Poetry/fiction
Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems: Collins’s poetry often returns to certain themes: concreteness, writing within a calm life, the meaning of ordinary things instead of the extremes. This collection starts with the fantastic Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House and contains excerpts from four earlier books as well as twenty new poems, the best of which is Dharma, about the present-mindedness of dogs, which has typical Collins wit and metaphors: “The way the dog trots out the front door/every morning/without a hat or umbrella …/never fails to feel the saucer of my heart/with milky admiration…/If only she did not shove the cat aside/every morning/and eat all his food/what a model of self-containment she would be,/what a paragon of earthly detachment…./if only I were not her god.” For metaphor and similes, see also Budapest, which begins, “My pen moves along the page/like the snout of a strange animal/shaped like a human arm/and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater,” or Lines Lost Among Trees: “They are gone forever,/a handful of coins/dropped through the grate of memory.” There’s also an excellent poetry joke in Splitting Wood: “Frost covered this decades ago/and frost will cover it again tonight, the leafy disarray of this woodland …”
Seanan McGuire, Sparrow Hill Road: Disappointing ghost story about Rose, killed on her prom night and walking the roads of America trying to save people and to outrun the man who killed her, who bought his eternal youth with the souls of road-killed people. I didn’t check its provenance, but the book feels very much like a bunch of short stories collected together, and the repetitions that can help the audience remember things in a series of connected short stories or a serial can become very annoying when encountered in rapid succession; I think that’s part of what annoyed me. Also, amidst all the evocation of Americana, so much of the narration was generic/unspecific that I didn’t engage. For example: “when you’re dead, you learn the art of the compromise. You learn that sometimes ‘almost’ is the best option of all.” How did Rose learn that? Your guess is as good as mine. The final blow: the book is set up as Rose’s slow realization that she has to fight back against, not just run from, the man who killed her. And then-well, let’s just say that’s not how it ends. I like McGuire’s other stuff, but this is subpar.
Tad Williams, The Dirty Streets of Heaven (Bobby Dollar, Vol. 1): Angels and demons advocate for the soul of each dead person; when the angels win it’s Heaven or Purgatory, and when the demons win it’s eternal damnation. Bobby Dollar is a hardboiled combat vet turned angel advocate, and my main reaction was that Williams was trying too hard for the noir narrative, even as the setting (sunny California) and the plot (corruption on high, lots of threats and beatings from bruisers, femme fatale with her own agenda despite her incredible attraction to our narrator) fit the bill to a T. Also, I was just creeped out by the narrator’s constant comparisons of his demonic lady love to a child, e.g., “With her youthful, wide-eyed face and long white-gold hair cascading over her naked shoulders she might have been a portrait of Alice that Reverend Dodgson would have kept locked away and shown to no one”-this, right after an explicit sex scene. Not my thing.
Lia Silver, Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) (Echo’s Wolf Book 1): DJ is a born wolf who joined the Marines, then was taken prisoner by a shady government organization when his wolf nature became clear after a mission gone wrong. Echo is a-well, it’s a spoiler, though they have some very cute banter where DJ tries to figure out just what she is. She’s reluctantly working for the same shady organization, and forced to partner with DJ while DJ seeks to escape. This had some good pining where both sides think the attraction is unrequited, which I’m a sucker for, and the plot moved at a good pace. It does end on a cliffhanger, but the romance is solidified by the end.
This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death, eds. Matthew Bennardo et al.: The Machine of Death tells you how you’ll die, though it’s kind of evil/misleading in its descriptions. From this one concept, many stories grew. In this, the second volume of stories, the authors push harder on the boundaries of the rules, tweaking and even breaking them (in the far future, the machine can tell when the probability of your death is 0 and when it’s 1; a version of the machine existed before the French Revolution; the machine was an indicator of alien invasion; the machine generates an industry of death explainers staffed at a call center in India; quarantines based on cause of death are a new variation on the worst that humans can do to each other; military assassins chosen for having “throat cancer” deaths and thus being unkillable in combat; etc.). I found them mostly quite enjoyable, and I was also proud of myself for identifying M.J. Leitch’s story before reading her name.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Seanan McGuire, Sparrow Hill Road: Disappointing ghost story about Rose, killed on her prom night and walking the roads of America trying to save people and to outrun the man who killed her, who bought his eternal youth with the souls of road-killed people. I didn’t check its provenance, but the book feels very much like a bunch of short stories collected together, and the repetitions that can help the audience remember things in a series of connected short stories or a serial can become very annoying when encountered in rapid succession; I think that’s part of what annoyed me. Also, amidst all the evocation of Americana, so much of the narration was generic/unspecific that I didn’t engage. For example: “when you’re dead, you learn the art of the compromise. You learn that sometimes ‘almost’ is the best option of all.” How did Rose learn that? Your guess is as good as mine. The final blow: the book is set up as Rose’s slow realization that she has to fight back against, not just run from, the man who killed her. And then-well, let’s just say that’s not how it ends. I like McGuire’s other stuff, but this is subpar.
Tad Williams, The Dirty Streets of Heaven (Bobby Dollar, Vol. 1): Angels and demons advocate for the soul of each dead person; when the angels win it’s Heaven or Purgatory, and when the demons win it’s eternal damnation. Bobby Dollar is a hardboiled combat vet turned angel advocate, and my main reaction was that Williams was trying too hard for the noir narrative, even as the setting (sunny California) and the plot (corruption on high, lots of threats and beatings from bruisers, femme fatale with her own agenda despite her incredible attraction to our narrator) fit the bill to a T. Also, I was just creeped out by the narrator’s constant comparisons of his demonic lady love to a child, e.g., “With her youthful, wide-eyed face and long white-gold hair cascading over her naked shoulders she might have been a portrait of Alice that Reverend Dodgson would have kept locked away and shown to no one”-this, right after an explicit sex scene. Not my thing.
Lia Silver, Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) (Echo’s Wolf Book 1): DJ is a born wolf who joined the Marines, then was taken prisoner by a shady government organization when his wolf nature became clear after a mission gone wrong. Echo is a-well, it’s a spoiler, though they have some very cute banter where DJ tries to figure out just what she is. She’s reluctantly working for the same shady organization, and forced to partner with DJ while DJ seeks to escape. This had some good pining where both sides think the attraction is unrequited, which I’m a sucker for, and the plot moved at a good pace. It does end on a cliffhanger, but the romance is solidified by the end.
This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death, eds. Matthew Bennardo et al.: The Machine of Death tells you how you’ll die, though it’s kind of evil/misleading in its descriptions. From this one concept, many stories grew. In this, the second volume of stories, the authors push harder on the boundaries of the rules, tweaking and even breaking them (in the far future, the machine can tell when the probability of your death is 0 and when it’s 1; a version of the machine existed before the French Revolution; the machine was an indicator of alien invasion; the machine generates an industry of death explainers staffed at a call center in India; quarantines based on cause of death are a new variation on the worst that humans can do to each other; military assassins chosen for having “throat cancer” deaths and thus being unkillable in combat; etc.). I found them mostly quite enjoyable, and I was also proud of myself for identifying M.J. Leitch’s story before reading her name.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.