Books I read during the vacations
The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
A series of short stories about a Witcher - a kind of magic user specialised in hunting down magical critters that harm humans - named Geralt, in a dark fantasy medieval world.
This is pulp at its best, the storytelling is very efficient, fun to read and often clever, the characters are sketchy but still intriguing enough for their roles; and there's an element reworking and deconstruction of fairy tale in most of the stories which was excellent. The sources of inspirations are slightly more Eastern European than your average fantasy novel, which was also well appreciated. This is very much pulp though, don't expect the novel of the century, but it was something I had much fun reading.
I also found interesting that, despite the male gaze and the bad ass male guy that kicks ass that wrapped the storytelling, every single story had at least one interesting female character, even when they were the monster or the love interest (or both), leaving me a bit puzzled about whether or not the treatment of gender dynamics was bad or not.
Gifts by Ursula Leguin
I read the sequel of this, Voices, before I did this one. This is an interesting story about a farming society that isolated from the rest of the world, where each of the powerful clans have one type of power that they use to rivalise and feud against one each others; and the life of one boy, Orrec, who should inherit the gift of Undoing as he comes to age.
I loved this one more than Voices, I thought the pacing and the themes were better handled, although the characters were perhaps less likeable. What I found most fascinating was the very realistic treatment of an agrarian society where people have some kind of powers, and the rather dreary analysis of how they would use them. At the same time the handling of the psychological weight that such a power has on people, as Orrec tries to come to grip with his own, were very well done and horrific. Also loved the stories within stories interwoven in the text (as I did in Voices) The writing style is as usual with Leguin, gorgeous and flowing.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Josef Kavalier escapes Prague in 1938, his family staying behind, for New York where he meets his cousin Sam Klay. Together they start writing comic books, inventing the superhero character of the Escapist who battles Nazi super villains, while the war in Europe expands and while Kavalier keeps trying without success to help his family come join him.
This was not the book I expected to read. I thought it was to be a book with a bit of SFF and pulp (there's "Amazing Adventure" in the title, you know); either of which it had very little of. It was also an excellent book, entrancing and with a lot of resonance. The exploration of Jewish lives and anxieties at this time, the way it is interwoven (as it was in reality) with the birth of superhero comic books; and the meta analysis that is played with those mirroring stories was nothing short of brilliant. The characters are also extremely well depicted and complex. The writing is a little bit heavy and dense for my taste, more omniscient PoV than I'm used to, with a flair for the quirky and the quaint which at sometime was a little bit annoying, but at other times succeeded at being darkly humorous or poignant. It was also a very "text, no subtext" book, which liked to spell out for the reader the themes and the various way they paralleled each others. The depiction of the society of that time, of various subcultures, was also extremely well done, quite researched, and with a lot of interesting cameo from people like Salvator Dali and Orson Wells. Overall an excellent read I would recommend to most.