Books September 2013
A slow reading month – I started and stopped a few books. Here are the ones I finished.
1. Finch – Jeff VanderMeer
A detective thriller unlike all others set in Ambergris a city unlike any other.
Detective John Finch works for the Gray Caps, the sentient fungi occupiers of Ambergris, and is sent to investigate a double murder amid a fractured city full of rival factions and loyalties. Finch is atmospheric and strange where the fantastic subsumes the detective genre.
2. Indoctrinaire – Christopher Priest
Priest’s first novel and it reads as such. It’s also very much a product of the 1960s so there’s drug use, paranoia, government coercion, and looming nuclear war all over the horizon. Indoctrinaire reads a bit similar to JG Ballard’s stuff from the same era, but it’s not as good.
3. Rapture (The Bel Dame Apocrypha #3) – Kameron Hurley
If my reaction to finishing the 2nd book in aseries is to immediately seek out and start book 3, you know the author’s doing something right. The Bel Dame Apocrypha have been some of my favorite books of recent years, and the series ends as messed up as it begins, but with enough closure to be satisfying. It’s also nice to see an author not closing down a setting just because the series is over. Instead Rapture ends with a much larger world being revealed.
The Bookstore Post
Last week I spent over a quarter of a million Korean dollars on books. It’s actually only about 400 USD, but it sounds cooler as a quarter of a million bucks. At the time I quipped that this only increased the likelihood of my opening a bookstore café here in South Korea, because eventually we will have too many books and what else am I going to do?
Have you ever read Lavie Tidhar’s Osama?
It’s a great pulpy novel, but I’m not sure if my amazement of it is transferable to others unless you’ve lived overseas as an expat.*
“Alfred was a man full of stories; now he filled his life with those of others, the small shop filled with worn and battle-weary books that had seen more of the world in their time, he liked to say, than he had and, like himself, had finally come to rest, for a while at least.”
It might be hard to get unless you’ve absorbed that ambiance of random books hoofed into a foreign country and left behind by carefree, downsizing backpackers, of going into a bar or burger joint and seeing if they have a shelf of cast-off Penguin classics, or maybe you’ve had a mental conversation like this one my buddy Gord Sellar outlined:
“Huh, well, I suppose I could read some Tom Clancy, since this Alvin Toffler looks a little like a retread of his last book, and I’m not interested in the bodice ripper. I wish whoever bought the books I brought for trade-in would bring in a few of theirs so I’d have something to buy.”
It’s a world made of cast-offs. You find yourself reading anything you can find. And you’re reminded by how disposable books are (unless you’ve lived in a big city where you can regularly find books tossed out in the trash). They’re what most people leave behind when they divest themselves of access baggage.
Every city that boasts a marginally sized English speaking expat community will slowly start to accumulate books. Whether in a bar or a café, you’ll find a shelf. Tired old paperbacks, the hip authors from the decade before, the disposable pulp novels, and the ones someone read to improve themselves. Stuff you never knew existed like the works of Stephen Leather or the foreign to you analogs. (Quick, who is Australia’s answer to Michael Chabon? Australians, no helping.)
And if you’re a reader what happens? You accumulate more, and think, maybe I should consolidate the cast offs. Maybe I should be the person with the shelf instead of the shitty frathouse bar. And since I’m at it, I’ll make it a nice place to hang out. Maybe let people tutor here or get a cup of coffee.
And that’s how it happens.
Another English language bookstore gets born.
* I recognize expat is a loaded term. Right now my definition is an expat lives in a foreign country expecting to leave it at some point. An immigrant lives in a foreign country with the expectation of settling there. And there’s likely overlap between the two.
The Books Will Find You
I remember reading the opening of this weird SFF book back in high school where a guy’s kidnapped from the present and imprisoned in the future for a crime no one will tell him about. I never finished it. The thing I remember is the guy being interrogated at a table that had a holographic hand hovering above it. Anyway I set the book down or lost it or whatever, and probably couldn’t have told you who had written it – until today when I started reading Indoctrinaire by Christopher Priest. That’s the book. I’m not sure how it found me here in South Korea.
Patricia Anthony (1947 – 2013)
Patricia Anthony died last month, and for whatever reason the word has only been released now.
Anthony published a number of SF books throughout the 90s that read like grimmer versions of Philip K. Dick novels: deceptively easy to read, but grueling in style or subject matter. For an example of one of these check out Brother Termite. She later drifted away from SF in disappointment and took to writing screenplays. Supposedly there are a few unpublished novels that may or may not see the light of day.
One of my favorite reads from recent years was Anthony’s Flanders, a World War 1 magic realist novel that it’s a bit like Goodbye to All That mixed with the Last Temptation of Christ. That’s actually a rather dumb description, but the book was a delight to read. Both funny and horrifying.
“I was having a good sit-down myself, not the yellow squirt I get when the water’s bad, nor the dark goat-turd pebbles I get when the food’s not plentiful enough. No, this was a great, glorious golden cigar of a turd that felt fine and upstanding coming out, a British sort of turd. Major Dunn would have pinned a medal on it.”
Yeah, it’s a quote about poop. So what? It occurs in the middle of a book featuring trench warfare. When it happens the main character has seen some bad shit (pun intended), and the fact that he can still be pleased and make a joke about crapping hits you like a punch in the gut. You’re laughing, but there’s something more going on. You actually feel happy for the guy.
It’s a shame she’s gone.
August Books 2013
It was staycation. Here are the books I read on the couch.
1. Infidel (The Bel Dame Apocrypha #2) – Kameron Hurley
The Bel Dame Apocrypha has been my favorite SFF series from recent years. The books are an amazing blend of assassins, shape shifters, pistol-packing magicians, and giant insects on some sad sack, craptastic, hellscape planet. They have great world building and a great cast of characters, and I say both those things as someone who hates in-depth world building and large casts of characters.
2. The Record of a Quaker Conscience – Cyrus Pringle
Pringle was a Quaker and objected to the Civil War on religious grounds, refusing to pay anyone to be his substitute upon being drafted. He refused to fight and was sent to prison on one of the islands in Massachusetts Bay. Later he got moved down to Virginia where he ended being tortured. His case and that of his companions would reach Lincoln and he would excuse them from service. Later, Pringle would go on to become a renowned botanist making expeditions into the American South-West. The book is available via Project Gutenberg and you can read about Pringle on wikipedia.
3. Sword of Fire and Sea (Chaos Knight Book #1) – Erin Hoffman
An enjoyable summertime read that reminded me a lot of the enjoyable summertime reads of my youth. It’s secondary world fantasy with elemental magic, gryphons, and stalwart sea captains. Also Hoffman can summarize action so you don’t have to be led about by the hand.
4. Poets in a Landscape – Gilbert Highet
A series of biographies of Roman poets mixed with an Italian travel guide circa 1957. Highet’s a classicist of the urbane over-educated type, but he has a passionate love of his subject, an inviting style, and the ability to share why he feels so passionate about his subject matter. Plus, he gives the occasional “fuck yeah, books!” battle cry that I love. An example:
“History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet”
“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.”
5. A Pretty Mouth – Molly Tanzer
A collection of horror stories documenting the history of the decadent Calipash family. It can be read as a novel or historical inquiry, and while the stories might begin as pastiche, they rise above their source materials by subverting and playing irreverently with them. I definitely recommend it. It reminded me of Caitlin Keirnan’s Dandridge Cycle of stories.
6. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness – Edward Abbey
Great nature writing by a combative anarchist misanthrope, Abbey mixes an outdoorsman’s contradictory elitism (more people need to see nature – tourists ruin nature) with a poet’s eye, while reveling in the simple necessities of being a living and highly fallible creature on this ball of dirt we call home.
7. Memory – Linda Nagata
I totally enjoyed this book. It’s set in a world that might be a computer simulation, but also might not be since it’s set far enough in the future that the words they use to describe their existence might not completely match our definition for those words. It’s an adventure story about a young woman searching for her brother in a world haunted by a strange mist that reshapes the land each and every night.
Project GutenBLARG!
Every now and then I think of spending a whole year reading nothing but books on Project Gutenberg. I’m unsure if this would be a great idea or a terrible one. To this end I will download heaps of books and put them on my kindle. This is what happened yesterday, and while I don’t know if I’ll spend a whole year reading Gutenderp it’s likely a lot more forgettable Victoriana and Alexandre Dumas will enter onto my to be read pile.
The picture is from Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blog. I have dozens of screenshots taken from there. Unfortunately I can’t always remember the artists, so I’m not comfortable posting them. This picture is from this anti-Communist comic. After Comrade Colonel Sanders says this about the old books he burns the Bible.
Damn, Horace!
“Lonely people write letters, so that they can communicate with those whose eyes are turned elsewhere. Often such letters are merely negative, calls for sympathy, cries of despair. Often they are dreary personal reports, tedious self-analyses, lists of miniscule happenings within one tiny system.”
– From Poets In A Landscape by Gilbert Highet (the Horace chapter).
July Books
A bumper month for laying about on the couch reading!
1. Mindplayers – Pat Cadigan
In 1955, EC Comics launched a comic called “Psychoanalysis”, and it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect for a comic called Psychoanalysis with a nameless doc talking to people laying on a couch. <i>Mindplayers</i> is sort of like that comic, except it’s SF from 1992, so the psychoanalysis is done via VR you access directly through your optic nerves after you remove your eyeballs. The book has more an episodic than a three-act or whatever structure. I suspect it might be a fix-up. It’s not a problem, but it’s the novel’s style and expectations should be set accordingly.
Also lots of eyeballs get removed and that takes a bit of getting used to.
2. The Glorious Ones – Francine Prose
The Glorious Ones are a troupe of actors made up of archetypes and each tells their story, parading forth their dreams and obsessions. It’s set in 17th century Italy but you wouldn’t know it from reading it. One of those books about stories and the power of stories, probably not for everyone, but a refreshing read just the same largely because it is short.
3. Yellow Black Radio Broke-Down – Ishmael Reed
A pulpy irreverent satire of America’s founding with voodoo priests, drag queen cattle ranchers, nymphomaniacs, beatnik presidents, and the pope – in other words something to offend everyone. Definitely worth tracking down.
4. Status Anxiety – Alain De Botton
I suppose there are some folks out there that object to De Botton’s “pop” philosophical style and shake their heads at his conclusions. I’m not one of those people.
5. Hong Kong – Jan Morris
A fascinating read. I definitely recommend it even though it took me a few months to make my way through it. Hong Kong’s history is depicted in alternating chapters of past and present (1989), and as it is I’m curious if and how Morris has expanded the book in recent years since China regained control of the colony. Morris writes in a Mandarin (in the Cyril Connolly sense), somewhat gossipy style; she seems to know everything about everyone, and in a lot of ways lives up to her description of a student of British Imperialism. In more than a few sections I was reminded of China Mieville’s Embassytown.
6. The Discovery of Witches – Matthew Hopkins
Matthew Hopkins was an infamous 17th century Witch-finder active during the English Civil War who took it upon himself to hunt for witches around the area of Norfolk, all for a modest fee of course. This pamphlet contains the transcript of Hopkins’ interrogation at the hands of magistrates hoping to understand his qualifications. It’s largely a question and answer tract on Hopkins’ witch finding methods and casually brings up torture, imps, and the differences between devil’s marks and hemorrhoids. All in all if the magistrates sought to intimidate Hopkins with their question, they failed, because he turned their questions around and made the whole case an advertisement for his abilities and services.
You can download a copy at Project Gutenberg.
7. and 8. Babel-17/Empire Star – Samuel R. Delany
Two fun reads that play with SF adventure stories and have a neat relationship with each other. In the Babel-17 universe all the characters reference Empire Star and it’s character Comet Jo as he’s sort of the Harry Potter of the future.
9. Elisha Barber – E. C. Ambrose
A historical thriller with magic, warfare, and buckets and buckets of bodily fluids. Elisha Barber can be an exhausting read where all the character spin on their heels and snarl breathlessly instead of speaking. That said, I dug it.
10. Nightside, the Long Sun – Gene Wolfe
I used to make this joke about how I wished more secondary world novels featured mundane details, like, and this was my go-to example, I wanted to see how people bought groceries. Well, I have now read that novel and I liked it.
The whole story takes place over two days in a massive hollowed out intergalactic generation ship where a slum priest learns his parish was sold to a crime boss. The priest decides to break into the boss’s house and talk to him. It’s the dullest heist ever, but it’s pretty great too. Then there’s an exorcism, but before that the priest eats some green tomatoes. Nightside, the Long Sun has to be the most mundane of all mundane SFF novels ever (actually no, that prize goes to China Mountain Zhang). It’s… something. Unfortunately it’s not a stand alone novel.
Matheson’s Game
Richard Matheson died a few weeks back. He’s one of those writers that people know without realizing they know. Anyways, when he died I made this quip on facebook:
Richard Matheson has died. Parents, when your child comes home with a copy of ENDER’S GAME, just go ahead and knock that trash from their hands, and give them I AM LEGEND instead.
That pretty much sums up my feelings on Ender Wiggin.
June Books
Counting books finished, ‘cause no one cares about the books stacked up on the back of the hopper/beside the bed/couch.
1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman.
Oh wow. A book for adults by Neil Gaiman… which means it’s 10 pages of a sad man remembering being a sad kid, then a 170 pages of him as a sad kid and his adventures with the magical pixie dream girl that lived down the road, until finally ten more more pages of the sad man sighing while he looks at a body of water. Yeah, “for adults”… well, at least it was short.
2. The Mapmaker’s War – Ronlyn Domingue.
I hate bloated epic fantasy with a white-hot hatred that could blind the baby Jesus, and the fact that your standard fantasy novel nowadays is 500+ pages of grimdark neckbeardio “world building” only makes my blood boil. So when this book crossed my radar, likely via amazon algorithm, the first thing I did was check out the page count. It was less than 300 pages. That was enough to make me want to read it.
Domingue’s The Mapmaker’s War reads like a blend of William Morris, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Jeanette Winterson mixing social allegory and utopian yearnings with keen-edged, descriptive prose. Fantasy fans deeply embedded in the genre will likely view the book with suspicion, since it’s “literary” in unacceptable ways: 2nd person narrator, unconventional dialogue tags, and lots of summary. Don’t be one of those people. Give it a read. It’s refreshing to read a secondary world fantasy novel completely orthogonal to the genre.
3. The Christmas Witch – M. Rickert.
So I have a stack of old SF magazines from the past 20 years and I’ve been slowly flipping through them. Most stories are meh, but some are not meh. This is a non-meh story, er, novelette. What a novelette is I can’t be bothered to care, likely it has to do with word count and is only important during award seasons. Anyway…
This is a creepy story about a creepy kid set in a small New England town where you’re not sure if the fantasy elements are real or imagined, and honestly, that hardly matters unless you’re a pedantic dope. It’s Stephen King country, but it’s not. If you have a stack of old of SF magazines from the past 20 years sitting around the house, this story is definitely worth checking out.
4. The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe.
A reread. Three interlinked novellas, the first is a coming of age story set in a brothel run by a genetic engineer, the second is a “tale” told by aliens about the events leading up to the arrival of intergalactic colonists, the third is a security “report” about a prisoner in a remote prison, who may or may not be a shape-shifting alien. If you’ve never read the book, I recommend it.
5. Meet Me in the Moon Room – Ray Vukcevich.
A short story collection by turns funny, sad, whimsical, and absurd. Most of the stories hone in on small moments and instances like an alien possession while folding one’s laundry, and they conclude and let you go almost as if they were jokes. My favorite story was “Beatniks with Banjos”.
6. Empty Space: A Haunting – M. John Harrison.
Some folks read books to be entertained, others to have a good experience. I read books for their mind-altering capabilities, and M. John Harrison delivers the goods. Definitely not for everyone, but if it’s for you it’ll twist around the way you look at the world.
Yesterweird 