Weasel Words
A Book Log
July
29,
2002
I really should like Charles Sheffield more than I do. His books are
packed full of science fictiony goodness, and -- most importantly -- have
that sense of pace that makes them compelling reading. But for whatever
reason, Sheffield has always remained one of my second-tier authors, one
of the guys whose books I'll buy if they look especially interesting, but
not otherwise; and whose books, once purchased, tend to sit on my
bookshelves in dusty neglect for a long time.
My suspicion is that the problem comes down to simple numbers.
Sheffield's written a lot of books, and it's hard to treat something as
precious when it's littering up the landscape. (In a way, P.G. Wodehouse
suffers from this same problem: If he'd only written five novels, I'd've
read and re-read them each a dozen times; as it is, I don't know if I'll
ever even read his whole oeuvre.)
The reason for this introspection is that I picked up Charles
Sheffield's Tomorrow and Tomorrow
this past weekend, stayed up
late reading it compulsively, liked it enormously, and wondered why I so
rarely read books by such a good author.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a deep future book: The protagonist
travels forward into time via a number of artifices (beginning with
cryo-freezing in the present day), and gets to spot-check the state of
human progress at several points in the increasingly distant future, until
he ends up yea verily at the end of the universe itself.
Structurally, this makes for an episodic book. While there is an
overarching story, million-year time skips inevitably lead to a certain
discontinuity in the supporting characters and setting, and Sheffield uses
these discontinuities to turn the story in several very different
directions -- different enough that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that
this was a fixup novel, combining three novellas and a few short stories
(there are a couple of "Interlude" chapters that are nearly capable of
standing alone).
The first third of the book can loosely be described as Observing The
March Of Progress, as we see human society evolve technologically and
culturally for some thousands of years; the second third of the book
concerns an intergalactic war; and the final third is about Our Posthuman
Future. On the whole, these thematic twists work well. Just about the
time we're starting to get a bit bored by seeing human civilization
advance, we get our big war; and about the time that we're starting to tip
into danger of being a Baen book (and now I'm trying to imagine the
process of cover uglification that would be necessary to turn this into a
Baen book), we switch to getting some perspective on the universe.
It's interesting, it's fast-paced, and it's got neat ideas (though none of
them have that compellingly original feel that you get with, say, Vinge).
And I'm still wondering why I don't read more Sheffield than I do.
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July
25,
2002
The problem with mysteries is that they have lousy beginnings.
Obviously, the interesting part of a mystery is the mysterious part, where
the detective tries to find out why the deceased was offed, why the
purloined object was lifted, or why the fraudulent earnings were reported.
But none of that investigation can happen until the
offing/lifting/reporting occurs. And none of that can occur until after
we've met our cast of suspects characters. Which means
that we've got to spend fifty pages mucking about getting a sense of who
all these people are, without anything significant happening.
Or so, at least, is the impression I'm getting from my reading of the
Brother Cadfael mysteries, another one of which (Ellis Peters' The
Raven in the Foregate
, specifically) I've just finished. Either
that, or Peters just can't write beginnings very well.
Middles and endings, though: those she can do fine. Once the crime is
committed, the book moves along nicely to a fine conclusion. The overall
feel of things is perhaps a bit too similar to the other Cadfael book I
read, but that's just the nature of long series.
A word of advice, though: I read this book second because it was right in
the omnibus edition (from the Quality Paperback Club, it appears), but
it's actually much later in the series. Normally, I don't do that kind of
thing, but I gambled that series order didn't matter here; I was wrong,
and it does. Read these in the real order, and you'll avoid much of the
confusion that I experienced.
In other book-related news, I read Alan Moore's Top Ten, Book
Two
last night. The premise here is a super-powered police force
in a world where everyone has a super power and wears a costume. I think
that perhaps I like it ever-so-slightly better than Tom Strong. It's got
a great sense of visual style, lots of little throw-off jokes and neatness
in the background (the bit with the mice was truly wonderful), nifty
writing and characters, and a fun premise. But like Tom Strong (and, for
that matter, like Watchmen), it really works best if you're already
familiar with superhero comics.
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July
18,
2002
Last night, as happens so frequently, I was looking for something fast and
light, so I picked up Alan Moore's Tom Strong, Book Two
. As
one might guess from the name, this is the second collection of Moore's
Tom Strong comic book.
Ironically, I picked it up because I was misremembering the first volume.
I remembered accurately that it was in the style of pre-Silver Age comics,
but I falsely extrapolated that into thinking that it was a completely
simple and straightforward tale of a musclebound man fighting against
alien menaces and evil villains.
There is plenty of that, yeah, but it's rather more complex than that. In
fact, this is almost a satire of old-school comics -- it plays with
conventions, varies dramatically in visual and writing style, and has
plenty of postmodern winkiness. It's pure fun of the best kind, and was
precisely what I was looking for.
I actually think that this may be my favorite Moore comic of the moment:
Promethea is dreary and pretentious, League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen is neat in concept but lacking in execution, and Top
Ten is... well, actually, I really liked the first volume, and have
the second one waiting to be read, so we'll see.
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July
15,
2002
I went camping this weekend (and what an utterly marvelous weekend it was
for camping -- picture-perfect weather). Camping, like any form of
vacation, calls for particularly light reading. It also calls for reading
that can hold up to a bit of physical abuse, as the Big Room isn't kind on
books.
So, I looked through Anne's shelves for appropriate reading, and threw a
couple of likely candidates into the book bag that we took with us. (As
an aside, you know you're a readerly couple when you go camping for a
weekend and have to bring a bag containing nothing but books.)
The first book I read was Paul Reiser's Couplehood
, which
isn't so much a book as a transcription of a stand-up routine. I'm always
kind of ambivalent about this kind of literary endeavor: it seems
disingenuous to pretend that the putative celebrity author actually wrote
the book, that Paul Reiser was sitting down at his Selectric every day
pounding out another chapter. I find ghost-written books distasteful on
principle.
But then, even if he didn't exactly write it, he didn't exactly not write
it, either. I mean, with most celebrity-authored books, the ghost-writer
needs to take a few inchoate ideas and thoughts and arrange them into a
book; but the nature of humor precludes that. If you're going to do
humor, you need to come up with not only the jokes, but a lot of the exact
wording, too. So, it may be that the ghost-writer really was more of a
transcriber (as he's tastefully described in the Acknowledgements page).
At any rate, my principled stands against ghost-writing aside, the book
was... well, have you seen the TV Show Mad About You? If you like
that, you'll like this. If not, no.
After finishing Reiser's book in short order, I turned my attention to
Ellis Peter's A Morbid Taste For Bones
(having no idea that Chad
would also read it over the weekend and thus make me look like a copycat).
This is apparently the first book in the Brother Cadfael series of period
mysteries. As you'd guess from the name of the series, the book focuses
on the sleuthing skills of a (rather worldly, actually) Benedictine monk
-- in this case, trying to solve a murder in a Welsh village.
The first five pages were pretty sloggable, as Peters simply gave
paragraph-length capsule descriptions of every character in the book; but
the pace picked up once things started to happen, and the book soon picked
up an undeniable momentum.
This is excellent light reading. It's got vivid characters, solid
plotting, impelling pace, and concrete setting. It's good, it's
different, and it's interesting. This series is definitely on my list of
books to look out for.
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July
10,
2002
Most fantasy -- or at least most of the fantasy I read -- takes place on a
big map. The characters wander from city to city, country to country, and
essentially take a tour of their world. Not so in Gene Wolfe's The
Devil In a Forest
.
This is a small novel, in every sense. Almost the entire thing is set in
a very small village and its surrounding woodland; the cast of characters
is largely confined of the village's dozen or so inhabitants, as well as a
handful of outsiders; the story's effects (despite the misleading and
wildly inaccurate back cover copy) are local; and the physical book itself
is a mere 250 pages. The Book of the New Sun this definitely
isn't.
Beyond its small size and scope, I'm not sure what to make of the book.
It's an excellent portrait of a parochial medieval village: Wolfe conveys
a solidity of detail to the place itself, and solidity of character to the
people inhabiting it. The texture and ambience of the book are terrific.
But it's a very low-key book, one that doesn't inspire great emotion or
passion. I read it quickly and interestedly enough, but I wasn't turning
pages to see what would happen, and never felt emotionally affected by
events.
It's tempting to dismiss this as a popcorn book, but that's really not the
right metaphor. It's more like a piece of stereotypical Baroque music --
technically precise, intricately detailed, making for a nice background
ambience, but with no weight and solidity to it.
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July
3,
2002
I'd never read Ovid's Metamorphoses
before, but it felt like
I had. Ovid's famous poem (which I read in an enjoyable prose translation
from Penguin Classics) tells stories from Greek and Roman myth and
folklore. They're not all instantly familiar, but many of them are -- who
hasn't read of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Phaethon, of Arachne, of
Perseus and Andromeda?
But, hey, if I've read some of these stories before, I haven't read
all of them, and it's good to read things in a quasi-primary
source, rather than in derived and edited modern compilations of
mythology. It's just how, even though everyone knows the story of the
Trojan War, reading The Iliad is still worth it.
This is undeniably a classic, in the most literal sense of the word; but,
as I did with The Canterbury Tales, I want to evaluate it on its
own merits, rather than just genuflecting in respect. Fortunately, Ovid
holds up under this sort of examination rather better than Chaucer, so I
sound a bit less of an uncultured twit.
Stylistically, we can thank the translator: I'm obviously unequipped to
determine the fidelity of the translation to the original Latin, but I am
equipped to say that the English was graceful and natural. The conversion
from poetry to prose suggests that readability in English was of more
interest to the translator than strict literality -- a choice I applaud
wholeheartedly.
Story-wise, the book is a bit odd, in that it's really a collection of
micro-stories woven together with often-flimsy segues: When Ovid finishes
a story about Cadmus, for instance, he then talks about how woe would come
to Cadmus's descendants, and inside of a paragraph, we're off reading
about someone else. These abrupt transitions threw me at first, because I
was treating them as digressions, and waiting to get back to the main
story line. But once I realized that there is no main story line, that
the text meanders through a bunch of thematically-linked anecdotes with no
overarching plot, I was set.
The biggest critique I can make is that there are an awful lot of stories
here, and they are a bit repetitive -- at about the thirtieth time that
someone gets turned into a tree for pissing off a god, it begins to feel
old hat. Still, there's enough variety (including a somewhat out-of-place
long discussion of ostensibly Pythagorean philosophy near the end, and a
truly amazing bit of sucking up to Augustus) and chocolately mythic
goodness mixed in that it's never a slog.
If, like me, you checked out every book on mythology in your junior high
library, you'll enjoy reading this (and wonder why your junior high didn't
have it on the shelves).
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July
1,
2002
(While this isn't related to my current reading, it is book-related, so
what the heck.)
I unpacked my books this weekend. Unpacking books is, depending on the
details of the experience, either a pleasant cruise through a few hours,
or a harrowing nightmare that lasts for weeks.
Last time I moved, it was the latter: I was rigid in my book-sorting
algorithm (sorted by binding type, height, publisher, author, and series,
in that order), and shelving my books was a task for which I steeled
myself night after night for far too long.
This time around, I decided not only to bite the bullet of chaos, but to
enjoy the bullet's metaphorical leady taste. My shelves are unsorted.
Completely unsorted. Del Rey abuts Bantam, Zelazny perches next to
Asimov, and hardcovers and paperbacks engage in forbidden embrace.
This creeps me out far more than I expected it to, but the advantage of
shoveling books from box to shelf can't be easily denied. Complex sorting
algorithms just require too much maintenance and upkeep to justify
themselves at my current library volume. Before this, I was treating it
as something of a hobby, arranging my shelves in the same way that others
might knit sweaters; but I'm afraid the activity no longer holds my
interest as much as it once did.
Still, I think there's a middle ground between my previous meticulousness
and my current carelessness. What I'd like to see -- and what I'd
implement if I weren't so lazy -- is a simpler sorting system where my
books are arranged first by their read/unread status, and then grouped
loosely by author.
That form of organization has several obvious benefits. First, consider
that my primary interaction with my bookshelves is searching for a new
book to read. By dividing out my read books from my unread ones, I've
just optimized the searching algorithm. (Where n = the total number of
books, and m = the number of unread books, the time it takes to look over
all unread books shrinks from an O(n) operation to an O(m). Now, m in my
case is about n/2, but for most people it's a constant of about 10-20.)
Additionally, I can get a sense of tangible progress when, upon finishing
a book, I get to move it from the unread shelf to the read shelf.
At any rate, it should be obvious that I'm still obsessive on the subject
of properly shelving books; but now my laziness has o'erthrown (aside:
replacing letters with faux-poetic apostrophes is more fun than you'd
think) my obsession, so that my bookshelves give no prima facie
evidence of my mad interest. This probably counts as progress of some
sort.
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