July

Well, two kids hasn’t stopped me from reading yet, though I’m pretty sure the worst of the sleep deprivation is yet to come; it has only been less than a week as of this writing. Last night I noticed that my book light might have been too bright for her, even though her bassinet is on the opposite side of the bed from me. This would be a difficult development, because I can usually count on at least 15 minutes or so of reading every night. Maybe I need to do my reading in a more covert fashion, and prop a blanket over my head while I do it.

John dies at the end – David Wong

I went into this one blind, picking it on title alone from positive Internet word of mouth (Word of hand? Letter of keyboard mouth?) The author writes for cracked.com, which despite formerly being the poor man’s mad magazine, has carved itself out a pretty funny corner of the Internet mostly via clever lists. As it turns out the book became popular in much the same way as I had originally heard about it. The author had written a short horror/comedy story, and posted it online around Halloween instead of his usual writing, and it got a small following. He continued this trend every year, and the following grew steadily until he decided to put all of the stories together into a book. This book reflects its origin by sometimes feeling a bit disjointed, though this makes perfect sense given that it was written piece by piece over a large span of time. There are story lines that fizzle out, and others that come in somewhat unexpectedly later on in the arc of the book. You cannot try to take this book at face value and make sense of all the ins and outs of the plot, it is by no means that precise. The book does a great job presenting a very specific mood throughout without seeming to care very much if the entire plot is logically airtight. In this regard it is much more David Lynch than Christopher Nolan; sometimes (constantly) weird shit happens, and you just have to roll with it and not think too hard about it.

By the end of the book I was left with was roughly the same feeling I remember from evil dead and army of darkness – an easygoing mix of scary and funny, these two things joined securely by absurdity. I am usually not one for serious horror in any medium, my overactive imagination takes whatever fright is actually there and ramps it up to terrible, otherworldly levels. My usual response is something like turning all of the lights on, locking the windows and putting a chair in front of the door, standing up in the middle of the bed for the entire night with a machete and a football helmet. Just to be safe. Please let the jury see exhibit A, the great event horizon freak out of 1997-1999; and exhibit B, the time I read the shining at night in the winter, what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking. This book did not trip my usual fear reflex, though some parts were creepy, it was creepy in an atmospheric way, instead of creepy in an I-can’t-sleep-ever-again-way.

One of the things that the author did that I found particularly endearing was in his characterization of the evil forces in his world. In this world there are major supernatural forces at work, across multiple dimensions, and as it goes, some of them are pretty fucking evil. Many fictional inter-dimensional evil forces are the strong silent type, see your typical saurons, or cthulus. Silent, evil, most of their work done through lesser evil intermediates. All communication with them is usually limited to a sense of dread, madness or pain. Not so the major evil in this book, Korrok, who is depicted as the guy you always hated in school, the bully, the asshole. Destructive merely for the sake of his own personal enjoyment, instead of fulfilling some sort of prophetic destiny for evil, the main antagonist takes perverse joy in what he does, and imagining all the hurtful ways he could do it. He physically embodies all the world's assholes and bastards, and talks to you the way you’d think they would talk to you, if they were a giant evil throbbing psychic eyeball. In ways it reminds me of Randall Flagg from the stand, evil, but with a lot of personality to go along with it. Not enough to win you over to his side, but enough so that you remember him, standing apart from all the others evils you’ve crossed paths with.

Seventh son – Orson Scott Card

I was looking for a quick read so that I wasn’t tied up with something when dance with dragons came out, so I re-read the first book from the alvin maker series. A good series, especially in the beginning, but each book loses a little of the spark that really drew me to the first one, though a little slower than card’s other series (ender’s Game) which not only fell off the rails in the third book, xenocide, but also crashed into the mountain and shit itself. This series doesn’t hit the wall all at once, but each sequel past number two or three is definitely worse than the one before it, but never by a large enough margin for you to put the series down - you have too much invested in it. By the fifth and sixth books, they are nearly unreadable, and you wonder how you got lured so easily into a bad book. If there was a serious disaster you could have just quit, but the quality level keeps slowly drawing you in deeper, until you are drowning in the quagmire of book 6. Maybe a quick check on Wikipedia for dates of publication to see if he lost his mojo all at once across all series....yeah, 1991 seems like the cut-off. I’ll just let it be known that ender’s game and it’s sequel, and this book and the next two after it are excellent books for most young readers, the rest of each series is to be dealt with at your own risk, and with forewarning.

Ender’s game is probably my favorite book, if measured purely by nostalgic value. It had immense meaning for me when I first read it at 12 or so, hitting at exactly the right time for maximum artistic impression. I have read it more times than any other single book, never going more than a year or two without going back to it. This one piece of art has always been so close to me, but the artist who made it is somebody whose opinions I find sort of reprehensible. This is a hard divide to span, loving the art, but hating the artist. I know some people who have disavowed him and all his works based on his personal views, and the publicity he draws about it. In his case I feel that he is a bigot, and a vocal one at that. But it really isn’t any different if the artist in question is more of a crazy person, like of the Kanye West variety, or sort of an asshole, of the David O. Russel variety. Both are not men I’d probably enjoy knowing personally, but both are excellent at what they do. Many of history’s most beloved artists have been terrible alcoholics or drug addicts, or just generally bastardly. Is it not possible that making truly great art for many must come from a place of turmoil? I usually fall on the side of the argument where you forgive them their faults, and enjoy the things they make as objects divorced from their creators. It seems like a can of worms the other way, where you have to vet the creator of everything you come across to make sure one of them isn’t a bit of a shit. The feeling I get from people who want to banish certain artists works based on their personalities is that they are being somewhat arbitrary in these decisions. If you dug deep enough into most of the people who make the things you love, I worry what you might dig up.

Dance with dragons – George R. R. Martin

I’ll follow the same structure I set out for my review of books one through three.
Short version: sigh. Slightly longer version: FUCKING SIGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I’m not sure where to start here; I’ve been so excited about this book for so many years. The shortest way to actually sum up how I felt about this book is to say that, at the end of it, it was not that book I expected or wanted it to be. Which I guess is my fault for expecting it to be anything in the first place, that is always a certain path to disappointment. It is fair, for those of you who have some familiarity with fantasy books, to say that he wheel of times this series pretty hard in this book. There are so many new names and faces, or names and faces that were peripheral characters before who are being drawn closer to the spotlight. Not that that is a bad thing, or a bizarre thing in a series with such a high character mortality rate, but the manner in which it is done is maddening. I don’t want new threads to be introduced this late, not when there is so much going on in the world that I already care about. I want the things that have been set down already to be resolved. Is that an unfair desire? I don’t know, maybe it is unrealistic. I just don’t want entire sizable fractions of the book devoted to new entirely new characters, when there are major characters who are left dangerously in the lurch, or whose wheels seem to be spinning chapter after chapter. Let me re-phrase what I said before: It’s not that I dislike new twists towards the end of the story, what I don’t like is when they feel shoe-horned in, or like they were never planned in the first place. Lots of times I like to feel like the author knows what is going on, or more importantly, what is going to happen later. Again, I think this is unrealistic. I know from reading what some authors write about their own writing process, that sometimes things happen that they didn’t foresee, or that characters become almost self aware, and start behaving in ways that go against the original plan of the plot without going against their own nature. As a reader, though, it is frustrating. I’ve seen enough good fictions lose their way later on because it seems like they are shooting from the hip instead of sticking to the original story. If, in some cases, there ever was an original story line to follow. I watched some lost, and got tired of it, that’s not what I’m looking for.

It’s not that nothing happens, things do happen. Not nearly as much as happens in books one and three, the agreed upon high points of the series, but it’s not to say that NOTHING happens throughout. The real problem, and this is a bizarre problem for a 1000 page book, five deep in a series, is that I felt like it ended too early. A more apt way to describe this is to say that it ended on the wrong beat to keep this book and the next one interesting. It seems like pretty basic narrative structure to have a character arc, but that is still needed to keep you invested in any story, even one as convoluted as this one. At the end of books one and three, almost all of the characters have had major development in the book, but many questions are left unanswered, many times by the cliffhanger ending. Cliffhangers aren't a problem, they just have to happen at the right point in the story to work properly. In order to avoid any serious spoilers, I’ll draw a comparison to star wars. Near the end of the empire strikes back, luke learns that vader is his father, after a long struggle to go to him and confront him. This would be an example of a good cliffhanger. There is some resolution (his quest to find vader) but also many new questions asked. If empire were this book, it would end when luke arrives at cloud city. Yes things would have happened in the movie, but the ending would have left you limp. No real questions would have been answered, the character arc was less of an arc, and more of a character tangent. Instead of seeing something big happen, and being excited about even more happening, the credits would roll, and you would think “That’s it? That was the end?”

I like the world this book takes place in quite a lot, the atmosphere, the history, all of it. I also like the characters, and as a work of minor to medium character development, this is the cat’s pajamas. However, I also like the over-arcing plot of the books, and mid range character development takes up space that could be devoted to propelling the story in some direction. The worst part about all of this, is that I still feel so close to this series, and so invested in it, that I’m certain to be waiting in line (online) when the next one comes out, and I’m sure I’ll have full faith that it will restore this series to it’s former glory. After 15 years and 5000 pages it fucking better.