Wyrd Sisters finished; The Man Who Was Thursday started

Around about Mort, I reached the point where the Discworld novels really pick up speed. I had faith that the books were getting there - I'd read Good Omens and knew that Pratchett's comic writing was solid. Additionally, these are extraordinarily popular books. There's bound to be a reason for that. So I had a feeling it just needed time to get going.

Now, I have talked to a few people who have told me that they feel as if they didn't quite get the big deal with Terry Pratchett. They tried reading the Discworld books, and just didn't care for it. I wonder if those people started at the beginning - because in the first couple of books, Pratchett is clearly still discovering his style.

So if you've tried to read the Discworld books from the beginning and just haven't been able to get into them, I recommend you start with Wyrd Sisters. You don't have to start from the beginning. The books do not carry on a greater storyline - there are times when characters from one book show up in another, but they are not telling a bigger story in which you are missing out if you fail to read those others. There's no need to be a completionist. You have permission to start wherever you like.

But the reason you should start here is that Wyrd Sisters is so spectacular. It spoofs Macbeth brilliantly throughout the story - imagine Macbeth from the witches' point of view, if the witches were actually reluctant to meddle, or even reluctant to be in a coven. It has also been the funniest so far. Give it another shot. The payoff is worth it.

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Next up I'm reading The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. All I really know about this book is that lots of writers I like recommend it (which is certainly good enough for me). All I really know about Chesterton is that he inspired Gilbert (aka Fiddler's Green) in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman.

The Road finished; for the love of God please let me read something funny

I checked The Road out of the library on last Wednesday. I finished it today (Monday) - which has got to be a record for me. One thing I can say about The Road - the story definitely pulls you forward. There are no chapters, no clean endings to the trials and perils that the characters face, just breaks between moments. It kept me reading.


But that same quality meant I could not put it down last night, until it got very late into the evening, which meant I had to sit up and watch a few minutes of Ocean's Eleven on TV to clear my mind for a while before sleeping. Because this story is an absolute nightmare.

If it were not on my reading list, I don't know if I would ever willingly read it. I believe it is the bleakest story I've ever read. And that's considering that I really enjoyed watching No Country for Old Men (adapted from another one of Cormac McCarthy's books).

The story is about two nameless characters, a man and his son, in a post-apocalyptic world. The event that caused the apocalypse is never fully described, but the boy was born soon after it occurred. Now he is older and he and his father - alone, because the mother committed suicide - are travelling south through America to try and find someplace warmer. On the road they have to scavenge for food in abandoned stores and houses because all wildlife and virtually all plant life has been killed off by the unnamed event. They also have to avoid roaming bands of marauders who have turned to cannibalism in order to survive. Meanwhile, the man tries to preserve his son's innocence and goodness.

The story is quite moving, and it's easy to see that it has earned its rave reviews. McCarthy demonstrates the tremendous emotion the man has for his son, and also reveals the boy's growing doubts about whether or not they really are "the good guys," as his father tells him. It also has a mythological quality - they are on a quest facing terrible hardships and monsters. They succeed because of luck, grace, and good guesses.

However, I also felt that the boy suffered the misfortune of being born to parents who were inadequate in many ways. Obviously the mother's failure is clear in her inability to stay alive for her child. The father has a survivalist's mindset (on the night that the unnamed event occurs, he immediately fills up the tub with water, knowing that it will be needed). This same mindset causes him to be distrustful of any other survivors, and to worry after the survival of his son so myopically that he endangers his son's essential goodness even as he tries to preserve it.

Of course, to say that one's parents are inadequately prepared to handle the apocalypse might be judging them a bit too harshly.

So overall, it was a well-written story. According to a little research after finishing it, the book has also been acclaimed by environmentalists as a strong argument for their cause - which is clearly an appropriate interpretation. It has obvious value. But it was also haunting to read. After reading several pages while stopping for lunch at Whole Foods, I then finished my shopping giving my fellow patrons suspicious looks - would you eat people if you were in this situation? How about you? There are some easy jokes I could make here, but it didn't feel like "ha ha, people who buy high-quality groceries are hilarious" - it felt like my world view had been seriously tainted. I would have cast the same suspicious looks at the salt of the earth types at the Wal Mart ("ha ha, people who shop at Wal Mart are funny" yeah, shut up. Seriously, this book is a waking nightmare).

Which leads me to the next selection, because it is time for my brain to be cleansed. Next up is Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett, from the Discworld series. It will be a while before I get started because I still have a few non-list books from the library to finish up. Honestly, if I'd known The Road would be this bleak and also this fast, I would have just checked out Wyrd Sisters during the same visit.

Brave New World started and finished; The Road started

Normally I post when I start a new book from the list, but things didn't work out like that this time.

I blame the iPhone.

I just got one, and I was extremely distracted by the downloading and utilization of apps. I mean, it's basically a toy that makes phone calls. I know it has several practical applications, but mostly I've used it to play. Not only are there plenty of apps that are fun to use, there are also games that are made specifically for the iPhone, like Angry Birds and Slayer Pinball Rocks. I highly recommend that pinball game, by the way. One review of it basically said get over your fear of satanism and buy this game. I have no fear of satanism (well, not Slayer's brand of it anyway), and so I did. Excellent pinball game. So much fun to play. My high score is 11,561,810.

So all these little distractions have kept me from blogging. But not from reading. So without ever taking the time to blog about it, I started Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. And then I finished it, because the book is really short.

Of course if you know anything about Brave New World, you know that it's only appropriate that I was distracted from blogging it by entertainment. Brave New World is a dystopian novel that supposes that the government may seek to control us by providing us with a wealth of entertainment and no desire to ever do anything but work and be entertained. In other words, no time for thought, no time for civil unrest, no time to wonder if things might not be quite right. Likewise, everyone under this particular government is bred from test tubes and raised being conditioned to love being the class that they are assigned prior to birth, and to love the job that is decided upon for them. No one is meant to be unhappy with who they are, what they do, and where life has placed him. It's all by the design of government, a government that has turned Henry Ford into a god-like person. It's an assembly line world, where everything and also everyone is generated on an assembly line.

Of course, not everyone comes out quite right, and a few characters aren't quite happy with the way they live - even though their conditioning is so strong that it makes them reluctant to act on their unhappiness. Enter the character John, a "savage" from a reservation (in other words, a free man that was born naturally and without the restrictions of the government), and the discontented characters begin to break down.

Things go kind of crazy at that point. John is unrealistically chaste, and is fully ashamed at himself for even entertaining the idea of participating in the modern society that he witnesses off of the reservation. He tortures himself as penance. He eventually goes crazy - quoting Shakespeare all along (the title of the book is from The Tempest).

My first reaction to this story is that it's interesting to read a dystopian tale that is not Orwellian. I don't think I'd previously considered that most dystopian tales are basically built upon the foundation of Orwell's work, in which a menacing government forces a helpless public to live miserable lives through force and violence. Brave New World flips that idea upside down with the idea that you might better control a population with the promise of happiness - provide lots of sports and entertainment, teach them to have sex frequently and with multiple partners without denying anyone, and indoctrinate them that if you ever begin to worry about something, you should take drugs - provided by the government. It's a fascinating idea.

The introduction of John causes things to break down. He's repeatedly referred to as "the Savage," which is clearly meant as an ironic statement regarding how he is more civilized than the "civilized" society. But John's growing insanity made me feel like the author treated John as a convenient proxy, and indeed considered him savage - not a representation of the ideals of the intellectual author. He seems too connected to stereotypes of the quaintness and ignorance of tribal people. John's self-abuse and the rituals of manhood from his village - which involve whipping a boy until he bleeds, a ritual that John longs to be tested by - also demonstrate a bizarre theme of the novel: that if life doesn't present you with some pain then you must quite literally create it, or else you can't be a whole person.

Also, I pity any high school English teacher who, upon assigning this as required reading, has to deal with the snarkiness of high school students who decide to use this story as evidence that Shakespeare will apparently cause you to go crazy. Obviously that's not the point of adding Shakespeare to the story, but I know how those kids can be. Conversely, it made me want to go find a good rendition of The Tempest to watch.

Overall it was entertaining, and by stepping out of the typical Orwellian model, I found it a bit more thought provoking than I might otherwise. It's definitely a good read if you like your dystopia a bit on the weird side.

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My next book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The Road is a bleak story about a man and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. My early prediction - it's not likely to end happy.

Hiatus yields varying results; Return of the Dapper Men saves the day

Happy New Year!

My last post was about all the comic book anthologies that I was eagerly awaiting from the library. They arrived, although I'm not sure how I feel about the anthology title, The Best American Comics. They may have been better named "The Best Independent American Comics."

Or "A Collection of Independent Comics", because I think that "best" might be pushing it.

Perhaps "So Fringe that they Mostly Seem Dumb."

Or how about "What Have R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, and Chris Ware Been Up to this Year?" Because seriously, every single book, each year, features each of these artists.

I became convinced to go check these out because Neil Gaiman edited the 2010 edition, which the library does not have. I went to look at the edition that he edited at a bookstore, and found it much more interesting than the previous 4 editions.

When checking all of these books out, I also checked out one anthology that was not a part of this series: The Year's Best Graphic Novels, Comics, & Manga. This anthology came out one year only, in 2005, and featured some truly entertaining stuff, including Scott Pilgrim. The 2010 edition of the Best American series of anthologies was the first to feature Scott Pilgrim - and thanks guest editor Neil Gaiman for that, but what a pity that this series only paid attention to that excellent book after the movie was released. The Year's Best anthology featured a few more comics I really like (specifically Fables, and an honorable mention to Courtney Crumrin although it was not excerpted in the book) and gave me a few ideas for some new stuff to check out. It's too bad that this anthology only came out that one year.

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Seeking out the edition that Neil Gaiman edited did pay off in one major way - while looking for it at the local Barnes and Noble, I found a graphic novel that outshone all the rest - Return of the Dapper Men by Jim McCann, illustrated by Janet Lee. I was drawn to it originally because of the steampunk imagery, and figured it might be fun to page through while wasting a little time in the bookstore. My first surprise was that Tim Gunn wrote the introduction to this book - yes, that Tim Gunn. I felt as if the book couldn't surprise me more after the revelation that Tim Gunn likes comics.

I was wrong. It's a gorgeous book.

So to cut to the chase, I got a Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas and went back and bought that book. No regrets.

The book actually has a trailer - watch the video to get a taste of it.

Finished Left Hand of Darkness; started a hiatus

I finally finished The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm just going to dive right into a brief description of the book, and then I'll talk about my impressions.

The story is about an envoy - Genly Ai -who is originally from earth, and who is sent to a planet to represent a galactic alliance of planets, which would like for this new planet to join up. The planet - which is called Gethen - is unaware of life on other planets. Right away, imagine the difficulty involved. Imagine if an alien came to earth and wanted to address us all us "earthlings" and ask us to join his planetary union. All the nations, agreeing on one thing. I'll note that while Le Guin kind of simplifies the nations of the planet in this story, she also makes it clear that an entire planet of nations agreeing on one thing is a bit difficult to accomplish.

Genly Ai has several troubles to overcome. The nation he lands in, Karhide, has bizarre politics that he doesn't understand. They have a system of honor and respect called "shifgrethor" in which they seldom speak plainly, which allows them to save face. They very seldom speak straightforwardly. The other Gethenian nation he deals with is Orgoreyn, where people act very straightforwardly but there are often hidden purposes behind it.

Additionally, almost all people of Gethen are androgynous. They have no gender except for when they go into "kemmer" once a month, which is basically like an animal going into heat. At that time their bodies choose a gender, and not necessarily the same one every time - one person may be a father to some children and a mother to others. There are occasional anomalies on Gethen in which a person is born with a gender and stays in that gender all the time. These people are considered perverts, as is Genly Ai. Meanwhile, Genly has trouble relating to these androgyns. He tends to characterize them all as men when they are not in kemmer, but is often put off by any feminine traits he sees in them.

Finally, Gethen is in an ice age. The conditions there are much colder than he is accustomed to, which leads to numerous hardships.

So clearly, Le Guin bit off a lot with this story. The book was published in 1969 when women writers were not very common in sci fi. While the feminist aspect of the story is not nearly the most significant issue, it's difficult for me to read this without concluding that Le Guin was overly eager to prove herself. There are just so many things - politics, gender, man vs. nature, war - the Gethenians have no word for war. They do not have wars, and it is suggested that this is because they have no gender, but this is not defended. I believe that she intentionally left it uncertain, but it's just one of many unresolved issues that left me feeling like the story was incomplete. My best sense of what the story is about is an outsider learning to understand a different race of people, and the story gets there eventually through the relationship between Genly Ai and Estraven, a Prime Minister of Karhide who assists Genly throughout the story. But it's a very slow story of understanding, partly thanks to the many sidetracks into other themes.

And then there is the language.

Kemmer is well explained. I could only figure out the meaning of shifgrethor through the internet, and even then it's unclear. There's also the Gethenian calendar, which is constantly being referred to, and which has no similarity to our calendar (of course). And the Gethenians have numerous words for snow, which are also often used. This seems unnecessary because Genly is translating to us from their language. Instead of using this particular word for snow, he could just say "sleet" or "slushy snow" or whatever. As if that isn't enough, Gethenians often have lengthy and complicated names which are not so different from the names of their months or their many words for snow. Often I got so bogged down in alien language that I got lost.

Of course, China Mieville also used his own made up calendar in The Scar, and it didn't cause any problems for me at all. The language isn't the only obstacle here. The pacing was very slow, and the story had no clear direction for a long time.

This is not the fault of the author at all, but while I've been finishing up the book, the weather here has been of the winter season so far. As I'm struggling to get my apartment warm, I've also been reading about Genly Ai and Estraven crossing over frozen lands that are barely hospitable to life. It's been a bit too easy to imagine their conditions. That last section of the book, when Genly and Estraven rely on each other closely for survival, is when Genly finally understands Estraven and shifgrethor. The book doesn't make it any clearer to the reader, though.

I think Le Guin was reaching for some very big concepts when she wrote this book, and she just didn't fully realize them all. I recognize that this book symbolizes a change in sci fi from stories about technology to stories about people, and that's certainly a contribution that changed the genre. But like so many influential works, it's rough and messy. The stories it inspired were more well crafted than this. It's value is obvious, but it's a dense read and doesn't really pay off at the end.

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I've decided to take the Christmas holidays off and read some comics, which is my favorite way to spend a hiatus. This hiatus was inspired by Neil Gaiman's recent spot on Talk of the Nation. Neil was discussing The Best American Comics 2010, which he edited. I'd never stopped to consider that there are comic book anthologies, and hearing about this really thrilled me.

See, some time ago my comic book guy was fired. I don't really care the reason why he was fired (and in case you were wondering the owner did not say it was theft when he gave me a lengthy and extremely unprofessional lecture on why he did fire him). My comic book guy read everything, and every time I came in to the store he had recommendations for me. He was also a good, non-judgmental comic book guy. The store owner is more like the comic book guy on the Simpsons, and regularly let me know that he hated everything I was buying (let me translate that for you - I don't read superhero comics, and so he hates everything I read because that is all that he reads). Basically, no matter what may have been wrong with my comic book guy as a worker, he caused me to buy comics through his excellent recommendations. The owner, on the other hand, drove me off because I really have no desire to patronize a store where the owner openly despises my patronage.

So I stopped buying comics from Jerky McNerdy-Snob's Comic Shop, which works just fine as a statement of my displeasure, but left me in the lurch by way of new comic book recommendations. I tried getting comic book recommendations from the internet, but it wasn't all that helpful. I don't get that personalized touch I got with my comic book guy, who knew my tastes.

So this anthology comes as a real delight to me, because it provides a survey of stuff that I can browse through and pick what I like, and pursue it further. I immediately went to the library catalog and found the volumes for 2006 through 2009. They have them at the library! Actually they don't because I reserved them all and checked them out tonight. So wait your turn.

Now, I'm looking forward to a merry Christmas made all the merrier through new comic book discovery.

On that note, this is most likely my last post of the season, and also the year. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Sourcery finished; The Left Hand of Darkness started

Wow, that was just a week. I think that's record timing for me.

Sourcery was everything I expected - funny, enjoyable, well written. If you've never read anything by Terry Pratchett, you really should. The Discworld series (which Sourcery is from) is a fantasy series that spoofs fantasy novels. If you don't feel like committing to a series, no problem - you can really start with any book in the series. Some of the characters are recurring, but the books don't need to be read in any particular order.

Even though I've really loved this series so far, I find it really hard to review comedy. So I decided that a section of the novel would represent the story the best:

"What on earth are you doing?" said Conina, not taking her eyes off the ghastly figure.

"I'm looking up the Index of Wandering Monsters," said Nigel. "Do you think it's an Undead? They're awfully difficult to kill, you need garlic and-"...

(a short while later)

"Of course, it could be a Zombie," said Nijel, running his finger down a page. "It says here you need black pepper and salt, but-"

"You're supposed to fight the bloody things, not eat them," said Conina.

The Discworld series seems to be getting better as it goes along. Sourcery had me laughing more than any of the others so far, but so did Mort (the last one I read), but so did Equal Rites (the one before that). Good books, highly recommended.

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Next up is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I haven't read any of her novels before, although I feel like I've always been aware of her as an author. I'm afraid to give an opinion of her in advance or even to feel excited about this, because every time I do that with a writer that's new to me, I end up hating the book.

Lost Souls finished; Sourcery started

I've finished Lost Souls, this year's Halloween vampire selection.

I did not like this book.

As always with books that I dislike, the main thing that nags at me is the writing. All along I've been thinking of situations in the story that were offensive to me (more on that later) but in the end, the very thing that made them offensive is not that they are in the story, but how they are used in the story. It's all in the style, not in the subject.

My main critique is that this feels like a teen novel. To clarify what I mean, there are very good quality novels that are about issues that concern teenagers primarily, but that can be enjoyed by adults as well because of the quality of the writing. Then there are teen novels, which are dummied-down to a low reading level and deal with subjects within a very narrow world view. In other words, they are novels that insult the reader's intelligence and don't ask the reader to think very much. Lost Souls falls more into the latter category.

Lost Souls also leans very heavily on shock value. Adults having sex with teenagers is a common scenario, but not a theme - the situations are merely lewd and gratuitous. There are also two incestuous relationships in the novel. One involves the non-vampires, a man and his teenage daughter. The scene is detailed graphically, which is absolutely cringe-inducing to read. Nothing screams exploitation like an incest scene written as if it's supposed to be hot. There's no real purpose behind it, other than his daughter has boobies now, and has messed up values because she takes Dracula a bit too seriously.

And yes, really, there's a girl in the book who has messed up values because she reads. There are numerous references to Dracula in this book, and plenty of gothic kids who want to be vampires. Apparently they want it so much, they are willing to prove themselves through acts of depravity. It reads like a true crime novel from the Satan-scare 80s, that strives to convince you that all goths are so obsessed with vampires that they set bizarre and depraved goals of initiation upon themselves. I heard that they have to break every one of the 10 commandments! I heard that they have to commit each of the seven deadly sins! I heard that if you see someone driving at night with their lights off, you shouldn't flash your lights to warn them, because it's really a car full of goths who are going to follow you and kill you and drink your blood!

Alas, these gothic kids cannot become vampires, because in this book vampires are born, not made. You know how with every vampire novel, the author feels the need to rewrite the vampire myth? This one is no different: a vampire is created when a vampire has sex and becomes pregnant or impregnates someone. This can include procreation with a human - humans can impregnate a female vampire, or carry a vampire child. The child kills the human at birth - so female vampires make a great effort to not get pregnant. As a safety against abortion, vampire spawn effect the mother's brain so that she puts the survival of the child first. These children - even though they are part human - are not dhampirs, but vampires. Older vampires have fangs, can walk in the sun but are less tolerant of it, and are unable to consume anything but blood. Meanwhile younger vampires can frolic in the sun all day and eat whatever they like, although blood is what truly nourishes them. But they don't have fangs so they have to file their teeth. This is not, again, because they are all half-human, but because of evolution. Vampire evolution. Fairly rapid evolution, thank you very much Mr. Darwin.

I can see where writers find it interesting to make their vampires their own, but the changes in this novel come rather close to the baseball playing, sparkly in the sunlight variety. Furthermore, the vampire's chief role is to symbolize taboo subjects that humans have trouble facing. It seems like a waste of time to put all this effort into defining what a vampire is if there is a story to tell - we know what vampires are, ya'll. They drink blood, they like the night, they have sex with absolutely everybody. Yes, get on with it - what's this story about?

And what this story is really about is how we are just as bad as the vampires. Every disgusting thing a vampire does is mirrored in a human's actions. The writing goes to great lengths to show that just living is a disgusting act. Even moments that seem meant to show some kind of tenderness between characters attempting to make a connection with one another are spoiled by the incessant use of the word "spit" every time two people kiss. Bodily fluids abound. Gluttonous young vampires eat junk food non-stop, spewing cake when they talk and smiling through chocolate-smeered teeth. For what reason?

Because we are all disgusting. We are all bags of spit and snot and blood, doing gross things like kissing and eating, like, all the time. The monsters and us, we are exactly alike.

I can just hear some ridiculous nihilistic teenager saying "whoa. We are all monsters." Maybe that teenager was me, once. I want to go back in time and smack her upside the head. Snap out of it, kid! Life ain't so awful!

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Now that that's over with, I've decided to start a new trend. Every time I read a novel that I dislike, that offends the intellect and the senses, that makes me feel like my brain needs to be cleansed, I'm going to follow it with a book from the Discworld series. There are quite a lot of them, and they are witty and charming, so it's the perfect change of pace. So now I've started reading Sourcery by Terry Pratchett. So far it's funny and doesn't make me feel like I can't read it while eating. I feel quite confident that it will remain that way throughout.