Book review, and general blah
First a review:
A while ago, my friend Fred tweeted about a small press having a sale: $1 a book. I picked up two collections of short stories, and finally got around to reading one of them.
I'm not really too sure what to make of the stories in Magic for Beginners. If I had to describe a style, they are mostly contemporary fiction, with a tinge of fantasy or horror. Link basically takes a pretty normal character or event, then provides a small twist to the idea by throwing in a fantasy element.
That is, except for the one that features no sort of fantasy or horror aspects at all, or the ones that are just completely fantastical with no base.
Nothing much really happens in any of the stories, which is suppose is my biggest problem with them. They may have a grounded starting point, but they don't really end so much as just stop. They often times seem to be building towards something, but then just meander off in a random direction rather than get there. Like if the big crescendo at the end of the Beatles' "Day in the Life" didn't build up to that single cord, but instead each part just sort of petered out, and the song ended with some guy playing a country song on a kazoo.
I'm not saying that every short story has to follow that old classic narrative structure of "Exposition - Rising Action - Climax - Falling Action", but some sense that this story is headed somewhere, and not just a random series of events would be nice.
The longest story, "Magic for Beginners", is about a boy and his mother preparing to take a cross-country trip so his mother can spend some time away from his father. It's about his relationships with his friends, and a TV show they watch that would best be described as "Doctor Who" but made by crazy people. It ends with he and his mother reaching Las Vegas, and they turn on the TV to watch the show.
"Stone Animals" is about a family that moves to a new house in the country, but the dad still has to go back to the big city for a few days at a time for work. Their yard is infested with bunnies, and items in the house start to be "haunted", meaning that no one in the family will use them any more. These two things fill roughly 3/4 of the pages of the story, but the ending ignores both of them.
I don't even know what to say about "The Cannon" which seems to be about a cannon that fires people to a place where primitive people with long hair weave their hair into blankets.
But I guess I'm pretty much alone in these complaints, as the list of short-story awards Kelly Link has won is as long as my arm. And if you're looking for simple, quirky fiction, I'm sure you could do worse, but I guess it just wasn't my cup of tea.
On a related note, I have something shameful to share. You see, it used to be I could brag that I had read every single one of the hundreds of books on my bookshelf cover-to-cover. At least once; some of them as many as 4 or 5 times. And that's not even counting all the books in boxes in my parents' basement.
I've gone to great lengths to keep that true. It took me three tries to get all the way through Tad Williams's execrable Dragon Bone Chair fantasy. (I have a long rant about how horrible that book was, if you want to hear it sometime.) I've read bad fantasy that I got as gifts; I've read horrible sci-fi that I picked up on a whim. Even the later Dune books, the ones written after Herbert apparently went crazy.
Lately, though, that's hasn't been the case. I've been buying new books completely intending to read them, and then either not starting them at all, or getting a few pages in, and then just putting the book down, and picking up something else next time.
And I'm not even sure why! I mean, sure, I can rationalize away Gravity's Rainbow by saying that it's a really dense book, and since I do most of my reading just before bed, I'm usually looking for something lighter. But I dunno...
A while ago, my friend Fred tweeted about a small press having a sale: $1 a book. I picked up two collections of short stories, and finally got around to reading one of them.
I'm not really too sure what to make of the stories in Magic for Beginners. If I had to describe a style, they are mostly contemporary fiction, with a tinge of fantasy or horror. Link basically takes a pretty normal character or event, then provides a small twist to the idea by throwing in a fantasy element.
That is, except for the one that features no sort of fantasy or horror aspects at all, or the ones that are just completely fantastical with no base.
Nothing much really happens in any of the stories, which is suppose is my biggest problem with them. They may have a grounded starting point, but they don't really end so much as just stop. They often times seem to be building towards something, but then just meander off in a random direction rather than get there. Like if the big crescendo at the end of the Beatles' "Day in the Life" didn't build up to that single cord, but instead each part just sort of petered out, and the song ended with some guy playing a country song on a kazoo.
I'm not saying that every short story has to follow that old classic narrative structure of "Exposition - Rising Action - Climax - Falling Action", but some sense that this story is headed somewhere, and not just a random series of events would be nice.
The longest story, "Magic for Beginners", is about a boy and his mother preparing to take a cross-country trip so his mother can spend some time away from his father. It's about his relationships with his friends, and a TV show they watch that would best be described as "Doctor Who" but made by crazy people. It ends with he and his mother reaching Las Vegas, and they turn on the TV to watch the show.
"Stone Animals" is about a family that moves to a new house in the country, but the dad still has to go back to the big city for a few days at a time for work. Their yard is infested with bunnies, and items in the house start to be "haunted", meaning that no one in the family will use them any more. These two things fill roughly 3/4 of the pages of the story, but the ending ignores both of them.
I don't even know what to say about "The Cannon" which seems to be about a cannon that fires people to a place where primitive people with long hair weave their hair into blankets.
But I guess I'm pretty much alone in these complaints, as the list of short-story awards Kelly Link has won is as long as my arm. And if you're looking for simple, quirky fiction, I'm sure you could do worse, but I guess it just wasn't my cup of tea.
On a related note, I have something shameful to share. You see, it used to be I could brag that I had read every single one of the hundreds of books on my bookshelf cover-to-cover. At least once; some of them as many as 4 or 5 times. And that's not even counting all the books in boxes in my parents' basement.
I've gone to great lengths to keep that true. It took me three tries to get all the way through Tad Williams's execrable Dragon Bone Chair fantasy. (I have a long rant about how horrible that book was, if you want to hear it sometime.) I've read bad fantasy that I got as gifts; I've read horrible sci-fi that I picked up on a whim. Even the later Dune books, the ones written after Herbert apparently went crazy.
Lately, though, that's hasn't been the case. I've been buying new books completely intending to read them, and then either not starting them at all, or getting a few pages in, and then just putting the book down, and picking up something else next time.
And I'm not even sure why! I mean, sure, I can rationalize away Gravity's Rainbow by saying that it's a really dense book, and since I do most of my reading just before bed, I'm usually looking for something lighter. But I dunno...