Weekend Reading
Over Memorial Day weekend, while Cory went to visit friends and play games in Austin, I stayed home by myself and pretty much just read the whole time. It was great.
Here's what I read:
Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- This is the third and final book in Larsson's series about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist and it makes for a good conclusion to the series (even though he'd been planning to write more books in this series before he died). It is, I think, the weakest of the three books in some ways. The biggest drawback of this book for me was simply that there wasn't enough Lisbeth Salander. She is an awesome and fascinating character and she was out of commission for much of the book. On the other hand, that made room for some other amazing female characters to come to the forefront. Larsson's books are primarily about violence against women and the culture and legal system that allows such violence to continue and he does a great job of both making a strong argument regarding the ongoing victimization of women without limiting women either to the role of victim or to the role of fucked up avenger.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the first four books of their Martin Beck books: Roseanna, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, The Man on the Balcony, and The Laughing Policeman. These books, written and set in the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden, are police procedural mystery novels that are absolutely foundational for the genre as it currently stands. They focus not on the heroic genius who figures everything out effortlessly or does battle with a worthy foe, nor do they focus on the Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot or even Sherlock Holmes style detective to solve the crime; they highlight the tedium, emotional toll, and luck involved in catching criminals; and they develop a tone and atmosphere that is melancholy and thoughtful instead of one that is oriented toward action or mere puzzle-solving. They set the stage for later mystery writers like Henning Mankell (also Swedish) and Stieg Larsson (also Swedish! It seems this may be a regional thing) to do similar work. They are brilliant novels. Each of them is only 30 chapters and approximately 180-200 pages and so I raced through them, but I know already that I will want to re-read them. The pleasure in these books is not in the solving of the mystery (though that's nice, too, I guess) but in the atmosphere, in the characters, in the journey. And there are six more books in the series that I can look forward to reading.
Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air -- I bought this book only after having bought his second book, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, when several reviewers on Goodreads commented that the second book, though not a direct sequel to the first, would have made more sense had they already read The Court of the Air. They are steampunk fantasy adventure novels and The Kingdom of the Waves drew me in with its ocean-y cover art featuring a submarine and diver, a sting ray, a turtle, and a wrecked ship at the bottom of the ocean. Sounds good, right? I still want to read that one, but I'm not sold on The Court of the Air. I haven't quite finished it yet since I didn't read at all yesterday, but it's somehow both too long and not long enough. The first part drags as it takes way too much time to switch back and forth between the various characters and their narratives (the middle and end pick up speed as the action builds and Hunt switches back and forth much more quickly, however); at the same time, though, there is simply too much book for this book. He doesn't seem to have enough time and space to do the necessary world-building, move the plot forward, and develop the characters into people I care about. At this point, the book seems to be mostly plot. The world-building is sometimes great and sometimes lackluster. And I don't care at all about the characters. I want to like them, but if they all died, I wouldn't be terribly sad. I would just know I was probably supposed to be terribly sad.
Despite these flaws, there are definitely good things about this book and I will still read the next book in the series (not just because of the cover art). It's set in the same world and I'm looking forward to more development of that world; I'm also hoping that maybe Hunt will have learned some things between books.
Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises From Today's Best Writers and Teachers, edited by Sherry Ellis -- I started this book before the weekend and haven't finished reading through it yet, but it's not exactly the kind of book you just sit down and read. I have a bunch of this sort of book and I find them terribly useful for teaching (both writing and literature), so I'm currently examining this book for exercises I can use in my summer American literature course. There are definitely some interesting and potentially useful exercises here.
I also bought some other books that I hope to have a chance to read sometime this summer: four more Sjöwall and Wahlöö books (The Fire Engine That Disappeared, Murder at the Savoy, The Abominable Man, and The Locked Room), Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, and the Galactic Milieu Trilogy by Julian May (Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask, and Magnificat).
Here's what I read:
Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- This is the third and final book in Larsson's series about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist and it makes for a good conclusion to the series (even though he'd been planning to write more books in this series before he died). It is, I think, the weakest of the three books in some ways. The biggest drawback of this book for me was simply that there wasn't enough Lisbeth Salander. She is an awesome and fascinating character and she was out of commission for much of the book. On the other hand, that made room for some other amazing female characters to come to the forefront. Larsson's books are primarily about violence against women and the culture and legal system that allows such violence to continue and he does a great job of both making a strong argument regarding the ongoing victimization of women without limiting women either to the role of victim or to the role of fucked up avenger.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the first four books of their Martin Beck books: Roseanna, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, The Man on the Balcony, and The Laughing Policeman. These books, written and set in the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden, are police procedural mystery novels that are absolutely foundational for the genre as it currently stands. They focus not on the heroic genius who figures everything out effortlessly or does battle with a worthy foe, nor do they focus on the Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot or even Sherlock Holmes style detective to solve the crime; they highlight the tedium, emotional toll, and luck involved in catching criminals; and they develop a tone and atmosphere that is melancholy and thoughtful instead of one that is oriented toward action or mere puzzle-solving. They set the stage for later mystery writers like Henning Mankell (also Swedish) and Stieg Larsson (also Swedish! It seems this may be a regional thing) to do similar work. They are brilliant novels. Each of them is only 30 chapters and approximately 180-200 pages and so I raced through them, but I know already that I will want to re-read them. The pleasure in these books is not in the solving of the mystery (though that's nice, too, I guess) but in the atmosphere, in the characters, in the journey. And there are six more books in the series that I can look forward to reading.
Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air -- I bought this book only after having bought his second book, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, when several reviewers on Goodreads commented that the second book, though not a direct sequel to the first, would have made more sense had they already read The Court of the Air. They are steampunk fantasy adventure novels and The Kingdom of the Waves drew me in with its ocean-y cover art featuring a submarine and diver, a sting ray, a turtle, and a wrecked ship at the bottom of the ocean. Sounds good, right? I still want to read that one, but I'm not sold on The Court of the Air. I haven't quite finished it yet since I didn't read at all yesterday, but it's somehow both too long and not long enough. The first part drags as it takes way too much time to switch back and forth between the various characters and their narratives (the middle and end pick up speed as the action builds and Hunt switches back and forth much more quickly, however); at the same time, though, there is simply too much book for this book. He doesn't seem to have enough time and space to do the necessary world-building, move the plot forward, and develop the characters into people I care about. At this point, the book seems to be mostly plot. The world-building is sometimes great and sometimes lackluster. And I don't care at all about the characters. I want to like them, but if they all died, I wouldn't be terribly sad. I would just know I was probably supposed to be terribly sad.
Despite these flaws, there are definitely good things about this book and I will still read the next book in the series (not just because of the cover art). It's set in the same world and I'm looking forward to more development of that world; I'm also hoping that maybe Hunt will have learned some things between books.
Now Write!: Fiction Writing Exercises From Today's Best Writers and Teachers, edited by Sherry Ellis -- I started this book before the weekend and haven't finished reading through it yet, but it's not exactly the kind of book you just sit down and read. I have a bunch of this sort of book and I find them terribly useful for teaching (both writing and literature), so I'm currently examining this book for exercises I can use in my summer American literature course. There are definitely some interesting and potentially useful exercises here.
I also bought some other books that I hope to have a chance to read sometime this summer: four more Sjöwall and Wahlöö books (The Fire Engine That Disappeared, Murder at the Savoy, The Abominable Man, and The Locked Room), Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, and the Galactic Milieu Trilogy by Julian May (Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask, and Magnificat).