All the Comics

Been reading comics lately, lots of 'em.  Saga.  Locke & Key.  Angel & Faith.  Bone.  So many great comics so far this year.

I'm sure you've heard of Saga, which is all over the place with buzz.  It's by Brian Vaughn, who brought us Y: The Last Man.  I enjoyed a lot of things about that series, but I found the story to be kind of flawed on a couple of levels.  It's hard to tell at this point what's going to happen with Saga, but the characters are so, so wonderful. The teenage ghost half-nanny, the troubled bounty hunter and his truth-scenting cat, the romance novel-reading soldier.

I almost didn't give it a shot, because the first issue contained a rather off-putting sex scene (really, the idea of characters with TVs for faces is kind of heavy-handed to begin with), but that was fortunately not indicative of the overall tone of the series.  I am SO on board for this ride.

Locke & Key has sold me on Joe Hill.  I don't know why I haven't read Joe Hill yet--everyone tells me how great he is. The first volume of Locke & Key is one of the creepiest things I've ever read, and now I have to read a bunch more.  I'm only on number two, but I'm already getting twitchy for the point at which our protagonists realize that there's something going on.  Because right now they're just wandering around having their strings pulled left right and center and not even realizing, and this is going to get really depressing until they start fighting back.

I'm going to skip Angel & Faith; my relationship with that series is incredibly complicated and based on a long and weirdly passionate emotional history with the Buffy franchise.  I hate Angel; I like Faith; I hate Eliza Dushku; I like David Boreanaz; I'm trying to follow the Buffy comics and I need to keep the dream alive.  But I can only watch the same characters learn the same lessons so many times over before I despair of them.  So that's all I'll say about that.

Bone, though!  Let's talk about Bone. Adam and Mike have almost finished it, but I'm still on volume 5.  It's just so charming.  It's got all the elements of epic fantasy, with the adorableness of a Sunday comic strip.  And you're reading about this aw-shucks little non-human character having a crush on the gorgeous girl, and it's like Opus the Penguin all over again, but then there are all these hints of backstory, all these echoes of incredibly rich world-building that you're just getting these tastes of but that point to something rich and wonderful.

I'm really glad to be reading the recently published color versions.  I've tried to read them before in black and white, but I found that the art was a little too complex to take in easily that way.  Mike tells me that ex post facto coloring is usually bad, but this is really excellent work; you would never know it wasn't meant to be this way.

More comics coming up!

First Impressions

Starting a bunch of new books.  Here's a rundown of my opinions based on the first 3-10% of each one (depending how long it is--I'm probably 40 pages into The Goldfinch and I just hit 3%.  Kindle tells me I won't be done for 17 hours, and every time I turn a page that estimate gets longer.  That cannot be a good thing).

The Cranes Dance, by Meg Howrey.  This one was a recommendation from Linden, and when the library had the ebook available I picked it up idly.  It starts with a ballerina's rundown of Swan Lake for the uninitiated and from the backstage point of view, and I was hooked.

Kate has an amazing voice. she is everything you believe hard-core ballet dancers to be--edgy, competitive, passionate, anxious--and you want more than anything to listen to her dish.  But it's not a fluffy book--it's about how ambition and intensity affect relationships and personality.

The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson.  Well, you know, meh.  The problem with a second book is always (or at least often) that you have to start fresh with a new plot.  So you start out with either no tension or unearned tension.  Plus, all the progress we made in the last book just seems to have fallen away.

There are other things that annoy me, though.  Kelsier as a charismatic character was not just holding the characters together, he was kind of holding me in the story last time.  Vin's being a jerk to the chandra.  And oh jeez, too much political meandering.  And not in a complicated Dune/Vorkosigan way, but in a boring The Phantom Menace kind of way.

That said, it's a LONG book and I'm just a little way in.  Eventually, he'll get me invested.  This reaction, though, is why I tend to avoid epics.

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt.  The first few pages set up a delightful tease--our narrator is holed up in a hotel room, clearly on the run, but in a banal kind of way (it's unlikely that anyone at this hotel will recognize him, but he doesn't have any underwear).  This had promise.  Then we flash back to what is explicitly the afternoon of his mother's death and spend a while with them at an art museum.

It's not that it's not good.  It's well written.  But I don't yet know why I'm reading it.  The thing about Donna Tartt is that she wrote The Secret History--a wild, chilling, almost surreal ride through an upper class that almost doesn't exist--and she also wrote The Little Friend--a dull-as-dishwater story that promises to be about an unsolved murder in a small town, but which is really a slice of life in the '70s in the South.  It might have been okay, but it was nowhere near as satisfying.  Southern Gothic a few decades ago is just much less interesting and fresh than New England Gothic hiding in plain sight at a college that is practically where I went.

So far, we see hints of a New York Gothic, and I'm kind of digging them--the family that lives in a doorman building and takes cabs everywhere, but has to scrounge for change in the couch cushions to tip the deliveryman from Gristedes.  There are hints of what made The Secret History great, of this odd world positioned right behind the one I'm in.  But I'm just not sure Tartt has enough trust left from me to make it work.

She'd better--that puppy is 800 pages long and I'm reading it for book club, so no quitting.

Finnikin of the Rock, by Melina Marchetta.  I'm not sure I can deliver even a first impression verdict on this one yet.  I've started but not finished several Marchetta books, and I find myself put off by the fact that she always seems to skip the exposition I want and start kind of in the middle of the story.  Not just in medias res, but with kind of an infodump that leaves you feeling stranded.

Finnikin, for example, is currently working with refugees from the destroyed kingdom of Lumatere.  But the story doesn't exactly start with him, and then give us back story.  It starts with a weird, confusing account of the end of Lumatere--full of a bunch of drama based around characters we don't know anything about and who are dead now anyway.  It's dense and confusing, and even the characters are unclear about some of it.  It's the predominant fact in the lives of all the characters, but I have no feel for it, no texture.

So Finnikin seems to be acting like a jerk when he's impatient to be kept from doing things that he's passionate about but I don't quite get.  They are traveling through all these places whose impressions I'm given, but don't quite get.

Sarah believes in this series--she read the last book several times in a row--and I'm going to read it.  But I'm not sure about it yet.

Endless Rue

I have discussed Madeleine Robins.  I love Madeleine Robins.  She wrote the Sarah Tolerance mysteries, but I hadn't read anything else by her yet--not till now, when I have fallen in love with Sold for Endless Rue. 

Okay, I'm out of practice here, and it's late and I need to get to bed, so this is going to be complicated.  The structure of the book isn't hard to explain, but it's hard to explain why the book is so wonderful.  Basically, the book is divided into three parts.  In the first, Laura is taken in and trained by a midwife.  In the second, Agnesa is a bride who is expecting a child.  In the third, Bieta is the daughter of an acclaimed female doctor and in training herself.

So, we've got midwives and medical students in 13th century Salerno.  If you read Mistress of the Art of Death, you know that female doctors were not unheard of at the time, and this is fascinating to me.  How different did Salerno need to be from the rest of Medieval Europe?  All of those Mediterranean places where Africa and Europe and the Middle East came together at that time are just amazing, and the details of Salerno are just wonderful.

But really, this book is about how every choice we make is influenced by all the other choices that came before--our own and everyone else's.  The character and historical details of Laura training as a midwife and medica in the first part would have been more than enough to keep me reading, but the weight of her history and the surprising ways it affects her are what make this more than just interesting. 

Laura has been kept as a slave by a man who murdered her family and destroyed her home.  When she escapes, she's hidden by Crescia, a midwife, and stays with her to learn her craft.  Most of the story is just about Laura growing up, but at every turn, we see how her personality was shaped by her life--by her family, her captor, her teacher, her understanding of danger, her fear and defiance.  And as we see how Laura is shaped by, say, Crescia, we learn a little of how Crescia was shaped by her own life. 

Then these observations are tied into how each person's understanding of the others is imperfect, and how even in agreement, they have differences.  And all these observations ricochet, explicitly and implicitly, through the different parts of the story.  And now I'm going to stop talking because I don't want to spoil it, but wow.  We can't really know each other, and sometimes the decisions we think are correct are damaging--sometimes while still being right.

If you're not someone who thinks "wow, a domestic novel with character studies of medieval midwives!  Sign me up!" then this might not be the book for you.  But lordy, it was the book for me.

Neither Ghosts Nor Zombies Nor Vampires

The dead are everywhere in this world; any shadow might contain them. Binders keep the villages safe, but something is wrong in Westmost.  Their binder is not well, her daughter, Otter, is untrained, and the most dangerous of the dead, the White Hands, stalk the village.  Sorrow's Knot, by Erin Bow: there's your setup.

There's some scary stuff here, and a good story, but what makes this book shine is the what it's about.  It's about chosen family, and about the ties that (forgive me) bind people together.  It's about mistakes--mistakes you don't realize you made, mistakes that have horrible results that could have been prevented if only you knew more.  It's about how life is incredibly messy, both in its strengths and its points of pain. 

There's so much that's cool and interesting and unusual here that are appealing.  The setting is based on a non-specific Native North American idea, but it's not derivative.  The specific trappings are all fantasy, though--the characters have dark hair and brown skin, wear deer hides and make arrowheads from flint, but there's nothing that feels stolen or condescending. 

Also, Westmost is not exactly a matriarchy, but it's a society of women, with only a few men.  Only women have power to bind the dead, so most boys born in the forest villages end up journeying to the plains, which are safer.  This is simply a world of women.

The friendships, though.  That's what really tore my heart out.  Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket are the main characters of the story, and the three are a family, more than anyone else.  And they have each other's backs, always--it's not even a doubt.  The friendships have facets and change, but they are never in doubt, at all.  There is no question of where any of their loyalties lie.  And in the end, really, those friendships are what save the world.

It's not a perfect book--there's a weak point in the middle, where the first crisis has past and the parts of the story that need to align for the second crisis are plopped together a bit heavy-handedly.  And, in a book about how messy life is, the writing style is somewhat stiff, in the manner of formal storytelling (which is a big factor in the story).  But I couldn't stop reading.

I said in a recent review that one of the things I loved about All Our Yesterdays was that it was so honest about how sometimes good and evil are so interdependent that you just can't untwine them; so many books shy away from that.  Well, this book is about how so often, enormous evil happens because someone makes a bad decision that looks innocuous at the time--or a decision that goes unnoticed.  Too often, everyone is able to undo their bad decisions, and the high stakes of the story are edged down because, essentially, everything turns out okay.

But not here.  The bad things that happen, they don't almost happen.  They do happen.  Some tragedies are prevented, but many are not.  There is real loss here, and not everyone gets the happy ending.  I think that's important.  It's definitely authentic.

That Great Moment

When everybody's raving about how great that brand new book is, you can be pretty much guaranteed that you'll have to wait for months for the library to acquire it, and then another few months on a waiting list.

BUT!  There is nothing like the feeling of looking for a new release idly, no hopes or expectations, and then finding it! There! With a SHORT wait!  And it'll be a couple of weeks at most before I'm reading Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie.\, about which I know very little, except that it's supposed to be really good.

And--bonus!--this one I've already got in my back pocket.  Another one from a few top-ten lists that I picked up to read a while back and thought I lost in the Computer Crash  of '13.  But no, just when everyone's telling me how great Rachel Bach's Fortune's Pawn is, here it is on my backup drive (shout out to Mike for setting up automatic backup software before it was needed!).

I can tell already, 2014 is going to be a great book year. 

End of the Year Thingie

Everyone's doing a wrap-up post, with statistics and analyses and best-of lists.  Do you all think more coherently than I do?

Anyway, since Goodreads crunches the numbers for you, I figured I might as well throw this out there.  So here are my stats.

Total titles for the year (according to Goodreads): 132

But wait, some of those are books that I gave up on but logged anyway: 17



Okay, now how many were comics?: 38





(Slightly embarrassing aside: how many of those comics were from the Buffy franchise?: 18)

What about kids' books--like, chapter books from the children's section?: 11



And sometimes you put in a short story or novella: 8



So how many "actual" books does that leave?--YA, nonfiction, novels: 59



So much good stuff.  Above were a few of my favorites--not necessarily my most-most favorite, but the ones that I am not seeing on everyone else's top 10 lists.  Fangirl, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Saga, Eleanor & Park, Americanah--a lot of my favorite bloggers are raving about these, so I'll just add some to the mix.

I'm back in a groove with some great reads in process now, so hopefully there will be more posts to come.  And I am already making a list of 2014 releases I can't wait for. In the meantime, happy new year, everyone!

(And, once again, I edited this because I left out a book!)

Time Travel Done Right

Let's skip over my long absence, and please don't expect a year-end post because not today.  Let me just give a quick shout out to the best book I've read this month, just what a lot more books should be: All Our Yesterdays, by Cristin Terrill.

Time travel narratives can rarely stand close deconstruction, and there's almost always some "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" hand waving to make things go smoothly.  All I ask is that you explain the rules and then stick to them: check.

 You've got all kind of sort of things here that might drive me nuts--there's kind of a sort of love triangle, but oh, it's not like that.  There are so many kinds of love  here, just among the few main characters--siblings and like-siblings, parents and like-parents, crushes and longings and necessary-friendship-has-brought-us-together.  They're all sensitive and complicated.  Marina knows full well her parents are useless as parents, but it still breaks her heart anew whenever they fail to come through for her.  Her best friend's brother and guardian is an amazing guy and knows his brother's friends and has inside jokes with them.  It's so real.

It grabs you at the beginning--Em is trapped in a cell, periodically tortured, thinking about escape, her only companion a voice from the next cell through the vent.  A hidden message, an escape, a time machine, and the story unfolds, in the present and in the past to which she travels.  You get enough information that you're not confused, but there are plenty of secrets.

And thank you, Cristin Terrill, for not making your suspense depend on keeping secrets that we all figured out early on.  With an author I've never read, I always worry--once I figure something out, are they going to pretend or assume that I don't know this until it's the big reveal at the end?  No, no--there are plenty of reveals, all along the path.  Yeah, I knew who was what early on (mostly), but there were more surprises.

A lot of the sense of the story relies on awkward emotional truths--basically, on a determined but really unhappy about it assassin.  At first, the whole "can't bring myself to do it" thing worried me, but god, do you remember that really good friend of yours that you once had a crush on--no, loved--who was so wonderful to you, but just so obviously didn't see you that way that you never even said anything?  But you hoped, and you accidentally leaned against them sometimes, and god, if only they'd see?  Yeah, I am so right there with you, Cristin Terrill and Team All Our Yesterdays.

There will be a sequel.  It does not need one.  This book made me really happy.

Update: 12/30: I am editing this post because I left out my favorite thing about the book! So, so many books about big world changers ignore the dark side of this stuff, the moral ambiguity that exists when the world is going to change.  Everyone wants to make the world better, but the stakes are already so high that there's no way for that to happen without something ugly taking place.  That recognition is what makes the bad guy bad AND what makes the good guys good.  I have so much respect for this complexity.  So I wanted to add that.

Stalker Follow-Up

For the record, I'm more than halfway through this book, and it's absolutely awful, and here's the quote that is probably going to make me quit it:

"I began to feel that I and other men were beginning to occupy a position in our society like that of women in repressive traditional societies, where the merest suggestion of sexual transgression could mean death."

There are so many things wrong with this sentence.  So. many.  First, death?  A tainted reputation is not death. The notion that someone might give him the side-eye because someone spread a rumor that he had an affair is NOT COMPARABLE to the possibility of being stoned to death for making eye contact with a man you're not related to. He'd be better off comparing himself to a Victorian lady--his vapors would support the comparison.

Second, your white dude suffering is definitely EXACTLY like what third world women go through. How perceptive of you to relate the experiences.  You know exactly what it's like.

And yes, men in general suffer like that, on an institutional level!  Poor widdle guy. 

He's a freaking doink.  I hate him. Not sure if I can finish the book.

Everything on Stalking, Please

The title of the book is Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. But the cover distinguishes between the title and subtitle only by the color differentiation, so it can be read as though a guy walked into a library and asked the librarian to "give me everything you have on being stalked."  And yes, this book would be on that list.

This book is very much a memoir, and it suffers, as some memoirs do, from the fact that I don't like the narrator very much.  I feel for James Lasdun, and unlike a lot of Goodreads reviewers, I don't assume that he was having an affair with this woman, or is misrepresenting his role in what happened somehow.  But the guy comes across as seriously self-absorbed, a complete snob, and maybe a little socially awkward (that could just be a reflection of his full-of-himselfness).

Now, I'll admit, I'm writing this before I've finished it (if I wait till I'm done with a book I never review it), so it could be that there's something at the end that will make me say, "Yes, my god, they are right. He must have slept with her."  But have you read The Gift of Fear?  (If not, you should.  Between this book and that one, Everything You Have may be the more literary, but Gift of Fear is the more compelling and psychologically honest.)  There are people who are just like this, who will fixate on you to one degree or another and not obey any of the social rules, without your doing anything out of line.

So yeah, I believe that things happened, even as he described them.  And yeah, his protests that he recognized her flirting but ignored it is probably disingenuous--either that or he's really dumb.  But engaging in an online flirtation does not mean he "asked for it."  It just makes his surprise less believable.

And then--here's where his negative Goodreads reviews get more on point--he starts to examine the exact emotional place he was around the time that their correspondence took place.  Really, this structure is weird for a lot of reasons: first, he relates the whole story in a relatively succinct and matter of fact way--a very interesting, long-article-length piece that is very factual and not speculative.  Then he backs up and puts layers of context and psychology and introspection on top of it, which is kind of tortured. 

This is clearly a man who's been taking notes for his memoir for years and has FINALLY found something interesting enough to sell to people, so is squishing all his favorite entries from his journal into this book.  Seriously, your emotional state during the period when you were not writing to her does not relate in any way to what she did.  Your silence over email conveyed no subtleties of the human condition.  Get over yourself, dude.

And if you do take this at face value--if you say, okay, being stalked gave this guy a reason to blather on a bit about Life and Art and things.  Let's measure him by that yardstick.  Really, this is where I really start to dislike him.  He wishes he wanted to write poems about Big, Important Things, instead of just personal, introspective poems about things like his relationship with his father.  But he's not compelled to write about those big issues, and he hates himself for that, considers himself a small man without any claim to High Art.  His father, now there was a guy who knew High Art.

Etc.  Seriously, you guys can guess how I feel about High Art, particularly as distinguished from The Kind Of Art That Appeals To The Masses.  I try not to misuse the word "pretentious"--it's not pretentious to like classical music, it's pretentious to fake liking it because that's what classy people like--but I'm pretty sure this is the worst kind of pretension.  He's horrible.

And that's pretty much where I am with this.  I'll finish it, because I want to know what's going to happen with the stalking.  But I'm not going to recommend it.  I think enjoying this book might mean you're pretentious.  But hey, tell me if I'm wrong.

One Misty Moisty Morning

There's nothing like getting into a new Epic Fantasy Series.  There is nothing so consuming, nothing quite so satisfying, and--to my mind--nothing quite so intimidating.  I mean, this is a thousand page book with a cast of zillions.  Maybe there's a pronunciation guide or six pages of maps, or the dreaded family tree.  And even if you're ready to read it, you know there are two more in the trilogy, and then a few other equally ponderous trilogies set in this world.  It's a lot to ask of a reader.

It's a lot to ask of a writer, too, which is one of the reasons I'm always so reluctant to invest in one.  When you pick up a thousand page book by an author you've never read, you are making a commitment that could bring you to readerly grief--wasted time! accidentally getting invested in events that are poorly written and being forced to suffer through more of the book to find out how they turn out!  The humanity!

So the good news--the great news--is that Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire (which sounds like the name of a video game, right?) is definitely worth my time.  Once you break the seal on a new author like this, tons more pages pour out, and I'm going to be reading Brandon Sanderson's universe for probably years--and that's just to catch up to where things are today.

So here we have some cool worldbuilding--the Lord Ruler is in charge of the Final Empire, which is to say the whole world, and he's just the despot you'd expect.  It's all anyone's known for a thousand years--nobles killing skaa, brown plants that barely produce enough food for the population, misty nights you can't go out in.  We've got rich spoiled nobles and poor downtrodden serfs, plus those people who lurk on the fringes of things--the thieves and beggars.

You've got some very interesting characters, most notably Vin, a street urchin clinging to the edges of  crew of thieves, no friends and no connections.  When she meets Kelsier and his band of specialized criminals, she finds herself caught up in a plan to overthrow the Final Empire.  Her participation leads to her first close-up view of the lives of the nobles, and she examines her own understanding of the world and those of her new friends.

Okay, there's a summary.  And the characters are really engrossing, though describing them wouldn't do much good. (God, don't read the back covers of epics till you're done with them.  Long explanations of intricate power plays are what the actual text is for, not the back cover!) The parallels between Kelsier and his singleminded desire to destroy the Empire and everything we learn about the Lord Ruler at the time when he created the Empire centuries ago are really great. 

There's a but; how big a but depends on how you feel about this sort of thing.  First, Vin is the only female within miles of this book for the full first half.  Around the middle, a nasty, snooty noblewoman tries to involve Vin in her political maneuverings.  I'm 2/3 of the way through, and this is literally every female speaking character in the book.  A big point is made of how women in particular are abused by nobles (half-blood babies cannot be permitted to exist, so if a nobleman sleeps with a skaa woman, they have to kill her after), and how most women in the criminal world end up being prostitutes.  The particular oppression of women is not counteracted by any examples of female characters at all--to the point where it's freaking conspicuous.

There's also a lot of talk about boring and vapid court ladies, which comes off as femmephobia when you look at the fact that everyone at court seems kind of vapid, but only the women are described as such.  It's not like most of the men are leading lives of the mind or anything.  Everyone's gossiping, but Vin complains about having to listen to women gossip.  Oh, and on a more plotted level, Vin falls clunkily in love very early on.  I mean, okay, you need her to fall for this guy, but you've set her up as this incredibly guarded, experienced criminal, and then she turns into a Blushing Teenaged Girl in front of the Cute and Maybe Not So Bad Enemy?  Please.

Plus, the machinations are AWKWARD.  The snooty noble lady says things like "you should be grateful to be used by your betters."  It made me long for the intricate levels of courtly intrigue in a book like Dune. 

Oh, man, Dune.  Now THERE'S an epic.  I wish the sequels weren't so unabashedly weird.

Anyway, I'm listening to The Final Empire as an audiobook, and I had my doubts about the reader at first--he has a harsh voice and it too him a while to really get the voices of some of the characters.  But I'm totally into it now, and I'm really glad I'm listening to it.  I feel the sweep of it a bit with the distance of the book.

And I have a guess that one of our trusted crew members is a traitor.  I won't tell you who, but I think Kelsier ended up at Hath Sin because of one of their crew, and that his wife was framed.  I am waiting for the betrayal.  No spoilers!

Book Club for the Time Being

I still don't know what that means in the context of this book, "for the time being."  There's a LOT going on in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being--like, a LOT; maybe more than is good for the book--and the idea of time and time beings is just one of many, many things.

Well, wait, I guess it's not so much that I don't know what it means--a person, anyone who lives in the flow of time, is a time being.  It's more like I don't quite know why that observation is useful.  As I said, a lot of things going on here.  As usual, I think a question list is a good place to start, although I also think that the last question will be the most important one.

1) Time: since it's in the title, let's talk about it.  This is a multipart question, though, and some parts work better than others.
   a) Where does time come up?  What kind of references, what kind of metaphors?  Explicit references and the ones that are built into the story, like the relationships between all the threads of narrative and how they unfold.  (I am really tempted to spew out a list here--the Friends of the Pleistocene, Ruth pacing herself as she reads, Proust--but you could go on forever.)
   b) How do all of these references to time support or relate to the actual themes of the book?  Is time actually a theme, or more of a motif?  Why are these references there?

2) Okay, so we've done time.  Let's do other themes.  There are tons--alienation and the character against society; nature (the island/the temple) vs. civilization (Tokyo/New York); death (duh).  Can you think of more?  Are they related to each other, or just piled on top of each other?

3) Does this book contain too many symbols and motifs?  Like, what's up with the Jungle Crow?  And pet cats?  What about the protagonists' relationships with little old ladies? French language and literature? Did all the parallels between Nao's life and Ruth's seem meaningful or add to the story for you? How?

4) Is there a difference between magical realism, surrealism, and dream logic?  And do you hate dream sequences as much as I do?  I also hate drug trips and mad ramblings (OMG JOSS WHEDON I'M LOOKING AT YOU), but what this book had in spades was dream logic.  Is this book magical realism?  Like, what do you think was going on with the pages of the journal? And what about the scene where Nao goes to class after the attack?  Is that her telling her story the way she wants it, or is it dream logic, or magical realism?

5) What's your general opinion of books where the protagonist has the same name and many of the same characteristics of the author?  Do they make you suspicious, seem overly precious?  Do you ever wonder what it must be like to know that person and either look for or see yourself in their books?  Have you read Everything Is Illuminated?  Do you suspect that Jonathan Safran Foer is too precious to live?  Woah, wait, that had a lot of magical realism in it, too.  Do you think the books are related in other ways? 

6) Back to Time Being and eponymous characters, how did you feel about Ruth's relationship with Oliver?  Did they seem to kind of hate each other?  Was this just standard long-marriage stagnation, or was it actual disdain?  Were you rooting for her to maybe leave, move somewhere with a good internet connection and a Starbucks? And harking back to question (5), how would you feel about this book if you were the real Oliver?

7) Did you feel like the story was hitting you over the head with things, or did they creep up on you?  For example, did you figure out what was going on with Babette before Ruth explained it to Oliver? (I didn't.)  Did you figure out what was going on with the internet bidding war before Oliver explained it to Ruth? (I did.) At what point did you realize that the book was not actually going to be the remarkable life story of a Buddhist nun that you were promised in the cover copy?  Were you resentful?  Are you still?

Dude, there is a lot to say here, and I've been writing this post for days (around getting a new computer due to a major crash experience).  I don't know how much I loved the book itself, but I did like it.  And I truly did love that it had me asking so many questions.  If I knew the answers to half of them, I think I would have loved the book itself, too.  I do like questions, but I'm very, very big on answers.

Unthinkable Unfinished

The thing about having an enormous reading list of exciting books that I'm dying to read is that my tolerance for a three-star book is minimal; something I might push through on another day is not going to hold my attention when so many tantalizing books are waiting in the pile.

Thus the sad fate of Nancy Werlin's Unthinkable.  In the afterword (which I skipped ahead and read; go figure, right?), she discusses how the book came about--how someone suggested she do a prequel to her excellent book Impossible, and she ended up writing a sequel instead.

Impossible is the story of Lucy, whose family is cursed.  In every generation, a baby girl is born.  That girl grows up to have a baby at 16 and then go insane.  Lucy and her adoptive parents don't believe in the curse--until Lucy finds herself pregnant and haunted.  Now, they need to find a way to break the curse before the baby is born. This was a lovely book, about the power of family, and how important it can be to have allies, and how cycles can be broken. 

Someone suggested the author write a prequel about Lucy's ancestor, Fenella, who was cursed centuries ago by a jealous fairy and has been his prisoner ever since.  Werlin declared a prequel to be a terrible idea, since of course we all know that the story has a sad ending.  Instead, she writes a sequel--Fenella, released from Fairy at last, has to earn her last bit of freedom by committing three acts of destruction--the counterpoint to the three acts of creation that saved Lucy originally.

So we have Unthinkable, which tells of Fanella reentering the world to free herself by harming others.  Interspersed, we have the story of young Fanella walking blithely into her curse.  It's all just so sad and depressing.  And frustrating!  There are so many places where things didn't have to end up the way they did, but by the time the book is underway, the whole thing feels like an exercise in cruelty, like one of those thought experiments where you have to decide which of your most precious loved ones you would save from a fire.

I'm sorry to set this aside; I really did love Impossible.  But as I said, there is a stack of exciting books beside me, and in a tight race like this, Unthinkable just isn't going to place.

Unfairest

I'm done with Fairest; let me tell you why.

I talked about my concerns in my review of the first volume, and my feelings about all these things have only gotten stronger.  Fables is an amazing, epic story with just as many strong, flawed, complicated, fascinating female characters as male--maybe even more.  I appreciate the desire for a spinoff series to tell one-off personal stories and fill in backstory, but the implication that women need this special place when Willingham had given them such a great seat at the table is just infuriating.

And then there's the imagery.  I linked to a bunch of covers in my previous post--do you want to see some more?



God I hate these.  I mean, they're lush and sexy and provocative, and I'm not offended by sex.  The one on the left I even find kind of gorgeous.  But I'm offended by the fact that this entire series seems to be about reducing the breadth of these characters.  Gah.

Anyway, these are reasons that I thought about stopping.  But ultimately, I'm driven by my baser instincts, and I will follow a good story into a lot of ugly places (The Color of Light comes to mind as a book I have loved for a long time that, as Jolene finally pointed out to me about 10 years ago, really hates women).  So I actually kind of liked the first volume, and I was really looking forward to the second.

Unfortunately, Bill Willingham did not write this volume.  Apparently the reason for the spinoff series is to give other writers a place in the Fables universe.  Amazon tells me this volume was written by Lauren Beukes.  I know nothing about her, but I do know that this story didn't make any sense at all.  I read the first two issues in the volume, and I could not for the life of me follow what was going on. 

There was this random paper crane the flew in through the window and suddenly Rapunzel knew that her children who she thought didn't exist did exist and were in trouble.  And then they're in Asia and we're flashing back to a time when the old world Rapunzel ended up in a Japanese fable realm for some reason.  And then we flash back forward to her unauthorized trip to Japan to track them down, where she runs into all these relevant characters on the same streetcorner in one night and then goes to this place with one of them that is--what, somewhere?  I don't know.  I don't get it. 

I can tell you that the most interesting part of the story was the problem of how to hide the fact that her hair grows four inches per hour on a 20 hour international plane flight.  I found this to be a fascinating problem.  They solved it with magic.  Snore.

Yeah, so I'm done.  The next volume of Fables proper comes out next month.  I'm just going to hang my hopes on that.