Tenth of December by George Saunders
George Saunders returns to several of his major themes in this collection of stories: SF-tinged tales of dealing with new behavior-altering drugs on the lines of Jonathan Franzen's Aslan; theme parks or horrible behavioral experiments; and people caught up in deciding whether to do right. I very much enjoyed his first collection, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, but I was a bit uncomfortable with the gloomy outlook on life it portrayed. These are much more "positive" stories, in that we find normal heroes (and one self-justifying louse) who have to choose whether to do good (or in one case avoid doing more bad). We come to like these heroes, particularly the children in the first story, "Victory Lap," and the lonely child and troubled adult in the final one, "Tenth of December." Probably the best, however, is "Escape From Spiderhead," in which a man subjected to mood-altering drugs must come to decide whether to inflict doses of pain on women to whom he's just made love -- it encapsulates our prescription drug-addled society, our obsessive imprisonment of all sorts of people and one person's decision to do no wrong. The story "My Chivalric Fiasco" is very funny for the most part and appears in at least one SF best-of compilation.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Top 10 Tuesdays: Books I hope to read in 2013
For the Top 10 Tuesday Web meme:
In 2012, the only book challenge I managed to complete was the Chunkster Challenge. I came close to finishing the Southern book challenge (three of four) and the British reading challenge (10 of 12), but that was about it. I will do the Chunkster Challenge again in 2013. In 2012, I read nine books of more than 450 pages, so I will commit to the Mor-Book-Ly challenge (eight books, three of more than 750 pages). In line with the Jan. 1 list of books I hope to read in 2013, here are 10 that would qualify for Chunkster. Some also will qualify for a TBR challenge:
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oskana Zabuzhko
Young Henry of Navarre by Heinrich Mann
2012 Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (various)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marissa Pessl
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clarke
Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel
Mountain Standard Time by Paul Horgan
The Complete Novels by Flann O'Brien
In 2012, the only book challenge I managed to complete was the Chunkster Challenge. I came close to finishing the Southern book challenge (three of four) and the British reading challenge (10 of 12), but that was about it. I will do the Chunkster Challenge again in 2013. In 2012, I read nine books of more than 450 pages, so I will commit to the Mor-Book-Ly challenge (eight books, three of more than 750 pages). In line with the Jan. 1 list of books I hope to read in 2013, here are 10 that would qualify for Chunkster. Some also will qualify for a TBR challenge:
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oskana Zabuzhko
Young Henry of Navarre by Heinrich Mann
2012 Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (various)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marissa Pessl
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clarke
Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel
Mountain Standard Time by Paul Horgan
The Complete Novels by Flann O'Brien
Book Review: The Rook
The Rook by Daniel O'Malley: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/707964780 (486 page)
O'Malley's urban fantasy opens with a woman who discovers herself wiped of memories and surrounded by a pile of dead bodies. The bodies start to pile up thereafter as she begins to discover her previous identity through a series of letters left by .. herself. It turns out she's a Rook, a key player in an organization dedicated to defending Britain from the supernatural and bizarre. Her colleague include a vampire, a man who can manipulate metal and a quadruplets who share a single consciousness. O'Malley is an entertaining first-time writer whose central character is complex (she is clearly not the woman she used to be) and whose powers are considerable. The mystery gets wound up in a fairly perfunctory manner (after some exciting bits of betrayal), but overall this novel is a great start to a possible series or a satisfyingly engaging and light one-off.
Chunkster challenge: chunksterchallenge.blogspot.com
O'Malley's urban fantasy opens with a woman who discovers herself wiped of memories and surrounded by a pile of dead bodies. The bodies start to pile up thereafter as she begins to discover her previous identity through a series of letters left by .. herself. It turns out she's a Rook, a key player in an organization dedicated to defending Britain from the supernatural and bizarre. Her colleague include a vampire, a man who can manipulate metal and a quadruplets who share a single consciousness. O'Malley is an entertaining first-time writer whose central character is complex (she is clearly not the woman she used to be) and whose powers are considerable. The mystery gets wound up in a fairly perfunctory manner (after some exciting bits of betrayal), but overall this novel is a great start to a possible series or a satisfyingly engaging and light one-off.
Chunkster challenge: chunksterchallenge.blogspot.com
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Book review: In Sunlight and in Shadow
Book review: In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin
(For the Chunkster Challenge Web meme)
I think the New York Times reviewer got this novel all wrong. Helprin always has had a strong romantic streak as well as a flare for satire. Here he takes the outline of a medieval story -- a knight returning from the Crusades to retake his inheritance and win the princess -- and transposes it to New York after World War II. Harry Copeland finds his father's leather business sinking because of European competiton and a strange new gangster who's extorting exhorbitant protection fees. He meets the beautiful, wealthy actress Catherine Hale on the Staten Island Ferry, then must win her from a suitor who has done terrible things to her. The novel is extremely long, and Helprin appears to go overboard occasionally in his paeans to New York and the environs, especially the sea. But essentially the story is captivating, with real heroes and villains, and his descriptions of Harry's close calls in war are as strong as his depictions of war in A Soldier of the Great War and Memoirs in Antproof Case. He also pokes fun at showpeople, accountants, building contractors, the nascent CIA and wealthy people in general. I recommend the novel despite its excesses. I think the New York Times reviewer got this novel all wrong. Helprin always has had a strong romantic streak as well as a flare for satire. Here he takes the outline of a medieval story -- a knight returning from the Crusades to retake his inheritance and win the princess -- and transposes it to New York after World War II. Harry Copeland finds his father's leather business sinking because of European competiton and a strange new gangster who's extorting exhorbitant protection fees. He meets the beautiful, wealthy actress Catherine Hale on the Staten Island Ferry, then must win her from a suitor who has done terrible things to her. The novel is extremely long, and Helprin appears to go overboard occasionally in his paeans to New York and the environs, especially the sea. But essentially the story is captivating, with real heroes and villains, and his descriptions of Harry's close calls in war are as strong as his depictions of war in A Soldier of the Great War and Memoirs in Antproof Case. He also pokes fun at showpeople, accountants, building contractors, the nascent CIA and wealthy people in general. I recommend the novel despite its excesses.
Top 10 Hollywood Novels
For the freebie Top 10 Tuesday Web meme:
Top 10 Hollywood Novels
I'm listing my 10 favorite after reading Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures in 2012. I'm defining this genre as novels that involve significantly participants in the film industry, past or present, or have motion pictures as a strong, overriding theme. They're not listed in any particular order.
1. Day of the Locust: This classic Nathaniel West novel explores the underbelly of Hollywood, exposing the dream factory as another beachhead for cutthroat capitalism and mob rule.
2. The Age of Dreaming: A relatively unheralded novel about an Asian silent-film star whose early retirement and transformation into a recluse hinges on an increasingly racist California and a William Deems Taylor-like murder. Nina Revoyr's story works both as cultural criticism and a compelling story.
3. Beautiful Ruins: This 2012 Jess Walter novel is a hilarious look at the lives of people either involved in our caught up with the film industry. The action takes place in several times and places, but it mainly occurs in recent Los Angeles, World War II and in the early 1960s, when Cleopatra was being shot in Italy. The characters all have dreams that don't quite work out, but in a sense they do, because somethings what you dream about Hollywood-style isn't what you get or even really wanted in the first place. A wonderfully entertaining and funny novel.
4. Late, Great Creature: A blast from the past, this overlooked gem involves a horror actor with a mysterious past, who finds a way to go out in style. A bizarre read, filled with raunchy sex, broad satire and a main character who will haunt your dreams.
5. Sunnyside: Glen David Gold's sweeping look at the end of World War I suggests that American movies, led by British auteur Charlie Chaplin, changed the world and was the real winner of the conflict, as society changed forever. It begins in a kind of fever dream, when nearly the entire country spots Chaplin in some fashion, then goes on to look at Chaplin's fascinating life as well as the lives of two other men, one caught up in the war in France and another sent to battle the Bolsheviks in the bitter cold of Russia. It all ends up having to do with the movies. It's one of those novels where you're glad it's more than 600 pages, because you want the stories to go on.
6. Miss Wyoming: I'm a Douglas Coupland fan, and although this may not be one of his most well-known novels, it's still funny and lightly likable. John Johnson is a decadent movie producer, and Susan Colgate is a former beauty pageant queen who found a way to disappear for a year. The novel, which is not told in chronological order, considers issues of fame, art and movie-making in his deadpan style.
7. Zeroville: One of the best novels I've read. Steve Erickson casts a mesmerizing spell in this novel about a bizarre victim of biblical childhood abuse who, after he gets an image of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor tattooed on his scalp, becomes the perfect movie editor with an understanding of film that goes beyond what's on the celluloid. A character based on John Millius makes several appearances.
8. Where the Truth Lies: Rupert Holmes, of Mystery of Edwin Drood fame, writes a mystery that's a thinly ficitonalized account of the partnership of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Maritn comes off as something of a wimp, but the Lewis character is a bold, agressive, worldly character who acts crazy for the cameras but is something of a lothario. The narrator is a reporter trying to get to the bottom of a murder the parters were connected to at the height of their partnership, but the mystery is secondary to the backstage look at the popular duo, as well as movies and the VIP tour of Disneyland.
9, The Loved One: Evelyn Waugh's brief but nasty satire of British expatriates in Hollywood and the cemetery-crematorium at the center of the action. A young Brit acts so bizarrely (threatening to found a religion) that he convinces British Hollywood to send him back to England, and a young woman meets a tragic fate.
10. I'm Losing You: Bruce Wagner's bizarre, gritty, unwholesome and downright depressing journey into many lives in Hollywood, focusing particularly on the people off the screen -- a horrible producer, a guy who gets dead animals out from under houses, a fugitive child and many others. It's a depressing but fascinating mosaic of life on the fringes of Hollywood.
Top 10 Hollywood Novels
I'm listing my 10 favorite after reading Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures in 2012. I'm defining this genre as novels that involve significantly participants in the film industry, past or present, or have motion pictures as a strong, overriding theme. They're not listed in any particular order.
1. Day of the Locust: This classic Nathaniel West novel explores the underbelly of Hollywood, exposing the dream factory as another beachhead for cutthroat capitalism and mob rule.
2. The Age of Dreaming: A relatively unheralded novel about an Asian silent-film star whose early retirement and transformation into a recluse hinges on an increasingly racist California and a William Deems Taylor-like murder. Nina Revoyr's story works both as cultural criticism and a compelling story.
3. Beautiful Ruins: This 2012 Jess Walter novel is a hilarious look at the lives of people either involved in our caught up with the film industry. The action takes place in several times and places, but it mainly occurs in recent Los Angeles, World War II and in the early 1960s, when Cleopatra was being shot in Italy. The characters all have dreams that don't quite work out, but in a sense they do, because somethings what you dream about Hollywood-style isn't what you get or even really wanted in the first place. A wonderfully entertaining and funny novel.
4. Late, Great Creature: A blast from the past, this overlooked gem involves a horror actor with a mysterious past, who finds a way to go out in style. A bizarre read, filled with raunchy sex, broad satire and a main character who will haunt your dreams.
5. Sunnyside: Glen David Gold's sweeping look at the end of World War I suggests that American movies, led by British auteur Charlie Chaplin, changed the world and was the real winner of the conflict, as society changed forever. It begins in a kind of fever dream, when nearly the entire country spots Chaplin in some fashion, then goes on to look at Chaplin's fascinating life as well as the lives of two other men, one caught up in the war in France and another sent to battle the Bolsheviks in the bitter cold of Russia. It all ends up having to do with the movies. It's one of those novels where you're glad it's more than 600 pages, because you want the stories to go on.
6. Miss Wyoming: I'm a Douglas Coupland fan, and although this may not be one of his most well-known novels, it's still funny and lightly likable. John Johnson is a decadent movie producer, and Susan Colgate is a former beauty pageant queen who found a way to disappear for a year. The novel, which is not told in chronological order, considers issues of fame, art and movie-making in his deadpan style.
7. Zeroville: One of the best novels I've read. Steve Erickson casts a mesmerizing spell in this novel about a bizarre victim of biblical childhood abuse who, after he gets an image of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor tattooed on his scalp, becomes the perfect movie editor with an understanding of film that goes beyond what's on the celluloid. A character based on John Millius makes several appearances.
8. Where the Truth Lies: Rupert Holmes, of Mystery of Edwin Drood fame, writes a mystery that's a thinly ficitonalized account of the partnership of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Maritn comes off as something of a wimp, but the Lewis character is a bold, agressive, worldly character who acts crazy for the cameras but is something of a lothario. The narrator is a reporter trying to get to the bottom of a murder the parters were connected to at the height of their partnership, but the mystery is secondary to the backstage look at the popular duo, as well as movies and the VIP tour of Disneyland.
9, The Loved One: Evelyn Waugh's brief but nasty satire of British expatriates in Hollywood and the cemetery-crematorium at the center of the action. A young Brit acts so bizarrely (threatening to found a religion) that he convinces British Hollywood to send him back to England, and a young woman meets a tragic fate.
10. I'm Losing You: Bruce Wagner's bizarre, gritty, unwholesome and downright depressing journey into many lives in Hollywood, focusing particularly on the people off the screen -- a horrible producer, a guy who gets dead animals out from under houses, a fugitive child and many others. It's a depressing but fascinating mosaic of life on the fringes of Hollywood.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Book Reviews: Aurorarama, Dodger and The World Without You
Book reviews:
Dodger by Terry Pratchett: I listened to this on my car stereo, because Stephen Briggs always does a great job with Pratchett's books. Dodger is something of a slight, non-Discworld novel. Pratchett's recent novels seem a little light on plot but still full of the humor he is famous for. This young-adult title seems to be stand-alone, although he seems to hint that Dodger could be the start of a series. A tosher (scavenger in the London sewers) nicknamed Dodger comes to the aid of a damsel in distress and finds himself catapulted into high society through the intervention of Charles Dickens. The problem here is that Dodger never really is in enough hot water to keep tension up, except for one scene toward the end, in which a villain is too easily overcome. (Another inkling that a follow-up is planned.) But for young people interested in Victorian London, Pratchett offers a colorful overview of the dirty but fascinating city. (British book challenge.)
Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat: I had seen a good review of this title a couple of years ago and put it on my to-read list. I finally got around to reading it after borrowing it from the Jacksonville State library. The novel takes place in an invented city of New Venice, built in the Arctic Circle. An enlightened patrician who runs the city's greenhouses and a disreputable professor at the college find themselves on a converging course to thwart the plans of the cabal that runs the city even as a mysterious dirigible hangs over the city. Magic, native peoples and magic are involved, as Valtat tries to create a steampunk-style world. I liked the structure of this imaginary place, but the narrative wavers quite a bit, and the book has a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes. There's a sequel out, but I don't know I'm involved enough in this universe to read it.
Dodger by Terry Pratchett: I listened to this on my car stereo, because Stephen Briggs always does a great job with Pratchett's books. Dodger is something of a slight, non-Discworld novel. Pratchett's recent novels seem a little light on plot but still full of the humor he is famous for. This young-adult title seems to be stand-alone, although he seems to hint that Dodger could be the start of a series. A tosher (scavenger in the London sewers) nicknamed Dodger comes to the aid of a damsel in distress and finds himself catapulted into high society through the intervention of Charles Dickens. The problem here is that Dodger never really is in enough hot water to keep tension up, except for one scene toward the end, in which a villain is too easily overcome. (Another inkling that a follow-up is planned.) But for young people interested in Victorian London, Pratchett offers a colorful overview of the dirty but fascinating city. (British book challenge.)
Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat: I had seen a good review of this title a couple of years ago and put it on my to-read list. I finally got around to reading it after borrowing it from the Jacksonville State library. The novel takes place in an invented city of New Venice, built in the Arctic Circle. An enlightened patrician who runs the city's greenhouses and a disreputable professor at the college find themselves on a converging course to thwart the plans of the cabal that runs the city even as a mysterious dirigible hangs over the city. Magic, native peoples and magic are involved, as Valtat tries to create a steampunk-style world. I liked the structure of this imaginary place, but the narrative wavers quite a bit, and the book has a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes. There's a sequel out, but I don't know I'm involved enough in this universe to read it.
The World Without You by Joshua Henken: Henken attempts to portray in some depth a large Jewish family grieving over the death of the brother, who was kidnapped and killed in Baghdad covering the Iraq War. Three sisters gather to be with their parents in Lenox, Mass., at their summer home, as does the widow of the brother. They are marking the one-year anniversary of the brother's death with the unveiling of a tombstone. Although the novel begins in some depth, as it probes the mother and father's impending breakup and the sister Noelle's Orthodox life in Israel (she fled the United States and has a husband and four children), about half the characters (two sisters and the father) really don't stand out in this narrative. They have too little to do. The real drama here is among the widow, the third Orthodox sister and the mother, but the other characters get in the way. Also, the novel has a weird way of dealing with the body of the dead brother (who in some ways is the most vivid character, coming across as a rowdy, playful and curious journalist); at some points it seems the body was intact, and at others it was identifiable only through dental records. I do praise Henkin for sending the beloved brother, Leo, to Wesleyan, however, and many of the details -- in-line skating through Lenox, playing tennis in a downpour, the facts behind how Leo and his wife, Thisbe, met -- are quite engrossing. But the novel lays there when the other sisters or father are involved.
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