Looking for something to
read? I'm posting a few comments about books I've read over the past
year or so, below. Hope it helps. Email me if you've got
comments or complaints, I always like getting email.
=========================================================================================================== NEW:
A
WRITER'S PARIS by Eric Maisel
Even if you've never had the
slightest interest in going to Paris, if you're a writer, you should
get this book.
Maisel is talking to writers as
a writer on several planes - yes, he's saying you can and should go spend time in Paris to write,
as an act of committment to your writing. He loves the City of Light and has spent a lot of
time there writing himself. But he knows not everyone can, or desires to, go to Paris (though he
gives plenty of information showing that it doesn't require $millions) - he also points out that
it's the "Paris attitude" - the attitude of the city itself - toward creative people and effort - that
can infuse your writing and your life with new fire and spirit. So if you can't or don't care to go
there, go somewhere else you've always wanted to visit - as long as you go to write, not to tourist
- and live there for as long as you can.
He goes further: If you can't go
anywhere, feed the writer in your soul at home: flaneur along the streets of your own town; dedicate more
time to your writing - make the writing schedule you would in Paris. Open your eyes to
your own, familiar, city, as you would to Paris.
Now I have always yearned to go to
Paris but it always seemed like an expensive daydream beyond my reach forever. But
following the internet links Maisel provides, I have learned that Paris really is affordable, if you're
willing to live modestly. For example, in an apartment of maybe 215 square feet (20 m2)
or smaller...it would be even cheaper if you're willing to take an apartment 4 or 5 floors up without an
elevator (think of the great exercise!). Who needs a huge apartment when you're going to be out
strolling around the city and writing all day most days, with the whole
place as your front room,
the parks as your courtyard, the bookstalls and bookstores as your library? This is a whole
different way of life, of thinking about your writing, your dwelling, what you can do. It might just
change your idea of what life is about.
A WRITER'S PARIS is more
than anything a guidebook to possibility. Give your writer self a
little vacation, a little
vision: read this book.
MARCHING
SPAIN by V.S. Pritchett
This book brought home to me the
astonishing fact that Spain, in the early decades of the 20th Century, wasn't much beyond Medieval
Spain in many ways. It also reveals - unintentionally - that maybe a lot was lost when we paved
the world.
Pritchett's young persona was
hilariously grumpy, seemingly Brit-arrogant, but if you pay attention, you'll see through the
curmudgeon to the intensely observant and compassionate traveler. He says of his walking
tour, "In no time in my life except thirty years later when I walked among the primitve poor whites
of the Appalachians in the United States have I been so tenderly treated."
And close attention to Pritchett's
work yields many clues for a writer about observing nature and the man-built environment, and
describing them with fresh and clever, often moving, insight:
"As
I crossed the narrow bridge, the donkeys and mules increased and the
songs with them. A gypsy
was singing in his shack by the river. He was making fish snares
out of rushes. I could see
at the end of the bridge the obese city gates, with officials and
peasants scattered brightly like
confetti about them. The sun leapt flying out of the plain like a
lark rising in a song of light, and
with that light the distances hardened and darkened, the green of the
pastures became vivid and
shrill, and the soil as red as infantry. The breath of Sierra
became a flame, and before it there
appeared dramatically a dark line of wilderness which the flame seemed
to be consuming."
That Pritchett is from another
culture and generation from ours is clear in his descriptions of the people he meets. His eye is
objective, he doesn't apologize for or soften what the Spaniards look, act, sound or smell like.
This is a writer who knows the truth is always the best way to honor and dignify human beings, and
that a true record is a priceless legacy.
Pritchett relates his walking
journey, and when it's over, the book ends. Today's writers feel
the need to Wrap Things
Up, to loop back and pick up a point, to make their scribbling go out
with a dollop of
Meaning. The end of MARCHING
SPAIN seems, therefore, almost abrupt and puzzling, until you reflect that every word and
incident and interaction along the way was all the meaning you need.
GENTLEMEN
& PLAYERS by Joanne Harris
A suspense novel with a clever
twist. The setting is one of those anachronistic "public" schools
in England - it would be
called "private" here. Steeped in tradition that was meaningful a
hundred years ago, but
which is becoming increasingly irrelevant, St. Oswald's School
for Boys by the 1960s was already dependent on tuition from social climbing
parents desperate to give their kids that "touch of class" they'd so resented and coveted in their
own youthful years. Rolling in money and well aware that they're just little pawns in their
parents' blind social games, the students epitomize the cruelty and ruthlessness of a captive society kept
in a pressure cooker.
But from the outside, going to
St. Oswald's looks like Heaven on Earth. One young,
lower-class outsider whose
life of squalor is matched only by thwarted intelligence discovers it's
possible to insinuate
onesself into the Hallowed Halls by taking advantage of the school's
own blind arrogance and
lax security.
A friendship - and something
stronger - is forged but it ends, inevitably due to the personalities involved, in tragedy and ruin.
The novel's POV switches between
that of the interloper's and one of the teachers, Roy Straitley, and between events past and
present. As the story wends its way toward what seems fated to be
a horrible denouement, we
learn more and more about how Straitley's life has become wholly St. Oswald's, and how the lust for revenge
- curdled to insanity - drives the hidden enemy.
Straitley's character is quite
enjoyable and sympathetic, but it must be noted he has been done before, many times. He's almost a
stock character, albeit one we love to see again, especially when as well-drawn as here.
This is a suspenseful and
well-written thriller well worth reading. I recommend it!
================
Older reviews:
GOD BLESS YOU, DOCTOR KEVORKIAN,
and TIMEQUAKE by Kurt Vonnegut
It had been many, many years since I
read any of Vonnegut's work. I think the last one was Palm Sunday
when it first came out, was it 1981? I thought it was earlier
than that. Anyway, I thought it was time I went back and saw what
he's up to now.
I'm sorry to say that I was
disappointed. These books strike me as almost being list-like
endeavors, and not ones he was particularly interested in to begin
with. Maybe I'm remembering wrongly but it seems to me like no
one could surpass Vonnegut in using seemingly neutral, detached
language to spew caustic sarcasm all over society's worst hypocrisies
and deceits. These two books have only dim echoes of that.
Maybe he's given up thinking he can change anything. That would
be sad for him, but moreso for the world.
MRS. CALIBAN, and BINSTEAD'S SAFARI by Rachel Ingalls
I saw an intriguing review of
Ingalls' work and got four of her novels from the library. I
started reading them in chronological order, these two having 1983 as
their copyright dates.
Mrs. Caliban is
definitely worth reading (as is the other one). Her protagonist
(the title character) is only partly sympathetic - with both book's
female leads I get impatient: Just dump the asshole!!! - and yet
interesting enough to keep me turning the pages. And very quickly
we meet the alien who sweeps her off her feet, so to speak, and her
troubled best friend, and the complications that lead to a violent
denouement - and as the jacket blurb promises, when we're done with the
book we have to go back and read it again because only then do we
realize *which* two stories Ingalls has been telling us, and how they
relate to one another in a tragic and illuminating way.
Ingall's "voice" is cool, detached -
omniscient - not an approach I'm wild about. It annoys me after
awhile, it can seem awfully mannered in some writers. I think
she's probably one of the best at handling it, though, and in Binstead's Safari that's a
good thing. Even with her arm's-length attitude the emotions,
events, and transgressions that creep, jump, crawl and develop
throughout this story of an unhappily married couple and what happens
to them when they go to London, then Africa, in pursuit of material for
a scholarly tome the husband wants to write - would overwhelm the
reader. Africa changes the two of them, yes it does indeed.
I'm looking forward to reading the
rest of Ingalls' books.
R IS FOR
RICOCHET by Sue Grafton
Is it yet a cultural given that
everyone is committed to read every one of Grafton's alphabet
novels? I think this was my second reading of this one.
It's got everything Kinsey Millhone fans love: liars, thieves,
sociopaths, locked doors, stacks of cash, hidden motives, her neighbor
Henry and his crotchety brothers, and Rosie with her steamroller chef's
ways. It also had me wondering why, as prickly and independent as
Kinsey is, she didn't give her fresh-out-of-prison charge the old
heave-ho the minute she could, that being 48 hours after she went &
got the young woman as she was released. Kinsey's client was the
girl's rich, guilty father and he'd paid her well. Who in their
right mind would allow themselves to get tangled up with this messed-up
loser? Oh well, if she had washed her hands of the ex-con, there
wouldn't have been a book. I'd have liked a better explanation of
*why* Kinsey let herself get in so deep. It's not one of Kinsey's
best but it's still worth reading, if only so you can stay on Grafton's
alphabet train. There's always the next one.
ROCKET
SCIENCE by Jay Lake
Jay's everything-but-the-kitchen
sink post-WW II story of an alien spacecraft stolen by a small town war
hero and brought back to plague the life of his
served-on-the-home-front civilian buddy Vernon Dunham, is just flat-out
great fun. You got yer Nazis, yer talking alien spaceship, yer
nerdy yet loveable hero, his questionable war hero best friend, and
best of all a fully-realized and completely immersible recreation of
what those years looked, felt, tasted, smelled and sounded like.
Jay does such a good job of seamlessly painting the backdrop that you
provide your own gray snap-brim fedoras, pleated trousers and red
suspenders, the billowy hairdo's on the women and the running boards on
the rounded black sedans. Even if you don't care for aliens, if
you love 1940s black & white movies on the TCM channel, you'll love
this book! And if you DO love aliens - Jay's got the story for
you.
================
Older reviews:
GOBLIN QUEST
by Jim C. Hines
Five Star Press, 2004
Wull, maybe you wouldn't be so het-up about those swaggering,
swashbuckling adventurers out on a quest if you could see them through
the mirror, the other way 'round. Crotchety old wizards, preening
princes, hair-trigger-tempered dwarves and fey-but-reluctant elves
aren't so bleeding adorable when you're the goblin at the far end of
their callously-wielded leash.
Jig's a goblin, all right, and though he's always
been on the bottom of his clan's pecking order (being small, dumb,
weak, myopic, and oh all right, not very scary), he's still loyal to
his brethren. Yes he is, despite the fact that the deeper he leads the
quarrelsome band of adventurers into his clan's cave, the more he
realizes two things: First, these invaders might actually have some
things to teach goblins that could alleviate his peoples' tendency to
die young and violently.
Concepts like trust and cooperation dawn in Jig's
pointed little head as the not-so-merry band magicks and battles their
way to find the fabled McGuffin. (It's a magic rod that will give its
possessor more power than the world has ever seen.)
The second thing he realizes is that not only is he
a lot smarter than his own clan's dominant bullies, he's smarter in
some pretty important ways than his captors.
With only his pet fire-spider Smudge as a friend,
Jig faces the hostility of his fellow goblins, the menace and arrogance
of the adventurers, horrors like dead soldiers magically re-animated to
slay the invading band, snotty but deadly dragons, and his own
insecurities. With everything against him, Jig's surprised - and pulls
off quite the surprise himself - by the very satisfying end of this
yarn.
Scary, hilarious, disgusting, suspenseful,
infuriating, inspiring and horrifying by turns, Jig's journey is a
delight and a real page-turner.
THE DESCENT by Jeff Long Crown Publishers, 1999
It is discovered that deep,
deep underground, in tunnels and labyrinths circling the globe, Hell
exists. More exactly, a subterranean world with its own alien ecology,
and its own human-like dominant intelligent species, has co-existed
with humankind since before humankind itself had evolved. Now the two
worlds are intersecting, and how the outer Earthlings deal with this
"new" world pretty much follows how humans have ever dealt with new
worlds - they seek to explore, conquer, exploit, exterminate, convert,
subjugate. And as always, "the other" gets all our own hopes and fears
and delusions projected onto it. They're noble savages; they're actual
minions of Satan; they're non-human impediments to commerce; they're
pitiable, literal, slaves of darkness who need their souls first
revealed to them, then saved...They're taking hostages.
The denizens of the tunnels
and caverns are savage, ruthless, adapted to their permanently dark
environment so that to top-siders invading the deeps, their attacks and
raids seem almost supernatural. In appearance they vary from
nearly-human to horrendously deformed and bizarrely-appendaged
nightmares. One of our protagonists, Ike Crockett, is a mountain
climber who'd lost first a pack of his tourist clients, then his lover,
and ultimately himself to the underworld. He was enslaved for years
until a military expedition chanced to free him; then he's drafted in
the top-sider effort to gain control of the underworld. With his
intimate knowledge of the underworld and brutally schooled in survival
exigencies, he's charged with leading an ostensibly scientific
exploratory expedition to the farthest recesses of Hell. In the group
is a nun whose specialities are getting in trouble with her superiors -
and ancient languages. Her secret mission is as emissary of a shadowy
world-wide group who believe that it is literally Satan who rules in
Hell, and their aim is to track him down. But no one is what he or she
seems in this story plumbing the darkest crevices of the human capacity
for evil, and the most glorious moments of human selflessness.
I was enthralled with the
concept of this story, and enjoyed repeatedly the too-rare sense of awe
that we seek in genre literature. Long imparts the environment of Hell
with wonder and mystery. Most satisfying of all, to me, was how he
shows us, through Ike, how people could possibly live in total
darkness, what kind of survival craft they would employ. Hearing,
touch, and smell replace sight as the great cue-givers as to what's
going on in that world. How would a "demon" know if the person he's
bumped into is a topsider or a fellow cave-dweller? The answer is, How
could he NOT? If you ran smack into a bear in a dark tunnel, would you
think it a person?
The last quarter of the book
is the usual "race against time" between Ike and another whose mission
is to...well, I'll let you read it. There's a big surprise toward the
end that you don't earn unless you read the whole book. And you want to
read this book.
STARFISH by Peter Watts Tor, 1999
Power companies are tapping
the virtually endless source of energy in the ocean's abyssal rifts.
Experimental stations on the Pacific floor are first manned by socio-
and psychopaths physiologically altered to survive in abyssal
conditions. They're prime material for the experiment: no one wanted
them on land; their psychology lent itself well to the extreme, bizarre
conditions at abyssal depths, and if (when) the technology evolved that
could replace them with robots, no one would object to their being
abandoned down there.
Watts, a marine biologist,
has gotten under the skin of several psychos in this book, not all of
them undersea. Though the rifters' biological alterations and skinsuits
mostly compensate for the extremes of temperature, darkness, and
crushing pressures, they do not alleviate the allure of isolation, nor
the incipient psi connections some rifters start to experience with the
abyssal fish and invertebrate species lurking just out of range of the
station's lights. Each rifter develops his or her particular mental and
emotional adaptations to this alien world. For some it means giving up
the last vestiges of humanity. For others it brings, unexpectedly,
healing.
Landward, corporate power
games and egos mesh in a spiraling dance toward disaster. Millions live
in coastal ghettos subject to tidal waves, earthquakes, and shortages
of every necessity, while the lucky few wheel and deal inland, no
convenience or luxury too expensive or decadent. Only a handful of the
elite know that the rifts hide something ancient and alive, known as
βehemoth, that could destroy all life on Earth. Only one
scientist, of
low status and shaky psychology, starts to realize that what's at stake
is far more horrifying than the power companies' stranglehold on energy
resources.
The broken people in the
undersea power plants, could they be any more beleaguered? Demons
within, without, and above, and the constant knowledge that the rifts
they work could erupt and vaporize their bodies any second. We're led
to root for one, Lenie Clarke, whose interior odyssey turns out to be
no less soul-shifting than the geological events she must survive.
In the meantime, computers
installed amidst the power plants are quietly developing their own
plans. These nodes are equipped with "smart gels" – thin films of
living neural tissue that exponentially increase the machines' ability
to learn and reason – and they hide and control nuclear bombs
intended
to blast a rift into earthquake-scale upheaval, when tectonic
conditions are calculated as right for augmenting power companies'
profits. But who knows what these "head cheese" chimeras might decide
to do? Whose best interests do they protect? Too late, their masters
learn that their safe, secure inland buildings can't withstand the
cataclysm they have themselves set up.
One of their rifters emerges
from the carnage. And she's pissed.
Watts' science is hard, juicy
and convincing, and he's even included a list of references at the end!
This book is recommended for anyone who likes their bio-geo-science
fiction with a sharp, dark edge, and their poli sci with a bitter,
realistic bite.
The sequel, Maelstrom, was
published in 2001. βehemoth, the last (the author vows) book in
this
story, is due out later this year (2004).
MANIFOLD ORIGIN by Stephen Baxter DelRey, 2002
An immense
“vacuum cleaner” appears without warning in the skies over
Africa and
scoops up several unsuspecting people, one of them Emma Stoney, the
wife of astronaut Reid Malenfant. Then a new moon, much larger than our
old familiar sterile rock, and visibly possessing oceans, clouds,
weather, and probably vegetation, replaces the Moon. The effects on
Earth’s tides are devastating, even while the scientific
community is
galvanized into ecstasies of hope and discord. Reid Malenfant has but
one purpose: to get up to the new “moon” and find his wife.
While Reid
pulls every string, twists every arm he can find to get a launch
arranged, Emma is dealing with several different species of primate
that she finds on the new moon. The ones who have any kind of speech at
all, speak English: a puzzle that’s never fully explained to my
satisfaction. The ultimate explanation for why all this is happening
was a little fuzzy, too. What
Baxter did do very well was put the reader in the minds of the other
primates, in scenes throughout the tale. I felt confident from start to
finish that the details of their daily lives were accurate so far as
anthropologists know now, and it was fascinating and awesome. The
latter because the lives of our earliest ancestors were so incredibly
difficult that I have to wonder how our line survived. And what happens
to Reid and Emma is right; no forced contrivance in these fates, or how
they meet them. All of the relationships in the book are like that;
Baxter has a good grip on human behavior and motivations.
Baxter’s
done a good job here, compelling reading with enough new information to
make it interesting, enough human emotions to engage your feelings, and
enough science to intrigue the curiosity.
THIS IS NOT CIVILIZATION by Robert Rosenberg Houghton Mifflin, 2004
Jeff Hartig's a career
do-gooder, globe-striding from Apache Indian reservation to remote
Central Asian mountain village to NGO branch office in Istanbul,
working tirelessly to help people improve their lives, against
impossible odds made even worse by his own and his nation's ignorance.
But hey, it helps him avoid himself. The only trouble is that he keeps
making lifelong friends.
One is Adam Hale, an Apache
youth who not only goes on to a successful college career after Jeff
clears out of town (which he does once he's been made stunningly aware
of how peripheral to rez life he really is), but also keeps up
long-distance letters back and forth as the two men fight and flee
their personal demons across continents and oceans.
Another is Anarbek
Tashtanaliev, pillar of that forgotten Kyrgyz village and economic
mainstay of all his cheese factory workers--a cheese factory that
hasn't produced any cheese since approximately the Kruschiev years but
whose idle workers collect paychecks monthly due to the breakdown of
the broken-down Soviet economic bureaucracy. Anarbek has a lot to worry
about: a rebellious daughter, Nazira, who shamed him by escaping from
the man who following time-honored tradition had kidnapped her and
carried her to his house--before he could rape her and seal the
tradition. A second wife his daughter's age. And a new Russian man
about town whose job is to inventory and evaluate all the factories.
Anarbek is Jeff's host and comes to regard him as a slightly crazy but
beloved son.
Two years later, when Jeff
leaves Kyzl Adyr-Kirova (the one thing the village *doesn't* lack is
unpronounceable names everywhere), after having made impulsive,
last-night-here love to Nazira, he drifts for a time before ending up
in Istanbul. He settles in to a job with a charitable organization
helping refugees get visas to America (usually).
His routine is interrupted
one day when he answers a knock at his apartment door and finds Adam
Hale standing there. He'd run out of "away from the rez" in the USA;
Istanbul sounded good.
Another evening Jeff answers
the door and finds Anarbek standing there, expecting him to give the
man $12,000 to pay off the Russian bureaucrat to keep the paychecks
flowing to the mythical cheese factory. He had the impression that the
American made that much every *month*. When Jeff informs him that's his
*annual* salary, the rustic hits the streets and starts learning
everything he can about "biznes." What he sees of the teeming and
lively commercial Istanbul is a revelation, and he soon gets a big idea
that he thinks might save his village.
He's there a month when yet
another knock comes at the door. This time it's Nazira, looking for her
father and madder than hell. Her younger sister was flirting with the
same repulsive guy who'd carried Nazira off and there was no man at
home to protect her. His young wife was mourning, missing him, and they
were all starving and freezing with the cheese factory checks
mysteriously not forthcoming. Underlying her anger at her father is the
fact that he's forced her to confront Jeff--the father of her son, Jeff
who she really never wanted to have anything to do with again.
The four of them make an
uneasy household. Anarbek finally gets a break with his business
idea--hooks up with an important person--and Nazira is given a job,
selling leather coats on street corners, that puts more money than
she's seen in her whole life in her hands with the first sale. Adam is
tutoring a wealthy politician's son in English, so the kid can get into
an Ivy League university in the USA. He and Nazira finally start to
warm to each other.
And then the dreadful
earthquake of 1999 hits Istanbul.
Any book whose first sentence
is: "The idea of using porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed
was a poor one" has got my attention. Rosenberg's prose is rather
Hemingway-ish in that he seemingly just lists events, "she thought
this, then he went over there, and then she did this, and then they
took the bus..." but the rich details of setting and culture leave the
reader room to open up to these characters, the infuriatingly opaque
Jeff, and the exotic surroundings and cultures, and be borne along as
helpless as they are, to the book's anything but storybook ending.
There are laugh out loud places, there are tearful passages, there are
horrors in this book. It portrays a world that is quite different than
what Americans have been hypnotized to believe operates. The details
are delicious, surprising, and true as gold. You want to see the world?
Forget the Travel Channel. Read this book.
VEILS OF AZLAROC by Fred Saberhagen Ace Books, 1978
Saberhagen's Azlaroc is one
of the most imaginative and unique worlds I've ever seen in SF. It's
not a planet, not a sun, but a world that's bathed periodically in
"veils" of dark matter that's been harrowed through the crucible of the
world's partner neutron star and escaped the ferocious gravity of the
other partner, a black hole. Each veil "covers" Azlaroc and everything
living and nonliving on it, sealing them all forever in their own "year
class." The people trapped within a year class age extremely slowly,
and as decades pass, subsequent people trapped in their own year
classes perceive the older ones as fading images, as ephemeral as
holograms, or smoke. Communication - and escape - become impossible.
The dark-veils are layer upon layer of time, literally blanketing and
isolating each year class. This was a slightly difficult concept, at
first, but Saberhagen handles it with casual artistry. The place has
become a tourist destination for people who find the whole thing exotic
and intriguing - but they have to avoid getting trapped in the next
veil, or they're stuck there forever. Oh, and watch the ground - it's
seismically unstable. In places. And...times.
What's happening in the story
on this strange world is that a galactic adventurer has been hired to
penetrate the tomb of a famous poet's lover and retrieve a book of
poetry that the poet dramatically left on her corpse. As he's scoping
out the job, one of the "explorers" - one of the first 500 people who
got trapped on Azlaroc, so many centuries ago that they're invisible to
most Azlarocans and visitors, has discovered that this year's Veilfall is
coming weeks early.
Desperately the original explorers try to communicate "forward" through
over 400 years' worth of dark-veils to the present-day tourists that
they must get off of Azlaroc as fast as they can, or be trapped
forever. The hours are ticking past - an irony in this world of
suspended time - while the adventurer gains the interior of the tomb
and discovers something that will give his entire self-centered life
new meaning, at a great price. At the same time, a fabulously wealthy
and excruciatingly lonely Azlarocan is making plans to escape his
prison of Time - through
the neutron star.
Saberhagen's characters
aren't particularly emotionally engaging, but the wonders of Azlaroc
kept me turning the pages all the way through.
=========================================================================================================== This way
back to 3 outside the skinny's home page.
Want to see what I've had published?
Some info about my favorite musicians - nine inch nails
and Bright
Eyes.