The Unincorporated War

Unincorporated War by Dani Kollin

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Avatars, personal incorporation, battle fatigue, mind control, a controversial view on the return of religion: this book had so many interesting ideas, which is probably why I was extra disappointed by the storytelling. I did not enjoy the storytelling because I could not engage with the characters.

Characters in the book felt like engineered aspects of the author's premise. Never for one moment did I feel as though the characters had any life of their own. In most cases characters were completely black and white- the bad guys acted like total jerks, the good guys were total goody two shoes. And it was not unusual for a character to suddenly pop up (even 3/4 of the way through the narrative) just long enough to give a long info dump on their whole life's history, be used to forward the plot, and then get conveniently killed off or simply forgotten about, and never enter into the story again. I felt like the characters were narrative tools, not people, and I could not and did not care about them at all.

Toward the climax of the book, the action did get quite exciting and engage my attention. It was almost like a tragic opera, announcing in advance what was going to happen, then letting the reader bite nails as the foreshadowed dramatic events unfolded. Unfortunately the denouement took the edge off the exciting conclusion by backpedaling and calling into question the finality of the climax. And to add insult to injury, it ended with a big old "to be continued."



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Everything Beautiful Began After

Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book had two rare distinctions for me: 1. only fiction book in which I highlighted lots passages that really struck me; 2. only book I have disliked in the middle only to find out that all the uncomfortable stuff was necessary to a good ending.
The book begins a little like a French novel, or Truffaut film. The middle sections dive into post modern 2nd person narrative, with lots of images of typewritten correspondence (it was this section that I found jarring and uncomfortable).
I was not surprised when I learned that Simon Van Booy is also the author of several philosophy books. This novel was an exploration of what it means to live- not just to survive, but to love, grow, and thrive. When the author states his thesis, he is often forced to use words that ring hollow to me: destiny, fate, God, meaning. Then he uses the characters he has breathed to life to play out the thesis, with beautiful attention to the detail of their experience. Those characters, those details, really spoke to me.
My biggest complaint would be that the narrative suggests that there is some endpoint, some place of completion in which characters have grown into their full potential. For narrative purposes there is something harmonious and satisfying at having that endpoint. But I suspect that the philosophical thesis would be more correct admitting that no person, no character, is ever truly finished.



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Wonderland: The Zen of Alice

Wonderland: The Zen of Alice by Daniel Doen Silberberg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Silberberg writes that after enlightenment, the Buddha did not think there was any way to teach the path to others, or even to put what he had experienced into words. Then he tried, anyway. Silberberg does much the same with this book on Zen. He admits there is no way to transmit his knowledge directly, like a how-to manual. Instead, he uses every method he can think of in a genuine attempt to spread the benefit of what he has learned. He uses personal anecdotes, Zen koans and stories, and, yes, even uses a little Alice in Wonderland to get his message across. As can be expected, some of these methods resonated with me more than others. Readers looking for a walk-through course on Buddhism organized around the adventures of Alice will be disappointed. But those familiar with Wonderland will see it used as one of several methods to describe something but can't be described. Silberberg does a good job of trying, anyway.



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Mistborn: The Final Empire

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Three stars means I liked it. This was an entertaining fantasy read that at times really held my attention and made me look forward to finding out what happened next. The magic of the world was satisfying in complexity and internal logic. Characters had sufficient background depth and motivation. Overall pacing was exciting. For some reason all these elements didn't come together to make magic for me. Everything was well crafted and well executed, but I was always aware that I was reading an invented story about imaginary characters in an imaginary world. I was never able to achieve total suspension of disbelief and feel as though the world was a place I could really go play, the characters old friends, the story a tale I'd heard long ago, then forgotten. My personal favorite fantasies make me feel as though I've actually lived them, and I know in my gut I've never really been to the Final Empire.



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The Astral: A Novel

The Astral: A Novel by Kate Christensen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Astral is all about experiencing life as it is, and everything from the plot, to characters, setting, and writing style beautifully convey the novel's theme. The book is set in Brooklyn. Having lived there, I felt Christensen did an excellent job of capturing the texture of real daily life in the borough. Her protagonist, a poet, prides himself on the fact that his poetry celebrates reality, that the only way he knows to live is by honestly, fully experiencing the reality of his days. The crisis at the beginning of the novel (getting kicked out by his wife in retribution for an affair he did not have) sets him on the path to discovering that he has been avoiding certain parts of his daily experience, building a fantasy of family life and marriage that either never existed or had already collapsed by the arrival of the crisis. Christensen's characters are are real and three dimensional, although a few (particularly James) feel more like foils for the protagonist and tools of the narrative than living breathing people.

Best of all, I love the ending of this book. There is a climax, a definitive ending to the story between the protagonist and his relationship to the life he believed he was living. But the denouement (where many books fall flat for me) is a beautiful admission that our experience is a delicate balance between the stories we tell ourselves, and our perception of the nuts and bolts of the world around us, which have their own transcendent radiance, no matter how well-worn or shabby.



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Incognito

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Incognito started out strong as a generalist's introduction to recent advances in the study of cognition. The author's enthusiasm for his subject was contagious, and he wrote with a great balance between explaining the subject and illustrating points with interesting case studies. Near the end of the book the author's thesis veered from general interest in cognition, to a passionate case for altering the criminal justice system. The end of the book really went wild, becoming more and more off tone and off topic from earlier chapters.



Eagleman explored the justice system by making an interesting case for punishment based on reformability instead of culpability. He began with extreme examples of brain damaged criminals physically incapable of controlling their violent behavior, and stated that it was cruel to punish such criminals, as they were not able to change their own behavior in response to the punishment. So far, so good.



Then my skin began to crawl as Eagleman extended the definition of brain damage to include criminals who had genetic tendencies toward depression, had suffered lead poisoning as children, or were raised in abusive households. The goosebumps did not come from the idea of a society in which crime goes unpunished- Eagleman was careful to state he intended to contain and/or behaviorally recondition all offenders to protect the general populace. I was creeped out by the broad definition of brain damage (nearly any history of physical or emotional trauma of significance qualifies you as brain damaged by Eagleman's definition). And if a criminal is identified as brain damaged, the idea of their correctional reconditioning was also creepy and ill-defined. The lobotomy as correctional reconditioning, Eagleman concluded, was no longer a socially acceptable form of reconditioning. That leaves correctional therapists with drugs and other shadowy brain reprogramming techniques to reshape criminal brains. Yikes.



Further, Eagleman hopefully anticipated a future when brain scans are used during sentencing to help determine the extent of a criminal's brain damage. Based on the scan, the criminal would be diverted to either punishment, correctional behavioral reconditioning, or indefinite containment. Eagleman claimed that taking the human element out of sentencing, and replacing it with science, would take the cruelty out of the justice system and make it more efficient. I think his hope for the future looks like a nightmare scenario rife with potential for abuse. The best biometric scans of the future will provide a stream of information that will be interpreted by human brain scientists, or by programs written by human brain scientists. That means the human element would still be alive and well, rife with prejudice, corruption, self-interest, and pressure from exigency (hmm, these results could go either way, but our reconditioning facility is overcrowded...). And the worst part would be, the justice system and our whole society would be pretending that we were perfectly impartial, purely scientific. Giving human foibles the face of absolute, impartial legitimacy is a dangerous, frightening, and downright threatening vision of a future criminal justice system.



And to end this book with a truly crazy bang, Eagleman knocked Occam's Razor, and made some pretty broad claims about science in general that I don't have the scientific background to agree with or dispute. But the remarks seemed quite off topic and out of keeping with the rest of the the book.



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Murder Past Due

Murder Past Due by Miranda James

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Maine Coons seem to be popular cats in fiction these days. This was a cozy whodunnit featuring a librarian and his Maine Coon cat. While the amateur detective's library skills were key to his ability to help solve the mystery, the Maine Coon cat was not. I expect the cat in a feline mystery series to be integral to the plot. Take the cat out of Murder Past Due, and you still have the exact same story.



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The Tiger's Wife

The Tiger's Wife: A Novel by Téa Obreht

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a very rare case of a book I planned to give three stars, but was so impressed by the ending, that I upped it to four. So often I'm loving a book, only to be disappointed by a clumsy ending, or an overly explained ending that takes something magical and tries to make it concrete, reducing it to dust with the heavy hammer of rationalization. The Tiger's Wife built up a beautiful, crumbling, European folklore ambiance. It blended past with present, reality with fantasy. Most importantly, it explored what it means to find and hold onto humanity in a world of loss and death and horror. Obreht captured the magic that is our willingness to find a sense of wonder in a world of senseless violence and aching loss. And she was able to blend reality with magic, magic with reality, in a memorable and beautiful way.



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Unfamiliar Fishes

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


As always, Sarah Vowell's enthusiasm for her subject succeeded in getting me excited about history- this time about the history of Hawaii. I listened to the book read by the author to get the full effect of Vowell's deadpan humor. I came away from the book intrigued by whale oil and sugar, and, for the first time in my life, excited about reading Moby Dick. Some Cherokee blood runs in Vowell's veins, and she makes a very personal connection to the fate of the native Hawaiians who lost their land and lives to the unfamiliar fishes that washed up on their shores. If anything, her genuine feeling for the loss of the Hawaiian way of life saps a little of her normal humor, takes just a little of the edge off her funny, sarcastic voice.



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Zen and the Art of Faking It

Zen And The Art Of Faking It by Jordan Sonnenblick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Good book. Sonnenblick was able to use techniques I'm familiar with from Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie to create a completely different protagonist. As I neared the end, I was really hoping there would be no neat ends, tying everything up, resolving all the protagonist's problems- because that would not be appropriate to this protagonist. Although not all the loose ends were cheerfully tied, I would have liked to see just a few more left loose. To me that would have taken the story from good to great.



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The Dream of Perpetual Motion

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A surreal, dark fantasy.  Thrilling, fascinating, horrible.  Great use of language and theme.  Beautifully brutal world-building.  Confident writing voice that can tell the reader what will happen chapters before describing the journey, heightening, not decreasing, the tension.


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A Memory of Wind

A Memory of Wind by Rachel Swirsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Poetic retelling of Iphigenia at Aulis.  The vivid sensory detail fades as the novella progresses, but that may be less an inability to sustain, and more intentional depiction of flesh and blood girl dissolving into spirit wind.  Swirsky circles back again and again to two key familial moments in Iphigenia's life, fleshing out the memories a little at a time to emotionally coincide with the story's climax.

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Jennifer Egan takes Pulitzer prize | Books | guardian.co.uk

via guardian.co.uk

For the second year in a row my favorite book I'd read in recent months won the Pulitzer. This year was Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Last year was "Tinkers" by Paul Harding.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan- best book I've read so far in 2011

via amazon.com

I love the way the characters' lives intersect and intertwine without ever really connecting. The writing style translates detailed, direct experience into clear prose. Though there is no through narrative, the constant reappearance of characters we met before in new contexts keeps things interesting.

Zombies vs. Vampires

Last week I finished two books, each a hallmark of the vampire or zombie craze.  The vampire book was Breaking Dawn (book 4/4 in the Twilight series) by Stephanie Meyer.  Zombies were represented by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (although Jane Austen gets first billing).

I've already discussed my thoughts on the Twilight series, and I don't want to give any spoilers.  I'll limit myself to saying that Breaking Dawn shared many of the same strengths and weaknesses as the first three books in the series, except that Book 4 did no tip-toeing around adult issues.  If anything, protagonist Bella grew up at lightning speed over the course of the final book in the series.  I was shocked that Meyer didn't spread Bella's journey to adulthood over a few more best-selling books.

As for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the idea of the sister warriors was comical, but entirely unbelievable.  Grahame-Smith made no attempt to offer readers a reason these young ladies had the raw material to be so suddenly transformed into effective zombie-killers.  But with a healthy dose of suspended disbelief, their training scenes were amusing.  The narrative was at its best when it was the most gruesome and gross.   Any time the storyline veered away from rotting carcasses it reminded me entirely too much of the original.  I think I might prefer having my brains eaten to spending an afternoon with Mary and Kitty.

Of the two books which did I prefer?  It's hardly fair for me to choose based on the merit of the books.  I'm all about vampires.  Zombie stories are okay, but they just don't hold the same appeal for me as vampires.

Vampire stories are psychological.  They touch on emotion, instinct, desire, hope, fear.  They touch on what it means to be human, but more than that, speculate on what it would be like to be more than human, to have great power, strength, and longevity, to see what man might be capable of if he were more. Zombie stories also explore the human condition.  Zombies show us what it is like to be dead, what it is like to be nothing more than a body, a shell, without any spark of consciousness.  Zombies get into the nitty gritty of mortality: rot, decomposing, loss of body parts.  Zombies often lose thumbs, shed limbs, eat their own tongues.  They shamble on, asking us how much we can lose and still claim to be ourselves.

Vampires let us experience immortality, zombies rub our noses in the reality of our mortality.  I guess between eternal life and putrid death, I find eternal life more fun.

Breaking Dawn ranks #59 in Books on Amazon.com.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ranks #540.  Both books are available in Kindle format.

Tinkers

On the rare occasions that Paul Harding tries to state in plain language the theme of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers, the sentences become complex, requiring the reader to wade through parentheses and vague pronouns to grasp at its elusive meaning.  Fortunately Harding has lots of other methods in his literary toolkit to help us understand what he is saying: metaphor, motif, character, description, mythology, plot.  His use of language as he employs these tools is mesmerizing.

Tinkers doesn't question the meaning of life; it asks, what is life and how does life feel?  The novel addresses how we experience our existence as human beings: how we perceive life in our own skin, how we sense a link to something greater than ourselves, and how we relate to that link.  It is a novel of direct experience, beautifully written so that the reader shares the experiences of the characters in a very visceral way.

In one of my favorite passages of the book, one of Harding's characters describes how the blind eat:

"That's how the blind know where the food is on their plates, like a clock, ham at six-thirty! biscuit at four! just like that, that's how Helen Keller did it, I bet, just like that, potatoes at high noon!"

Not only does this passage tie in with the clockwork motif that runs throughout the book, its chatty text defines the heart of the novel.  We all come into the world blind, told by religion, local culture, and the experience of those who come before us, to expect ham at six-thirty, biscuit at four.  The father and son protagonists of Tinkers are blind men engaged in direct experience of life.  They rely on no road maps, assumptions, or conventions.  Not only don't they know where the ham is on the plate, they aren't taking anyone's word on what ham is.  Their knowledge of ham comes from their groping contact with it- the smell, the slippery grease on their fingers, the salty taste, the resistance of the meat on their teeth.

For me this rendering of direct experience makes Tinkers more than worthy of the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded in April.  Literature is a rendering through the art of language of how we experience the human condition.  Solid grounding in the reality of our condition is the ironic ignition to transcendence, allowing us to touch something ethereal and magical that defines new planes of reality.

Tinkers is ranked #13 in Amazon's print literary category, and ranks #228 on the Kindle best seller list.

The Potter's Field

The Potter's Field nestles into the category of comfortable detective story that titillates just enough to keep the reader interested, but throughout reaffirms warm, safe, hearth and home values.  Although this was the first Brother Cadfael novel I've ever read, it is actually book 18 of 21 in a series that definitively ended with the death of the author, Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters is a pseudonym).  

Pargeter was an accomplished historian and linguist.  Any hopes I had of language playing a role in the mystery were disappointed.  However, the detective plot is inseparable from its historical setting, and that inseparability is a hallmark of how successfully Pargeter blended mystery and historical fiction.

Certainly this Brother Cadfael novel pales next to it's monastic medieval mystery cousin, The Name of the Rose.  But taken for what it is, The Potter's Field is a pleasant, logically satisfying, and harmless read.

The Potter's Field is currently unavailable on amazon.com in either print or Kindle format.  The audio book is available at audible.com. 

The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi strikes a sweet spot for a brand of fiction I like to call survivalist SF. He starts with a premise that's been used since the Golden Age of science fiction: humanity is on the brink of extinction. Not only does Bacigalupi use this familiar predicament to write a super exciting story with great characters, but he builds an intriguing history of how humanity has gotten itself into such a mess.

Bacigalupi does a far better job than I ever could detailing the privations suffered by survivors in Bangkok, and dropping intriguing nuggets of information on blister rust, cibiscosis, Calorie Men, White Shirts, and Yellow Cards. I'd rather focus on what makes the Windup Girl stand out in the field of survivalist SF.

When reading science fiction about life after large scale disaster, I sometimes end up depressed, dreading the story, and counting the pages until I make it to the grueling end. I didn't have this reaction to the Windup Girl because the story is just as much about the beginning of a new chapter in humanity as it is about the end of the old. As in much survivalist SF, most characters in the Windup Girl are motivated to save their own skin, and convergence of their struggle to survive meets in vicious conflict. But not all characters are driven solely by the urge to save their own lives- some are worried for their families, their friends, their people, their country, and some even risk their lives for personal and religious values.

And perhaps the thing that tickled me the most about the Windup Girl was Bacigalupi's use of motif. From the dangerous, coiled DNA of a mutating plague, to kink spring energy technology, to the stutter-stop movements of the title character, to the tightly wound plot, Bacigalupi really embraced the idea of winding things up- and the repeated motif brought a touch of literary quality that put his book above much of the other survivalist SF I've read.

There were a few minor disappointments as I read the novel. Bacigalupi's portrayal of Buddhism proved that he has observed the difference between street Buddhism in Thailand and the Western intellectual interpretation practiced, for instance, at a well-to-do Zen center in downtown San Francisco. However, Bacigalupi's attempt to make Buddhist characters despise engineered beings based on lack of a soul was not at all consistent with Buddhism, and seemed a little silly to me. And one final point: although the prose was good throughout the novel, the use of the word "blossom" to describe every blow, gunshot, or injury drove me a little crazy.

The Windup Girl ranks 2,918 in Books on Amazon.com. It is not available for the Kindle.

The Dark Mirror

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called Second Helpings in which I expressed my disappointment that some of my favorite authors are turning out "new" books that failed to say anything new. So I picked up The Dark Mirror by Juliet Marillier with a certain amount of trepidation. Marillier writes romantic fantasy series based on Celtic history and mythology. There are certain hallmarks I expect from a Marillier novel: I expect her protagonist to have a deep respect for nature, I expect druids and supernatural abilities, I expect Celtic folklore and mythology, I expect a conflict between nations, I expect a conflict between the native religion of the land and Christianity, I expect the protagonist to be socially exiled, and that some kind of romantic relationship will sustain her in the final struggle to achieve her goal.

In The Dark Mirror Marillier delivered all these trademarks, and at the same time managed to do something new. How did she make the familiar exciting and new? By developing minor themes from her previous work and making them the major themes of her new book.

For instance, toward the end of Marillier's first book, Daughter of the Forest, readers are introduced to the idea that a community may reject and be afraid of a nubile young outsider, tying this fear to stories of mermaids or other mythological creatures who lure young men from their communities, or simply drive them mad with their beauty. This theme, which did not appear until the final chapters of Daughter of the Forest, was central to The Dark Mirror. War and political intrigue, which played the role of setting in Daughter of the Forest, were crucial to the plot of The Dark Mirror. And, appropriate to the role of battle and political plotting, the primarily female perspective of Daughter of the Forest was replaced by evenly split scenes from the point of view of the hero and the heroine. The Dark Mirror did not have the fairytale quality that made me fall in love with Daughter of the Forest- it felt more like a history, rooted in court life with professional bodyguards, tasters, and men and women angling for power. Marillier changed the tone and character of her followup without losing her voice- and she remained consistent to her world, and made all the changes resonate with elements of her previous work.

The result was a novel that I was just as enthusiastic about at the end of the read as I was when I bought it.

On Amazon the paperback edition of The Dark Mirror ranks #51,413 in Books, and the Kindle edition ranks #9,328 in the Kindle Store.

Blossoming is a pain

Why does pain always have to blossom? Why do gun shot wounds blossom red on white shirts? I've read this "blossoming" description so many times in spec fiction books that it's starting to annoy me, and has officially made my list of expressions I want to avoid in my own writing.

Isn't blossoming a gentle, slow-motion process, anyway? I wonder what attracts writers to this description for being on the receiving end of sudden acts of violence . Perhaps it is the juxtaposition between the beauty of a blooming flower and the horror of intense pain.