Let be be the finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
I've been trying to actually update this thing every once in a while, and it's been many a moon since I talked about some books, so let's do that. A couple of these I read a while ago so hopefully me memory isn't too fuzzy. No spoilers ahead!
Day Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko
I talked about the first book in the Watch series - which I continue to describe to others as a kind of "hard-boiled Harry Potter" story - a while back, and my complaints (low on characterization, resorts to gender cliches, etc.) are the same if somewhat diminished with the second book. I want to get through the series because I'm very curious about what might happen in the big picture and was considering this one an unfortunate stepping stone: I knew going in that it tells a story at least partly from the side of the Dark ones and didn't know how interested I could get.
As it turned out, Alisa was a fairly captivating anti-heroine, and of course the more intimate glimpse into how the Dark ones rationalize their decisions and the types of people that are easy targets for their recruitment felt pretty essential to the overall story. Unfortunately the big forbidden romance that unfolds in the first story (as it was with Night Watch there are three interconnected stories so that the books could almost be considered composite novels) is told pretty weakly; in the brief time of its development the relationship is told through the rote of exaggerated lust, through pages that could have been spent on something more convincing, but it's clear from how Lukyanenko paraphrases other romantic entanglements in the series that he thinks making your readers care about the love story is for sissies or some shit, regardless of how much those emotions impact significantly on the bigger story, which actually seems to happen a lot. We're supposed to follow the ball without caring about who kicked it. It frustrates me to admit that this actually works well enough. It takes one hell of a plot for me to keep turning the pages when I only give half a damn about any of your characters, and this series manages to make me do that, even with the stories at the same time being sometimes more low-key and philosophical.
Little by little, though, I think I am warming up to a lot of the recurring characters. If there's one thing I can commit to saying I love about Anton it's how he's always going off on thoughtful tangents about just dryly accepting the gambit roulette his senior mages are capable of; and it is interesting to have a main hero who lies low in the role of (sometimes deceivingly) passive rather than being all that fatefully special or particularly good at what he does (at least not yet).
'Salem's Lot - Stephen King
Out of the, uh, four King books I've read by now, I was probably the least excited about this one when I picked it up, since I don't really go to him for horror and the story is very straight-up horror. Something about the structure of a horror story has just always seemed the wrong kind of bleak to me; I'll take a bloody ending to a fantasy story or a war story but when it comes to what I associate with horror it tends to fall into anti-climax and a vaguely more antipathetic treatment of characters, and the demises rarely hit the right rhythms or sense of meaning, I guess. But I guess my anti-horror stance has come firmly into question. It's just a stupid vampire book, right? - But the tragedy reads in the most human terms. It's such a deeply mournful novel, and it treats the vampire premise with so many unsettling observations that it might have been the first time I could actually see what is terrifying about the most traditional variety of the creature; we know the whole drill, but it never feels tedious that the characters are unprepared for whatever's haunting the old house.
Mystic River - Dennis Lehane
I remember the movie got a number of awards back when it came out, and I'm of the sort of uncool opinion of actually liking Clint Eastwood, but I'm very glad I hadn't seen the movie when I picked this up. Continuing with my odd trend of being grimly fascinated by childhood trauma stories, I couldn't resist the rather unhappy premise of a group of three boys being permanently affected by an incident that left their friendship not entirely estranged but very frayed: Dave was lured into a car by two men claiming to be police officers, became a victim of this abduction and all the horrors we can imagine that entailed, but did manage to escape to go back to his troubled home and live with the trauma. Jimmy and Sean, who hadn't been fooled into approaching the kidnappers, remain almost as haunted by the fact that they didn't get in that car as Dave struggles to escape from that aspect of his past long into adulthood. Many years later, when all three are still living in the same town, Jimmy's daughter falls victim to a murder; Sean, now a detective, apparently considers himself just emotionally separated enough to be put on the investigation. Oh, and Dave just might have been connected somehow to the events of the murder.
The lingering connections and emotions between these characters is crucial to much of the story, even if you have to comb through not just the present and past actions but the spaces in-between them to find where the tangles are. I felt that Jimmy's criminal inclinations, for instance, could well have been grown out of guilt so unresolvable that he grew to discard the notion of guilt entirely; when his daughter is torn out from his motivation to stay morally centered, he seems to mourn more for a part of himself than for her. So low is his grieving state that he contemplates the fact that if he'd gotten in that car when he was a kid, surely none of this could have happened.
Tana French, whom a lot of you know is one of my favorite authors, talked about Lehane in an interview I listened to recently, expressing that when she first read this book it had a big impact on her viewpoint of just how much a mystery novel can really be about; "...We're allowed to do that?" she recalled thinking. I wasn't sure at first whether I thought the characters were all that strongly imagined, but a couple of them - Dave's wife Celeste in particular - pleasantly surprised me. Actually the wives of Dave and Jimmy and the way that their aims were aligned maybe a little too loyally with their husbands' bothered me a lot, but there's kind of a double twist on how far this goes by the end, and I think Lehane was gracefully conscious of making them both as well-rounded as any of the three main guys; and if I definitely felt like my gritting my teeth at one of them by the end, I think I was more or less supposed to feel that way.
I really want this to be an all-around shining review - I was hooked much of the way through and I would have gladly read a longer book about the characters - but the ending didn't quite stand up to the rest in terms of the craft rather than the story. For one thing (I was glad to see someone else on goodreads say this because I wasn't sure if it was just in my mind) the prose kind of loses its steam by the end. Lehane is a little more on the conversational than descriptive side but he knows how to pack a punch to his words or build seemingly effortless atmosphere, closer to the beginning of the book; at the end, for some reason it's not as much, and some moments that should have had some of the highest intensity just fizzled out a bit for me? And then there's the small but niggling problem I had with the resolution of the crime plot, because it just frustrated me so much that a situation that proves to be slightly too incidental didn't have to be because the more believable set-up for it was sitting right there and it wasn't used, almost as if in some attempt at unpredictability that totally wasn't needed. Like I'm not even in this kind of story for a mystery plot that works like a well-oiled magic trick but that aspect is still bothering me, LOL. But overall definitely worth the read, and I will probably check out more by the author.
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Day Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko
I talked about the first book in the Watch series - which I continue to describe to others as a kind of "hard-boiled Harry Potter" story - a while back, and my complaints (low on characterization, resorts to gender cliches, etc.) are the same if somewhat diminished with the second book. I want to get through the series because I'm very curious about what might happen in the big picture and was considering this one an unfortunate stepping stone: I knew going in that it tells a story at least partly from the side of the Dark ones and didn't know how interested I could get.
As it turned out, Alisa was a fairly captivating anti-heroine, and of course the more intimate glimpse into how the Dark ones rationalize their decisions and the types of people that are easy targets for their recruitment felt pretty essential to the overall story. Unfortunately the big forbidden romance that unfolds in the first story (as it was with Night Watch there are three interconnected stories so that the books could almost be considered composite novels) is told pretty weakly; in the brief time of its development the relationship is told through the rote of exaggerated lust, through pages that could have been spent on something more convincing, but it's clear from how Lukyanenko paraphrases other romantic entanglements in the series that he thinks making your readers care about the love story is for sissies or some shit, regardless of how much those emotions impact significantly on the bigger story, which actually seems to happen a lot. We're supposed to follow the ball without caring about who kicked it. It frustrates me to admit that this actually works well enough. It takes one hell of a plot for me to keep turning the pages when I only give half a damn about any of your characters, and this series manages to make me do that, even with the stories at the same time being sometimes more low-key and philosophical.
Little by little, though, I think I am warming up to a lot of the recurring characters. If there's one thing I can commit to saying I love about Anton it's how he's always going off on thoughtful tangents about just dryly accepting the gambit roulette his senior mages are capable of; and it is interesting to have a main hero who lies low in the role of (sometimes deceivingly) passive rather than being all that fatefully special or particularly good at what he does (at least not yet).
'Salem's Lot - Stephen King
Out of the, uh, four King books I've read by now, I was probably the least excited about this one when I picked it up, since I don't really go to him for horror and the story is very straight-up horror. Something about the structure of a horror story has just always seemed the wrong kind of bleak to me; I'll take a bloody ending to a fantasy story or a war story but when it comes to what I associate with horror it tends to fall into anti-climax and a vaguely more antipathetic treatment of characters, and the demises rarely hit the right rhythms or sense of meaning, I guess. But I guess my anti-horror stance has come firmly into question. It's just a stupid vampire book, right? - But the tragedy reads in the most human terms. It's such a deeply mournful novel, and it treats the vampire premise with so many unsettling observations that it might have been the first time I could actually see what is terrifying about the most traditional variety of the creature; we know the whole drill, but it never feels tedious that the characters are unprepared for whatever's haunting the old house.
Mystic River - Dennis Lehane
I remember the movie got a number of awards back when it came out, and I'm of the sort of uncool opinion of actually liking Clint Eastwood, but I'm very glad I hadn't seen the movie when I picked this up. Continuing with my odd trend of being grimly fascinated by childhood trauma stories, I couldn't resist the rather unhappy premise of a group of three boys being permanently affected by an incident that left their friendship not entirely estranged but very frayed: Dave was lured into a car by two men claiming to be police officers, became a victim of this abduction and all the horrors we can imagine that entailed, but did manage to escape to go back to his troubled home and live with the trauma. Jimmy and Sean, who hadn't been fooled into approaching the kidnappers, remain almost as haunted by the fact that they didn't get in that car as Dave struggles to escape from that aspect of his past long into adulthood. Many years later, when all three are still living in the same town, Jimmy's daughter falls victim to a murder; Sean, now a detective, apparently considers himself just emotionally separated enough to be put on the investigation. Oh, and Dave just might have been connected somehow to the events of the murder.
The lingering connections and emotions between these characters is crucial to much of the story, even if you have to comb through not just the present and past actions but the spaces in-between them to find where the tangles are. I felt that Jimmy's criminal inclinations, for instance, could well have been grown out of guilt so unresolvable that he grew to discard the notion of guilt entirely; when his daughter is torn out from his motivation to stay morally centered, he seems to mourn more for a part of himself than for her. So low is his grieving state that he contemplates the fact that if he'd gotten in that car when he was a kid, surely none of this could have happened.
Tana French, whom a lot of you know is one of my favorite authors, talked about Lehane in an interview I listened to recently, expressing that when she first read this book it had a big impact on her viewpoint of just how much a mystery novel can really be about; "...We're allowed to do that?" she recalled thinking. I wasn't sure at first whether I thought the characters were all that strongly imagined, but a couple of them - Dave's wife Celeste in particular - pleasantly surprised me. Actually the wives of Dave and Jimmy and the way that their aims were aligned maybe a little too loyally with their husbands' bothered me a lot, but there's kind of a double twist on how far this goes by the end, and I think Lehane was gracefully conscious of making them both as well-rounded as any of the three main guys; and if I definitely felt like my gritting my teeth at one of them by the end, I think I was more or less supposed to feel that way.
I really want this to be an all-around shining review - I was hooked much of the way through and I would have gladly read a longer book about the characters - but the ending didn't quite stand up to the rest in terms of the craft rather than the story. For one thing (I was glad to see someone else on goodreads say this because I wasn't sure if it was just in my mind) the prose kind of loses its steam by the end. Lehane is a little more on the conversational than descriptive side but he knows how to pack a punch to his words or build seemingly effortless atmosphere, closer to the beginning of the book; at the end, for some reason it's not as much, and some moments that should have had some of the highest intensity just fizzled out a bit for me? And then there's the small but niggling problem I had with the resolution of the crime plot, because it just frustrated me so much that a situation that proves to be slightly too incidental didn't have to be because the more believable set-up for it was sitting right there and it wasn't used, almost as if in some attempt at unpredictability that totally wasn't needed. Like I'm not even in this kind of story for a mystery plot that works like a well-oiled magic trick but that aspect is still bothering me, LOL. But overall definitely worth the read, and I will probably check out more by the author.
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