Weasel Words
A Book Log
June
30,
2002
I've been reading my current book for a surprisingly long while, thanks to
factors both intrinsic (it's not a fast read) and extrinsic (I've been
moving, and have become rather addicted to the computer game
Morrowind). Of course, I feel simply terrible about neglecting my
legion of adoring fans; so, to make it up to both of them, I decided that
I should read something quick so that I could make an entry. So, I picked
up Kurt Busiek's The Wizard's Tale
, a short graphic novel.
I first encountered Busiek through his brilliant Astro City series.
Astro City is the synthesis of the Silver Age thesis and the Watchmen/Dark
Knight antithesis. It's a superhero series that retains all the good
stuff of classic superhero books -- a sense of exuberant possibility, neat
superheroes with cool powers and costumes, and a detailed, intricate world
with its own mythological history -- and combines them with the
psychological depth and greater realism of the dark 'n' gritty books. I
absolutely love this series.
His Marvels, which examines the history of the Marvel Universe from
the perspective of a non-super-powered civilian, is also excellent.
After I'd read both of these works, I started to buy everything I could
find of Busiek's.
This turned out to be something of a mistake. Busiek has done a lot of
work for conventional monthly titles, and it's not up to the standard of
(what I think of as) his personal works. I don't know if that's because
he just doesn't try as hard, because the limitations of a tight schedule
take their toll, or just because he's trying to stay within the house
constraints. Either way, though, his work on (for instance) Avengers is
only worth reading by people who like straightforward, simple, slightly
cheesy superhero books. (Which I actually do, so it wasn't a complete
loss there.)
Anyway, though, The Wizard's Tale looked like it would be a more
personal story, so I decided to give it a whirl. Unlike most of his other
stuff, it's not superhero-related at all -- it's a straight fantasy. The
protagonist is an evil wizard who really doesn't like being evil, and is
lousy at it, besides; and now he's just found the location of the codex
that will allow the evil wizards to complete their dominion over the
world.
It's a reasonably interesting concept executed reasonably well. The art
is attractive, the background details are interesting, and the story's got
a nice pace. However, there's no spark to the book; there's no lightning
moment of insightful surprise, no real emotional jolts, and no sentences
that demand to be savored. It's competent, but forgettable. And it's
also really short (I read it in under an hour), so almost certainly not
worth the $20 it exorbitantly costs.
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June
18,
2002
Chad Orzel warned me about possible repetitiveness, so I was prepared for
Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs
to be astonishingly
similar to Sleeping in Flame -- in fact, I was kind of looking
forward to it, since Sleeping in Flame was a damn fine book.
But that's not quite what I got. Sure, there are some elements in common
between the two books, but the commonality wasn't overwhelming. If I'd
not had Chad's warning in mind, I might not have thought twice about the
similarities; with it, I only noticed the enormous dissimilarities.
The biggest difference between the two books is the unquantifiable one of
tone. Sleeping in Flame was a meditative, reflective book, and was
fundamentally about human relationships; The Land of Laughs was
creepy and eerie, and was about the disconnect between appearances and
reality. This tonal difference completely outshadowed any similarities of
plot or characterization.
It also meant, regrettably, that I liked this book less. I have a strong
aversion against horror -- I really just don't get the appeal of the
genre. Back when I was younger, I was firmly of the opinion that if lots
of people liked something, there must be something good there, so I tried
reading Stephen King. I read a half-dozen of his books, enjoying maybe
one of them (The Stand, which is more post-apocalypse science
fiction than horror), before I realized that perhaps other people just
enjoy different things than I do.
Carroll's book isn't straight horror, but it's shaded too far in that
direction for my liking. Objectively speaking, it's probably nearly as
good as Sleeping in Flame, which I adored; but for my tastes, it's
decidedly sub-par.
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June
16,
2002
John Kessel's Corrupting Dr. Nice
desperately and obviously
wants to be hyper-clever, despite which it's reasonably decent.
We join our heroine in media scam, as she attempts to con a wealthy
time-traveller in medieval France; we jump to our hero smuggling a
dinosaur out of the Paleozoic; and then we get our Meet Cute when they
stumble into each other in Jerusalem A.D. 30 -- a time and place which
inspires a few obvious questions.
The remainder of the book concerns itself with two plots arising from this
meeting; one is a rather obvious and unconvincing romance, and the other
concerns the political and ethical ramifications of time travel. Neither
one of the plots is especially compelling -- and one of the biggest flaws
of the book is that Kessel imagines that both are just infused with
essence of coolness. The dialogue is particularly embarrassing, as it
attempts the sort of panache that Daniel Keys Moran pulls off in The
Long Run, but fails to achieve it.
Still, the book isn't without merit. The world-building is solid, with a
lot of interesting details, like the LEX justice system. Even there,
though, Kessel's desire to be writing a cool book shows through -- the
world is media-saturated and show-biz-cynical in the same way that you see
in the worst of Bruce Sterling's work.
The overall effect of this desperate grab for originality, paradoxically,
is that the book feels a bit generic. There's little to complain about,
and if it were the first SF I'd ever read, I might have really liked it;
as it is, though, it's merely competent and uninspiring. A year from now,
I'll likely have nearly forgotten it.
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June
10,
2002
One of the symptoms of my insane desire for order is my fondness for
things that match. This manifests itself on my bookshelf in a number of
ways: The very first books I bought, way back when, were boxed sets with
matching covers; I arrange my books by publisher; and I have an
over-weening fondness for publisher-based series with uniform covers.
That last manifested itself, when I was young, in the form of a gazillion
DragonLance and Forgotten Realms books on my shelves. Since then, I've
acquired more taste, and turned my eyes to Penguin Classics. So a few
months ago, I was paging through the Penguin catalog, trying to figure out
which books I wanted to buy when my eyes alighted (alit?) on Edwin A.
Abbott's Flatland
.
The name triggered up nostalgia. Somewhere along the way, as a kid, I'd
read a book that focused on mathematical fiction and had excerpts from
(among others since forgotten) The Phantom Tollbooth and
Flatland, both of which I'd re-read time and again. For whatever
reason, though, I'd never realized that the Flatland piece was just an
excerpt from a longer work; having discovered that this was the case, I
put the book on my buying list.
The bit I remember reading when young was a rather
science-fictional thing that took the premise of a 2D universe
populated by polygons, and tried to explain how the universe worked
from the viewpoint of one of those shapes (the narrator is a Square).
Interesting thoughts about how all different shapes looked like lines
(since, of course, they're viewed edge-on), how sharp-pointed
isosceles triangles serve in the military, how shapes of regular
polygons are discerned by means of feeling a single angle, and so
forth. It wasn't so much a story as an interesting
thought-experiment.
So reading the actual book was a bit surprising. Oh, the mathematical
gedankenexperiment layer was still there, but there was also an entire
layer of socio-political commentary. Flatland, the reader comes to
understand, is not just physically different from our own world, but
politically different as well. What's particularly interesting about this
is that Flatland is a piece of genuine Victoriana, written back in
the late nineteenth century, so the politics have this charmingly quaint
feel to them.
Actually, that's a good way to describe the entire book: Charmingly
quaint. The entire book has a feel of musty scholarship; you can almost
imagine Abbott retiring to the study to write this out longhand. And,
oddly enough for a book populated entirely by polygons (with a cameo from
a sphere), the book has a certain personality and character to it.
Flatland wasn't mind-blowingly great, but it was certainly a
pleasant diversion.
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June
7,
2002
Picking up Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass
, the third
and final volume in his trilogy, was a more imposing task than picking up
the first two. Pullman seems to have fallen into the trilogist's
trap -- at the end of the second book, he belatedly realizes that he's
only halfway done with the trilogy, and needs to cram a lot into
the final volume.
Tad Williams' To Green Angel Tower, a third volume that was split
into two 900-page books for paperback release, stands as the crowning
example of the trilogy-at-all-costs third volume; fortunately Pullman's
case isn't that bad, but this book is nevertheless far longer (and with
smaller type) than the previous two. Which isn't a big deal, really,
except that it is. Somehow, the idea of reading through another 30 pages
of a 480 page book is less appealing than reading through another 30 pages
of a 280 page book. I like a feeling of tangible progress, I suppose.
At any rate, this book took a lot longer to read than the first two, both
because of its length, and because I was less quick to pick it up in my
odd free moments. Actually, now that I think of it, there's another,
rather idiosyncratic, reason I was slower to read it than the previous two
volumes.
When I read books, I'm very careful with them: I won't crack the spine, I
won't get the pages dirty, I'll try to avoid scuffing the corners. This
means that I can't read while I'm eating, need to be careful where I take
the book, and must generally exercise significant care. Anne, on the
other hand, is your prototypical book-destroying reader: she wrinkles the
spine, bends corners to mark her page, and reads in the bath without
regard for the harmful effects of humidity on paper.
Since Anne got to the two previous books before I did, the books were
ruined before I started them, and I was able to treat them with a greater
casualness than I'd ever treat one of my own books; with The Amber
Spyglass, though, I was reading an essentially-new book, and even
though I knew Anne will ruin it as soon as she reads it, I found it
difficult to treat it as badly as I know she will, so I held off from
reading it in sub-optimal conditions until I was able to overcome my
instinctive protectiveness.
So we can see that allowing yourself to destroy your books makes it easier
to read them; I still don't think it's a worthwhile price to pay.
Thankfully, Anne has imposed on herself a voluntary injunction against
reading my books, so I don't need to panic about her degenerate reading
habits.
Well, that was a nice bit of digression. We were talking about a book,
weren't we? Oh, right: Pullman. Anyway, then.
The thing about this book is that I can't really tell you anything at all
about it without comprehensively spoiling the previous two books, because
the plot takes an unexpected turn midway into the series, and giving that
turn away would ruin much of the fun of developing surprise. (For that
reason, I also recommend not reading the cover blurbs or laudatory quotes;
but that's standard practice in the Kozlowskiverse, anyway.)
So, without saying a single word about the plot, I'll just tell you that
this actually is really good, and I recommend it widely. Helpful kind of
fellow, aren't I?
Okay, maybe I can be a bit more helpful: All of the setup in the previous
books is satisfactorily resolved in this one, which is quite remarkable,
considering how much setup there was. All of the plot points and all of
the character arcs are accounted for, and not always how you'd have
thought they would be. This book is an excellent conclusion to a
intricately-plotted, fast-paced, well-written, likable-character-laden,
and brilliantly original trilogy. I've got nothing but good things to say
about it.
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June
3,
2002
Like the first book in the series, Philip Pullman's The Subtle
Knife
is fast-paced and compelling. Also like the first book, I
found myself skimming through blurb quotes and award listings to see if
anyone ever really thought this was a kids' book. Because dammit, it is
unqualifiedly not. I don't even know what kind of bizarre, twisted
criteria could make somebody think that it was. Other than an under-aged
protagonist, there is nothing at all to even begin to suggest kidlit in
this series. The vagaries of the publishing world are entirely beyond me,
I'm afraid.
Anyway, though: Good book. It continues all the good stuff about the
first book, while also introducing several new twists into the series,
which is moving in an entirely unexpected direction. I'm very interested
to see where things go from here, and have already begun the third book.
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