Book Review

Angelmaker

/ Rebecca Demarest / Leave a comment

My friend Zac is an avid fan of the author Nick Harkaway and has insisted I try reading his work. I couldn’t get into Gone-Away World, but his newest, Angelmaker  seemed much more my style, so I decided I would fight my way through it if I had to. As it turns out, while I struggled a bit with the first 100 pages or so, after that I was totally sucked in. Before I get to why, here’s a little about what Angelmaker is.

Harkaway has put together a novel that is 1 part detective noir, 1 part steam punk, 1 part classic Victorian fantasy, and 1 part spy novel. They don’t always necessarily appear in conjunction with each other (ie, we have steam punk and spy thriller flashbacks, a Victorian structure, and a noir hero) but somehow they come together  to form a tasty whole. Think of it like Mole Chicken. Who would have though chocolate and chicken would go together, but it turns out it’s a damn fine dish.

In Angelmaker, Joe (Joshua Joseph Spork, Crazy Joe, Josh the Clock, etc) has taken up his grandfather’s trade of clock-making and clockwork repair while trying to forget that his father was a notorious gangster king of London. He is approached for a job that ends up getting him in trouble with the government and a very bizarre sect of monks which forces him to turn to his father’s community of cut-purses and thugs for help.

Now, here’s where I had some trouble with the novel. For the first I don’t know how many pages, Joe has absolutely no agency. Things happen to him and around him and he runs away from them and steadfastly refuses to take any direct action. It drove me nuts. Then we started to get Edie’s back story and I was enthralled because Harkaway’s powerful and compelling storytelling abilities finally had a focus that wasn’t a pansy. And then Joe get quite ballsy and I loved it. I just wish Harkaway had let Joe take some action for himself much earlier on. I mean, the only thing he does to better his life during the first third of the book is play a prank on a nasty cat. But, once all of the characters are up, moving, and kicking ass, it becomes a fantastic action/adventure.

When I say it’s in the style of a Victorian fantasy, I’m referring to long foreshadowing titles and (unfortunately) a character who begins with no agency and just waits to see where events take them, while simultaneously freaking out just a bit. This worked well with Harkaway’s somewhat sardonic tone of voice and there were several times I laughed out loud at his character’s lines (this was somewhat awkward on the subway). His descriptions were detailed and complex, his characters were well defined and lively, and the story-line itself is enthralling. So, once you get past the slow opening, you are in for one heck of a trip.

Cover of Angelmaker

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

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I’d heard of this book before, actually in a few literary magazine articles, so I thought I’d give it a go. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a true science fiction novel that is being lauded as literary in quality, so I was more than intrigued. Author Charles Yu presents to us a very interestingly constructed monologue on the theories of time, science fiction, and familial relations in such a mind-bending way that you finish the book feeling a little bit exhausted.

Here’s the thing. His main character, Charles Yu, begins the novel by killing his future self as he steps out of his time machine. It was in an effort to prevent a paradox, you see, but he instead traps himself in a time loop in which he is forced to travel along his now predetermined path to death, all while trying to find his father before it’s too late for him.

Now, the novel does not take place in our standard universe, but is instead set in Minor Universe 31 on the outskirts of fiction. Physics wasn’t quite completely installed, the people are pretty uniformly unhappy, and it’s easy to find a retconned dog for a companion. Charles, a time machine mechanic, spends most of his time floating in neutral in time, sort of just outside the time stream living in his repair machine. Until he shoots his future self.

The plot is rather griping, but I think it would have been boring and trite except for the delivery, which is in itself rather fascinating. The book which we are reading was read/written by Charles Yu while in the time loop. It is one of those curious items that can spontaneously appear in said time loops that cannot exist separate from them because they have no real origin. Charles was to have written it, but he’s reading it before he’s written it, so when was the original text ever written?

The whole book is flawlessly executed from start to finish, and you don’t need to be a theoretical physicist to understand the time mechanics since they are more literary than anything else. And, rare as it is with a novel lauded by the literary community, I was very happy when I got to the end of the book. The ending wasn’t dark and depressing and resolute. It was actually quite uplifting.

So, if you’re looking for an intriguing and mind-bending, extremely well-written literary science fiction, I would definitely give this a read.

Cover from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

I’m going to name the wind…

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And her name is Mariah. No, wait, wrong story. I wanted to talk about Name of the Wind and it’s sequel The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. Bonus points though if you get the Mariah reference and if you put it in the comments, I’ll think of a really cool prize…

But back on topic. Rothfuss has started us on an epic tri-part story in his Kingkiller Chronicles, starting with Name of the Wind and continued with The Wise Man’s Fear. There is no third as of yet, and only the briefest hint of one (there’s a title on Wikipedia) but no projected publication date or anything. When I got to the end of the second one and reached for the third, I yelled at my father for recommending an incomplete trilogy to me. (Rothfuss, you damn well better write the third before you pop off!)

Cover of Name of the Wind

If my aside gives you any indication, these books are addictive. Like crack. And just about as bad for you, too. The story is following Kvothe, a young man who goes off to learn at the University and study what appears to be a mix of magic and science. Not a bad premise, and in fact the plot line and characters I have no problems with, which is unique for something as high fantasy as this. They are solid, well written, and engaging. And it’s that story that makes me want to keep reading because he drops tantalizing hints all the way through of things to come that–if he pulls it off–will make the third book the most goddamn exciting thing I’ve read for a while.

No, it is not the story of the characters with which I find fault. It is the method of delivery. This trilogy is couched in a storytellers format with the current timeline taking place in Kvothe’s tavern where he is hiding out and telling his life story to a traveling historian called Chronicler. So there’s that going on. And then we have the story that Kvothe is actually telling.

Now, sometimes this is done extraordinarily well, where either the back story or the current story are kept mercifully brief and unobtrusive. A prologue and an epilogue, say, of the storyteller. Or a chapter here and there of flashback. But the story takes place in one timeline or another.  With Kingkiller Chronicles, it feels almost like Rothfuss is trying desperately to drag us up to the current timeline cause there’s just so many exciting things happening today, but there is so much that leads up to and informs current events that we need over a thousand pages dedicated to it. And to top it off, the current timeline keeps interrupting the main block of storytelling, sometimes literally in mid-sentence.

That’s when I yelled at the book. Once I figured what in hell was going on with the end of the chapter and it wasn’t just an e-book error. Poor choice, Rothfuss. And the current events just keep interrupting! We get it, shit’s bad, go away and let me GET to you already. Here we are, 1500 pages in, and we still don’t know how you hooked up with the demon man or even what your relationship actually is with him; we don’t know what the damn spider things are that are wreaking havoc; we don’t know why you’re called a Kingkiller cause all you’ve done up until now is save a King here and there. You talk about long arduous days at the university but then entirely SKIP OVER stories about mayhem and storms on the high sea. I’m much, much more interested in hearing about being captured by pirates then I am about you griping about not having money. Or did your editor insist you take parts out because it was too long to print, so you just decided to summarize in one paragraph what should have been a kickass couple of chapters? Here’s an idea, go back through and make your character quit his whining. We got it already, he spends most of his time broke and missing the crazy chick. Check.

Cover of The Wise Man's Fool

But for all of this, you want your next fix. I crave the third book even though I know Rothfuss is going to have me yelling and throwing a tantrum over being interrupted YET AGAIN by something happening in the current timeline because I just don’t care. Kvothe’s storytelling is much more interesting. This concludes my withdrawal rantings about the Kingkiller Chronicles. If you want to read them, the story is fantastic, but I might wait until the third book is out, if I were you. The story shakes aren’t all that pleasant.

Dead Seagulls

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I have read so many books that refer to or quote from Anton Chechov, that I knew eventually I would have to pick up one of his works, regardless of my tempestuous relationship with Russian literature. And lo, a wild play appears! No, really, it was free on the Kindle. Chekhov’s The Seagull.

For this review, I have to try very hard to separate the technical critique from my personal reaction, so we’ll go with the part that should be impartial first. I can admit, right up front, that I think Chekhov deserves the reputation that he has. My trouble with Russian literature is that I’m not reading it in Russian, nor am I Russian, so I’m sure I’m losing a lot of the tone and references and everything that makes some of these unbearably melodramatic works wonderful. But with Chekhov, I can relax into his writing and not constantly be ripped out of the narrative because my suspension-of-disbelief shattered over a character’s actions. So that definitely helped. He also presented the ideas in this work in a unique way that pushes the comfort boundary of his audience (at least this audience) in its use of a dead seagull as metaphor.  So, in all of that, I found it remarkably successful.

Of course, therein also lies my complaint about this play. A fledgling writer who has yet to make their first big step onto the publishing stage should NOT read this when in a vulnerable state, such as looking for an agent. *cough*ME!*cough* It presents an incredibly bleak perspective of young writers and the art/popularity bipolarity. And it does not end happily for the young writer involved. Yes, the well established writer is doing fine, but young Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplyov does not do so well. (Yeah, say that 10 times fast.) I don’t want to spoil things too much for those who like a decent surprise in their plays, but he ends up rather like that seagull he shot in Act II. The whole thing feels like an enormous metaphor for the emerging writer, with Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaya playing the part of the fickle public who is loyal and adoring to an older, established writer, while still liking the attentions of the young artist. So, on the whole, not real encouraging to all of us fledglings out here trying to get our wings under us.

In summary, maybe don’t read this one as your first Chekhov when trying to break into a notoriously capricious market, but it is still a fine example of Russian play-writing.

Cover of The Seagull

Inconstant Moon

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A friend of mine was asking about speculative fiction and it’s literary value, so I spent an evening trying to remember the titles of all the sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, etc that I considered of a literary caliber. It took a while to remember the title of one particular story, but Google came to my rescue and informed me it was “Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven. And then I learned it was part of a collection of speculative stories that Niven had published in the ’70s and I determined there and then that I would get my hands on a copy.

The collection Inconstant Moon is a fun little collection of tales of adventure and chaos. They are pretty much uniformly dystopian in various distinct and different futures. There is an apocalyptic even with the moon (which would be the title story) and a dark futuristic noir about addiction to stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain.

While I found the stories entertaining, they also don’t seem to stick in my mind much, except for “Inconstant Moon.” I remember enjoying them immensely while reading them, and they were fantastic in their construction, but now, about a month later, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what the individual ones were about. I’m sure I could go back and figure it out, but, frankly, I’m not all that motivated to. “Moon” was just as good as I remembered, but it seems to be the stand alone strong piece in the collection.

But, if you’re a fan of Gaiman flavored dystopian science fiction worlds, you’d probably find this short read just as entertaining as I did!

Cover of Inconstant Moon

Vonnegut and Slapstick

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They recently started doing this new flee market in a parking lot near my house and I just couldn’t resist this last weekend. On my stroll through over-priced hipster collectibles booths, I stumbled across a box of cheap paperbacks and promptly bought 2 (after making sure I didn’t want anything else at the market, that is); Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut and Island by Aldus Huxley. I promptly sat down and read straight through Slapstick and Island is next on the list, but I wanted to share this little odd ball with you first.

It was kind of reassuring after reading Basic Training to come back to something approaching what I consider Vonnegut’s classic style of absurd science-fiction. Yes, I know you’ll say all science-fiction is absurd and unrealistic, but Vonnegut’s storytelling style is what pushes his sci-fi from standard to absurd. You can have all the hyper-realistic, nitty-gritty star adventures you want, but there is something about the simple, stripped down and straightforward delivery of Vonnegut’s crazy scenarios that makes his work simultaneously chilling, enlightening, and hilarious.

In Slapstick, The King of Candlesticks is writing his memoirs on the eve of his 100th birthday in which he recounts being born a di-zygotic neanderthaloid with a sister who, when they put their brains together, were some of the smartest people on the planet. After her death, he continues on to become the last President of the United States and through a series of unfortunate events, the United States collapses and he ends up living on the Dead Island of Manhattan along with his pregnant granddaughter. Like I said, more than a touch absurd.

The story line itself is less interesting than some of the concepts and strategies Vonnegut employed for this novel. One of which is that everyone is lonesome and in order to correct for this, as President, he institutes a policy wherein he gives everyone an artificial new middle name to group people into enormous extended families. He himself is a Daffodil-11. It really made you stop and think when all these people–as their country slides into disrepair and illness–happily turn to supporting and welcoming total strangers who they have been told by a randomizing computer that they are now to care for each other.

He talk a lot about not only this truly artificial regrouping of people but also the natural extended families that we create for ourselves on a daily basis: fraternities and career networks; bar-hopping friends and book-shopping friends; families we marry into or divorce out of. It really is amazing when you sit down and start thinking about just how many people we reach out to and connect with on a daily basis and how we tend to group them around ourselves for particular kinds of support. The President simply took it one step further and mixed everyone up so that there was the greatest representation of careers, ages, and ever other descriptor you could think of in these enormous families.

A couple of other, slightly less interesting, concepts were the fact that gravity had become a variable, and so you never really knew how heavy everything would be from day to day and from there he once intimates that the Chinese, who have shot far ahead in their science, have figured out how to arbitrarily control gravity. I’m not quite sure where he was going with the two intertwined concepts, but they kept me amused through the novel.

Stylistically, it’s about on par with Slaughterhouse 5, in that it is chapters of small snippets with interjections of a catchphrase throughout. Here, the phrase is, “Hi ho.” It slips in almost as a punctuation mark in places. He calls it a senile hiccup, but after the first few irritating interruptions, it became a soothing “So mote it be” to the sections and seemed to make way for a small breath before starting forward. When he first started using it, I questioned whether I would be able to stand it, but by the end, I found myself smiling at each “hi ho.”

I don’t mean to sound like a total fan-girl, but I have yet to read a Vonnegut that I dislike. I find him thought provoking and I’m sad it took me 24 years to actually get around to reading him, but I’m trying to make up for lost ground now, one flee-market book at a time. So, if you’re looking for a good Vonnegut or even just an easy, somewhat humorous read, Slapstick is for you.

Cover of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick

Extremely Ludicrous and Incredibly Obtuse

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So, with all the bru-ha over Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, I thought I’d give it a try. There are times I regret my decision to read best-sellers as market research and this is one of those times. On a normal day, I wouldn’t pick up a book proclaiming to be a funny and moving tale of emotional recovery by a child after losing his father to September 11th, but so many people had fallen in love with Foer, and I found a free copy, so I figured I’d read it…I made a mistake.

One of my professors, Maria Flook, once went on a rant about child narrators, including chastising the offending student on their voice and content before segueing into a generalized rant about how most people when they use child narrators fall into one of two traps: the voice of the child is way too mature or there is no content worthy of writing about because all most children think about is puppies and bubbles. She used more profanity, but that’s the general idea. Safran fell into the first trap.

He focused on a very heavy topic, and he failed to have his child narrator come across as a child. His main character is a 9-year-old who speaks like a 40 year old and whose mother knowingly lets him traipse about New York City mostly unaccompanied to try and find the person with the last name of Black who might know something about a key his father left behind. He’s looking for some kind of closure and resolution, needless to say, he doesn’t quite find what he’s looking for.

But beyond my qualms with the narrator (and they were large; they pulled me hard out of my suspended disbelief frequently) I also found myself skipping over parts that were apparently letters written by his grandparents. However, those I managed to struggle through added nothing to the story and were simply a disjointed distraction. Major looming questions they pose (“Why won’t the grandfather talk?”) are never satisfactorily answered and they are so intentionally obfuscating that I found them simply frustrating. So, by half way through the book I just started skipping them because i just wanted to know whether the boy ever found the right Black.

And the ending, can we talk about that? *SPOILERS* It turns out the Black he was looking for was the husband of a woman he talked to on like the first day of his search, but he didn’t know it was him because he didn’t listen to the phone messages for several month and his mother didn’t tell him. (Boy, do I have some serious issues with the pasteboard character that is his mother.) And it had nothing to do with his father beyond the fact that his father had accidentally acquired it. End of story. And he doesn’t even go to see what was in the security box it unlocked. Serious, serious let down. Nothing was resolved, the entire novel felt like a wasted enterprise.

</rant>

Anyway…the one thing I did find interesting about the novel– since I do try and find a redeeming feature in everything I read–was the scrapbook “Things that happened to me” that the boy puts together. We get pictures sporadically through the book that the kid puts in there (which half the time never came close to happening to him, but were simply symbolic of something…I’m hoping). I found it a tasteful little addition that worked as a buffer against all the dreck you had to slog through.

Cover of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The Emotional Life of My Brain

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So I’m kicking off the handful of reviews I have waiting with The Emotional Life of Your Brain because I have to return it to the library and I wanted to share it with you first.

This book has an interesting academic background. Essentially, it is a culmination and summation of Richard J Davidson‘s work in the psychology and neurology of emotions and what he calls the six emotional dimensions influenced by your brain’s function. Those are Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. How you score on these scales is determined not only by genetics and upbringing, but also in how your brain has formed and they are all plastic to some degree. You can nudge where you fall on the scale with some judicious and particular exercises.

I know you’re all wondering how I fall on the scales (and how you’d fall on the scales) so if you know me, this should give you some idea of how these scales work. I am Fast to Recover (Highly Resilient), I have a Positive Outlook, I am very Socially Intuitive, I am fairly Self Aware, I am extremely Sensitive to Context, and I am fairly Focused (Attention). Dr. Davidson includes a handy dandy questionnaire in the book that, though only a rough estimate, can start to give you some idea of where you fall on the scales. And, if you’re unhappy with a particular axis, he also provides tools to help you nudge your scores in one direction or the other.

But, this is only about 1/3 of the book. The rest is a pompous summary of his life and career as a psychologist. Frankly, by the time I got a third of the way into the book, I was completely skipping any of the sections about him and how he got to this point of his research because I was just fed up with his wanking about how he was good friends with this prime researcher or look how young he was when he gained a professorship. Good for you, Dr. Davidson. I don’t care. At least, not when you share it as though you are some psychological messiah.

Anyway, his research is interesting and it seems to be backed up by some fairly solid research, so if this sort of thing interests you, I’d say give it a read. And if you can stand to read the autobiographical sections, you have more patience than me. And if you can’t, I really don’t think you’re missing out on anything.

Cover of The Emotional Life of Your Brain

She Who Must Be Obeyed

/ Rebecca Demarest / 2 Comments

She: A History of Adventure is a Victorian era adventure novel by Henry Rider Haggard. It’s not normally something I’d pick up except that if you remember, back in December I read a book called Supergirls wherein this book was talked about as the genesis for the She-Ra type characters, the Amazon women, the wild-woman in comic books. And it sounded interesting enough to pick up.

I’m sure you all know by now I don’t particularly care for the Victorian style of novel-ing, but this one was an exception. The story couched as a manuscript given to a friend of the narrator’s to publish as he sees fit after their deaths. This manuscript tells the incredible story of a cross-generational/time romance and adventure in Africa of a young man and his mentor. What is boils down to is, the narrator’s adoptive son is the great-great-hellagreat descendant of an Egyptian priest who got caught up in a love triangle way back when and ended up murdered for it. His pregnant wife recorded the details and charged her children with avenging their father. Apparently, it didn’t matter how many generations this took because the woman who killed him out of jealousy would live forever.

Now, these two brave adventurers think this sounds like a mighty fun adventure, even though they don’t believe they’ll meet this mysterious long-lived woman, and take off for Africa following the various ancestors’ directions on a shard of ancient pot. Needless to say, the woman is real, and believes the young man to be the reincarnation of her dead beloved. THEN things get tricky.

It’s in the fairly standard Victorian style, overwrought and full of hand-fanning, but it didn’t bother me so much this time because there was none of the gossiping, fainting women, or dressed up dullary that I find pervades most of the literature of that time. The female characters are all incredibly strong, the plot is well constructed, and I’d happily follow these two men onto whatever adventures they wanted to go on next.

So, if you like a good adventure, strong sexy women, or Victorian literature, I’d say pick this one up and give it a go!

Title page for She: A History of Adventure

Harry’s My Man

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After watching Jay O’Callahan perform his newest piece “Main Street, Jonesborough” a couple weeks ago, I decided that I needed to read his novel (which I had not realized he had written until I saw it in his study during the practice-performance of the new oral piece).

Harry’s Our Man is a quirky story about a history professor named Harry Hutchinson who decides that he wants to run for congress because no one is talking about the big issues: the bomb (can you tell it takes place in the 50’s?), the mental health of their young people, discrimination, etc. And he doesn’t much care if he wins because all he really wants to do is force people to look at these issues for what they really are. I won’t tell you much more except that the election actually takes place towards the middle of the book and the second half is the aftermath.

I found the presentation of this novel to be interesting because O’Callahan is primarily an oral tradition performer and the language of this novel definitely reflects that. When I stopped expecting the form to match what is more common written conventions, it was more enjoyable to read. Devices that are more common in the oral tradition such as repetition and shorter combinations of sentences felt a bit awkward on the page at first, but only until I got used to seeing them, rather than hearing them.

But if you like a book that digs a little into politics, but more into the culture of the cold war, then this book would be an excellent read for you. The characters are superbly constructed (as if you could expect anything less from O’Callahan) and the story line is fascinating.

Cover of Harry's Our Man