Swarm of Beasts

2008-04-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

I've been incredibly remiss in updating, but I'm now blogging on Wordpress. There's a lot of new content up there!

Very brief mentions of a number of books.

2007-11-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch: Perhaps it's that you need to read a critical mass of the Ankh-Morpork novels to really get them, or perhaps I chose the wrong one; I liked it but not as much as Pratchett's YA, despite the time travel and the revolutionaries.

Sara Ryan, Empress of the World: Girls fall in love at gifted summer camp. I liked the first half much better than the second half; it's a much better book when it's making small sharp observations than when it feels the need to move the plot forward. The secondary characters felt kind of perfunctory, especially Isaac and Kevin, who I kept getting mixed up.

Esme Raji Codell, Vive La Paris: Paris's older brother is getting beaten up by one of Paris's classmates, and won't defend himself. He doesn't believe in violence. Meanwhile, Paris is taking piano lessons from old Mrs. Rosen, who used to live in Paris and who turns out to be a Holocaust survivor.
This is an intense and beautiful look at the meaning of pacifism, of nonviolent resistance, of how we should treat our enemies and those who are cruel to us. In a world that can be dark and cruel, is violence necessary to survive? Is it foolish to think you can avoid violence? This is heavy stuff for a middle-grade novel, and Codell deals with it with amazing sensitivity.

Esme Raji Codell, Sahara Special: Not as good as Vive La Paris because of the I'm So Specialness of the teacher (who feels a bit like an authorial projection), but a good story of a girl who's recovering from the breakup of her family by writing secret letters.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: Junior, a nerdy fourteen-year-old on a Spokane reservation, loses it when he realizes he's using the same math textbook that his mother used. He throws the book at his teacher--who forgives him and tells him to get off the rez. When he transfers to the all-white high school 22 miles away, he faces prejudice from both the white students and the people on the rez who call him a traitor. This is an extraordinarily delicately balanced book. There's so much darkness in it and yet Junior's narrative voice has enough distance in it that you don't feel pummeled by the darkness, and a genuine sense of humor shines through the terrible parts.

Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl: When Deanna is thirteen, her father catches her having sex in a car. It's a small town, word gets around, and her life is pretty much ruined. Years later, she is still trying to move on, working in a terrible pizza place, saving up money so that her brother and his girlfriend and baby daughter can move out. There are no easy solutions, but a few small and hard-won gestures of reconciliation.

Stephen Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Linguist Pinker discusses the relation between words and thoughts, which aren't (in his view) as neat as some would suppose; he takes a hard-line stance against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that thoughts are constrained by language. Pinker explores causation (if you cause a window to break by distracting the window installer, that's not the same thing as 'breaking the window'), naming, swearing, and politeness. There's tons of "Wow! I never thought of that before!"
I thought it was great. But I should note that I previously agreed with Pinker on a lot of linguistic issues. He's been criticized for presenting his views as uncontroversial, settled facts when that is in fact not the case, and he's so persuasive you can't imagine that he might be wrong. And this isn't necessarily a good thing when he's basically the only popularizer that linguistics has.

2007-08-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

By no means do I want to be the kind of blogger who only posts to apologize for not posting.

But: my car was stolen last week; since recovered, needs lots of work; library books missing; not in much condition for reading and writing.

Castellucci, Cecil. Beige

2007-08-16T04:41:00.001-07:00

15-year-old Montreal girl Katy has to spend the summer with her dad in Los Angeles while her mother goes on an archaeological dig in Peru. Oh--and her dad is a legendary punk rock drummer. And she hasn't seen him in a couple years because the last time he was up in Canada, he got kicked out of the country for brining in drugs. It is not a positive way to start out a summer. But because of the kind of novel this is, you know that she will grow to love the people here. This isn't surprising; but it IS surprising that it's done really well.

Some young adult novels seem to unthinkingly take it for granted that of course one's parents are lame, and of course one wants more freedom from them. Katy, on the other hand, seems young for her age, seems like the kind of kid who has to be dragged kicking and screaming from childhood, from insulation. The book is a series of unpleasant truths discovered; but they're not things to Reconcile Oneself To. They're things that bring Katy from relating to people as a child, to relating to people as an adult--which means honesty, and raw emotions, and scary things like that. It's very symbolic, isn't it, that Katy's mom knitted a ton of blankets for the people in her life? That's comfort, and safety, and what Katy wants to cling to. But can't.

Castellucci knows Montreal like I know Montreal. She makes me long to go back there. And it's a great deal of fun reading a novel that makes you say "Oh! I remember that! I love that!" We only get to see Montreal in Katy's remembrances, but I for one would love a sequel. It wouldn't even need to have a plot. It could just have Katy hanging around Montreal doing Montreal-type things.

I was curious about one thing. I am sure that Castellucci has done bucketloads of research and is way more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than I am, but: Guitar Center? Really? Raleigh isn't a L.A. or Nashville or Seattle but there are half a dozen music stores that I would go to in preference to the corporateness of Guitar Center. Maybe the one in L.A. is better?

Anyway, good book, loved it (maaaybe not quite to the extent of Boy Proof?), it made me cry.

Abdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big In This?

2007-08-14T18:32:00.000-07:00

Australian-Palestinian girl Amal decides to start wearing the hijab full time, faces racism and stupidity at school, joins the debate team, has a crush, and deals with her friends' problems: Leila has a strict mother who wants her to leave school and get married, while Simone is a size 14 and has much angst about her figure and unlovability.

It is a book with a fabulous voice and a lot of genuine humor--I skipped through some pages at random to refresh my memory and got, "So is it like nuns? Are you married to Jesus now?"

If it hadn't been written with as much authority and assurance, I might have thought some of the situations were over the top -- obviously my high school (pre-9/11) and a snooty Australian prep school (post-9/11) don't have much in common, and I'm sure that I wasn't aware of everything that went on, but I felt like at my high school it was accepted as just normal that we had a handful of students who wore head scarves. But Abdel-Fattah made it totally convincing and believable.

Now, there were moments when it was just a little preachy (I thought Simone's issues were handled much less gracefully than Amal's) and moments when it lacked narrative drive and moments when it was trying too hard to be cool. But (without dismissing the seriousness of the issues involved) it's nice to read a book that takes on serious issues while being both reverent and irreverent, and very funny.

School from seventh grade to tenth grade was Hidaya - The Guidance - Islamic College. Where they indoctrinate students and teach them how to form Muslim ghettos, where they train with Al-Qaeda for school camp and sing national anthems from the Middle East. NOT!

2007-08-07T05:15:00.001-07:00

Read and enjoyed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (yes, the day after it came out), but don't feel like I have anything to say about it that hasn't already been said a dozen times. (I'm just now updating my sidebar with the page count, so I feel like I should mention it).

Bear, Elizabeth. Whiskey & Water

2007-08-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

The sequel to Bear's Blood and Iron-- a book that was occasionally a little like watching two strangers play three-dimensional chess. Fascinating, but not always easy to understand, or to invest with emotional meaning. This book is more like when you've been at the chess tournament for a while, have begun to absorb the rules, and have chatted with both players in between games. Much easier to understand, both intellectually and emotionally.

But it's still three-dimensional chess. We've got Hell, with Lucifer and other various devils; the Prometheans, who want to keep the power of Faerie bound; Matthew, ex-Promethean, a wounded man of divided loyalties; Faerie, and its queen; Heaven, and the angel Michael; oh, and Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright (late of Prometheus, Faerie, and Hell). And a loose band of humans who could've almost come straight from a Charles DeLint novel. All these groups and people have their own allegiances and motives, personal, political, and metaphysical.

The most interesting thing about this novel, to me, is that it has a number of things that ordinarily would push all my buttons and make me go squee. Like sexy devils! And sexy angels! And sexy Kit Marlowe! And cute gothy people! And then-- it turns around and stays too honest and dark and brutal to actually make me go squee. It's not even the turned-up melodrama of everybody dying beautiful tragic deaths; it's something quieter than that, and harsher in its own way. But this is so much a book about stories and lies (all stories are true, we hear again and again; but all stories are lies almost by definition; the most powerful magic is the magic of deception, which is the same thing as the power to control one's own stories...). And so the book's delicate balance between tragic/gorgeous/seductive and brutal is Just. Perfect. In fact, it rather exactly mirrors what one of the characters goes through...

It's not a book without flaws. In particular, it's so dense that I couldn't read it quickly, but it also requires so much memory that I couldn't read it slowly without losing track of my threads. Bear doesn't just require you to put two and two together; she requires you to put two and x together, where x is a detail you hopefully remember from a hundred pages back. So there were plot developments where I had to say, "Okay, I buy it, if you say so." But it would be silly of me to blame the book for being too smart for me, wouldn't it?

Swann, Leonie. Three Bags Full

2007-08-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

When their shepherd George is suddenly found dead with a spade in his chest, a flock of sheep determine to solve the murder: Othello the mysterious black sheep, Mopple the Whale, clever Miss Maple, and a dozen others (some more differentiated than others).

Something appealed to me about this book from the very first. I don't know why; I don't read mysteries normally, and especially not mysteries where overly intelligent pets solve the crime. But I had a good feeling about it, and that was borne out.

First of all, the writing is lovely. I was about fifty pages in when I started skipping around the back and front matter out of curiosity, and discovered: it's a translation! From the German! This didn't entirely astonish me because it feels like the quirky sort of book that would have an easier time getting published in Europe, but I was astonished that a translation would have writing that brave and interesting. (What I mean by brave is this: if I were a translator I would want to beat more sense into a paragraph like the following, and I would be scared of what my editor would think if I didn't.)

Green stretched all the way to the horizon. Green was the song of unreason. It grew without sense or understanding, urging all creatures to do the same. And they did. Green was the most beautiful commandment in the world

Mind you, most of the prose is a lot more straightforward than that.

A lot of the story is necessarily a little oblique. The reader doesn't always understand the sheepy things that happen, and the sheep definitely don't understand the human things that happen:

None of them thought Satan capable of such an act. Satan was an elderly donkey who sometimes grazed in the meadow next to theirs, and uttered bloodcurdling cries. His voice was truly dreadful, but otherwise he'd always struck them as harmless.
"I still think it was God who killed him," said Mopple, with his mouth full. "Beth thought so too." The sheep had a certain respect for Beth because she had invested so much time and trouble in such a doubtful thing as George's soul

As a result, none of the plotlines had as much emotional impact as maybe I was hoping for.

And yet-- as I finished the book, I was utterly satisfied and content with it. And that's saying a lot.

In lieu of full write-ups

2007-07-18T05:20:00.000-07:00

Jack Gantos, Love Curse of the Rumbaughs

What a strange, strange book. Gantos's preoccupation with free will vs. predestination is an interesting one. I think I admired more than liked it.

Cecil Castellucci, Plain Janes

What Boy Proof does for geeks, Plain Janes does for suburbia: hits the balance between empathy and call-to-action. "Yes, it sucks, I know it sucks, you have every right to be angsty and alienated. But it's up to you to make things better. Nobody else is going to do it for you. So go to it! It's fun!"

Loved it, but wanted more (especially given all the advertising in the back pages...)

Katayama, Kyoichi. Socrates in Love

2007-07-14T04:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not abandoning the blog-- I've been spending my lunch hours reading in Japanese. It takes longer. (And I have a couple more books to write up this weekend that I've really been meaning to get to!)

And this is one of the books I've been reading. I looked over the translation and wasn't particularly impressed by it, but as you'll see, I wasn't particularly impressed by anything else in the book either.

Two Japanese teenagers, Aki and Sakutaro, fall in love. Then Aki gets leukemia and dies. There is not much plot (but you never expect a Japanese novel to have too much plot); there is a lot of sophomoric philosophy and maudlin rehashing of people's feelings. (Let the record show that the version I borrowed was not entitled Socrates in Love, but that apparently is the author's original title.)

It was nowhere as deep as it wanted to be; and that's because of how intensely it idealizes Aki, and the relationship between Aki and Sakutaro. Does Aki never do something dumb? (Sakutaro does, but it's romantic dumb stuff) Do they never say things that are angry and mean? Why do you only have scenes like this? (my translation, not official translation):

"I think we have everything right here and now." When she finally spoke, she chose her words carefully. "We have everything we need, we don't lack anything. So there's no reason to ask God for anything, no reason to seek heaven or the afterlife. Because--everything is here right now, and you just have to find it." After a while she said, "What I don't have isn't going to appear after I die. The things that are here right now will still be there even after I die. I guess I can't put it into words right..."
"Like, my love for you exists now, and that's still going to be there even after you die."
"Right," Aki nodded. "That's what I want to say. So I'm not sad or scared."

Truthfully? I kind of want to smack her. Not only for that scene, but because it isn't balanced out with the truth that dying sucks, and dying before you've even graduated high school sucks, and being told you have aplastic anemia even after you start getting chemo and your hair starts falling out sucks.

Go get some Kleenex and download "Casimir Pulaski Day" off iTunes; it's six minutes and a much better "my girlfriend got cancer and died" story.

Meyer, Kai. The Water Mirror

2007-07-05T18:29:00.000-07:00

I do have at least two more books to write up after I get home from my weekend in New York; and then there's the new fiscal year at the library, thanks to which I now have ten new books on request. This'll do for now.

In an alternate Venice, stone lions roam the streets, mermaids live in the water, and the Flowing Queen protects the city from the siege of the Egyptian empire. Orphaned Merle is sent as an apprentice to a magic mirror maker, along with the blind girl Junipa; boy thief Serafin works for the mirror maker's rival, a weaver of magical cloth. Merle and Serafin get tangled up in some convoluted plotting and have adventures.

So, the worldbuilding is superlatively inventive. It's not a mish-mash of completely unrelated things, but it IS totally original. There are new and exciting things around every corner. The plotting is not as strong; the world seems to revolve around Merle. The story is perfectly content to abandon Junipa and Serafin in order to have Special Exciting Things happen to Merle, and none of the peripheral characters seem to have much reality. So the plot is forever picking up threads and then abandoning them (something I recognize in my own early novel attempts).

I must say that it intrigues me enough to read the sequel.

Riordan, Rick. The Lightning Thief

2007-06-25T03:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, turns out I am going to have a little burnout if I try to read six books in a weekend.

This is one of those books that everyone has read already. Percy Jackson has a beleaguered mother and an awful stepfather, and he's gotten himself thrown out of school six years in a row on account of his dyslexia, ADHD, and the fact that Poseidon is his biological father. That last one was supposed to be a secret because it's very, very dangerous to be a child of a major god, but when it starts putting his life in danger it can't stay a secret for very long. Which is how Percy winds up at Camp Half-Blood, which is (as you might guess from the name) a summer camp for demigods. And just as he's getting used to the lessons in swordfighting and ancient Greek, he gets a very important quest that sends him across the country to Los Angeles-- where else do you find the entrance to the underworld?

This is a really fun book that totally deserves its popularity. It has a fast plot that doesn't stop moving, and it also has enough of an emotional arc drawn in so that I care what happens to these people. It has a lot of hidden easter eggs for those who are familiar with Greek mythology, so that it makes those who are familiar with some of the myths feel very clever, and perhaps may provoke some interest in Greek myths among the rest. Or, if nothing else, some awareness of just how wonderfully soap-operatic they could be.

48-hour book challenge, final stats

2007-06-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

Books read: 6
Pages read: 1675
Hours spent: ~16

I wanted to get to 7 or 8 books, but I got so unsatisfied with the state of my apartment that I spent a lot of time today just cleaning up. Which is what the weekend is for. ;)

Ryan, Pam Munoz. Esperanza Rising

2007-06-10T11:40:00.000-07:00

48-hour challenge: 6 books, 1675 pages.

And this will be the end, because perhaps I could finish one more book in 2:20, but I'm drowsy and would fall asleep if I tried another one. Plus, I have to do my dishes.

Esperanza, the 13-year-old daughter of a wealthy Mexican landowner, finds her fortunes swiftly changing: her father dies, and her ambitious uncle, trying to corner her mother into marrying him, burns down their house. Her family's options shrink, and she leaves for California with her mother, where they find agricultural work. Esperanza is spoiled and privileged, and has a hard time reconciling herself to a life of poverty and hard work.

I don't really know what to say about this book. It was a thoroughly adequate book, but it generally felt pretty paint-by-numbers, like it's retreading the paces of a couple dozen other YA novels in the "life-used-to-be-really-hard" genre.

Johnson, Maureen. 13 Little Blue Envelopes

2007-06-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

48-hour challenge: 5 books, 1420 pages.

16-year-old Ginny gets a letter from her eccentric, artistic, young, and dead Aunt Peg, giving her $1000 in cash and instructions to travel to New York and get a package waiting there for her-- and thence to London. The New York package has 12 more blue envelopes, each with a new mission for Ginny's international travels.

The book captured the atmosphere of foreign travel well, the alternate feelings of excitement and alienation. On the other hand, it kept going on about how Paris was just like a scene from Ginny's French textbooks-- and that drove home how, generally, the travels don't really seem to go beyond the picture you get from textbooks and travel guides.

Smart, fun, and really entertaining... but a little fluffy and conventional in the places where I wish it had gone a little deeper.

Wilson, Diane Lee. Black Storm Comin'

2007-06-09T19:33:00.000-07:00

48-Hour Challenge: 4 books, 1099 pages.

While the family is en route to California in the 1860s, in search of a better life, 12-year-old Colton Wescott's father abandons the family after an accidental shooting; Willie, the newborn baby dies; Ma is sick; and Colton has to take care of his two younger sisters. When they finally pull into Dayton, Colton (who's good with animals) gets it into his head to be a rider for the Pony Express -- not just because his family needs the money, but also because there's something inside him pushing him to escape, to get away.

And so he does, but it's not easy making his way across the treacherous mountains and confronting awful weather; dealing with people isn't easy either, when Colton's a quarter black, and anxious about whether he can pass as white, or whether he should.

Before I picked this up there was a part of me going "Historical, 1800s, boooring," and if you read the first fifty or sixty pages it feels like you've got an awfully grim story on your hands (helped out a great deal by Colton's engaging voice, I'll admit), but especially once the Pony Express bits start, it gets to be really exciting and vivid, in the mode of the "boy-and-his-dog" and "boy-and-his-horse" books of my childhood.

I'm keeping this one in mind to recommend to people; it's clean but exciting, well-written but with a casual and very readable style, good for young YAs and Black Stallion fans.

Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. Haters

2007-06-09T14:58:00.000-07:00

48-hour challenge: 3 books, 808 pages.

Pasquala--Paski--was enjoying her eccentric-but-sane New Mexico life when her father's comic gets optioned for a movie. Suddenly they're in southern California, everyone has bucketloads of money, power and money count for a lot more than they used to, her father's being all weird, and Paski gets on the bad end of a love triangle.

I truly liked what a well-rounded character Paski is. She's into mountain biking (and wow, the biking bits are written like Valdes-Rodriguez actually knows what she's talking about), she works on the school newspaper, she's a little bit psychic. And you could say that the book itself is really well-rounded too. You've got family-drama, popularity-and-friendship-drama, and romance-drama, and the story manages to be a little socially conscious without being too much.

What I didn't like so much was the cheese and the wish-fulfilment. (Spoilers ahead, sorry!) By the end of the book, she is dating the hottest guy in school and has just won a regional motocross championship despite, uh, having exactly one day of previous motocross experience. And there were times when the tone went over to simplistic moralizing.

I'm glad that a book can look at the stereotypical everybody's-richer-than-God southern-California experience without either blind idolization or total cynicism, and I like that the world of the book is diverse and layered.

Mosley, Walter. 47

2007-06-09T04:14:00.000-07:00

48-hour challenge:
2 books,
457 pages

A young slave, 47, meets Tall John, supposedly a runaway slave from another plantation, but actually a space alien, stuck on earth with a broken spaceship, seeking to avert something that will rip the fabric of reality itself.

I didn't quite feel that the science fictional elements were well integrated into the rest of the story; they were there either to move the plot forward or for moral enlightenment. That part didn't work for me until towards the end, when you begin at last to fully see the consequences of the collision between John's idealism and the brutality of the real world.

But as a story about friendship, and about the effects of slavery and oppression, it worked much better, and Mosley has a great command of voice.

Westerfeld, Scott. So Yesterday

2007-06-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

48-hr challenge: 1 book, 225 pgs.

Hunter is, well... a cool hunter. Find the new, cool, thing, take a picture of it on his cell phone and send it to his boss. The new cool thing of the day is a new way of tying your shoelaces-- and the shoelaces in question belong to Jen, who is pretty cool herself. An Innovator, rather than just a Trendsetter.

Next thing you know, they're getting called in to a focus group for an ad, where Jen notes the missing-black-woman formation:

"You know, the guy on the motorcycle was black. The guy on the bike was white. The woman was white. That's the usual bunch, you know? Like everybody's accounted for? Except not really. I call that the missing-black-woman formation. It kind of happens a lot."

Turns out Hunter's boss likes this original thinking. Hunter and Jen are to meet her in Chinatown the next day about something top-secret... but when she goes missing, they have to track her down, while evading whatever shadowy organization is behind her disappearance.

This is such a Scott Westerfeld novel. Like, Peeps was fantastic because it had an intimate-sounding knowledge of New York, and a ton of fascinating random facts, and a cool slick style, and just a little bit of romance, right? So Yesterday is just like that only even more so. And it made me squeal with delight half a dozen times.

48-hour Book Challenge

2007-06-08T13:48:00.000-07:00

Today at 5:00 I am starting the 48-Hour Book Challenge! Whoo! It will run until Sunday at 5:00.

The books in my bag right now:

Virginia Euwer Wolff, "True Believer"
Pam Munoz Ryan, "Esperanza Rising"
Walter Mosley, "47"
Scott Westerfeld, "So Yesterday"
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, "Haters"
Maureen Johnson, "13 Little Blue Envelopes"
Diane Lee Wilson, "Black Storm Comin'"

Leavitt, Martine. Keturah and Lord Death

2007-06-08T13:36:00.001-07:00

Lured into the forest by a hart, Keturah quickly becomes lost, alone, close to death; and when Lord Death comes for her, she makes a bargain with him. She tells him one half of a story-- a story of a girl who dreams of meeting her true love at last, but who meets Death first, and tries to persuade Death to let her live. Very well-- Lord Death will wait one day to find out the end of the story, and if Keturah can find her true love within the day and marry him, she will be spared.

And she also has to stop the village from being overrun with the plague.

Between this beginning and the ending, we have baking, midwifery, a fair, lemons, romance, charms, and more encounters with Lord Death-- so that, even with the intrusions of the supernatural, it's a wonderfully cosy and domestic sort of book.

A very tightly woven plot, too; too neat and too tidy and too happy for most books, but right from the beginning this reads like a fairy tale, so the neatness of the ending fits just right.

The ending is all kinds of yay.

Gratz, Alan. Samurai Shortstop

2007-06-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

It's the Meiji era in Japan. The feudal era is gone, and so are samurai; westernization and technological development are in full swing, not without a great deal of resistance from the traditionalists. Two of those traditionalists, former samurai, are Toyo's uncle, Koji, who commits ritual suicide at the beginning of the book, and his father, Sotaro.

Toyo starts high school at Ichiko, an elite all-boys boarding school. He joins the baseball club, but at the same time, he takes lessons in bushido--the way of the warrior--from his father, who despises newfangled western imports like baseball and fears the disappearance of the traditional way of life.

When you're writing about a culture that is not your own, there's research, and then there's getting the gut-level intuitions for what feels right and what doesn't. Gratz's research is largely impeccable, and I'm sure that for at least some of the particular points of this book, he knows a lot more than I do. But there are also a lot of points that just feel subtly off, or that place emphasis on points that are too obvious (seppuku! bushido!) And there were points where I couldn't say anything but "Yeah, right. Come on."

I'm not sure whether it would be right or wrong to consider this book separately from whatever cultural inaccuracies it might have; but I have to admit, if I do so, it's a really good book. It has lots of vivid detail and humorous episodes; it has realistically drawn characters and genuine emotional dilemnas. It's a superbly crafted novel in almost all respects. And I really want to see more YA literature set in Japan from periods besides WWII, and the Meiji era in particular deserves a lot more exploration.

It's a great book, if I can pretend it's not actually set in the real historical Japan.

Vaughn, Brian K. Runaways, vol. 2

2007-06-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

We rejoin half a dozen teenagers who have just found out that their parents are supervillains, who have super powers / nifty gadgets/ cool pets themselves (including a tame Velociraptor by the name of Old Lace) and who are trying to figure out what to do now that they know their parents are evil. This volume is a bit episodic, with the plot developing in small increments; it's a nice change of pace after the frenetic first volume.

Lightning-quick-paced and fun. Is it any wonder that Joss Whedon (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is writing it now? Runaways shifts back and forth between teenage soap opera and action scenes. The characters tend to be drawn in bold, simple lines (figuratively...), but everybody is interesting if not very complex.

I sure do want to know what happens next.

Reisz, Kristopher. Tripping to Somewhere

2007-06-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

Gilly and Sam have their share of problems. Gilly is gay, which is pretty much Not Fun when you live in Alabama and go to high school; also, she is in love with Sam, who doesn't feel the same way. Sam has some family dysfunction and takes too many Xanax when she can't deal with the world.

So when a half-blind homeless man with a crow comes into the convenience store where Sam's brother works, and tells them the Witches' Carnival is in Atlanta and they can catch it if they hurry... it's not long before they're on their way.

So this is a classic "what shall it profit a man if he gains the world and loses his soul?" story (as Reisz suggests by putting Marlowe's Faust in the book, not exactly subtly), but with plenty of sex, drugs, rock and roll, magic, fraud, mayhem, and violence.

It's a trip. In a good way.

It feels a little first-novelly to me, in that there are technical missteps I wouldn't expect from a more experienced novelist; the book's sparkly-crazy-doomed energy fizzles in the scenes where Gilly and Sam aren't present, and Gilly and Sam don't talk like self-described white-trash Alabama C-students. (I don't particularly like conveying dialect with phonetic spelling, but there's a lot you can do with sentence rhythm and word choice.)

But Reisz gets both the fantasy bits and the real bits right in a way that impresses me. What I mean is-- if a person reads fantasy for Cool Stuff and for a sweep of plot and morality plays, there's plenty of that, and if a person reads realistic fiction to recognize themselves in it, some of it is cringeworthy in how familiar it feels. And I can be hurtling along through the book going "Cool! Hell yeah!"-- and then the bottom drops out and the book punches me where I don't expect it.

And magic and doing the right thing can't get Gilly a get out of jail free card (uh... so to speak...), but they can insulate her somewhat from the real-life consequences of what she does. Which, somehow, is exactly as it should be within the context of the story.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it to everybody, but: if it sounds at all like your kind of thing, it probably is.

Tiptree, James. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

2007-06-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna have to concede defeat on this one. Tiptree is an excellent writer but also one who's very easy to overdose on, and I have been trying for a little too long to convince myself to finish the stories I haven't read. No doubt I'll come back to them at some point in the future.

This is a collection of the short fiction of James Tiptree Jr., who is also Alice Sheldon and Raccoona Sheldon. (If you are curious about her, and you probably will be if you read many of these stories, Julie Phillips's recent biography of her -- James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon-- has been very well received, and won a National Book Critics Circle award.

These stories circle around a couple of recurring themes. She writes about the relationships between men and women, and the general hopelessness thereof, but that's only a small part of her general obsession with the slavery of humans to instinct and biology.

No, they're not happy stories.

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin makes the point that science fiction is always about the present, and not the future. This is absolutely true, yet reading the science fiction of several decades ago still rings a little odd. Why are the men in Tiptree's stories so consistently awful? Is that the reality of gender relations at the time, or do they come from Tiptree's life experiences and her depression? I find myself positing some kind of catastrophe between today and the time period of the story to explain why women seem to have lost so much ground. This isn't a criticism; science fiction's not about predicting the future. It's just that it's a strange experience to read them.

"And I Awoke and Found me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" is one of those fearful stories about the things that humans find themselves compelled to do.

"The Girl Who Was Plugged In": When advertising is outlawed, only outlaws will have advertising. One of the most gorgeously written stories in the collection. About what it means for us to be embodied, or not embodied.

"Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" is a sad and joyous exploration of vulnerability and invulnerability, and whether we can or should live without fear.

"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" is rescued from polemicism by good writing and thoughtful detail and a surprising amount of attention to characterization.

"We Who Stole the Dream" is good slick space opera that skids towards a knife-stab you can see coming.

"Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" is another of those stories about the compulsions of biology, written in an insectoid stream-of-consciousness that is not easy to read but worth it.

Some of the stories I found too simplistic: "And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways" is too obvious with its religion=science symbolism and its heavy-handed moralism; "With Delicate Mad Hands" is a bit too wish-fulfilment for me.

Worth reading. But not all at once.

Some links to stories online: The Women Men Don't See, Love is the Plan the Plan is Death.