July
31,
2008
The book that interrupted my prophecied comic binge was Steven Brust’s Jhegaala
. Which, really, is sort of the perfect counter-point to my Butcher binge, because reading this now vividly illustrates the difference between reading a whole bunch of books in a series all in one swift run, and reading them as isolated dribs and drabbles spaced out over years.
Because Jhegaala was a perfectly fine book, and if I’d read it immediately after finishing Dzur (and two days after finishing Issola), I’d doubtless have thought it was all super-awesome and been pissed off only that there wasn’t more to read. But as it is, it felt like an interesting little story-nugget, a nice appetizer, but hardly a full meal.
And that’s not just because it’s a single book written years after the last; it’s also because it’s set in the middle of the series, chronologically, between Phoenix and Athyra. Brust has written other intra-series books before, and I never thought it was any sort of problem at all — in fact, I always liked hearing vaguely about an event and then later getting to read about the actual event. It makes it seem like the world has even more depth than it probably does.
But that’s when I know that I’m going to be able to pick up the next book and keep going with the main storyline. Here, it looks like it’ll probably be years again before we get another Vlad book, and I’m still waiting for the events of Issola to really hit, so after waiting this long and knowing I’ll have to wait longer, this just isn’t satisfying enough.
But if you haven’t started the Vlad series yet, you’ll be able to read the whole thing straight through, and you won’t have any idea what I’m bitching about. I can only recommend that course of action.
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July
31,
2008
So I predicted that after finishing off the ol’ Dresden books, I’d plow through a pile of comic books. Well, if a pile can consist of a single item, my prediction was correct, anyway.
In this case, the pile was Brian Michael Bendis’ The Mighty Avengers, vol. 2: Venom Bomb
. On the plus side for the series is that Bendis is a good writer, and he’s doing some fun stuff with thought bubbles (one of the under-appreciated tools of comics). On the minus side is that it’s full of heroes with no real backstory (Ares? The Sentry?) and second-stringers (Ms. Marvel, The Wasp, Wonder Man, the Black Window). On the even bigger minus side is that it’s seemingly just connective tissue between Major Events, as it started from the Civil War plotline and is taking no break at all before it launches into Secret Invasion.
On the biggest plus side is that it’s a comic book full of superheroes in the Marvel universe, and I have very minimal standards for reading such things, so we’re all good.
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July
19,
2008
So the good news is that Jim Butcher’s Small Favor
is super-great. If the ninth book of the series was a bit weak, the tenth is a return to form; so it looks like the weak book was just an aberration and not the beginning of a trend. Which is, all things considered, highly excellent.
Now, on to book... oh. Right. April 2009, eh? Sigh.
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July
16,
2008
So I could tell you that Jim Butcher’s White Night
isn’t as good as the previous few volumes, that it felt a little lower-key and less intense, more akin to the earlier books. But really, if I did tell you that, what would you do with it?
It’s not like anyone who’s reading the series is going to stop doing so. And it’s even less likely that somebody who’s not reading it is going to have their mind changed in either direction because I report that book nine is merely very good instead of completely excellent.
So forget I said anything. Now, on to book ten.
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July
14,
2008
It’d be easy to get the impression that the Dresden books are just episodic mysteries that can be read in any order. I mean, take a look at Jim Butcher’s Proven Guilty
, the eighth book in the series.
The cover starts off the pretense by subtitling the book “A Novel of The Dresden Files”. Not “Book Eight of The Dresden Files,” just “A Novel.” Inside, Butcher continues the theme by giving us the same introductions that he’s given us in every single book. Hey, Harry’s VW Beetle isn’t really blue anymore, since he’s had lots of panels replaced, but he calls it the Blue Beetle. We’re told this with predictable regularity in every single volume of the series, just as every Encyclopedia Brown book tells us that Idaville has a low crime rate. It’s as if Butcher really thinks we’re going to pick up this random novel of the Dresden Files and start reading here.
But — and this is important — you should ignore all that, because these books aren’t at all episodic, and there are deep and important running storylines and character developments, many of which come to a head in this book and are handled masterfully.
Yet another great installment of an excellent series. And now, on to book nine.
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July
13,
2008
I regard basically everything I might say about the story in Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat
to be a spoiler, so let me instead just say a quick thing about the Dresden series in general.
So: What’s really surprising to me is that the series is getting better as it goes along. There aren’t a whole lot of series that get better all the way through book seven. At a hasty thought, I’m coming up with Pratchett’s Discworld (which had its best volumes at either 20 or 29 by Wikipedia Pete’s reckoning), and that’s both good company to be in, and well-boding for future installments. Like Pratchett, Butcher’s writing is getting sharper, his jokes getting funnier, his characters’ relationships getting deeper, and his world-building getting stronger.
Also, despite what you may consider the high praise that I’m lavishing on these books, I think I’ve been mentally underestimating them. Whenever I tear through a series quickly and addictively like this, I tend to think of it as something fluffy and light, and I guess these are — and yet, there’s not a damn thing wrong with them, and whenever they have a chance to fall into cheap cliche and comfortable ruts, they go just a little bit off the path and do something slightly less obvious. They’re clearly entertaining reading, but they’re quality entertaining, like Bujold at her prime or Weber without all the horrid politics.
All that said, I hate to hype things up, because then you’ll read the books and inevitably be all disappointed. My own expectations for the Dresden books (gleaned from unreliable sources and misapplied snark) was that they were trashy, guilty fun like those Anita Blake books are supposed to be, which I think has been a great help toward my being so impressed. What I really want to say is that these books are precisely as good as will make you read them, but no better — so, what I need you to do is to chalk up all my raving to weird idiosyncratic reactions on my part, but figure that there must be something interesting there, even if this sort of book isn’t really your thing, and that they’re worth checking out and might be kinda okay, you guess.
Easy, right? Now, on to book eight for me.
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July
9,
2008
As promised, Jim Butcher’s Summer Knight, Death Masks, and Blood Rites
, books four through six of the Dresden Files.
The virtues of the earlier books — great characters, increasingly interesting world-building, and incredible pacing — continue, and are joined by Butcher’s writing getting consistently better, particularly (and unexpectedly) in the direction of humor. It’s rare for “witty dialogue” to actually be witty dialogue without the scare quotes, but in these books it mostly is — and there are some genuinely funny laugh out loud lines that I’ll refrain from quoting only because I’m too lazy to page through the books and find them considerate to spoil the joke for you when you get there.
Excellent — and addictive — stuff. And now, on to book seven.
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