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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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In my last Amazon order, I picked up the latest Andrew Vachss, an author whom I adore, and own all of his books. Well, maybe not all, but certainly all the Burke novels, and most of his fiction. I’m missing a couple of his graphic novel creations, things like that. Anyway. I think Burke’s New York is one of the more fascinating settings out there. This isn’t one of Vachss’s more stellar efforts, but it’s still a solid read. I put it away in one evening. Yay.
A few weeks ago, when I was in the library, I saw books 5, 6 and 7 of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King (that’d be Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower). Since I’d liked the first few books in the series, but had dropped it when it wasn’t clear whether King would ever finish the series, I decided to pick these up. I actually went back and re-read book 4, Wizard and Glass, when it was clear that I didn’t remember it, and it had some relevance. So I’ve slammed through probably close to 2000 pages of crap in the last few weeks. Fortunately, it’s fast reading, so I didn’t waste as much time as you might think.
Spoilers ahead, if any of you care.
I really did like the first three books in this series. They all have some memorable moments, with mythic overtones. Wizard and Glass was okay - obviously not very memorable, since I had to re-read it - it’s basically a standard Western plot set in a fantasy realm. The last three books are just kind of painful. King apparently decided that this was his opportunity to tie all of his books together, so he started dropping in characters from all of his books to meet the gunslingers and help them out. Characters from Salem’s Lot all the way through his more recent books like Insomnia (none of which I’ve read). So that added confusion, since I hadn’t read these stories, and these characters which I’m clearly supposed to recognize are showing up.
It gets even better, though, when King has these fantasy characters cross dimensions into a facsimile of our world. In this world, they meet, yes, that’s right, King himself, who is portrayed as one of the most valuable people in the universe, supporting one of the “Beams” that holds the universe together through his writing. I started losing steam quickly at this point.
Plus, the writing just isn’t very good. King, if nothing else, generally spins a good yarn. Books like The Shining or It are gripping, and have a sort of inevitability about them that is one of the keys to horror writing. These books just start wandering; in his attempt to include all of his other books, it just becomes a series of vignettes - “Oh, look, another of my characters!” And it suffers for that. By the time the main characters start getting killed off, I no longer cared about them.
In the last couple books, he also started pulling the omniscient narrative nonsense - things like “He slipped the .40 into his docker’s clutch almost without thinking, so moving us a step closer to what you will not want to hear and I will not want to tell.” How melodramatic is that?
I kept with it, mostly out of a desire for completeness. Just to finish it. And to find out what’s in the Dark Tower. And, of course, it’s a copout. I should have known.
Anyway. Strong anti-recommendation. The first three books are worth reading if you like a western-crossed-with-fantasy kind of book. And maybe book four. But if you never read 5, 6 and 7, you won’t be missing anything.
I saw this in the library. The title was just too good to pass up, especially since I’m always fascinated by tales of the trickster, of which the coyote is one of the main avatars. I flipped through the first few pages, liked the tone, and checked it out. I mean, each character is introduced with a D&D-style character sheet, with comments like “Technological Intelligence: +99 A-Team/MacGyver” and “Genre Alignment: SF (general), ST (original series), SW, Marvel, Alan Moore +79″. The Genre Alignment listed for each character is actually pretty useful if you follow sci-fi, because it gives you an idea of what they like and what they respond to. Of course, you have to be a pretty big geek to catch all the references.
Overall, the book has a Snow Crash-like feel to it in a lot of ways, with African mythology replacing Sumerian mythology. It has the same sort of breezy action-packed narrative, with a bit of “Um, what the hell” when it delves deeper into the mythology. One of the interesting narrative tricks used is to write in first-person, but switch the character speaking to provide different perspectives. Each character is introduced by the D&D sheet before their first narrative section, and after that, you have to keep track of who’s talking by the different authorial voice used. It’s artificial, but it gives a bit more insight into what’s going on in the other characters’ brains.
The other thing I liked about the book was the author’s willingness to explain things slowly. Because it’s first person, he’ll have a character drop a reference to something, and not explain it until 200 pages later when that character is talking to somebody else. It gives you something to look forward to as you’re trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It’s also interesting because the main character is writing his sections after the book’s events have taken place, so he gets to drop in remarks about what’s going to happen (early on, you read this sentence, “In a few days’ time, when machetes are pointed at me, when an old, old friend betrays me, when a sharpened ice-cream scoop is poised to scrape out my eyes, I’ll be wishing I’d never met this woman”) to sharpen the anticipation.
Overall a fun read. Not one I’m planning to buy and/or re-read, but pretty entertaining.
Christy read this and then gave it to me. It didn’t do a lot for me. Several of my friends really like Iain Banks, so I keep on trying his work, but very little of it sticks with me. I think I have three or four of his books on my bookshelf, and I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about what happens in them without re-reading them, whereas there are books that I read once and grab me and stick in my memory. I mean, it’s competently executed, and a tolerable way to pass the time, but that’s about it. And since these reviews are my way of recording what struck me about a book, and I don’t have anything to say, I’m just using it as an excuse to comment about this weird disparity between the high regard people I know have of Banks and the disconnection I feel from his work. Anyway.
Brian bought this on our layover in Chicago on the way out, mostly because his other choice of reading material was a mathematical optics book. I don’t know what he was thinking. Anyway, I was running out of reading material on the way back, so I borrowed it from him, and traded him the novel I’d been reading. Like most Philip K. Dick material, this book is really weird. I’m not sure it’s even worth describing. Here, I’ll quote the back cover:
When CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his psychiatrist wife, Mary, file for divorce, they have no idea that in a few weeks they’ll be shooting it out on Alpha III M2, the distant moon ruled by various psychotics liberated from a mental ward. Nor do they suspect that Chuck’s new employer, the famous TV comedian Bunny Hentman, will also be there aiming his own laser gun. How things come to such a darkly hilarious pass is the subject of Clans of the Alphane Moon, an astutely shrewd and acerbic tale that blurs all conventional distinctions between sanity and madness.
Um. Yeah.
I’ve liked Swain’s previous books, so when I saw this one in paperback at the used book store, I picked it up. Not as entertaining as the previous entries in the series, partially because Swain doesn’t spend as much time explaining various casino swindles. The centerpiece scam isn’t as interesting or intricate either. Still an okay read. Not much more to say than that.
As previously noted, I picked this up after reading a book of Wallace essays and enjoying them quite a lot. It’s an enormous book, 980 pages with a further 100 pages of end notes. I’ve been slogging through it for the past six weeks after borrowing it from the library, and finished it yesterday.
It’s a sprawling book. And yet, none of the dozens of characters end up being well-developed. There’s not a single character that I feel like I “know” them after reading this book, the way I do in character-based fiction like the Vorkosigan series or the Stephanie Plum series. There really isn’t a plot to speak of. The ending just kind of fizzled out without ever following up on events that are mentioned earlier. There’s some interesting digressions, but it’s hardly worth reading the entire novel for. Maybe I’m missing something, but it really seems like Wallace is an excellent short-form writer who strung together some brilliant observational essays interspersed with hundreds of pages of relatively uninteresting events. Wallace’s random one-liner observations about people are often far more interesting than the actual episode surrounding them. I was pretty disappointed by the experience, obviously.
The digressions I liked included:
Anyway. I think I might pick up some more of Wallace’s shorter works, fiction and essays, because I do like his writing and his sharp eye for absurdity. But I’m going to steer clear of the novels in the future.
I’m a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s Kenzie/Gennaro series. I didn’t enjoy Mystic River as much, although the movie was well done. So I didn’t know what to expect from this novel, which I picked up from the library. It was okay. Pretty standard psychological thriller. Interesting characters, breezy writing. I should have seen the ending coming, but I didn’t. It’s a quick read. Not much more to say than that.
I never got around to reading Ayn Rand in college when everybody else did, but I was going away for a week on business, and wanted something long but compact to read, so I picked this up in paperback form at the used bookstore. Her basic thesis of Objectivism is that reason and egoism should be the principles upon which society is based. In particular, capitalism is the ultimate economic system because rational self-interest will cause great things to happen. Rand also has a view of the world where there are great heroic humans that we should not hold back. From the Ayn Rand Institute webpage, “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
Atlas Shrugged is a morality tale, expounding the dire consequences that would occur if we went down the road of communism rather than capitalism (the book was written in 1957, so this was a relevant question). I think she takes things to too extreme a level, but her ideas are interesting. And I can definitely see why many nerds take up the banner of Objectivism so enthusiastically in college. Early on, she captures the feeling of being surrounded by people who don’t get you, who prattle on endlessly about meaningless topics, which is a feeling that nerds are all too familiar with when trapped in parties with people talking about fashion and the like.
She also makes a pretty compelling case to me of the result of truly following the concept of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” She talks about the inevitable race to the bottom that would occur if such a philosophy were truly put into place as each person tries to outneed the next, and the corruption that would be endemic to such a system. Not a bad description of what happened in the Soviet Union, from what little I know. She also emphasizes the total disincentive for people of ability to work under such a system. In fact, the whole book is a novelistic exploration of what happens when the heroic producers go on strike against such an unjust system.
All in all, I think she makes a lot of good points, especially given the era in which she was writing. The novel definitely drags in places (1000+ pages), especially where she inserts multiple page soliloquys about the horrors of a communistic system and how it holds the true heroic producers in shackles. In fact, I skipped the final 50-page long speech by John Galt, because I just couldn’t take it by that point. But it was worth reading, and I have to admit that my personal philosophy has a lot of similar elements to objectivism. And the novel was persuasive enough that even though I think she goes too far, I spent some time thinking about what she had to say and trying to figure out why I thought she was too extreme. And a book that makes me think is always a good thing.
Another Stephanie Plum novel. It was at the library when I stopped by recently, and so I grabbed it and read it. Entertaining and frothy as always. A nice quick read.
