Reading roundup, including The Neon Court
21. Jonathan Kellerman, Killer -- so this totally did the job of hooking me instantly and getting me to finish it within 24 hours of having picked it up t the library, like these books normally do. It was interesting / rather different from most Delaware books in that spoilers, including the whodunit! Alex was personally involved from the start rather than playing plucky detective's assistant, and the way that affected his interaction with everyone, especially Milo, was interesting -- the fear and relief associated with Connie and her murder, the second-guessing when everything points to Cherie as the suspect, the emotional involvement that comes from Rambla being a patient (and the emotional involvement with Efren, too) -- and the way this isolates him from the police, including Milo, because he's not an objective bystander anymore. The way Milo questions whether Alex is being objective, too, although this did mean that I missed the friendship scenes between them -- not much Milo in this one in general, relatively speaking.
The mystery itself was kinda meh, though. Or, rather, the resolution was. I found the set-up of Connie, Cherie, and Connor's family life intriguing -- the way they all remembered/reported their childhood differently, the different ways in which their parents -- nature and nurture, probably -- had warped them. And, as an extension of that, the friendship between Ree and the Lonesome Moan guys dating back to that time was interesting, too. I was expecting something rooted in everyone's shared past, and would've found that interesting. Having the killers be random baliff guys and their sociopathic niece whose existence only surfaced late in the novel just didn't feel satisfying from a whodunit perspective. (But I did like the fact that Rambla's paternity had nothing to do with anything and we never did meet the father -- that, I thought, was a decent red herring.)
Part of my enjoyment of Kellerman's novels is meeting the new one-off characters. Here, in cameo appearances, I quite liked Ree's punky landlady, the scion of the olive magnates, and, in slightly less cameo presence, the two young lawyers, earnest Myron and brash Medea (I kind of hope those two crazy kids work out!). And Efren was a nice character, too -- I was sad when the book ended with him dead, though it was probably inevitable.
22. Kate Griffin, The Neon Court (Matthew Swift #3) -- I've liked each successive Matthew book more, though I'm not entirely sure how much of that is due to the ratio of cranberries and bran shifting in my preferred direction vs just my expectations being better aligned with what I'm likely to encounter now that I've got a couple of these under my belt. I do think there's a lot of the former going on, though. Spoilers from here!
For one thing, Penny is an awesome addition, and any scene Penny was in was a scene I automatically enjoyed a lot more. Not just because Penny herself is a cool character, but also because it gave Matthew somebody to consistently interact with, and somebody to connect with on a human level. The other character I really liked in this was Ms Dees. Who is dead now, of course. Along with Oda, another favorite of mine. (So many dead women... I mean, it's because nearly every recurring supporting character, and many of the non-recurrent ones, is female, and large numbers of the male supporting cast are dead, too, but, just... so many dead women, Dana Mikeda and Vera and Dees and Oda and JG...) And cameos by the indomitable Dr Seah and Dudley Sinclair continue to be very welcome, and I enjoyed the haunting of Matthew by Bakker very much, including his farewell. Lots of great character interaction all around!
The other thing that worked really well for me here -- for a given value of "well" -- was the creepiness. I didn't think much of Hunger as a villain -- what was interesting to me was Bakker's motivation and Matthew's interaction with him, not the shadow -- and the Death of Cities was not bad as far as anthropomorphic personifications of doom go, and accounted for some really cool writing, but I didn't find him/it emotionally affecting. Blackout, though, was genuinely scary. I don't know if fear of eye trauma is a universal thing or if I have it especially -- Sandman's Corinthian and self-blinding in "24 Hours" also creeped me out -- but the eyes-turned-into-pudding thing was shudder-inducing (and I liked the way the angels reacted to the possibility of being left 'in crippled flesh'), and the footsteps at the end of the alley were creepy, and this was creepiest of all: the bleeding eyes of the mannequins. And I liked this quote explaining Blackout's power: "Blackout's magic is the magic of shadows and fear, of reason saying one thing and instinct saying the other" (and the whole passage that's taken from). These books veer way closer to horror than I tend to read intentionally, but this one did it really well, at least.
Oh, and I think the plot of this one was better, as in, it actually kept me engaged and wanting to read on, kind of a first for this series -- admittedly, probably because I was a lot more invested in Oda's fate than in a) Matthew's and b) in the fate of London in general. I figured out that JG was Oda's little sister a handful of pages before Matthew did, and I found the whole conspiracy thing a bit too much to swallow (though I liked Matthew's characterization of it: "A really good plan that exploited one of the greatest weaknesses of the magical community -- our willingness to believe pretty much anything on the basis that almost anything can be possible"), but I like Anton Chaigneau, so I was happy he had returned -- for the last time, I suppose. Though it would be nice to have some happyish endings every once in a while (I guess one in three books is not so bad?), I did rather like the fact that Matthew succeeds in saving JG from the magical entities after her... only to have her die by a sniper's bullet anyway.
Of course, the best thing about the series is the magic. Urban sorcery continues to be pretty cool. My favorite bits of magic were Matthew's "stop walking" spell that immobilizes Oda-Blackout at one point, and the recorded delivery spell, and Matthew's fire-extinguisher breath. Other things, big magic things, just didn't really work for me, like whatever it is Matthew does to escape with JG from the massed forces of the Neon Court and the Tribe, or the whole falling through the cracks thing.
Of mystical denizens, the plastic-bag Roc, the librarian (seen only through Penny's eyes) and the denizens of the Night Bus were very cool additions (as was the magic to summon the Night Bus in the first place). The Aldermen continue not to be very interesting to me, collectively or mystically -- the whole dragon-transformation thing just looks ridiculous in my head. I actually didn't think much of the Neon Court -- it was a pretty standard take on urban faeries, with bonus Oriental flavor for some reason, but there were a couple of details I enjoyed -- the description of the effect of Lady Neon's unveiled face, and her ability to scry through glamour magazines. Oh, and the dragon jet! And the Tribe... oh dear.
I found the idea of the Tribe as perpetual, deliberate outcasts -- whose nature keeps changing as the nature of what is accepted keeps changing -- quite interesting, but the thing with carving away their flesh just made me cringe, and I suspect having them talk in accented chatspeak was a way to constantly make the reader cringe, a way to reproduce, on page, the jarring nature of having to look at humans with so much of humanity stripped visually, deliberately away. As such, it is very clever! And quite effective. And it made my soul hurt to read any scene they were in, which may be a little bit counterproductive.
The anthropomorophic personifications (Blackout excluded) also worked less well for me in this one -- I had been looking forward to Fat Rat, but was left unenthused by the result. I was looking forward to seeing the Beggar King again, but his return significantly underwhelmed me.
And Matthew/angels split personality thing continues to amuse me, though I feel like there was less of it in this book, the two of them perhaps having settled down more. Oh, and on a random note, Matthew/food continues to be highly entertaining, especially trying to tell a mushroom from cheese while temporarily blinded. But he surprised me by refusing to try Korean food. What's up with that?
There are still wall-of-text paragraphs that go on for a page, which I tend to skim, and there's still the italicized-sentence-fragment writing that feels totally pretentious to me. But there's also great dialogue and really cool turns of phrase, and I guess I'm enjoying the writing a lot more on balance than in the first book.
dialogue with Korean lady:
"Are you death?"
"Um. No."
"Are you sure?"
"Um. Yes?"
"Are you an angel?"
"In a way."
"Are you from the council about the rubbish?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Matthew and Ms Dees:
"When you became an Alderman, Dees, were you hired for your tact and managerial sensitivity, or for your capacity to vaporise your enemies at a thought?"
"Hopefully you need never find out, Mr Mayor."
More Matthew and Dees:
Matthew: "Oh--and I have beautiful eyes."
D: "I can't say I ever really looked."
M: "Thank you for your lack of interest."
D: "Mr Swift, if it's any comfort to you, I can promise that were I not a happily married woman with a husband I love well, you would definitely be in my top two genders of choice."
"You know how to flatter a guy."
"It seemed important for you to hear it."
And yet more Dees:
M: "And, this is where you say, 'Goodness, Mr Mayor, there may be more...'"
D: "Oh, yes, of course. Yes, sorry, Mr Mayor, you were right, and the collective wisdom was, just this once, wrong, and I'm very sorry that reason has failed, and you have prevailed and I will try to doubt you with more politeness and, I trust, a wiser soul from here on in." A pause. "That is what you wanted, isn't it?"
Sinclaire and Matthew:
"Dear boy, why didn't you come to see me sooner?"
"I was amassing information," I replied primly. "And... you know... getting the crap beaten out of me."
Bakker:
"Good God but it is tedious having to share your consciousness, Matthew. So much 'could be' and 'might be' and 'what if' and 'if I could' and 'but I should' and all these empty empty sounds that make you believe yourself to be doing the right thing weven as sheer necessity and the demands of the time force you to do what is in fact the needful thing. The only thing that there is to be done. I sometimes think that the only difference, to you, between what you classed as my wickedness and your goodness was that you wasted time lamenting those you'd forced to die of necessity, while I accepted that necessity has no time for grief and got on with it.
And a non-dialogue bit, too:
"JG screamed, the high-pitched scream of someone who's watched too much TV and knows that's what you do under these circumstances."
So, onward to the last Matthew book, which I also have in my possession.
23. Shel Silverstein, Every Thing On It -- this is the last poem collection, publishes posthumously in 2011, which I did not realize was more than a decade after his death. I went and read the Amazon reviews after I finished -- it's got a 5-star rating overall, but I read the less favorable ones on purpose, and I tend to agree -- even his mediocre poems are better than most stuff out there, but you can pretty much tell this is a posthumous collection, because there are very few real gems here, and the average quality is just lower -- there's a reason, in short, why many of these had probably been excluded from previous collections. Poems I liked were "The Genie in the Flask", "Lizard", "The Lovebutcants", "Fourth Place", "Growing Down", "Call the Please", "Henry Hall", "Food?", and the one below:
Happy Endings
There are no happy endings.
Engings are the saddest part.
So just give me a happy middle
And a very happy start.
which is not a lot of poems to like out of a 200 page book... There were others that were amusing and others that just didn't do anything for me at all -- which of course is the case with all Silvestein books, but the propoertions were way off on this one...
*
I am laboring through an ever-increasing list of books I'm in the middle of. Currently these are, in order of me having started them:
- Volha #3 (which I think I'll probably go back to after Kosmopsiholuhi withdrawal)
- The Fox
- Thursday Next #1
- one of the Hollows books, I forget which one
- Codex Born (Libriomancers #2)
- Raising Steam
- The Carpet People
and also Tanya Huff's The Silvered, but I'm not really sure I'll end up finishing that one.
The mystery itself was kinda meh, though. Or, rather, the resolution was. I found the set-up of Connie, Cherie, and Connor's family life intriguing -- the way they all remembered/reported their childhood differently, the different ways in which their parents -- nature and nurture, probably -- had warped them. And, as an extension of that, the friendship between Ree and the Lonesome Moan guys dating back to that time was interesting, too. I was expecting something rooted in everyone's shared past, and would've found that interesting. Having the killers be random baliff guys and their sociopathic niece whose existence only surfaced late in the novel just didn't feel satisfying from a whodunit perspective. (But I did like the fact that Rambla's paternity had nothing to do with anything and we never did meet the father -- that, I thought, was a decent red herring.)
Part of my enjoyment of Kellerman's novels is meeting the new one-off characters. Here, in cameo appearances, I quite liked Ree's punky landlady, the scion of the olive magnates, and, in slightly less cameo presence, the two young lawyers, earnest Myron and brash Medea (I kind of hope those two crazy kids work out!). And Efren was a nice character, too -- I was sad when the book ended with him dead, though it was probably inevitable.
22. Kate Griffin, The Neon Court (Matthew Swift #3) -- I've liked each successive Matthew book more, though I'm not entirely sure how much of that is due to the ratio of cranberries and bran shifting in my preferred direction vs just my expectations being better aligned with what I'm likely to encounter now that I've got a couple of these under my belt. I do think there's a lot of the former going on, though. Spoilers from here!
For one thing, Penny is an awesome addition, and any scene Penny was in was a scene I automatically enjoyed a lot more. Not just because Penny herself is a cool character, but also because it gave Matthew somebody to consistently interact with, and somebody to connect with on a human level. The other character I really liked in this was Ms Dees. Who is dead now, of course. Along with Oda, another favorite of mine. (So many dead women... I mean, it's because nearly every recurring supporting character, and many of the non-recurrent ones, is female, and large numbers of the male supporting cast are dead, too, but, just... so many dead women, Dana Mikeda and Vera and Dees and Oda and JG...) And cameos by the indomitable Dr Seah and Dudley Sinclair continue to be very welcome, and I enjoyed the haunting of Matthew by Bakker very much, including his farewell. Lots of great character interaction all around!
The other thing that worked really well for me here -- for a given value of "well" -- was the creepiness. I didn't think much of Hunger as a villain -- what was interesting to me was Bakker's motivation and Matthew's interaction with him, not the shadow -- and the Death of Cities was not bad as far as anthropomorphic personifications of doom go, and accounted for some really cool writing, but I didn't find him/it emotionally affecting. Blackout, though, was genuinely scary. I don't know if fear of eye trauma is a universal thing or if I have it especially -- Sandman's Corinthian and self-blinding in "24 Hours" also creeped me out -- but the eyes-turned-into-pudding thing was shudder-inducing (and I liked the way the angels reacted to the possibility of being left 'in crippled flesh'), and the footsteps at the end of the alley were creepy, and this was creepiest of all: the bleeding eyes of the mannequins. And I liked this quote explaining Blackout's power: "Blackout's magic is the magic of shadows and fear, of reason saying one thing and instinct saying the other" (and the whole passage that's taken from). These books veer way closer to horror than I tend to read intentionally, but this one did it really well, at least.
Oh, and I think the plot of this one was better, as in, it actually kept me engaged and wanting to read on, kind of a first for this series -- admittedly, probably because I was a lot more invested in Oda's fate than in a) Matthew's and b) in the fate of London in general. I figured out that JG was Oda's little sister a handful of pages before Matthew did, and I found the whole conspiracy thing a bit too much to swallow (though I liked Matthew's characterization of it: "A really good plan that exploited one of the greatest weaknesses of the magical community -- our willingness to believe pretty much anything on the basis that almost anything can be possible"), but I like Anton Chaigneau, so I was happy he had returned -- for the last time, I suppose. Though it would be nice to have some happyish endings every once in a while (I guess one in three books is not so bad?), I did rather like the fact that Matthew succeeds in saving JG from the magical entities after her... only to have her die by a sniper's bullet anyway.
Of course, the best thing about the series is the magic. Urban sorcery continues to be pretty cool. My favorite bits of magic were Matthew's "stop walking" spell that immobilizes Oda-Blackout at one point, and the recorded delivery spell, and Matthew's fire-extinguisher breath. Other things, big magic things, just didn't really work for me, like whatever it is Matthew does to escape with JG from the massed forces of the Neon Court and the Tribe, or the whole falling through the cracks thing.
Of mystical denizens, the plastic-bag Roc, the librarian (seen only through Penny's eyes) and the denizens of the Night Bus were very cool additions (as was the magic to summon the Night Bus in the first place). The Aldermen continue not to be very interesting to me, collectively or mystically -- the whole dragon-transformation thing just looks ridiculous in my head. I actually didn't think much of the Neon Court -- it was a pretty standard take on urban faeries, with bonus Oriental flavor for some reason, but there were a couple of details I enjoyed -- the description of the effect of Lady Neon's unveiled face, and her ability to scry through glamour magazines. Oh, and the dragon jet! And the Tribe... oh dear.
I found the idea of the Tribe as perpetual, deliberate outcasts -- whose nature keeps changing as the nature of what is accepted keeps changing -- quite interesting, but the thing with carving away their flesh just made me cringe, and I suspect having them talk in accented chatspeak was a way to constantly make the reader cringe, a way to reproduce, on page, the jarring nature of having to look at humans with so much of humanity stripped visually, deliberately away. As such, it is very clever! And quite effective. And it made my soul hurt to read any scene they were in, which may be a little bit counterproductive.
The anthropomorophic personifications (Blackout excluded) also worked less well for me in this one -- I had been looking forward to Fat Rat, but was left unenthused by the result. I was looking forward to seeing the Beggar King again, but his return significantly underwhelmed me.
And Matthew/angels split personality thing continues to amuse me, though I feel like there was less of it in this book, the two of them perhaps having settled down more. Oh, and on a random note, Matthew/food continues to be highly entertaining, especially trying to tell a mushroom from cheese while temporarily blinded. But he surprised me by refusing to try Korean food. What's up with that?
There are still wall-of-text paragraphs that go on for a page, which I tend to skim, and there's still the italicized-sentence-fragment writing that feels totally pretentious to me. But there's also great dialogue and really cool turns of phrase, and I guess I'm enjoying the writing a lot more on balance than in the first book.
dialogue with Korean lady:
"Are you death?"
"Um. No."
"Are you sure?"
"Um. Yes?"
"Are you an angel?"
"In a way."
"Are you from the council about the rubbish?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Matthew and Ms Dees:
"When you became an Alderman, Dees, were you hired for your tact and managerial sensitivity, or for your capacity to vaporise your enemies at a thought?"
"Hopefully you need never find out, Mr Mayor."
More Matthew and Dees:
Matthew: "Oh--and I have beautiful eyes."
D: "I can't say I ever really looked."
M: "Thank you for your lack of interest."
D: "Mr Swift, if it's any comfort to you, I can promise that were I not a happily married woman with a husband I love well, you would definitely be in my top two genders of choice."
"You know how to flatter a guy."
"It seemed important for you to hear it."
And yet more Dees:
M: "And, this is where you say, 'Goodness, Mr Mayor, there may be more...'"
D: "Oh, yes, of course. Yes, sorry, Mr Mayor, you were right, and the collective wisdom was, just this once, wrong, and I'm very sorry that reason has failed, and you have prevailed and I will try to doubt you with more politeness and, I trust, a wiser soul from here on in." A pause. "That is what you wanted, isn't it?"
Sinclaire and Matthew:
"Dear boy, why didn't you come to see me sooner?"
"I was amassing information," I replied primly. "And... you know... getting the crap beaten out of me."
Bakker:
"Good God but it is tedious having to share your consciousness, Matthew. So much 'could be' and 'might be' and 'what if' and 'if I could' and 'but I should' and all these empty empty sounds that make you believe yourself to be doing the right thing weven as sheer necessity and the demands of the time force you to do what is in fact the needful thing. The only thing that there is to be done. I sometimes think that the only difference, to you, between what you classed as my wickedness and your goodness was that you wasted time lamenting those you'd forced to die of necessity, while I accepted that necessity has no time for grief and got on with it.
And a non-dialogue bit, too:
"JG screamed, the high-pitched scream of someone who's watched too much TV and knows that's what you do under these circumstances."
So, onward to the last Matthew book, which I also have in my possession.
23. Shel Silverstein, Every Thing On It -- this is the last poem collection, publishes posthumously in 2011, which I did not realize was more than a decade after his death. I went and read the Amazon reviews after I finished -- it's got a 5-star rating overall, but I read the less favorable ones on purpose, and I tend to agree -- even his mediocre poems are better than most stuff out there, but you can pretty much tell this is a posthumous collection, because there are very few real gems here, and the average quality is just lower -- there's a reason, in short, why many of these had probably been excluded from previous collections. Poems I liked were "The Genie in the Flask", "Lizard", "The Lovebutcants", "Fourth Place", "Growing Down", "Call the Please", "Henry Hall", "Food?", and the one below:
Happy Endings
There are no happy endings.
Engings are the saddest part.
So just give me a happy middle
And a very happy start.
which is not a lot of poems to like out of a 200 page book... There were others that were amusing and others that just didn't do anything for me at all -- which of course is the case with all Silvestein books, but the propoertions were way off on this one...
*
I am laboring through an ever-increasing list of books I'm in the middle of. Currently these are, in order of me having started them:
- Volha #3 (which I think I'll probably go back to after Kosmopsiholuhi withdrawal)
- The Fox
- Thursday Next #1
- one of the Hollows books, I forget which one
- Codex Born (Libriomancers #2)
- Raising Steam
- The Carpet People
and also Tanya Huff's The Silvered, but I'm not really sure I'll end up finishing that one.