[Book Reviews] Notable, for good or ill
Since I have so many books on my to-review list, this iteration is books that I felt particularly strongly about, or that I felt had some outstanding characteristic. [grin] You have been warned.
I bought Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir's "Butterflies in November" in my local indie store off the "Staff Picks" shelf without reading any reviews. I came home, and the first sentence of the first review on Goodreads was "this book is like being forced to watch amelie on a loop while bjork makes you snort pixie stix." I began to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was not as whimsical as I was then expecting... the protagonist has some improbable experiences, but it never utterly transcends the possible. This is a book of unremarked-upon remarkable coincidences that everyone appears to take for granted, surprising acceptance of the world's internal weirdness by the characters, and a sense of inevitability about the whole thing that I found a little disturbing. (Despite knowing that it was not a grimdark book, I kept waiting for something far worse to happen, heh.) It's a basically happy book, black comedy or not. Character-driven more than plot driven... when it ended, I kept reading into the recipe section because that didn't have the feeling of an ending that I'd have expected despite there having been resolution of some of the plot threads. Like this review, it just kind of ends. (Three out of five torrid road trip affairs with someone you've known for two seconds.)
Max Gladstone's "Three Parts Dead" was marvelous! Gladstone has built a complex world which slowly unfolds itself to the reader, so deftly that as I was a third of the way through or so I was worried that the joy of discovery would turn out to be unfounded. I needn't have worried -- the world is indeed rich, detailed, and internally consistent. His characters are pleasantly imperfect, determined and ambitious, decisive and strategizing, and it's all the fun of political machinations on a smaller scale. I liked both major protagonists; they were sympathetically drawn and their motivations understandable. The interweaving of religion with major changes in the world was particularly well drawn, and the differing reactions of the characters to the revelations of the second half of the book gave it verisimilitude rather than a pat "well of course" feeling. It came to me well reviewed and my faith in the reviewer was entirely justified by the book. [grin] I will definitely be reading the rest of this series; what a lovely find! Five doughty necromantic lawyers out of five, and the pick of this batch.
I wanted to like the five-author commentary extravaganza "Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone): Half Crazy, Half Genius -- Finding Modern Meaning in the Sword Saint's Last Words" much more than I did, but the authors kinda lost me right from the beginning. In the introduction, they went from "Musashi might have displayed some pathological tendencies" to "let's use a dictionary definition to diagnose mental health conditions of historical figures" to "so he was 100% most definitely a psychopath". It's not impossible that they had a worthwhile line of inquiry there, but their conclusions were not supported sufficiently by their argument, and certainly not to the degree of assurance with which they argued them. (That reminded me of high school debate club, or most political stumping, where the object is to sway the audience with rhetoric more than to present a fact-based analysis.) Musashi wrote only 21 precepts (short sentences) in the entire book, so I felt it was misleading to have his name on the cover as the primary author in giant font... this was much more opining and commentary about Musashi than Musashi's own actual content. They should have given larger font billing to the primary editor, and then listed the five authors in smaller font on the cover. As for the main text, two of the five authors had viewpoints that I thought were interesting and valuable, a third was kinda hit or miss for me, and two of the five were missing the point consistently. The whole "modern meaning" of the book is, unfortunately, often without reference to the context the book came out of. (Shout-outs to the monk and the warrior for getting that part right, though!) So statements like "I wish Musashi had used this word instead of that word" for shades of meaning were infuriating when the source text is itself a work in translation and the translation is differently rendered by different authors. (Again, some of the authors totally got that! But some others didn't.) Basically, I wanted a lot more scholarly rigor than there was, and instead it ended up feeling more like sitting around with your friends opining on a series of writing prompts. It's fun to do, but it's less fun to read. Rory Miller liked it, but I didn't -- two brief snippets of actual Musashi out of five.
Another NPR-review-sourced read, I found all promised the complexity and discussions of the nuanced psychological difficulties of colonialism in Seth Dickinson's "The Traitor Baru Cormorant". I also found it much more ultimately depressing than the reviewer did, though... the plot moves on, but the ruins that empire has made in its wake are still there, and nothing is going to change that. Baru is a thoroughly well-realized protagonist, deep, subtle, and believable. I liked her, and that made it more difficult to read about the devil-and-deep-blue-sea choices she found herself confronting. Stylistically, the book shares a feature that I don't like about some mystery novels -- in an effort to show you how clever the protagonist is, she comes to conclusions that the reader is unlikely to have come to. When writing a really smart protagonist, I'm far more impressed if they can do that with information that the reader had access to but wasn't able to assemble in the same way. Here, you don't really have a chance to measure yourself against Baru because she just knows things about her world that haven't been mentioned yet to you. That's minorly disappointing. Still, overall the book is well-crafted if not a feel-good novel. Three and a half wheels-within-wheels accountants out of five.
I put off reading Cixin Liu's Hugo-award-winning "The Three-Body Problem" far longer than I should have, believing that it would be more difficult than it was. There's some technical heft to it, but I read enough science and math that I was engaged rather than trudging. Surprising characters, enjoyable problem-solving revelations in-game -- I should have seen the nature of the system long before the character figures it out, but it was such a satisfying conclusion! That was probably my favorite part of the novel; it put me in mind of Buckminster Fuller's quote about the beauty of correct solutions. The novel's setting against the Cultural Revolution was unfamiliar enough to keep me pleasurably doing research and learning things in order to better understand it, a process that I also enjoy. I appreciated both the author's note and the translator's note at the end showing their hands in how they brought the book to us and made it comprehensible to people coming from a different history and context; transparent metadata in translation is helpful to the reader too. Four and a half realignments of the rules you thought you knew out of five.
catvalente is back! "Radiance" was everything I loved about her work, and probably my favorite thing she's written since "Palimpsest". Her famously lush prose, full of weird analogies and Classical references, still reads like poetry. It's a book dense with allegorical weight, meta-meta-meta-self-referential in its commentary on what it is to always be before the lens as a storyteller, a truth-teller, a documentarian, a playwright, a director, an actor. A liar. A subject. A detective. It's a book of snappy dialogue and slow dances with the subconscious. I had a difficult time with the horrorlike aspects of the back half of the book, and was decidedly relieved when it went back to a noir flavor instead. (Aliens are fine. "Aliens" are not fine.) I am impatiently waiting for one of my film nerd friends to read it so they can tell me what I missed about the finer points of film-making, but there was plenty there for the plainly literary-minded, so even if you're not a film buff you can completely go away satisfied. Four and a half episodes of lunacy out of five.
Why, why, WHY do I keep trying to read books marketed as lesbian literature? I always hope that it will be good and/or speak to my experience, and I have yet to find any that I like. (As a lady-preferring bisexual, this is super annoying. These should be my people! But they keep telling the same damn story, and it's depressing and boring all in one. Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt/Carol" is that same damn story. None of the characters made much emotional sense to me... they were either distanced and detached, not very self-aware, or prone to baffling caprice. Someday I will read a lesbian story that isn't a coming-out story, one where the ladies can have their romance without a major tragedy befalling either of them and the story is about anything other than how wonderful-awful it is to be a lesbian. I wished this book were far less depressing than it was... reading about how social persecution sure can rip your nascent relationship apart is pretty realistic, but not very enjoyable. Ugh. Two and a half moments of the destruction of happiness out of five; if anyone knows a good lesbian story where nobody is coming out, leaving a terrible relationship with a man for True Love with a woman, or being persecuted/having her life destroyed, do let me know.
Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" is an incredibly well documented, intensively footnoted condemnation of IBM's rise as a multinational conglomerate right before World War II, and the cascading effects of their prioritization of profits. Chilling to reflect on what "don't ask, don't tell" can get you in the use of technology... I'm sure many of the IBM worker bees of the era were unaware of the human cost being paid by the victims of the Holocaust for their delivered efficiency, but many of the IBM employees were not only involved, not only complicit, but responsible for architecting the decisions and solutions that the Reich implemented. There can be no effective denial of that, despite the company's also-deliberate attempts to obscure its actions for the historical record. This is an important read for students of history and politics, but more so, it's an important read for people working in technological and engineering fields today. Being a good company employee isn't always the right thing to do. Hats off to the author and his research team for producing such a powerful, disturbing book; five long looks at the ethics of doing business with evil out of five.
Hari Kunzru's "Transmission" is an absolutely brilliant first half of a book in search of a coherent ending. I howled my way through the first few chapters, having been to those meetings and talked to those people. I sent excerpts to my friends -- I particularly loved the opening of "Guy Swift: The Mission". Everyone's been cornered by that guy at parties. Unfortunately, the cleverness can't sustain itself past the point where the plot begins to resolve. Once our protagonist takes his decisive action that's meant to fix everything, the tight writing of the first half unravels and everyone just kind of meanders off into "well, I guess that happened, and on with our separate and unrelated lives from here on out". New characters are Chekhov's-rifle introduced at the very end and then nothing is done with them. People just vanish from the plot with a shrug. I had such hopes, but they were only half realized... three buzzword saturated romps through the void out of five.
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/529404.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.
I bought Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir's "Butterflies in November" in my local indie store off the "Staff Picks" shelf without reading any reviews. I came home, and the first sentence of the first review on Goodreads was "this book is like being forced to watch amelie on a loop while bjork makes you snort pixie stix." I began to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was not as whimsical as I was then expecting... the protagonist has some improbable experiences, but it never utterly transcends the possible. This is a book of unremarked-upon remarkable coincidences that everyone appears to take for granted, surprising acceptance of the world's internal weirdness by the characters, and a sense of inevitability about the whole thing that I found a little disturbing. (Despite knowing that it was not a grimdark book, I kept waiting for something far worse to happen, heh.) It's a basically happy book, black comedy or not. Character-driven more than plot driven... when it ended, I kept reading into the recipe section because that didn't have the feeling of an ending that I'd have expected despite there having been resolution of some of the plot threads. Like this review, it just kind of ends. (Three out of five torrid road trip affairs with someone you've known for two seconds.)
Max Gladstone's "Three Parts Dead" was marvelous! Gladstone has built a complex world which slowly unfolds itself to the reader, so deftly that as I was a third of the way through or so I was worried that the joy of discovery would turn out to be unfounded. I needn't have worried -- the world is indeed rich, detailed, and internally consistent. His characters are pleasantly imperfect, determined and ambitious, decisive and strategizing, and it's all the fun of political machinations on a smaller scale. I liked both major protagonists; they were sympathetically drawn and their motivations understandable. The interweaving of religion with major changes in the world was particularly well drawn, and the differing reactions of the characters to the revelations of the second half of the book gave it verisimilitude rather than a pat "well of course" feeling. It came to me well reviewed and my faith in the reviewer was entirely justified by the book. [grin] I will definitely be reading the rest of this series; what a lovely find! Five doughty necromantic lawyers out of five, and the pick of this batch.
I wanted to like the five-author commentary extravaganza "Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone): Half Crazy, Half Genius -- Finding Modern Meaning in the Sword Saint's Last Words" much more than I did, but the authors kinda lost me right from the beginning. In the introduction, they went from "Musashi might have displayed some pathological tendencies" to "let's use a dictionary definition to diagnose mental health conditions of historical figures" to "so he was 100% most definitely a psychopath". It's not impossible that they had a worthwhile line of inquiry there, but their conclusions were not supported sufficiently by their argument, and certainly not to the degree of assurance with which they argued them. (That reminded me of high school debate club, or most political stumping, where the object is to sway the audience with rhetoric more than to present a fact-based analysis.) Musashi wrote only 21 precepts (short sentences) in the entire book, so I felt it was misleading to have his name on the cover as the primary author in giant font... this was much more opining and commentary about Musashi than Musashi's own actual content. They should have given larger font billing to the primary editor, and then listed the five authors in smaller font on the cover. As for the main text, two of the five authors had viewpoints that I thought were interesting and valuable, a third was kinda hit or miss for me, and two of the five were missing the point consistently. The whole "modern meaning" of the book is, unfortunately, often without reference to the context the book came out of. (Shout-outs to the monk and the warrior for getting that part right, though!) So statements like "I wish Musashi had used this word instead of that word" for shades of meaning were infuriating when the source text is itself a work in translation and the translation is differently rendered by different authors. (Again, some of the authors totally got that! But some others didn't.) Basically, I wanted a lot more scholarly rigor than there was, and instead it ended up feeling more like sitting around with your friends opining on a series of writing prompts. It's fun to do, but it's less fun to read. Rory Miller liked it, but I didn't -- two brief snippets of actual Musashi out of five.
Another NPR-review-sourced read, I found all promised the complexity and discussions of the nuanced psychological difficulties of colonialism in Seth Dickinson's "The Traitor Baru Cormorant". I also found it much more ultimately depressing than the reviewer did, though... the plot moves on, but the ruins that empire has made in its wake are still there, and nothing is going to change that. Baru is a thoroughly well-realized protagonist, deep, subtle, and believable. I liked her, and that made it more difficult to read about the devil-and-deep-blue-sea choices she found herself confronting. Stylistically, the book shares a feature that I don't like about some mystery novels -- in an effort to show you how clever the protagonist is, she comes to conclusions that the reader is unlikely to have come to. When writing a really smart protagonist, I'm far more impressed if they can do that with information that the reader had access to but wasn't able to assemble in the same way. Here, you don't really have a chance to measure yourself against Baru because she just knows things about her world that haven't been mentioned yet to you. That's minorly disappointing. Still, overall the book is well-crafted if not a feel-good novel. Three and a half wheels-within-wheels accountants out of five.
I put off reading Cixin Liu's Hugo-award-winning "The Three-Body Problem" far longer than I should have, believing that it would be more difficult than it was. There's some technical heft to it, but I read enough science and math that I was engaged rather than trudging. Surprising characters, enjoyable problem-solving revelations in-game -- I should have seen the nature of the system long before the character figures it out, but it was such a satisfying conclusion! That was probably my favorite part of the novel; it put me in mind of Buckminster Fuller's quote about the beauty of correct solutions. The novel's setting against the Cultural Revolution was unfamiliar enough to keep me pleasurably doing research and learning things in order to better understand it, a process that I also enjoy. I appreciated both the author's note and the translator's note at the end showing their hands in how they brought the book to us and made it comprehensible to people coming from a different history and context; transparent metadata in translation is helpful to the reader too. Four and a half realignments of the rules you thought you knew out of five.
catvalente is back! "Radiance" was everything I loved about her work, and probably my favorite thing she's written since "Palimpsest". Her famously lush prose, full of weird analogies and Classical references, still reads like poetry. It's a book dense with allegorical weight, meta-meta-meta-self-referential in its commentary on what it is to always be before the lens as a storyteller, a truth-teller, a documentarian, a playwright, a director, an actor. A liar. A subject. A detective. It's a book of snappy dialogue and slow dances with the subconscious. I had a difficult time with the horrorlike aspects of the back half of the book, and was decidedly relieved when it went back to a noir flavor instead. (Aliens are fine. "Aliens" are not fine.) I am impatiently waiting for one of my film nerd friends to read it so they can tell me what I missed about the finer points of film-making, but there was plenty there for the plainly literary-minded, so even if you're not a film buff you can completely go away satisfied. Four and a half episodes of lunacy out of five.
Why, why, WHY do I keep trying to read books marketed as lesbian literature? I always hope that it will be good and/or speak to my experience, and I have yet to find any that I like. (As a lady-preferring bisexual, this is super annoying. These should be my people! But they keep telling the same damn story, and it's depressing and boring all in one. Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt/Carol" is that same damn story. None of the characters made much emotional sense to me... they were either distanced and detached, not very self-aware, or prone to baffling caprice. Someday I will read a lesbian story that isn't a coming-out story, one where the ladies can have their romance without a major tragedy befalling either of them and the story is about anything other than how wonderful-awful it is to be a lesbian. I wished this book were far less depressing than it was... reading about how social persecution sure can rip your nascent relationship apart is pretty realistic, but not very enjoyable. Ugh. Two and a half moments of the destruction of happiness out of five; if anyone knows a good lesbian story where nobody is coming out, leaving a terrible relationship with a man for True Love with a woman, or being persecuted/having her life destroyed, do let me know.
Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" is an incredibly well documented, intensively footnoted condemnation of IBM's rise as a multinational conglomerate right before World War II, and the cascading effects of their prioritization of profits. Chilling to reflect on what "don't ask, don't tell" can get you in the use of technology... I'm sure many of the IBM worker bees of the era were unaware of the human cost being paid by the victims of the Holocaust for their delivered efficiency, but many of the IBM employees were not only involved, not only complicit, but responsible for architecting the decisions and solutions that the Reich implemented. There can be no effective denial of that, despite the company's also-deliberate attempts to obscure its actions for the historical record. This is an important read for students of history and politics, but more so, it's an important read for people working in technological and engineering fields today. Being a good company employee isn't always the right thing to do. Hats off to the author and his research team for producing such a powerful, disturbing book; five long looks at the ethics of doing business with evil out of five.
Hari Kunzru's "Transmission" is an absolutely brilliant first half of a book in search of a coherent ending. I howled my way through the first few chapters, having been to those meetings and talked to those people. I sent excerpts to my friends -- I particularly loved the opening of "Guy Swift: The Mission". Everyone's been cornered by that guy at parties. Unfortunately, the cleverness can't sustain itself past the point where the plot begins to resolve. Once our protagonist takes his decisive action that's meant to fix everything, the tight writing of the first half unravels and everyone just kind of meanders off into "well, I guess that happened, and on with our separate and unrelated lives from here on out". New characters are Chekhov's-rifle introduced at the very end and then nothing is done with them. People just vanish from the plot with a shrug. I had such hopes, but they were only half realized... three buzzword saturated romps through the void out of five.
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/529404.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.