Booklog 5: The Aperture Science Reading Log Welcomes You
So, it is now June, and here is a book post! I did not have the best of months, reading-wise; I had a few things I didn't get round to reading because actually I just was like 'blaaah I do not have the energy I am re-reading some GK Chesterton instead', which resulted in me looking at my list to write this post and going "holy effing what that's a lot of white dudes". I guess awareness of one's own laziness is the only way you can start improving it, right?
- The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse by Susanna Clarke
This is a very cute story by Susanna Clarke about Arthur Wellesley accidentally going into Faerie to get his horse back. It's very Susanna Clarke, and I love that: I love that she has this particular view of fairyland and the magical stuff that is consistent, and consistently interesting.
(For some reason, while I can swap between modes of magic as used by different authors, the same author using different types/approaches to magic and the uncanny in different books sets me up weird and I find it difficult to adjust to. I don't know.)
- The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones
Oh, DWJ, I am so sad you are so sick, please somehow magically live forever in a non-creepy way. :(
As that is sadly unlikely to happen, though, I am going on a thing of trying to finish her oeuvre. This is quite classic DWJ: two people from different universes have adventures which almost accidentally turn out to involve similar things, while the people are funny and engaging and the world is sort of sparklingly wonderful and kind of terrifying in the way you sort of hope it would be if there were magic. It's great.
Here I especially love Roddy - and not just because I nearly ended up named Arianrhod myself. I really loved the way the different POVs were used; I liked that she found Nick kind of annoying, I liked that they didn't end up a couple at the end despite Nick wanting them to. I liked that the Izzies weren't being raised by A Bad Mother, but were actually casting spells so she didn't realise what they were doing at all - I was kind of expecting some mother-bashing to creep in with them, and it never did.
Conversely, I wasn't sure what to make of Roddy having been enchanted. It made sense, I guess, and I kind of like the implication that obsessive caring over others in an unhealthy way is not actually an inherently female trait but something encouraged and imposed from outside. I also liked that the dyslexic kid was not at all stupid, in fact just the opposite. I do, however, wish he'd properly apologised to Roddy or more had been made of how wrong what he did was. I mean, I see that would be difficult without making it a big moralistic ott enchilada, but still.
Basically, however, it is still true that people not reading Diana Wynne Jones are missing out. Her books are so much better than they sound it's ridiculous.
- The Innocence of Father Brown and The Wisdom of Father Brown by GK Chesterton
I re-read these because I hadn't picked up any Chesterton in ages and I meant to re-read these ever since reading The Man Who Was Thursday.
Father Brown is kind of weird as detective stories go: they almost, to me, aren't detective stories at all, but almost character studies of the human condition. They are abstract in a way most murder mysteries aren't at all, because there's no focus on actual clues or timelines or anything, it's all solved by Father Brown's knowledge of humanity's sins and knowledge of human nature. They're very quiet and charming and beautifully written, and very very Catholic in a way that is occasionally odd for a non-Catholic but mostly part of its beauty.
...and then you suddenly get The God of the Gongs, which I would swear wasn't in the copy of The Wisdom of Father Brown I read previously because oh dear god it is like another series altogether, where suddenly Father Brown is being horrifically and disturbingly racist. o_O Like, there are a few of the stories which have some very outdated and unfortunate ways of talking about race, but this was just out of this WORLD. I would still recommend these stories to people who love language or detective stories or both, but I would also recommend leaving that one way the hell alone.
- Mr Peanut by Adam Ross
I mostly just fucking hated this book. I only finished it because it was a review copy. So, um, I am entirely biased about this.
It's supposed to be sort of a Hitchcockian take on detective noir with a whole bunch of post-moderny meta stuff added in. And the end result is just, to me at least, obnoxious.I don't like that it devolves into a random ramble about how great Hitchcock is at the end, because if you do not think your readers will get that you're trying to be Hitchcock then you should say so earlier and also you're doing it wrong and also YOU ARE NOT HITCHCOCK, I hate that it jumps from POV character to character like a demented weasel. I hate that all the main characters are white dudes who want to kill their wives.
I WISH I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THAT.
...or, okay, were convicted of killing their wife but actually probably didn't. But then I also hate that it makes Sam Sheppard out as a sort of hero. He's one of the detectives (did I mention yet there's ALMOST NO PLOT RESOLUTION?) and while I don't know enough about the Sheppard case to do a proper critique, I think I have a problem with this guy who basically spiralled into his own destruction after spending ten years in jail for murder being remade as this... not Strapping Action Hero, but he's kind of as close as the novel gets. And I am just bored of this idea that jackassy white straight dudes are automatically interesting because they are jackassy white dudes. Actually, no, if you want me to read and enjoy your novel then I would appreciate it if the main characters didn't all treat the people like me AS BASICALLY IRRITATING LIVING DOLLS. Thankyou.
Oh and yeah, the main character, husband of the woman who may or may not have been murdered and whose case the book revolves around? Spends large amounts of the time he does think about his wife obsessing about her weight. Because she is obese, you see, or she was because then she magically goes to weight loss camp and has weight loss surgery and then she keeps losing weight and the WHOLE THING is just OBSESSED. I mean, I guess I give slight props to the fact he finds her hotter when she's bigger and also the weight loss surgery is mentioned as not being good for her health. But the weight loss thing is still shown as waaay more important. And just. Argh.
- Instruction Manual For Swallowing by Adam Marek
This is in fact not an instruction manual, but a short-story collection. It is very weird and all the stories end kind of abruptly, with little sense of beginning or end. It's all middle. But I kind of found I didn't mind that so much; it's not something I'd want every book to do at ALL, but I thought it successfully pulled off the feeling of jumping into these crazy worlds and seeing events for a while and then jumping out again while events continued behind me.
It is also very cute, but there is one story about a giant caterpillar which I find genuinely kind of disturbing in a very Stephen King way.
- Fevre Dream by George RR Martin
Vampires! Vampires in the antebellum Southern US! And it's done really, really well, too. The big reveal of the vampirism is kind of obvious, but I love the vampire culture stuff here. The idea that being transformed is impossible, and people who believe they will be transformed into a vampire are actually being duped, almost hypnotised... I thought that was genuinely brilliant, and so creepily perfect. It made up for the big fight at the end being kind of... not anti-climactic, really, so much as sad. It was never going to be the huge and epic thing they thought it would be.
Which ties in to the other main thing of the novel, the South. I really loved the portrayal of river life, and I loved the way the racism was dealt with. It was there, and a lot of the characters had grown up in a world where selling people like cattle was entirely fine, but it still wasn't shown as okay, at all. And the bits with the escaped slaves were among the creepiest and most effective, to me.
- Dying of the Light by George RR Martin
I read this because I did not feel up for any Song Of Ice And Fire, and I loved Fevre Dream. This... I kind of enjoyed? But not that much. It's kind of a weird book, and struck me as being a very teenage boy kind of book. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it would be a bright and probably interesting teenage boy, but I didn't like the main character much and I didn't quite know how to deal with that. I don't have to like as in want to be friends with the main characters in my media consumption: not be vaguely irritated by them, yes. And I was vaguely irritated with Dirk.
To be fair, there was actually a LOT about how Dirk had in fact been a jackass and needed to grow up and treat women like people. The trouble is that this is in a book with exactly one female character, whose motivations are largely discussed by other people.
I liked that Gwen never actually called Dirk, though. I spent the first bit of the book going "if she called him, she knew he was coming, then she is pathetic and badly drawn because nobody would act like this if they had asked someone to come!" But, she hadn't, and she had at least consistency and believability of character, if not that much depth.
And I did really love the aliens in this. All the aliens: I really wanted to see more of the cultures we heard about that had gone. I just found the setting and background culture more interesting than the main people!
- Where There's a Will, Some Buried Caesar, Black Orchids, and Might As Well Be Dead - Rex Stout
I did the post for the re-read of Where There's A Will, here, despite foolishly never having read it before, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Some Buried Caesar is maybe my very favourite, because Archie being arrested and setting up a Prisoner's Union and Wolfe actually trying to give him bedding a pillow to make his stay in jail easier is just adorable and hilarious!
Black Orchids I found cute and kind of geekily interesting, but not as robust as some of Stout's other stuff.
And omg, Might As Well Be Dead they KILLED JOHNNY KEEMS. Which I was completely not suspecting and genuinely went "...what?!" at. Poor Johnny Keems! (Keeeeeems.) I also loved the plot, the whole advertisement and false-name thing worked really well for me, largely because they got a lot of irritation from it from other people initialed PH insisting they were innocent. Hee. But mostly, omg no more put-downs about how Johnny Keems wants Archie's chair!
None-reading-list-related stuffs:
Sue Perkins does a documentary about Anne Lister, Regency-era landowner and lesbian. It's excellent!
So, Stephen Colbert shows up at Conan O'Brien's New York tour date, and hijinks ensue! Warning: features a dance-off, surprise!Jon Stewart, and the mighty, mighty vengeance of the sound-effects guy. Bwah. Times A MILLIONTY.
The new Scott Pilgrim trailer has Wallace in it. WALLACE! ♥ ♥ ♥ And KIM DRUMMING. ♥ ♥ ♥ (There is no way I'm going to love this movie as much as I hope I am, right?)
- The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse by Susanna Clarke
This is a very cute story by Susanna Clarke about Arthur Wellesley accidentally going into Faerie to get his horse back. It's very Susanna Clarke, and I love that: I love that she has this particular view of fairyland and the magical stuff that is consistent, and consistently interesting.
(For some reason, while I can swap between modes of magic as used by different authors, the same author using different types/approaches to magic and the uncanny in different books sets me up weird and I find it difficult to adjust to. I don't know.)
- The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones
Oh, DWJ, I am so sad you are so sick, please somehow magically live forever in a non-creepy way. :(
As that is sadly unlikely to happen, though, I am going on a thing of trying to finish her oeuvre. This is quite classic DWJ: two people from different universes have adventures which almost accidentally turn out to involve similar things, while the people are funny and engaging and the world is sort of sparklingly wonderful and kind of terrifying in the way you sort of hope it would be if there were magic. It's great.
Here I especially love Roddy - and not just because I nearly ended up named Arianrhod myself. I really loved the way the different POVs were used; I liked that she found Nick kind of annoying, I liked that they didn't end up a couple at the end despite Nick wanting them to. I liked that the Izzies weren't being raised by A Bad Mother, but were actually casting spells so she didn't realise what they were doing at all - I was kind of expecting some mother-bashing to creep in with them, and it never did.
Conversely, I wasn't sure what to make of Roddy having been enchanted. It made sense, I guess, and I kind of like the implication that obsessive caring over others in an unhealthy way is not actually an inherently female trait but something encouraged and imposed from outside. I also liked that the dyslexic kid was not at all stupid, in fact just the opposite. I do, however, wish he'd properly apologised to Roddy or more had been made of how wrong what he did was. I mean, I see that would be difficult without making it a big moralistic ott enchilada, but still.
Basically, however, it is still true that people not reading Diana Wynne Jones are missing out. Her books are so much better than they sound it's ridiculous.
- The Innocence of Father Brown and The Wisdom of Father Brown by GK Chesterton
I re-read these because I hadn't picked up any Chesterton in ages and I meant to re-read these ever since reading The Man Who Was Thursday.
Father Brown is kind of weird as detective stories go: they almost, to me, aren't detective stories at all, but almost character studies of the human condition. They are abstract in a way most murder mysteries aren't at all, because there's no focus on actual clues or timelines or anything, it's all solved by Father Brown's knowledge of humanity's sins and knowledge of human nature. They're very quiet and charming and beautifully written, and very very Catholic in a way that is occasionally odd for a non-Catholic but mostly part of its beauty.
...and then you suddenly get The God of the Gongs, which I would swear wasn't in the copy of The Wisdom of Father Brown I read previously because oh dear god it is like another series altogether, where suddenly Father Brown is being horrifically and disturbingly racist. o_O Like, there are a few of the stories which have some very outdated and unfortunate ways of talking about race, but this was just out of this WORLD. I would still recommend these stories to people who love language or detective stories or both, but I would also recommend leaving that one way the hell alone.
- Mr Peanut by Adam Ross
I mostly just fucking hated this book. I only finished it because it was a review copy. So, um, I am entirely biased about this.
It's supposed to be sort of a Hitchcockian take on detective noir with a whole bunch of post-moderny meta stuff added in. And the end result is just, to me at least, obnoxious.I don't like that it devolves into a random ramble about how great Hitchcock is at the end, because if you do not think your readers will get that you're trying to be Hitchcock then you should say so earlier and also you're doing it wrong and also YOU ARE NOT HITCHCOCK, I hate that it jumps from POV character to character like a demented weasel. I hate that all the main characters are white dudes who want to kill their wives.
I WISH I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THAT.
...or, okay, were convicted of killing their wife but actually probably didn't. But then I also hate that it makes Sam Sheppard out as a sort of hero. He's one of the detectives (did I mention yet there's ALMOST NO PLOT RESOLUTION?) and while I don't know enough about the Sheppard case to do a proper critique, I think I have a problem with this guy who basically spiralled into his own destruction after spending ten years in jail for murder being remade as this... not Strapping Action Hero, but he's kind of as close as the novel gets. And I am just bored of this idea that jackassy white straight dudes are automatically interesting because they are jackassy white dudes. Actually, no, if you want me to read and enjoy your novel then I would appreciate it if the main characters didn't all treat the people like me AS BASICALLY IRRITATING LIVING DOLLS. Thankyou.
Oh and yeah, the main character, husband of the woman who may or may not have been murdered and whose case the book revolves around? Spends large amounts of the time he does think about his wife obsessing about her weight. Because she is obese, you see, or she was because then she magically goes to weight loss camp and has weight loss surgery and then she keeps losing weight and the WHOLE THING is just OBSESSED. I mean, I guess I give slight props to the fact he finds her hotter when she's bigger and also the weight loss surgery is mentioned as not being good for her health. But the weight loss thing is still shown as waaay more important. And just. Argh.
- Instruction Manual For Swallowing by Adam Marek
This is in fact not an instruction manual, but a short-story collection. It is very weird and all the stories end kind of abruptly, with little sense of beginning or end. It's all middle. But I kind of found I didn't mind that so much; it's not something I'd want every book to do at ALL, but I thought it successfully pulled off the feeling of jumping into these crazy worlds and seeing events for a while and then jumping out again while events continued behind me.
It is also very cute, but there is one story about a giant caterpillar which I find genuinely kind of disturbing in a very Stephen King way.
- Fevre Dream by George RR Martin
Vampires! Vampires in the antebellum Southern US! And it's done really, really well, too. The big reveal of the vampirism is kind of obvious, but I love the vampire culture stuff here. The idea that being transformed is impossible, and people who believe they will be transformed into a vampire are actually being duped, almost hypnotised... I thought that was genuinely brilliant, and so creepily perfect. It made up for the big fight at the end being kind of... not anti-climactic, really, so much as sad. It was never going to be the huge and epic thing they thought it would be.
Which ties in to the other main thing of the novel, the South. I really loved the portrayal of river life, and I loved the way the racism was dealt with. It was there, and a lot of the characters had grown up in a world where selling people like cattle was entirely fine, but it still wasn't shown as okay, at all. And the bits with the escaped slaves were among the creepiest and most effective, to me.
- Dying of the Light by George RR Martin
I read this because I did not feel up for any Song Of Ice And Fire, and I loved Fevre Dream. This... I kind of enjoyed? But not that much. It's kind of a weird book, and struck me as being a very teenage boy kind of book. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it would be a bright and probably interesting teenage boy, but I didn't like the main character much and I didn't quite know how to deal with that. I don't have to like as in want to be friends with the main characters in my media consumption: not be vaguely irritated by them, yes. And I was vaguely irritated with Dirk.
To be fair, there was actually a LOT about how Dirk had in fact been a jackass and needed to grow up and treat women like people. The trouble is that this is in a book with exactly one female character, whose motivations are largely discussed by other people.
I liked that Gwen never actually called Dirk, though. I spent the first bit of the book going "if she called him, she knew he was coming, then she is pathetic and badly drawn because nobody would act like this if they had asked someone to come!" But, she hadn't, and she had at least consistency and believability of character, if not that much depth.
And I did really love the aliens in this. All the aliens: I really wanted to see more of the cultures we heard about that had gone. I just found the setting and background culture more interesting than the main people!
- Where There's a Will, Some Buried Caesar, Black Orchids, and Might As Well Be Dead - Rex Stout
I did the post for the re-read of Where There's A Will, here, despite foolishly never having read it before, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Some Buried Caesar is maybe my very favourite, because Archie being arrested and setting up a Prisoner's Union and Wolfe actually trying to give him bedding a pillow to make his stay in jail easier is just adorable and hilarious!
Black Orchids I found cute and kind of geekily interesting, but not as robust as some of Stout's other stuff.
And omg, Might As Well Be Dead they KILLED JOHNNY KEEMS. Which I was completely not suspecting and genuinely went "...what?!" at. Poor Johnny Keems! (Keeeeeems.) I also loved the plot, the whole advertisement and false-name thing worked really well for me, largely because they got a lot of irritation from it from other people initialed PH insisting they were innocent. Hee. But mostly, omg no more put-downs about how Johnny Keems wants Archie's chair!
None-reading-list-related stuffs:
Sue Perkins does a documentary about Anne Lister, Regency-era landowner and lesbian. It's excellent!
So, Stephen Colbert shows up at Conan O'Brien's New York tour date, and hijinks ensue! Warning: features a dance-off, surprise!Jon Stewart, and the mighty, mighty vengeance of the sound-effects guy. Bwah. Times A MILLIONTY.
The new Scott Pilgrim trailer has Wallace in it. WALLACE! ♥ ♥ ♥ And KIM DRUMMING. ♥ ♥ ♥ (There is no way I'm going to love this movie as much as I hope I am, right?)