In writing these reviews I’ve been trying to find a consistent voice, and I have been generally pleased with the results after a few months of trying. In fact I feel sort of embarrassed going back to read some of the early entries and seeing how short and uninspired they were. Not to be too critical, I guess I was falling back on old methods; in years past I’ve kept reading lists that weren’t really much more than bullet pointed lists with occasional elaboration. Writing more about each book has forced me to change slightly the way I read in the first place. When I am reading a book now, I’m not trying to force a story or a theme out of it, but I am trying to keep a part of my mind open for inspiration. Sometimes it comes to me early and easily, sometimes I have to work at it a bit. For a few reviews I have just started writing and seen where it goes, and for some I just stumble across it during a conversation, or I see a relevant point in some other medium to use as a jumping off point. But this month I have a new problem in that I’ve read things that I just can’t find a full topic to write about. It came up with the third book in the series by Larsson, which is not bad at all. I just don’t have anything to say about it in long form. I don’t want to write a 3 sentence review, but if I did it would go like this: Good read. A lot like the others. Too bad he wont write any more in the series. Also in this category are The internet is a playground by David Thorne, and Brian’s winter by Gary Paulsen. Respectively, the ultra short reviews would be: I really hope all of his emails are real correspondences, it makes them so much funnier that way, and yep, more hatchet, but really cold this time. On to the long ones.
Salt - Mark Kurlansky
I have a soft spot for a particularly dry sort of non-fiction, of which this book is a great example. My wife used to tease me about a book I read about how each of the states came to have its particular borders. To me it was an interesting look at how the balance between federal and state power in the u.s. has changed over time, but to her it was an almost comically dry book that would have been hard to read even at gunpoint. I tried to read her a little bit out loud once, and she made me stop after only a few sentences. It is her loss that she will never now know how it came to be that the southern border of Michigan didn’t incorporate the then booming port towns of Toledo and Gary in exchange for the land that would become the upper peninsula. Sometimes with books this dry the premise can sound good, and with what the author has to present it might make a really good and dense say, long form magazine article, or chapter in a larger book. However, once you try to make it into a full length book, and when you don’t have a narrative to rely on, it really slows down towards the end. You’ve already seen the same formula play out in all the earlier chapters, all the same general facts in the same general order. With the state boundary book, there are definitely interesting stories to be had concerning certain borders, but the author tells you every tale of every single border, regardless of if it even remotely worth telling or not. Salt suffers from the same problem, which is, I guess, one of editing. I was really interested in many of the historical aspects of salt throughout human history and I felt sort of dim for not realizing how important it was in ancient societies. But, sweet jesus salt, you need to pick and choose. I don’t need to know the type of salted fish that each society of man since the invention of writing has eaten in lean times. I think we could just have said in the beginning of the book: look, lots of people ate fish. Salted fish. Lots of times sardines, then later it was cod. Bang! I just eliminated 75 pages from the book. This is not to say the entire book suffered from editing problems, or repetition, I did learn quite a bit. The Chinese, Romans, and later the renaissance Italians all had major tax revenues from the sale of iron and salt. The control of salt mines or other salt works played a major part in the placement of early settlements, and was the crux of many military conflicts. The problem was that despite all the good stuff, the boring fish salting parts outweighed it, and I had to quit reading the book at seventy percent. That is probably the farthest I’ve ever been into a book without finishing it. I’m usually a stickler about finishing a book after a certain point, but I just couldn’t do it this time. I’m not even sure how we finally got salt to be such a easily available commodity in modern times, and I would really like to know. Maybe with some distance I’ll be ready to go back and find out the thrilling conclusion to how we now salt foods in the canning process, and which fish we currently salt the most.
Divergent - Veronica Roth
There seems to be quite a lot of science fiction/fantasy young adult novels of varying degrees of quality lately that have become very popular. On one hand you have your harry potters, and your hunger games, while on the other hand you have your twilights, and all of your, I’m assuming, even lower quality twilight derivatives. Seriously, have you been to a bookstore lately? The young adult section is preposterous, lousy with sexy vampire knockoffs. Sometimes I feel conflicted about reading these (not the sexy vampire knockoffs, the regular YA books), almost like if I read them and like them that it reflects poorly on me and my taste in books. This book skirts the line for me between books that are acceptable for children to read but are written well enough to have value for adults, and books that are just for kids. I enjoyed reading it, and would probably read a sequel if it came out, but it didn’t grab me the same way the hunger games did. There was more adolescent pining, and more doe eyes, more swooning than in that. Not that I am made of stone; it was in part, a pleasant reminder of days past. I remember what it was like to feel an electric thrill just to be holding someones hand, or the rush you felt throughout your whole body when you were just talking to, or looking at someone you had feelings for. Maybe I’m being too critical of the writing, saying it is so youthful, when all that was really happening was that I was feeling old while reading it because I was remembering how far removed I am from that mindset.
Despite generally liking this new wave of science fiction, some of the problems I have with it stems from my personal feelings towards that genre as a whole. I think a lot of these YA scifi books are intended perhaps not exclusively for new readers, but readers who are new to books featuring magic, or future technology. My problem with them is that I usually want more background information on the world itself. I come to these worlds for the details, the history, all the little details. I feel like with this book, you are given some background, but not the whole picture. The world is sort of fucked in this book, but I want to know why. How did it get this way? There exists a brand new society. OK, again, how did that come to be? Was it a war, a peaceful revolution? Did we go full caveman for a while before building this new thing from the ashes? Instead of it just being a story that happens to be set in this new and fanciful place, I want to know about this new place and how it affects the characters who occupy it. I want it to seem like a real and plausible place, and I want to see how the people reflect the world in their actions. A story set in a place and time I know is going to have all of that back and forth already, and even one set in an unfamiliar place but in my time is going to have a lot of contextual clues for me to work with. A story, even one that isn’t fantastic in nature, but that is set in a different time and place than I know has to be as much about the place as it does the people. It doesn’t do me any good to know about Frank Mccourt, without getting a feel for what Ireland of the 1930’s was like. It didn’t do me any good to get to know Francie Nolan without learning how she related to Brooklyn of 1912. I don’t feel like I can really get to know a character without some context, and I don’t mind having to work at learning about the world they live in, but in order to do that the world they live in has to be made real enough for me to feel like I can place them in it.
Kurt Vonnegut - Man without a country
Kurt Vonnegut is a special author to me, I discovered him at a time in my life where it seemed like I was just waiting to hear what he had to say. I remember reading cat’s cradle while on vacation with my mom in Florida, I had picked it up on a whim from a very agreeably priced local used bookstore. His blend of dark humor and wit was one I was instantly in love with, and I have read most of his books more than once. I read his final work on a whim as a palette cleanser between other books, and as always, he has quite a lot to say. Some of it is great and timeless, but a few of his opinions sound old fashioned. However, for a man who has seen and done so much, I think we can forgive him his old fashioned-ness.
I could write a lot about him, or about most of the topics in his book, but Instead I’ll just relay a point he made that had not occurred to me about a popular saying. The saying he talks about is a quote taken from Karl Marx, that religion is the opiate of the masses. The context I usually hear this quote used in is as a critique of modern Christianity. The way it usually seems to be used is to compare religion to opiate addiction: it is easy to get into, hard to kick, and all encompassing while you are under its spell. I myself have used it in this context before, and I still think there is some truth in that comparison, and certainly not limited to Christianity. The point that Vonnegut makes was one I had never considered before, and it was this: at the time of Marx’s writing, opiates were one of, if not the only truly reliable pain killer available to doctors. It seems that this may be the missed point about this quote - that it isn’t the addictive qualities we have come to associate with the opiate family, but the relief of pain it and only it can truly provide. As I have grown away from my brash youth, I have come to realize that despite the fact that it plays no role in my life, religion does provide comfort to millions of other people. It is easy to sit outside and criticize those who have faith, but it is missing the point entirely that organized religion, despite its many (many) faults can provide a very serious relief of metaphysical angst to people in a way that for them, nothing else can. This was a very insightful look at a quote I have heard so many times without giving it any real critical thought, and it reminded me to always think twice about the things you hear or read, and to try to look beneath the surface for what else might be in there.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
My wife Has a special relationship with the harry potter series, they are without a doubt her favorite books. She has read the series through in its entirety at least 6 or 7 times, though her super fan-dom ends there, falling well short of the robe wearing, slash fiction writing, brewing your own butter-beer sort. I was the one who introduced her to the books, though in a roundabout fashion. I read the books in college, receiving the first four as a gift from my mother, who knew I liked to read, and sent me them after hearing all the hullabaloo. After giving them the sort of look Ron might have given his christmas sweater (BOOM!) I decided to give them a try, reasoning it would have been rude to exchange them without reading them at all. So I laid down in bed and opened up the first book, pledging to stop no sooner than two chapters in. As you may have seen coming, I read all four straight through, only breaking for food and sleep. I got the remaining three as they came out, narrowly dodging spoilers for all three later books, as they came out in the summer and I was working at camps for all those years. When the sixth book came out I was dating my wife to be at the time, and she asked me if I thought she would like that book. I said yeah, but you should start with the first one. What I did not realize at the time was that this suggestion was almost like putting her on the rack and demanding under duress of bodily harm that she ignore me and start with the sixth one, like a wang. Which she did. She than turned around and read the whole series, from the beginning, and then number six again. Which made her want to start over. So, when the last book came out, we were both eagerly anticipating it. We went out the morning after release, and each bought our own copy so that we could both power through it simultaneously, in order to avoid one of us knowing more than the other, and possibly having the long awaited ending get ruined for us when we went back to camp on Monday. This was the only time I had read the seventh book, and she requested that I read it again, so that I could actually take my time and enjoy it. She also though I might have a different opinion about it this time. We made a deal, a book exchange, where I agreed to read this if she read a book of my choice. I had her read slaughterhouse five, she hated it. Go figure.
As it turns out, this is a really good book. It wraps up one of the most popular book series of all time, and it does it in a totally satisfactory way, which is much more than can be said of the endings of many otherwise great series that shit out towards the end. It has been since the seventh book was first released that I have read any harry potter, and in the meantime I have seen the movies a number of times. The movies, while good, aren’t as good as the books, and some of the characters creep in and take over their novelized counterparts in your head. In their defense, the movies have some really incredible casting choices in them, many more good than bad. The problem is that this seems to make the bad ones stick out that much more. Yes, Hermione is a bit more shrill than I thought she was in the books, but what I am really talking about is Dumbledore in movies three through seven. He is the worst. THE WORST. Dumbledore is one of my most beloved characters across all literature, just the perfect mixture of dad, grandpa and teacher. It’s not just that the actor doesn’t do him justice, its that he gets him the opposite of right. He yells, and loses his temper, he isn’t warm or caring. He misses out on all the things that make the character right and good. It was nice to get the real character, the one I remember from the books back in my head as the gold standard.
******* YARRRRR, HERE BE SPOILERS FOR BOOK SEVEN *******
So, there are three main things I didn’t like when I first read the seventh book. The first was the sequence where Harry, Ron and Hermione are all stuck in the tent, searching for horcruxes. I remember feeling like it dragged, and was poorly paced. It didn’t seem that way at all this time. Even though it is slower than some of the other parts of the book, it still seemed well paced, and appropriate for that part of the story. It gave me a better feeling of how cut off they were from everybody else during their search, and how alone they were in the fight, or at least how alone they felt. The second issue I had the first time through was that I felt like the sequence where harry goes to meet voldemort in the woods felt contrived and poorly explained afterwords. Again, I did not feel the same way this time through. Even though I couldn’t now draw you an exact set of instructions on how to set up a proxy horcrux in a target of a killing spell that puts a part of your soul into them, it all seemed appropriate for the end of the book. For some reason this time through I didn’t need iron clad logic, or it just made more sense to me; or I wasn’t at the end of a day long reading binge, with eyes on the finish line. The last point I had a change of heart on was the last chapter of the book, set 20 odd years after the battle of hogwarts. I have a very clear memory of disliking that chapter, feeling like it sounded juvenile after the relative seriousness of the seventh book. This time through, again, I just didn’t have that criticism. It felt like a fine coda to a serious book. It was economical in the way it gave you just enough bits of post-school harry potter to give you an impression of the world. You knew the world had to be peaceful enough to get all the kids back to school, and that various wizarding families were still going strong. So, the short version here is that my wife was right in telling me to re-read this, and that I do have a renewed appreciation for what Rowling has created with this series.
August
I was asked by a co-worker during a conversation about hobbies out of work, when I have time to do all the things that I do. The specific thing in question was designing and building a metro rail system for all my friends in Minecraft in order to speed up overall mining operations. Not that, past this, I claimed to be a great doer of things, but I mentioned that In addition to fake public works projects, I also read quite a bit. Additionally, I also find time to play other games (video and board), cook the occasional fancy meal, and write all this. I mentioned that sometimes I work on wood too, but that was mostly to look extra accomplished, I haven’t really worked on any wood projects in a while. Now I’ll be the first to admit, I’m really not that motivated of a guy, I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle/lower middle in terms of overall human levels of get up and go. But the take away from the conversation was that it was astounding, given the number of children in my house, the amount of free time I seem to have to fill with my various hobbies. Do I do more than I realize? Or do I work with people who don’t fill their time with hobbies, but instead with..... something else? I never quite figured out what. Maybe TV, maybe just family affairs.
Ok. Books.
The botany of desire - Michael Pollan
This was an interesting read about the human relationship with four breeds of plants: the tulip, apples, marijuana, and potatoes. These specific plants were selected mostly because of their ability to adapt to human desires, hence the title. Each one of these plants has the ability to change quite easily, or more specifically to be changed by humans quite easily. If you were so inclined, I think it would be easy to assume the author has a poor grasp of evolutionary biology, due to his constant discussion of the plants desires, as if they are willing and knowing participants in their own evolution. I’m confident the author knows what he is talking about, and is using the term in a poetic way, or as a way of summing up the will of not the individual plant, but of the species for overall survival. And even then, I don’t think he uses the term in the same way as a human desire, with it’s sense of purposeful agency, but instead as a force one is incapable of fighting, more of a destiny than a desire. It does seem like an excellent toe hold for someone who wanted to try to pick apart the evolutionary stance this book takes, though maybe I’m giving that camp too much credit here; I don’t think they base much of what they say on evidence and reason.
Each plant that the author chose to focus on has its own way of adapting itself to human beings, and the reason we interact heavily with not just these plants, but most of the plants we grow is specifically because of the ease in which they adapt to our needs. Marijuana plants will grow in almost any condition, and react quite favorably to modification of its genetics and growing conditions.They will grow larger and faster if you give them more light or Carbon Dioxide than they would ever find in nature, with no adverse side effects; it has a nearly inexhaustible appetite for growth. On the other hand, instead of marijuana’s malleability, the apple gives us genetic variety. Each apple contains five seeds, all of them wildly genetically different. This allows us to cull from a seed planted orchard only the trees and fruits that have the traits we want, selecting some for durability, or sweetness, or color. This variety also allows for the apple to adapt to new environments quite easily; being so different makes it more likely that sat least one will thrive in a given area, making it easy to move the apple through different climates and growing regions.
My only complaint was that the author continued to harp on this dichotomy between Dionysus and Apollo, comparing the plants and their various proponents to either a wild Dionysus, or an ordered Apollo. Not that it was a bad comparison, or more specifically, not that it would have been a bad comparison just the once, but it seemed to get brought up in every chapter, sometimes in multiple spots. Some of the comparisons were alright, but after the fourth or fifth time of hearing about the wild Dionysian abandon of this, that or some other thing I wanted to say “OK, mike, I get it. Untamed wilds. Awesome. Lets move it along.” This is a minor quibble though, overall this was a very insightful book regarding the co-evolution of humankind and the plants we are drawn to.
The girl with the dragon tattoo - Steig Larsson
My mother has been advising me to read this for a while, and at first I put it somewhere in my queue past the top three, then continued to shuffle it downward as newer and more pressing books came along, or at the very least, books I happened upon sooner after finishing whatever it was I was on at the time. She has given me good advice before, so it wasn’t a polite sort of, oh yes, that sounds good, I'll be sure to get to that when I have time, but oh... I have so many things to read first - no, no, why don’t you just keep it for now sort of situation. Anyway, I got around to it, and it is quite an enjoyable book. Other people who told me to read it warned me to press through the first 100 or so pages, and that it picked up after that. I liked it right away, though I admit it starts slow - but that is one of the things I like the most about this series: it is willing to take its time, stopping to smell the character development flowers, if you will. Rare is the book willing to have a long span of time be devoted to really kick ass and thorough researching segments. Despite the upcoming (second) film version of this book, I don’t think this is the sort of book that translates well to cinema. There is so much of it that comes from character’s inner thoughts, or from finding a key piece of data in a library, that it will take some serious screenplay modification to keep the pace of the film from being unwatchable. (You know what would translate well to film? The hunger games. I rarely cared about what Katniss was thinking, and would love to be able to focus mostly on the games, and the world, and not give more than one half of one shit about which of her boys she is going to hold hands with, or whatever. No inner thoughts, just a few brief mopey stares at some young beefcake, and then back to more hunger, and more games.) Despite the slow start, and your opinions on that, it turns into a pretty intense page turner at some point. The real draw for me though was that is does this without veering into Dan Brown territory, and forcing you to acknowledge the poor writing whenever you give it any praise, so as to avoid looking like some sort of literary philistine.
With books that have been translated, it is hard to tell what stems from the cultural differences, or the peculiarities of the language, and what instead is just the way that particular author writes. At one point somebody is said to be as daft as a syphilitic pole cat. Is this a common turn of phrase in Sweden? I really hope it is, and that it was just so colorful that it defied anything other than literal translation. This other-ness adds a nice flavor to the experience, though I worry in some cases what I might be missing by not being in on some of the knowledge that might fill in some of the gaps. For example, if you were familiar with the Midwest, and I told you that I was from rural Indiana (I’m not) and that I went to college in Chicago, but then I moved to Madison after school, all those places would color a picture of the person being described. Maybe a bit of a hayseed, who goes to a big city to get away from his country roots, he then decides to get away from the rush of the city but still be somewhere with a lively arts community. If you weren’t familiar with any of those places, then you would have no more information than could be found on a map. Like if I said to you that I grew up in Malmo, and then went to university in Gothenburg, but decided later to move to Trollhattan; not quite the same story is painted, instead it is just reads as a series of facts. This book makes me, at some points, feel like I may be missing out on some of the details between the lines. I still don’t know the cultural standing of the Nykvarn municipality. I don’t really know the difference between the Fiskargatan and Lundagatan Neighborhoods. I’m not really sure if they are even neighborhoods, or if they are regions, or suburbs. To be fair, I don’t know the difference between the upper east side and lower west side of new york city, so this is not a thing unique to books taking place outside of America, but still - sometimes it just feels like reading names off a map with no frame of reference. The author does a good job of giving you some contextual clues, but I’m sure to a Stockholm native the book is a much richer read.
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
I’m not sure what I expected given the back of the book blurb on this one (I’m not sure how I know the back of the book blurb, given that the back of the book I read it on is matte black, but I do) which states in various breathless ways what a life-changing read this is, and how it will forever alter your view of the world. I wanted for this to be true, to really have an eye opening experience. I’ve had them before with books, but they all seemed to be either in the impressionable 12-14 stage, or the equally impressionable 20-22 stage. I went back to read Ishmael a while back with the same desire, though that time it was to see if it held up over time. It did not. So I wonder if my feeling towards this would have been different if I had read it at the same time that I read Ishmael.
Regardless of what might have been, this did have the effect on me I would have hoped. Not that it was bad, it just seemed sort of simple. In fact, simple by itself would have been preferable. The story isn’t the problem - a young man goes from Spain to Egypt to see the pyramids and has to suffer through a number of setbacks on the way. The book has a good message: if you work towards following your dreams they will (be much more likely to) come true. The problem is that it makes this so fucking obvious the whole time. Hey, hey hey, did you know your destiny is your own? HEY! LISTEN! DESTINY! LIFE DREAM! I generally don’t like it when “the message” is made a central theme of the book (show, game, so forth). Central theme might not be the right way to describe it; How about instead, I don’t like it when the subtext becomes the text. If it had just been a story about a young man going on an adventure instead of being complacent in his life, I think I would have drawn a message from that. Instead, it makes damn well sure that you know that if you FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS the universe will HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR DESTINY. Subtext should always be sub to some degree or it ruins whatever meaning it could have had, like having to explain the punchline to a joke. I usually resent this sort of hand holding, and appreciate being allowed to figure things out on my own; I like the feeling of understanding that comes from having to mull over an idea in my head. I think that in cases like this, the story would be able to stand on its own if it was just written straight. If the message is good enough, it will rise to the top and people will understand it. Well, certain people will, and I think that is the real issue. By lowering the bar, you let a lot more people in on what is really going on. And again, the message (that is loud-speakered at you from almost every page) is not a bad one, maybe a bit new-agey towards the end, but still a good thing to think about. Is it worth it though? Is it better to have a book that reaches more people, but alienates those who like to think for themselves, or have an somewhat obtuse theme that only comes to those willing to dig for it? I guess it depends on which side you are asking. For me, I truck with the latter, and thought this book came off as trite and heavy-handed.
The girl who played with fire - Steig Larsson
***SPOILER WARNING***
The thing that struck me to write about regarding this book contains major spoilers for both this book, and season five of the wire. If you want to read/see either and haven’t, this is the last book for the month, go ahead and stop right here.
***SPOILER WARNING***
It is a shame that the author passed away, as after reading this book I think there is probably more than just one remaining book’s worth of fertile writing ground for these characters and this setting. This book, like its predecessor, starts slow. And again, I liked this part of the book very much. It is rare that a mystery book just lets the characters get fleshed out without getting right to the meat of things. I guess what is rare is that the book has such a laid back pace to start with and it never feels boring. I was interested to know what was going on in the lives of the main characters, and with their jobs, travels, and so forth. It was refreshing. And again, like the first one, at some point it moves slowly and seamlessly into a fast paced story, one that is hard to get too far away from.
My wife and I watch some TV series, not that many, usually ones that are critically well regarded, and for dramas, usually we watch them all in one fell swoop. We watched the entirety of the sopranos, mad men and battlestar galactica in the course of a few weeks each. Right before the birth of our second child, we hunkered down for what is generally regarded as the best television series of its time: the wire. It’s reputation is well deserved, and it was a pleasure to watch. One of the most likable characters in the show is a man named Omar. I was trying to think of what title to put in front of him, like I could have said, a robber named Omar. Or I could have said a noble anti-hero named Omar. But that is the beauty of the show, it doesn’t fit well with easy archetypes. It is the exact opposite of a book like the alchemist. It doesn’t hold your hand at all. In fact, if you reach out to hold its hand, it swats you away with a harsh look on its face. By the time we get to the fifth season, many of the characters slide from the moral gray area they occupy into the moral black area, making clearly bad decisions in order to (poorly) rectify the bad decisions made by others. Omar is left as one of the only remaining people who seem to be following a code. He was one of the very few characters out of many whose actions we felt deserved some sort of positive outcome; he was the last man standing. In the second or third to last episode he is killed in a humiliating and anti-climactic way. He was acting alone, with nobody who would carry on his task. I was crushed. I actually yelled out, and threw something to the floor. It felt so unfair. At the end of the episode I said I wasn’t interested in finishing the show, and part of me really did feel that way. I felt betrayed.
I bring all this up because of the end of girl who played with fire. In the end one of the main characters is finally meeting up with her father, a man who abused her and her mother, a clear cut villain by any definition. She finally tracks him down and in a conflict with him (the sort she has creatively escaped from before), she gets shot. First in the hip, then in the shoulder, then in the head. Her perspective fades to black and the next scene is her father burying her at the spot of the shooting out in the woods. This was only a day or two after the incident with Omar, and I said out loud, albeit very quietly, “are you fucking kidding me?” I was ready to open my window and drop my book onto my back porch. After just shy of two books worth of getting to know and like this girl, now they just shoot her in the head and bury her in an unmarked grave? It was too much to handle. I put the book down for a minute and thought about it, and it seemed out of character for this author. I kept reading, and it turns out that the shot to the head was not fatal, and she ends up clawing her way out of the shallow grave. That fits in much more closely with the tone of these books than if, ha-fucking-ha, one of the two main characters dies shamefully and short of their goal two books in.
These two incidents made me think about the death of characters, especially in light of the fact that I specifically praised it when in regards to game of thrones. I still feel about deaths the way I said I did for that series, but I can’t quite put my finger on what makes it different. In the girl who played with fire the character was too central to the story line for it to sit well, But in the wire, the comparison was more direct to game of thrones - an ensemble drama where very few characters, if any, are without faults. Why was the death of one character so much more unpleasant in Baltimore, than in Westeros? There are definitely parallels between the two, and specifically between the characters who die, but there is some difference between the two that I can’t reason out. I remember being astonished at some of the deaths in game of thrones, but instead of leaving a bad taste in my mouth and making me lose interest in the story, after I resumed reading it made me want to read more. I wish I had a pithy ending for this, but I don’t. It is just a question at the end with no good answer. Sometimes the death of main characters draws me in and sometimes it pushes me away.
Ok. Books.
The botany of desire - Michael Pollan
This was an interesting read about the human relationship with four breeds of plants: the tulip, apples, marijuana, and potatoes. These specific plants were selected mostly because of their ability to adapt to human desires, hence the title. Each one of these plants has the ability to change quite easily, or more specifically to be changed by humans quite easily. If you were so inclined, I think it would be easy to assume the author has a poor grasp of evolutionary biology, due to his constant discussion of the plants desires, as if they are willing and knowing participants in their own evolution. I’m confident the author knows what he is talking about, and is using the term in a poetic way, or as a way of summing up the will of not the individual plant, but of the species for overall survival. And even then, I don’t think he uses the term in the same way as a human desire, with it’s sense of purposeful agency, but instead as a force one is incapable of fighting, more of a destiny than a desire. It does seem like an excellent toe hold for someone who wanted to try to pick apart the evolutionary stance this book takes, though maybe I’m giving that camp too much credit here; I don’t think they base much of what they say on evidence and reason.
Each plant that the author chose to focus on has its own way of adapting itself to human beings, and the reason we interact heavily with not just these plants, but most of the plants we grow is specifically because of the ease in which they adapt to our needs. Marijuana plants will grow in almost any condition, and react quite favorably to modification of its genetics and growing conditions.They will grow larger and faster if you give them more light or Carbon Dioxide than they would ever find in nature, with no adverse side effects; it has a nearly inexhaustible appetite for growth. On the other hand, instead of marijuana’s malleability, the apple gives us genetic variety. Each apple contains five seeds, all of them wildly genetically different. This allows us to cull from a seed planted orchard only the trees and fruits that have the traits we want, selecting some for durability, or sweetness, or color. This variety also allows for the apple to adapt to new environments quite easily; being so different makes it more likely that sat least one will thrive in a given area, making it easy to move the apple through different climates and growing regions.
My only complaint was that the author continued to harp on this dichotomy between Dionysus and Apollo, comparing the plants and their various proponents to either a wild Dionysus, or an ordered Apollo. Not that it was a bad comparison, or more specifically, not that it would have been a bad comparison just the once, but it seemed to get brought up in every chapter, sometimes in multiple spots. Some of the comparisons were alright, but after the fourth or fifth time of hearing about the wild Dionysian abandon of this, that or some other thing I wanted to say “OK, mike, I get it. Untamed wilds. Awesome. Lets move it along.” This is a minor quibble though, overall this was a very insightful book regarding the co-evolution of humankind and the plants we are drawn to.
The girl with the dragon tattoo - Steig Larsson
My mother has been advising me to read this for a while, and at first I put it somewhere in my queue past the top three, then continued to shuffle it downward as newer and more pressing books came along, or at the very least, books I happened upon sooner after finishing whatever it was I was on at the time. She has given me good advice before, so it wasn’t a polite sort of, oh yes, that sounds good, I'll be sure to get to that when I have time, but oh... I have so many things to read first - no, no, why don’t you just keep it for now sort of situation. Anyway, I got around to it, and it is quite an enjoyable book. Other people who told me to read it warned me to press through the first 100 or so pages, and that it picked up after that. I liked it right away, though I admit it starts slow - but that is one of the things I like the most about this series: it is willing to take its time, stopping to smell the character development flowers, if you will. Rare is the book willing to have a long span of time be devoted to really kick ass and thorough researching segments. Despite the upcoming (second) film version of this book, I don’t think this is the sort of book that translates well to cinema. There is so much of it that comes from character’s inner thoughts, or from finding a key piece of data in a library, that it will take some serious screenplay modification to keep the pace of the film from being unwatchable. (You know what would translate well to film? The hunger games. I rarely cared about what Katniss was thinking, and would love to be able to focus mostly on the games, and the world, and not give more than one half of one shit about which of her boys she is going to hold hands with, or whatever. No inner thoughts, just a few brief mopey stares at some young beefcake, and then back to more hunger, and more games.) Despite the slow start, and your opinions on that, it turns into a pretty intense page turner at some point. The real draw for me though was that is does this without veering into Dan Brown territory, and forcing you to acknowledge the poor writing whenever you give it any praise, so as to avoid looking like some sort of literary philistine.
With books that have been translated, it is hard to tell what stems from the cultural differences, or the peculiarities of the language, and what instead is just the way that particular author writes. At one point somebody is said to be as daft as a syphilitic pole cat. Is this a common turn of phrase in Sweden? I really hope it is, and that it was just so colorful that it defied anything other than literal translation. This other-ness adds a nice flavor to the experience, though I worry in some cases what I might be missing by not being in on some of the knowledge that might fill in some of the gaps. For example, if you were familiar with the Midwest, and I told you that I was from rural Indiana (I’m not) and that I went to college in Chicago, but then I moved to Madison after school, all those places would color a picture of the person being described. Maybe a bit of a hayseed, who goes to a big city to get away from his country roots, he then decides to get away from the rush of the city but still be somewhere with a lively arts community. If you weren’t familiar with any of those places, then you would have no more information than could be found on a map. Like if I said to you that I grew up in Malmo, and then went to university in Gothenburg, but decided later to move to Trollhattan; not quite the same story is painted, instead it is just reads as a series of facts. This book makes me, at some points, feel like I may be missing out on some of the details between the lines. I still don’t know the cultural standing of the Nykvarn municipality. I don’t really know the difference between the Fiskargatan and Lundagatan Neighborhoods. I’m not really sure if they are even neighborhoods, or if they are regions, or suburbs. To be fair, I don’t know the difference between the upper east side and lower west side of new york city, so this is not a thing unique to books taking place outside of America, but still - sometimes it just feels like reading names off a map with no frame of reference. The author does a good job of giving you some contextual clues, but I’m sure to a Stockholm native the book is a much richer read.
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
I’m not sure what I expected given the back of the book blurb on this one (I’m not sure how I know the back of the book blurb, given that the back of the book I read it on is matte black, but I do) which states in various breathless ways what a life-changing read this is, and how it will forever alter your view of the world. I wanted for this to be true, to really have an eye opening experience. I’ve had them before with books, but they all seemed to be either in the impressionable 12-14 stage, or the equally impressionable 20-22 stage. I went back to read Ishmael a while back with the same desire, though that time it was to see if it held up over time. It did not. So I wonder if my feeling towards this would have been different if I had read it at the same time that I read Ishmael.
Regardless of what might have been, this did have the effect on me I would have hoped. Not that it was bad, it just seemed sort of simple. In fact, simple by itself would have been preferable. The story isn’t the problem - a young man goes from Spain to Egypt to see the pyramids and has to suffer through a number of setbacks on the way. The book has a good message: if you work towards following your dreams they will (be much more likely to) come true. The problem is that it makes this so fucking obvious the whole time. Hey, hey hey, did you know your destiny is your own? HEY! LISTEN! DESTINY! LIFE DREAM! I generally don’t like it when “the message” is made a central theme of the book (show, game, so forth). Central theme might not be the right way to describe it; How about instead, I don’t like it when the subtext becomes the text. If it had just been a story about a young man going on an adventure instead of being complacent in his life, I think I would have drawn a message from that. Instead, it makes damn well sure that you know that if you FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS the universe will HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR DESTINY. Subtext should always be sub to some degree or it ruins whatever meaning it could have had, like having to explain the punchline to a joke. I usually resent this sort of hand holding, and appreciate being allowed to figure things out on my own; I like the feeling of understanding that comes from having to mull over an idea in my head. I think that in cases like this, the story would be able to stand on its own if it was just written straight. If the message is good enough, it will rise to the top and people will understand it. Well, certain people will, and I think that is the real issue. By lowering the bar, you let a lot more people in on what is really going on. And again, the message (that is loud-speakered at you from almost every page) is not a bad one, maybe a bit new-agey towards the end, but still a good thing to think about. Is it worth it though? Is it better to have a book that reaches more people, but alienates those who like to think for themselves, or have an somewhat obtuse theme that only comes to those willing to dig for it? I guess it depends on which side you are asking. For me, I truck with the latter, and thought this book came off as trite and heavy-handed.
The girl who played with fire - Steig Larsson
***SPOILER WARNING***
The thing that struck me to write about regarding this book contains major spoilers for both this book, and season five of the wire. If you want to read/see either and haven’t, this is the last book for the month, go ahead and stop right here.
***SPOILER WARNING***
It is a shame that the author passed away, as after reading this book I think there is probably more than just one remaining book’s worth of fertile writing ground for these characters and this setting. This book, like its predecessor, starts slow. And again, I liked this part of the book very much. It is rare that a mystery book just lets the characters get fleshed out without getting right to the meat of things. I guess what is rare is that the book has such a laid back pace to start with and it never feels boring. I was interested to know what was going on in the lives of the main characters, and with their jobs, travels, and so forth. It was refreshing. And again, like the first one, at some point it moves slowly and seamlessly into a fast paced story, one that is hard to get too far away from.
My wife and I watch some TV series, not that many, usually ones that are critically well regarded, and for dramas, usually we watch them all in one fell swoop. We watched the entirety of the sopranos, mad men and battlestar galactica in the course of a few weeks each. Right before the birth of our second child, we hunkered down for what is generally regarded as the best television series of its time: the wire. It’s reputation is well deserved, and it was a pleasure to watch. One of the most likable characters in the show is a man named Omar. I was trying to think of what title to put in front of him, like I could have said, a robber named Omar. Or I could have said a noble anti-hero named Omar. But that is the beauty of the show, it doesn’t fit well with easy archetypes. It is the exact opposite of a book like the alchemist. It doesn’t hold your hand at all. In fact, if you reach out to hold its hand, it swats you away with a harsh look on its face. By the time we get to the fifth season, many of the characters slide from the moral gray area they occupy into the moral black area, making clearly bad decisions in order to (poorly) rectify the bad decisions made by others. Omar is left as one of the only remaining people who seem to be following a code. He was one of the very few characters out of many whose actions we felt deserved some sort of positive outcome; he was the last man standing. In the second or third to last episode he is killed in a humiliating and anti-climactic way. He was acting alone, with nobody who would carry on his task. I was crushed. I actually yelled out, and threw something to the floor. It felt so unfair. At the end of the episode I said I wasn’t interested in finishing the show, and part of me really did feel that way. I felt betrayed.
I bring all this up because of the end of girl who played with fire. In the end one of the main characters is finally meeting up with her father, a man who abused her and her mother, a clear cut villain by any definition. She finally tracks him down and in a conflict with him (the sort she has creatively escaped from before), she gets shot. First in the hip, then in the shoulder, then in the head. Her perspective fades to black and the next scene is her father burying her at the spot of the shooting out in the woods. This was only a day or two after the incident with Omar, and I said out loud, albeit very quietly, “are you fucking kidding me?” I was ready to open my window and drop my book onto my back porch. After just shy of two books worth of getting to know and like this girl, now they just shoot her in the head and bury her in an unmarked grave? It was too much to handle. I put the book down for a minute and thought about it, and it seemed out of character for this author. I kept reading, and it turns out that the shot to the head was not fatal, and she ends up clawing her way out of the shallow grave. That fits in much more closely with the tone of these books than if, ha-fucking-ha, one of the two main characters dies shamefully and short of their goal two books in.
These two incidents made me think about the death of characters, especially in light of the fact that I specifically praised it when in regards to game of thrones. I still feel about deaths the way I said I did for that series, but I can’t quite put my finger on what makes it different. In the girl who played with fire the character was too central to the story line for it to sit well, But in the wire, the comparison was more direct to game of thrones - an ensemble drama where very few characters, if any, are without faults. Why was the death of one character so much more unpleasant in Baltimore, than in Westeros? There are definitely parallels between the two, and specifically between the characters who die, but there is some difference between the two that I can’t reason out. I remember being astonished at some of the deaths in game of thrones, but instead of leaving a bad taste in my mouth and making me lose interest in the story, after I resumed reading it made me want to read more. I wish I had a pithy ending for this, but I don’t. It is just a question at the end with no good answer. Sometimes the death of main characters draws me in and sometimes it pushes me away.
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.
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.
June
The baby storm looms, dark on the horizon. I plan on finishing the next martin book before she gets here, and we’ll see how I do after that.
George R.R. Martin - A Feast For Crows
This book is the first of the series that is a chore to finish, and to me that speaks highly of the three previous books, being as long as they are, and yet being so propulsive. It is the sort of book you’ll only like if you are already deeply engrossed in the world, and still, you’ll enjoy it begrudgingly. This is the book that a song of fire and ice hipster would claim as their favorite. The story with this book is this: the author realized as he was writing it that it was getting too long, and decided to split it into two books. In order to avoid an awful cliffhanger ending, and a fractured and unfinished book, he decided to split the two books in half by character, focusing on a handful of characters in book 4, and saving the rest of the characters for the fifth book. His misstep was that he picked (and introduced new) almost all shitty and grating characters for this book. In its defense, there are a lot of things that get set up that will surely have serious consequences later on. This is still, however, the slow point in the middle of the series, after all the good set up, but before all the interesting resolution starts to unfold. The good news is that by using up all the boring bits in this book, he has saved all the good characters for the next book. So let’s all keep our fingers crossed that he hasn’t lost it, and that book four was just sort of bland.
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
I would recommend this book to anybody who has ever worked with children or adults with special needs, it raises a number of interesting ideas about the nature and consequences of intelligence. Another of the “heard of it but never read it” types of classics, the story focuses on a mentally retarded man (Charlie) who receives an experimental surgery that hopes to dramatically increase his brain function. One of the things I found myself thinking about the most during the book is about how much truth there is in the old adage “ignorance is bliss”. The surgery makes him much smarter than before, but this new found cognitive ability gives him not only the ability to remember facts and analyze higher forms of argument and logic, but also to reflect on the possibly awful nature of the people who he knew when he was retarded.
I used to work at a summer camp for children and adults with disabilities, and one of the things I felt was that the more profoundly mentally challenged people were happier than the people who only had mild to moderate disabilities. The mild cases were much more likely to not only know what was wrong with themselves, but also be able to compare how they acted in relation to “normal” people. The most self aware and mildly disabled seemed to me to usually be the most likely to be unhappy, because they were the people who could recognize when they were being mocked, or when they were being excluded based on their differences. I knew a number of children and adults who were mildly disabled, and bristled at being treated as inferiors, or became easily frustrated at their lack of skills in certain areas because they could see where others succeeded, and it tore at them. Now, to be clear, this is by no means a rule. I also knew many people who were severely disabled who seemed quite unhappy, or people who were mildly disabled but had a cheerful demeanor and positive outlook on life. Lots of it came down to personality, and could not be classified or defined by levels or types of disability, but it was still a general pattern I saw.
In the book, Charlie has much the same train of thought. He sees interactions from his past in a new light, whereas before he might have thought that the people he worked with were laughing with him, he could now see clearly that they were laughing at him. One of the other side effects of his surgery is that along with his intellectual growth comes an equal level of emotional growth, which seems logical enough. He goes through a crash course of emotions that most of us get to deal with slowly throughout adolescence and young adulthood in the course of a few weeks. He stumbles through a romantic relationship or two, not knowing how to conduct himself, or how to act on all the new feeling he has . He has to come to terms with his growth from generally childlike to full adult emotions too fast, and as a result his personality changes from generally cheerful to cynical and callous.
I don’t think that the author intends to give you the impression that ignorance is indeed bliss, but it at least shows that it isn’t a simple issue, and that sometimes more knowledge can be as hurtful as it is enlightening.
Daniel Quinn - Ishmael
I have read this book before, maybe 6 or 7 years ago. At the time I remember feeling strongly about it, that it was an important book, with a strong and well argued point. The book is about man’s environmental impact on the earth, and how this problem is larger than just America, China and the rest of the major industrial powers of the world; the claim is that it has been a large scale societal problem for most of humankind sine the rise of planned agriculture in the fertile crescent. The book does not suggest that we drop steady agriculture in favor of hunting and gathering, but more that we acknowledge that we can’t keep consuming and growing at the rate we do without there being dire consequences. It also makes some interesting suggestions about the biblical story of cain and abel (among others) being an allegory for the dominance of agrarian societies at the time over the pastoral way of life. In the story, cain is shunned for his sins, and is marked as a sinner and driven away. The standard reading of the story makes cain the farmer out to be the villain, and it is suggested that it is told this way because it is originally a myth told from the point of view of the nomadic shepherds of the region. This is noted as ironic because the early Jews who adopted this story in the old testament were most certainly part of an agrarian society, and had adopted somebody else's denouncement of their way of life into their central creation myth.
Many of the ideas in the book are valid and worth discussing, but they are delivered in what now seems to me like a cheap and juvenile manner. I think it would have come across as a more well reasoned book if it had critically analyzed some of its own assertions, instead of just having a one sided discussion often bordering on lecture. It seems comparable to some of the old greek philosophical works, where an idea is presented as a false dialogue by having an “opponent” try to take the idea apart with mostly straw-man arguments, only to be continually rebuffed by the expert on the subject. It might have come across as better written if it had been just a book of non fiction about what the author thinks about the modern ecological movement, or if it was more deeply rooted in a better worked piece of fiction, and you took the ideas from the book in a less direct manner. Instead it seems like the book it beating you over the head with these ideas, all the while sort of weakly pretending to be a work of fiction. Doing some reading about the book after I had finished it to see if my sentiments was shared by anyone else who had come back to the book (they were), I was surprised to find that many people reported that this book was presented to them in a college level course. This is, in my opinion, not college level discourse. Not that i think it is without merit - quite the opposite in fact, there are many good points of discussion presented, I just think it is better suited for critical evaluation by a younger audience. Though I read it and felt moved by it in my post college years, looking back on it now it seems so different, so much less important. I think this is a book best read during that critical impressionable part of your life, where you are open to big, sloppy world changing ideas regardless of how well formed they are. It serves as an excellent reminder to me that while many things in the world have stayed the same, I have changed.
Gary Paulsen: Hatchet
After revisiting Ishmael, I decided to try to read something else I had already read, but from much farther back. I remember being deeply attached to this book at a very young age, some time in grade school. As with the previous book, this is one that needs to be read in the right age range to leave the maximum impression, that range being maybe 8 to 12. This is the first time I have re-read anything aimed at such a young audience, and the thing I was the most surprised at was how short the book was. I finished it in what seemed like less than one sitting, having only 1700 or so kindle mystery pages (conversion rate to real book pages not known). This is a great book for any emerging readers, a story of a child’s self sufficiency in the wild using just a small hand axe and his accumulated knowledge. It was a pleasant change of pace in its simplicity compared to the moral quagmires i usually read, there was very little awful soul crushing shit happening all the damn time, yes I’m looking at you mister Martin and mister McCarthy. There really isn’t much to say about this one, it is competently written, straightforward and to the point. Not much going for long form subtext here. Though one time at work one of my co-workers said, during a conversation about books we had read and loved as kids, that she very specifically did not like this book. Not indifference, not apathy - no. She said it was boring and stupid, who would want to read about someone out in the woods? I guess it takes all kinds. Even the doesn’t like a good book kind.
George R.R. Martin - A Feast For Crows
This book is the first of the series that is a chore to finish, and to me that speaks highly of the three previous books, being as long as they are, and yet being so propulsive. It is the sort of book you’ll only like if you are already deeply engrossed in the world, and still, you’ll enjoy it begrudgingly. This is the book that a song of fire and ice hipster would claim as their favorite. The story with this book is this: the author realized as he was writing it that it was getting too long, and decided to split it into two books. In order to avoid an awful cliffhanger ending, and a fractured and unfinished book, he decided to split the two books in half by character, focusing on a handful of characters in book 4, and saving the rest of the characters for the fifth book. His misstep was that he picked (and introduced new) almost all shitty and grating characters for this book. In its defense, there are a lot of things that get set up that will surely have serious consequences later on. This is still, however, the slow point in the middle of the series, after all the good set up, but before all the interesting resolution starts to unfold. The good news is that by using up all the boring bits in this book, he has saved all the good characters for the next book. So let’s all keep our fingers crossed that he hasn’t lost it, and that book four was just sort of bland.
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
I would recommend this book to anybody who has ever worked with children or adults with special needs, it raises a number of interesting ideas about the nature and consequences of intelligence. Another of the “heard of it but never read it” types of classics, the story focuses on a mentally retarded man (Charlie) who receives an experimental surgery that hopes to dramatically increase his brain function. One of the things I found myself thinking about the most during the book is about how much truth there is in the old adage “ignorance is bliss”. The surgery makes him much smarter than before, but this new found cognitive ability gives him not only the ability to remember facts and analyze higher forms of argument and logic, but also to reflect on the possibly awful nature of the people who he knew when he was retarded.
I used to work at a summer camp for children and adults with disabilities, and one of the things I felt was that the more profoundly mentally challenged people were happier than the people who only had mild to moderate disabilities. The mild cases were much more likely to not only know what was wrong with themselves, but also be able to compare how they acted in relation to “normal” people. The most self aware and mildly disabled seemed to me to usually be the most likely to be unhappy, because they were the people who could recognize when they were being mocked, or when they were being excluded based on their differences. I knew a number of children and adults who were mildly disabled, and bristled at being treated as inferiors, or became easily frustrated at their lack of skills in certain areas because they could see where others succeeded, and it tore at them. Now, to be clear, this is by no means a rule. I also knew many people who were severely disabled who seemed quite unhappy, or people who were mildly disabled but had a cheerful demeanor and positive outlook on life. Lots of it came down to personality, and could not be classified or defined by levels or types of disability, but it was still a general pattern I saw.
In the book, Charlie has much the same train of thought. He sees interactions from his past in a new light, whereas before he might have thought that the people he worked with were laughing with him, he could now see clearly that they were laughing at him. One of the other side effects of his surgery is that along with his intellectual growth comes an equal level of emotional growth, which seems logical enough. He goes through a crash course of emotions that most of us get to deal with slowly throughout adolescence and young adulthood in the course of a few weeks. He stumbles through a romantic relationship or two, not knowing how to conduct himself, or how to act on all the new feeling he has . He has to come to terms with his growth from generally childlike to full adult emotions too fast, and as a result his personality changes from generally cheerful to cynical and callous.
I don’t think that the author intends to give you the impression that ignorance is indeed bliss, but it at least shows that it isn’t a simple issue, and that sometimes more knowledge can be as hurtful as it is enlightening.
Daniel Quinn - Ishmael
I have read this book before, maybe 6 or 7 years ago. At the time I remember feeling strongly about it, that it was an important book, with a strong and well argued point. The book is about man’s environmental impact on the earth, and how this problem is larger than just America, China and the rest of the major industrial powers of the world; the claim is that it has been a large scale societal problem for most of humankind sine the rise of planned agriculture in the fertile crescent. The book does not suggest that we drop steady agriculture in favor of hunting and gathering, but more that we acknowledge that we can’t keep consuming and growing at the rate we do without there being dire consequences. It also makes some interesting suggestions about the biblical story of cain and abel (among others) being an allegory for the dominance of agrarian societies at the time over the pastoral way of life. In the story, cain is shunned for his sins, and is marked as a sinner and driven away. The standard reading of the story makes cain the farmer out to be the villain, and it is suggested that it is told this way because it is originally a myth told from the point of view of the nomadic shepherds of the region. This is noted as ironic because the early Jews who adopted this story in the old testament were most certainly part of an agrarian society, and had adopted somebody else's denouncement of their way of life into their central creation myth.
Many of the ideas in the book are valid and worth discussing, but they are delivered in what now seems to me like a cheap and juvenile manner. I think it would have come across as a more well reasoned book if it had critically analyzed some of its own assertions, instead of just having a one sided discussion often bordering on lecture. It seems comparable to some of the old greek philosophical works, where an idea is presented as a false dialogue by having an “opponent” try to take the idea apart with mostly straw-man arguments, only to be continually rebuffed by the expert on the subject. It might have come across as better written if it had been just a book of non fiction about what the author thinks about the modern ecological movement, or if it was more deeply rooted in a better worked piece of fiction, and you took the ideas from the book in a less direct manner. Instead it seems like the book it beating you over the head with these ideas, all the while sort of weakly pretending to be a work of fiction. Doing some reading about the book after I had finished it to see if my sentiments was shared by anyone else who had come back to the book (they were), I was surprised to find that many people reported that this book was presented to them in a college level course. This is, in my opinion, not college level discourse. Not that i think it is without merit - quite the opposite in fact, there are many good points of discussion presented, I just think it is better suited for critical evaluation by a younger audience. Though I read it and felt moved by it in my post college years, looking back on it now it seems so different, so much less important. I think this is a book best read during that critical impressionable part of your life, where you are open to big, sloppy world changing ideas regardless of how well formed they are. It serves as an excellent reminder to me that while many things in the world have stayed the same, I have changed.
Gary Paulsen: Hatchet
After revisiting Ishmael, I decided to try to read something else I had already read, but from much farther back. I remember being deeply attached to this book at a very young age, some time in grade school. As with the previous book, this is one that needs to be read in the right age range to leave the maximum impression, that range being maybe 8 to 12. This is the first time I have re-read anything aimed at such a young audience, and the thing I was the most surprised at was how short the book was. I finished it in what seemed like less than one sitting, having only 1700 or so kindle mystery pages (conversion rate to real book pages not known). This is a great book for any emerging readers, a story of a child’s self sufficiency in the wild using just a small hand axe and his accumulated knowledge. It was a pleasant change of pace in its simplicity compared to the moral quagmires i usually read, there was very little awful soul crushing shit happening all the damn time, yes I’m looking at you mister Martin and mister McCarthy. There really isn’t much to say about this one, it is competently written, straightforward and to the point. Not much going for long form subtext here. Though one time at work one of my co-workers said, during a conversation about books we had read and loved as kids, that she very specifically did not like this book. Not indifference, not apathy - no. She said it was boring and stupid, who would want to read about someone out in the woods? I guess it takes all kinds. Even the doesn’t like a good book kind.
May
All quiet on the technical front, except that I can hear this little piece rattling around inside the new kindle. I wonder how many hardware issues I’m going to have before I start to really complain? I guess as long as they keep sending me new ones, I haven’t really got that much to be mad about.
In my reading this year I have been focusing mostly on books that I haven’t read before, and have only a few times gone back to re-read something. There are so many books from various best of lists that I have loaded up on my computer that I have yet to try out, it seems silly to re-read something when all that great new content is waiting for me, but there are some books worth returning to for a second tour. At the beginning of the month I was coming off last month’s serious book tear (there are still three books that I read last month that I just didn’t write about, for lack of great insight - I guess I could just do a quick blurb/review? I don’t know.) and I decided to go back and re-read something I had already read. And instead of picking something quick, I picked the opposite.
A GAME OF THRONES,
CLASH OF KINGS,
STORM OF SWORDS,
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
I’m just going to lump all of these together, as they are all the same long story in a series. These books are universally loved by most, they come out at a snail’s pace, and the newest offering is set to come out this July, so I wanted to come into the new one with the story fresh in my mind. This time along I have encouraged other people to read it with me, and I have three guys at my work reading it, my wife, and I think I’m about to get my cousin on board too. Here is my short review of these books: DAAAMN.
Here is my slightly longer review: DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.
Here is the full length version. If you read what I had to say about name of the wind, many of the same things are going to be applicable here. Lots of the books that I read when I was younger were written poorly, or in the no frills / workmanlike manner that many books aimed at pre-teens can be written. I would like to think that this series is a bit more well written, and it is arguable whether it is or not, but the subject matter is pitch black. Murder, incest, slavery, rape, torture, betrayal, war - rarely is it done tastelessly or sensationally, but the world these books take place in is a pretty fucking unforgiving place. The worlds of harry potter and lord of the rings (for example) are black and white places. Yes, in both stories, bad things can occasionally happen to good people, but generally speaking, the good guys are good and they win in the end, and the bad guys are bad and lose because of it. Not to knock either of those series or authors, it is just part of what they are. I never really worry that harry potter is going to die in any of his adventures. Harry is in the woods with a spider? Yes the forbidden forest full of elephantine spiders is a bit frightening to imagine, but in the back of my mind i know he is going to make it out alive. There is a zero percent chance that the encounter will end with the spider impaling Harry through the chest and then sucking his insides out through the stab hole while Ron watches from his own silken cocoon, shitting himself and screaming until his voice is hoarse. ZERO PERCENT. This makes sense with harry potter, it being aimed at children and all, but as an adult reading it there is a certain sterile quality to the encounters that removes some of the suspense from them. Not so in this series, (officially called “a song of fire and ice” but to hell with that, I call it game of thrones) the encounters are the opposite of sterile. They are, metaphorically speaking, filthy. People die all the time. Main characters. I’m not going to spoil any of the series for you here, but let it be known: main characters are not safe. No no no, they are not. The first time I read through the books, at one point I put the book down in disbelief, then flipped through the rest of book’s chapter headings to see if I was being tricked. At a later point in the series, I had to put the book down and walk away from it for a bit, to let my head clear, and decide if I wanted to keep reading. It is incredible what this does to the potency of the story - once you realize how harsh the world is, nothing becomes out of bounds, and every encounter becomes something you need to take seriously. The emotion of the characters become more potent, their fear more palpable; it lends a gravity to scenes in other books that just seem like filler between adventurous moments.
The author has cited the war of the roses as part of the inspiration for this series, and much of the book is given over, predictably if you know anything of that period in history, to court intrigue. The cast of this book is well past one hundred by the end of the first book, and most of them have their own selfish motives and desires. The absolute skeletal outline of the beginning of the first book is that a leader from a part of the world where there is no backstabbing aristocracy to speak of is drawn into the royal court during a time of serious upheaval and is immediately out of his element. In any other fantasy book, this stoic, salt of the earth sort of leader would be the clear good guy to the weaselly scheming of his new royal group of bad guys. Everybody there has their own agenda and personal advancement to see to, and sometimes this requires them to abruptly change allegiances if it looks like that will help them more than their old plan would. There is some excellent food for thought in the first book concerning the usual tropes of good guys following the rules, and bad guys looking out only for themselves. The question arises a few times of whether it is more right to follow the rules if that will lead to bad things happening, or if it is alright to massage the truth if it means avoiding those catastrophic situations. It turns nicely on its head the idea that the traditional good guy does what’s right, and that will always lead to the best possible outcome, and instead asks you to ponder if he may be blindly doing more harm than good by sticking to what is right by law. Now, certainly the schemers make out like bandits from these massagings of the truth, but what if they also avoid a war? Are they really looking out for the best interest of anyone but themselves? The characters are written with enough subtlety and depth that it isn’t always obvious who wants the greater good, and who wants personal gain, or if they really can want both.
The first three books are definitely plotted on an upward trending graph, whereas the fourth book has a touch of the shitties. It’s not completely without merit, but compared to the third book it is the first time I have felt like my re-reading to get up to date for book five is more chore than pleasure. Given the specific reasons why he fourth book was bad it is very likely (fingers crossed, wood knocking, so forth) that the fifth book will pick up where the third left off, and be fucking awesome. Or maybe he lost his authorly way and the whole series will be garbage forever, and be the twin peaks of fantasy novels: lots of early promise, no follow through.
In my reading this year I have been focusing mostly on books that I haven’t read before, and have only a few times gone back to re-read something. There are so many books from various best of lists that I have loaded up on my computer that I have yet to try out, it seems silly to re-read something when all that great new content is waiting for me, but there are some books worth returning to for a second tour. At the beginning of the month I was coming off last month’s serious book tear (there are still three books that I read last month that I just didn’t write about, for lack of great insight - I guess I could just do a quick blurb/review? I don’t know.) and I decided to go back and re-read something I had already read. And instead of picking something quick, I picked the opposite.
COMPLETED
A GAME OF THRONES,
CLASH OF KINGS,
STORM OF SWORDS,
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
I’m just going to lump all of these together, as they are all the same long story in a series. These books are universally loved by most, they come out at a snail’s pace, and the newest offering is set to come out this July, so I wanted to come into the new one with the story fresh in my mind. This time along I have encouraged other people to read it with me, and I have three guys at my work reading it, my wife, and I think I’m about to get my cousin on board too. Here is my short review of these books: DAAAMN.
Here is my slightly longer review: DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.
Here is the full length version. If you read what I had to say about name of the wind, many of the same things are going to be applicable here. Lots of the books that I read when I was younger were written poorly, or in the no frills / workmanlike manner that many books aimed at pre-teens can be written. I would like to think that this series is a bit more well written, and it is arguable whether it is or not, but the subject matter is pitch black. Murder, incest, slavery, rape, torture, betrayal, war - rarely is it done tastelessly or sensationally, but the world these books take place in is a pretty fucking unforgiving place. The worlds of harry potter and lord of the rings (for example) are black and white places. Yes, in both stories, bad things can occasionally happen to good people, but generally speaking, the good guys are good and they win in the end, and the bad guys are bad and lose because of it. Not to knock either of those series or authors, it is just part of what they are. I never really worry that harry potter is going to die in any of his adventures. Harry is in the woods with a spider? Yes the forbidden forest full of elephantine spiders is a bit frightening to imagine, but in the back of my mind i know he is going to make it out alive. There is a zero percent chance that the encounter will end with the spider impaling Harry through the chest and then sucking his insides out through the stab hole while Ron watches from his own silken cocoon, shitting himself and screaming until his voice is hoarse. ZERO PERCENT. This makes sense with harry potter, it being aimed at children and all, but as an adult reading it there is a certain sterile quality to the encounters that removes some of the suspense from them. Not so in this series, (officially called “a song of fire and ice” but to hell with that, I call it game of thrones) the encounters are the opposite of sterile. They are, metaphorically speaking, filthy. People die all the time. Main characters. I’m not going to spoil any of the series for you here, but let it be known: main characters are not safe. No no no, they are not. The first time I read through the books, at one point I put the book down in disbelief, then flipped through the rest of book’s chapter headings to see if I was being tricked. At a later point in the series, I had to put the book down and walk away from it for a bit, to let my head clear, and decide if I wanted to keep reading. It is incredible what this does to the potency of the story - once you realize how harsh the world is, nothing becomes out of bounds, and every encounter becomes something you need to take seriously. The emotion of the characters become more potent, their fear more palpable; it lends a gravity to scenes in other books that just seem like filler between adventurous moments.
The author has cited the war of the roses as part of the inspiration for this series, and much of the book is given over, predictably if you know anything of that period in history, to court intrigue. The cast of this book is well past one hundred by the end of the first book, and most of them have their own selfish motives and desires. The absolute skeletal outline of the beginning of the first book is that a leader from a part of the world where there is no backstabbing aristocracy to speak of is drawn into the royal court during a time of serious upheaval and is immediately out of his element. In any other fantasy book, this stoic, salt of the earth sort of leader would be the clear good guy to the weaselly scheming of his new royal group of bad guys. Everybody there has their own agenda and personal advancement to see to, and sometimes this requires them to abruptly change allegiances if it looks like that will help them more than their old plan would. There is some excellent food for thought in the first book concerning the usual tropes of good guys following the rules, and bad guys looking out only for themselves. The question arises a few times of whether it is more right to follow the rules if that will lead to bad things happening, or if it is alright to massage the truth if it means avoiding those catastrophic situations. It turns nicely on its head the idea that the traditional good guy does what’s right, and that will always lead to the best possible outcome, and instead asks you to ponder if he may be blindly doing more harm than good by sticking to what is right by law. Now, certainly the schemers make out like bandits from these massagings of the truth, but what if they also avoid a war? Are they really looking out for the best interest of anyone but themselves? The characters are written with enough subtlety and depth that it isn’t always obvious who wants the greater good, and who wants personal gain, or if they really can want both.
The first three books are definitely plotted on an upward trending graph, whereas the fourth book has a touch of the shitties. It’s not completely without merit, but compared to the third book it is the first time I have felt like my re-reading to get up to date for book five is more chore than pleasure. Given the specific reasons why he fourth book was bad it is very likely (fingers crossed, wood knocking, so forth) that the fifth book will pick up where the third left off, and be fucking awesome. Or maybe he lost his authorly way and the whole series will be garbage forever, and be the twin peaks of fantasy novels: lots of early promise, no follow through.
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