Dresden Files, Best of 2007
Ok, this is my last review post of the year, so I guess I'm obliged to list my top books reviewed this year. But first one more review squeaks across the line:
Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Summer Knight, and Death Masks (Jim Butcher): When I'm reading a couple books to review together and I read the first book a while before the others, I sometimes write down a couple quotes or something to remind me what the first book is like when I've finished the rest. In this case the quote I wrote down was I shook my head, bewildered. They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we've got nothing, nothing at all, on women.
After reading another four books, this quote still looks totally apt as a representation of the series -- you've got a protagonist who's basically Philip Marlowe but is also a wizard, and the fact that he says "women" instead of "dames" lets you know it's set in the present day.
I also happen to know that there's an RPG sourcebook for the Dresden Files being developed (based on the Spirit of the Century rules, yet) and I can't say this surprises me at all. The books totally read like RPG fiction -- er, but not in the bad sense. Just that, ok, the guy decides to write a werewolf book, and so his solution is to put in not one, not two, but five kinds of werewolves. Similar amounts of loving detail go into the three different kinds of vampires, the two different kinds of faeries (or six, or a zillion, depending on how finely you want to group them), the five (or six or eight or whatever) rules of magic, and so on. While there isn't anything necessarily wrong with this, it's a little incongruous to have the world so richly detailed and the characters so shallow. Everybody (including the protagonist) can be sketched out in a phrase or two, and their motivations rarely feel planned out enough to do anything except drive the next chunk of plot. The plots are pretty tangled and involve multiple factions working at cross-purposes, and are full of twists, but they're generally pretty simple twists -- if somebody mentions an X as being important, you can generally scan the earlier bit of the book and find the matching X and know it'll come up later.
But if you think of the major characters as RPG protagonists, the weaknesses of the book become strengths. There's a well-known phenomenon (also discussed in Understanding Comics) that a blank-slate protagonist lets the reader/player project their own personality and interpretation onto the protagonist, and results in them perceiving the protagonist as rich and detailed, even if the actual provided detail for the content is small. On the other hand, the more setting detail in an RPG, the better -- the players have precise control over how much they want to hear/interact with the detail, so the more the DM has defined, the better. Similarly, relatively simple twists in the plot are totally satisfying to the players if they're being ad-libbed: books produce higher standards for complexity only because the reader's got a more god's-eye view of the story. (Also, if the protagonists are RPG characters, you can hand-wave the parts of the books where the other characters act like morons to ensure that the protagonists are the only one dealing with the problem, even when it's end-of-the-world territory.)
Anyway, even though this is snarky I had a good time with the books. It feels like the basic formula could get repetitive after a while, but in fact the fourth book was the best of the first five, so that's a good sign for future reading.
Now then, the best-of for the year. It looks like I did 107 book reviews, so I should probably pick a top couple. Here are nine, not taken from non-books or re-reads:
In addition, I wrote some reviews that I thought were funny or insightful or charmingly meandering or something, even if the book didn't make my best-of list. My top five of those:
And that was 2007!
Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Summer Knight, and Death Masks (Jim Butcher): When I'm reading a couple books to review together and I read the first book a while before the others, I sometimes write down a couple quotes or something to remind me what the first book is like when I've finished the rest. In this case the quote I wrote down was I shook my head, bewildered. They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we've got nothing, nothing at all, on women.
After reading another four books, this quote still looks totally apt as a representation of the series -- you've got a protagonist who's basically Philip Marlowe but is also a wizard, and the fact that he says "women" instead of "dames" lets you know it's set in the present day.
I also happen to know that there's an RPG sourcebook for the Dresden Files being developed (based on the Spirit of the Century rules, yet) and I can't say this surprises me at all. The books totally read like RPG fiction -- er, but not in the bad sense. Just that, ok, the guy decides to write a werewolf book, and so his solution is to put in not one, not two, but five kinds of werewolves. Similar amounts of loving detail go into the three different kinds of vampires, the two different kinds of faeries (or six, or a zillion, depending on how finely you want to group them), the five (or six or eight or whatever) rules of magic, and so on. While there isn't anything necessarily wrong with this, it's a little incongruous to have the world so richly detailed and the characters so shallow. Everybody (including the protagonist) can be sketched out in a phrase or two, and their motivations rarely feel planned out enough to do anything except drive the next chunk of plot. The plots are pretty tangled and involve multiple factions working at cross-purposes, and are full of twists, but they're generally pretty simple twists -- if somebody mentions an X as being important, you can generally scan the earlier bit of the book and find the matching X and know it'll come up later.
But if you think of the major characters as RPG protagonists, the weaknesses of the book become strengths. There's a well-known phenomenon (also discussed in Understanding Comics) that a blank-slate protagonist lets the reader/player project their own personality and interpretation onto the protagonist, and results in them perceiving the protagonist as rich and detailed, even if the actual provided detail for the content is small. On the other hand, the more setting detail in an RPG, the better -- the players have precise control over how much they want to hear/interact with the detail, so the more the DM has defined, the better. Similarly, relatively simple twists in the plot are totally satisfying to the players if they're being ad-libbed: books produce higher standards for complexity only because the reader's got a more god's-eye view of the story. (Also, if the protagonists are RPG characters, you can hand-wave the parts of the books where the other characters act like morons to ensure that the protagonists are the only one dealing with the problem, even when it's end-of-the-world territory.)
Anyway, even though this is snarky I had a good time with the books. It feels like the basic formula could get repetitive after a while, but in fact the fourth book was the best of the first five, so that's a good sign for future reading.
Now then, the best-of for the year. It looks like I did 107 book reviews, so I should probably pick a top couple. Here are nine, not taken from non-books or re-reads:
- Blankets: This graphic novel is the best argument I have seen for the existence of graphic novels as a genre.
- The Company series (finishing with The Sons of Heaven): An sf series about time travel, immortal cyborgs, and all that good stuff. Long but worth it.
- The Porcelain Dove: A fairy-tale version of the French Revolution, with magic, but if this makes you think it is all spun-sugar and nice you are reading the wrong fairy tales.
- Prince of Foxes: This is a romance in the Prisoner-of-Zenda sense of the term, set in Renaissance Italy and with all the machinations, heroics, and art that implies.
- Scott Pilgrim series (and book 4): A charming set of graphic novels that blends a variety of genres together into a romance/comedy/slacker/videogame thing, drawn in a Western style but heavy manga influence.
- Second Person: A collection of theories, how-tos, and surveys of the field in some of my favorite areas - interactive fiction, RPGs, and videogames - by both critics and authors.
- Stumbling on Happiness: A discussion of the nature of happiness, what it means to be happy and how to get there (or why we don't get there). It has philosophy for the philosophers, psychology for the psychologists, and stories about people in psychological experiments for everyone else.
- The Time Traveler's Wife: An sf novel written by someone who's not an sf author, but working out way better than that makes you think. Similarly better than what you think of if I describe it as a predestined romance. Just read it, seriously.
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: Graph porn is its own reward.
In addition, I wrote some reviews that I thought were funny or insightful or charmingly meandering or something, even if the book didn't make my best-of list. My top five of those:
- Classic adventure week: Several famous adventure novels, compared.
- Imaro and Kull: Exile of Atlantis: Two Conan-type novels and how they compare to the main thing.
- Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe: How you can deduce everything about this book from its title.
- New Amsterdam: I gripe about vampire novels for a while.
- Replay: A time-loop story, and how it compares to Groundhog Day.
- The Sundering and Conventions of War: Some random bits about to write a space-battles novel.
And that was 2007!