, and two-dimensional. The plotting is stupid and contrived, and only works if all the characters are stupid (which they fortunately are). The central conceit — that it would be utterly shocking if bloggers covered a Presidential campaign... in 2040 — is idiotic beyond belief. And the world-building is just ridiculous, full of implausibilities stacked on implausibilities. I could go into a lot more detail, because it’s really phenomenally stupid in very deep ways, but I can’t quite find the energy at the moment.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, this isn’t the worst Hugo nominee ever, but it is very, very bad. And it very nearly won. Worldcon attendees, I look askance at you. And if you personally want to read a zombie apocalypse novel, go read World War Z instead.

So then there’s N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms . This is the one that I guess I’m supposed to have loved; everyone else apparently did. But so the thing is, it’s basically a very standard court-intrigue fantasy, set in a moderately-inventive world, with characters who are moderately annoying, and with a tacked on Goth-dark romance. It reads a lot like a minor Dave Duncan novel ( Ill Met in the Arena , say). And since good Dave Duncan novels never get nominated for awards, I’m not sure why a merely okay one should be so highly praised. It’s an inoffensive and reasonably enjoyable book, but it’s a weak Hugo nominee.

And finally, there’s Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House , which is certainly the “respectable” choice for the Hugo. It’s got a respectably interesting setting in Istanbul; it’s got a respectable interesting set of intertwining plots (a nanotech thriller, an occult mystery, and a financial heist); and it’s got respectable writing.

But it also has a first half that’s incredibly dull (I nearly quit reading before it turned interesting), a cast of characters that I don’t care about at all, and a kind of generic feel to it. It’d be hard to really dislike this book, or to deny that it’s a perfectly solid work with some genuinely good attributes; but it’s impossible to get excited about it. I think that on balance it’s actually the best of the Hugo nominees, but I understand why it finished last in the voting.

Overall, an underwhelming slate of nominees, and if the winner wasn’t a great book, well, hey, at least it wasn’t Feed.

Comments | :::

August 9, 2011

So I’ve also been re-reading a lot on the Kindle, mostly revisiting fluffy favorites of my youth.

For the most part, this hasn’t been surprising and hasn’t generated much new to say. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is still as funny as it was the first thirty times I read it (if maybe not precisely as fresh). And Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man is just about exactly what you’d expect from mid-early Discworld (which is to say, pretty excellent, but not quite at the heights the series gets to later).

But then there’s David Eddings’ Belgariad and Mallorean quintets. Back when I was in junior high, these were some of my favorite books; but I haven’t read them since I was a wee lad. So obviously as an adult, I’m aware that their reputation isn’t all that great, and I was curious to see how bad they were, and if they really had the virtues that attracted me to them as a kid.

The answer turns out to be: pretty bad, but also yes.

They’re deeply infused with racism (in the “all members of Race X have Trait Y” sense, which is philosophically problematic and becomes more practically problematic when it is instantiated in the form of “all Murgos are slanty-eyed Easterners who are evil and cruel and have no redeeming qualities and their teeming hordes will fight against the good white men of the West”), and only slightly less-deeply infused with sexism (they have strong female characters, but there’s a lot of Mars ‘n’ Venus bullshit being flung around).

They have ridiculous travelogue plots whose events don’t necessarily have a lot of motivation other than “hey, the prophecy says we should go here, so let’s go here.” This is particularly awful in The Mallorean, where Eddings dropped even the fig leaf of having organic reasons for the plot to proceed — at just about every key event in that book, when the plot requires someone to do something ridiculous or stupid, the prophecy pops in as a literal character and is all “I require you to do this thing, so do it.” It is laughably transparent and unbelievable.

They’re also surprisingly slow books. The Belgariad takes a while to get going, but that’s epic-farmboy-destiny genre stuff — it’s not like Tolkien rushed Frodo out of the Shire, is it? — but The Mallorean takes it to absurd levels, with essentially the entire first volume serving as a prologue before the real book starts.

So, yeah, it’s pretty obvious why people think they’re bad. It’s because they are. But the thing is, I still enjoyed reading them, and I can’t 100% put my finger on why.

Part of it, no doubt, is the travelogue aspect — they really do go to every city on the map, and as broadly drawn and near-caricatured as the various societies are, it’s still fun to read about different societies in a fantasy novel. I’ve always thought of Dave Duncan’s Man of His Word series as being similar to the Belgariad, and I think this is why — both of them do that same world-traveler thing.

The other thing they’ve got going for them is a cast of characters who like each other, banter around, and just generally seem like they’d rather be together than not. This is a thing that was very common for a while (and is still a mainstay of D&D games, for obvious reasons), but which is actually rather rare in fiction these days. The Ocean’s Eleven movies are maybe one of the best examples of how appealing this can be.

And so anyway, if you somehow missed reading Eddings when you were a kid, should you read him now? Probably not. While I did like parts of these books, I have to admit that nostalgia is another big reason for their attraction to me, and clearly they are not objectively that good. So I recommend that you instead follow that link to the Dave Duncan books and read those instead, which have most of the virtues of Eddings’ books (plus many of their own) and few of the faults.

Comments | :::

August 9, 2011

I’m in sort of an unusual situation right now, because normally when I have a massive backlog, it’s due to having read lots and lots of comic books, due to how easy they are to read. But you know what else is easy to read? The Kindle, that’s what. And between that and a spate of laziness in re updating, I’ve now got one of those “hey, I think I vaguely remember that” backlogs. So let’s talk real quick-like about the books where I don’t have much to say.

First, Galen Beckett’s The Magician’s and Mrs. Quent and The House on Durrow Street , which is basically Jane Eyre meets Cthulhu. This sounds like a great premise, and it nearly is, but the execution is uneven at best. I was going to say “as you’d expect from a first-time novelist,” but it turns out that Galen Beckett is actually a pseudonym for Mark Anthony, who has written some Forgotten Realms and DragonLance novels, and maybe it’s not so much that he’s an awkward first novelist as just that he’s an awkward novelist. Still, the books weren’t bad. And hey, he’s a better standalone novelist than R.A. Salvatore.

Next up, let’s talk about Walter Jon Williams’ The Green Leopard Plague , which is a collection of short stories. Walter Jon Williams is a reliably excellent writer, and these were, for the most part, excellent stories. You should read his stuff.

Then there’s Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , which you may have heard of due to it being a massive bestselling novel. As always, I’m sort of baffled by what random quirks of fate make something massive and bestselling. This is a pretty standard thriller, smarter than The Da Vinci Code (but what isn’t), but not particularly outstanding in any way. Although the Swedish setting does provide for a frisson of exoticism, and probably represents the book’s main virtue.

And speaking of mainstream fiction, let’s talk about Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss , which I read after thinking to myself, “Self, you like all sorts of fiction, not just the scientifictions, so why do you never read actual straightforward literary fiction?” and realizing that I had no good answer for that question. So, a quick skim of award-winner lists, and here we were. This ends up being a multi-generational, time-and-place-skipping thing about imperialism and emigration and family and such, set primarily in India. It’s mostly a personal story (or a series of personal stories), seeing people’s lives and how they’ve been warped and shaped by colonialist institutions. A good book, and probably one that deserves a better write-up than this.

Comments | :::

March 31, 2011

So what’s funny is, if you go back and look at the booklog entries for Dzur , Jhegaala and Iorich , you’d see that I liked each book when I read it. And yet, for all that, I want to start off my entry about Steven Brust’s Tiassa by noting that, in contrast to the last few disappointing books, this is a genuinely great installment in the Taltos series.

Part of it is that the last few books have felt really small, with plots that get resolved inside of a day or two, and a small cast of characters. Part of it is that the last few books (with the partial exception of Iorich) have been pretty somber affairs, without the sense of fun that I enjoy in the series. And part of it is maybe just my memory lying to me, who knows.

But at any rate, Tiassa definitely has a larger plot, with events that span enough time to thoroughly confound anyone trying to read the books in internal chronological order. And it certainly has a sense of fun, with old-style wisecracking Vlad plus a bit o’ Paarfi. In fact, between the narrative complexity and the sheer joy of the book, it’s possible that this might be my favorite book in the series, though to be honest, I’ve read most of them so long ago that I wouldn’t trust my judgment in that regard.

Highly recommended, and I’m definitely anticipating the next book in the series now.

Comments | :::

March 23, 2011

So I’ve already reviewed previous editions of Andrew Tobias’ The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need — both the 1998 edition and the 2004 edition, but now I’ve read the 2011 edition.

I’ve really loved this book in the past, and it’s probably one of the most life-changing books I’ve ever read, as it got me started with saving and investing money by demystifying a complex and confusing subject back when I first read it. So it sort of pains me to say that the book may be getting a bit long in the tooth.

Oh, the 2011 edition is all revised-up, to be sure. It makes reference to recent events, updates some anecdotes with recent data, and points to relevant resources. But while that worked fine with the previous editions (the book is originally from the ‘70s), the world has changed enough now that it is starting to feel like it’s in need of a wider-ranging revision. All the references to brokers, for instance — do you know anyone who actually uses a personal broker for managing their investment? I don’t even know where you’d find one. The internet has made that sort of thing completely irrelevant, and while the text of the book acknowledges that in places, it was fundamentally written in an era when brokers were the only way to invest, and it shows.

It’s still a good book, and if you don’t know a darn thing about anything, you could do a lot worse than to read it. But it’s going to feel dated in a few places, and (I feel) it’s not emphatic enough about precisely how to do the right thing. At this point, I actually think that Burton Malkiel’s investment guide is the better book; but on the other hand, I haven’t been new and confused and intimidated by this stuff for quite a while, and don’t trust my judgments on how they’d come across to someone trying to get themselves started on investing.

Comments | :::

March 23, 2011

Like the subtitle says, Jim Butcher’s Side Jobs contains “stories from the Dresden Files.” Here are the minor adventures of Harry Dresden, ranging over his career from before Butcher wrote the first book all the way through a little coda to the most recent book.

Most of the stories are slight; a couple of them were little promo pieces for pamphlets or something, apparently. But it’s not like people come to Dresden books looking for super-heavy epics, anyway, and Butcher is always an engaging writer. If you’ve been reading the series and enjoying it, you’re likely to enjoy this, although almost certainly not as much as you’d enjoy a full-on novel.

As a side note, one of the novellas in this collection was published independently by Subterranean Press for some extortionate price like $30. I almost bought it by accident (I thought it was a real book when I saw it on Amazon, where you don’t get that instant “this thin thing is not a real book” feedback), and am pleased as punch that I managed to avoid getting ripped off. So from a value perspective, this contains a novella that sells for some multiple of the price of the whole collection: What a deal!

Comments | :::

March 23, 2011

So Naomi Novik’s Tongue’s of Serpents is the latest in the Temeraire books. Each book in the series ends up being a travelogue of some place or other, and this one is: Australia.

Australia seems like an interesting place in reality, but in fiction, it often ends up being kinda dull. Pratchett’s Lost Continent is one of the weaker Discworld books, and Tongue of Serpents is definitely the weakest Temeraire book.

It’s not totally dull, mind. There are interesting bits in it, and some pretty critical character and story development happens. But fundamentally, a lot of the book consists of them being lost in the desert and enduring privations, which isn’t particularly fascinating in any way.

If you’re reading the series, you’re going to read this book, because you don’t have a choice; and it’s still pretty decent, so it won’t be a chore or anything. But keep your expectations in check, because it’s not as super-awesome hyper-excellent as the previous installments were. Hopefully it’ll bounce back after this.

Comments | :::

March 23, 2011

Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Above His Proper Station is the second half of A Young Man Without Magic. As you’d expect from the second half of a book, it picks up pretty much exactly where things left off, and continues forward from there.

I still haven’t read Sabatini, so am unable to compare it to its inspiration, but this definitely reads like one of those old-timey historical novels set in the French Revolution, which is fun. Watt-Evans remains an engaging writer, as always, and fantasy of manners turns out to be a good genre for him. I’d prefer if he wrote nothing but Ethshar novels (as I seriously love that puzzle fantasy genre and the world he created), but this is good stuff, too.

Comments | :::

January 31, 2011

Free Book-Fest continues with Jane Austen’s Emma . This is one of those cases where I saw the movie long before I read the book; and it’s one of those even weirder cases where I’m not sure the movie isn’t better.

I mean, Austen is still a fine writer and all, but the book has a fundamental problem, which is that its core romance is basically between a young girl and a dude who has been acting more like a father or (much) older brother to her. He’s basically helped raise her since she was a little girl, and the part where he has worked to mold her into a woman he can fall in love with? Yeah, icky.

So in the movie, the actors are able to underplay the parental dynamic and try to make it more like a friendship between a flighty, enthusiastic young woman and a proper, reserved man, and that mostly works — it still feels a little weird in the movie — but the book, well, the book is what it is. Definitely not Austen’s best.

Comments | :::

January 31, 2011

Speaking of Baen giving away their books, I actually paid six bucks for Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryoburn , because it didn’t even occur to me that they would just give away a highly-anticipated new release. I seriously have no idea what they’re thinking over there, or if they’re just on autopilot from the era when ebooks were a promotional tool used to sell “real” books instead of actually being the real book.

Anyway, though, Cryoburn, right? So it’s a Miles book, which means that you, who has read all the Miles books to date, are going to read it, and therefore it would be spoilery for me to talk about. In fact, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that even talking about the book in the vaguest and most general terms would be more spoilery than anything I would want to read, so I’ll just skip right to the conclusion.

The book is pretty decent, and if it’s not up with the best Vorkosigan books, neither is it one of the worse ones. It’s sort of like Cetaganda in its way. But of course you’ll read it anyway, especially since it’s free. (And if you haven’t read any of these books, well, they’re all free, and they’re mostly excellent, so you should.)

Comments | :::