Dangling Conversations

Posted 06 Sep, 2006 at 20:24 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

Had it not been for a stray comment in Neil Gaiman's blog, I might never have realised that Susanna Clark, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, also wrote one of my favourite stories in the Sandman: Book of Dreams anthology. I haven't picked up the volume since shortly after the Great Flood in my apartment over six years ago, and while I remember the story (Stopp't-Clock Yard) vividly, I had nothing to hang the author's name on in my mind at the time.

(Looking in the book now, it turns out that I still sort of follow the authors of my other two favourite stories; I've been reading Steven Brust for quite some time, and John M. Ford is one of the posters on Making Light.)

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Posted 18 Jan, 2006 at 16:07 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

In case you're on the look-out for "speculative fiction"...

• Bellwether by Connie Willis. This is my second attempt at Willis' work -- I hated The Doomsday Book, finding it tedious and full of characters I just couldn't bring myself to care about -- and this one went a lot better. Lots of neat bits about fads and the nature of scientific discovery, with not terribly inaccurate hints of chaos theory dropped in the mix.
• Idlewild and Edenborn by Nick Sagan. Neil Gaiman characterized the first of these as "Zelazny's Amber meets the Matrix", and there's certainly elements of both. (Idlewild starts with the first-person narrator waking up without any memory of who he is, which is pretty blatant as homage goes.) I didn't like how Idlewild ended, but the sequel puts it into some perspective. There's a lot of good world-building here, and some clever auctorial games.
• The Alera Codex by Jim Butcher. I came to these books by familiarity with the author's noir-fantasy series The Dresden Files, which I heartily recommend to anyone else who likes noir-fantasy. (If you have no idea what I mean by that, then check them out, or Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, to see what I'm talking about.) I'm not as fond of these books -- which are more high-fantasy in tone, but with a good richness of plot and political complexity; think Guy Gavriel Kay, or Jacqueline Carey, or Robin Hobb -- but they're still definitely worth reading.

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Posted 12 Jan, 2006 at 14:22 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

For whatever reason, it seems like I can't go more than a fortnight or so without reading someone or other talking about The DaVinci Code; most recently, a thread on Crooked Timber about Judas revisionism. I've not read the book, and really have little inclination to read the book, but maybe some of you have.

If so, could you tell me what that book has that Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco does not? Or is there no serious comparison to be had between the books? Is Dan Brown just another of Belbo's lunatics?

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Posted 29 Sep, 2005 at 16:57 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

I read Long Way Down -- Nick Hornby's latest, a jolly little tale of four people who meet while standing on a roof with the intent of jumping -- a few weeks ago, and had some trouble articulating my reactions. Now that it's been mulling for a while, let's see if I can do any better.

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Posted 24 Mar, 2005 at 09:19 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

I'm feeling like there's not enough short fiction in my life at present. What collections of short stories would folks commend to my attention?

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Posted 27 Feb, 2005 at 16:50 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

John Brunner is a science-fiction author that anyone who's interested in SF should read. He writes social SF for the most part; what there is in the way of technological gadgetry is mostly subordinate to questions of how people -- large groups of people -- manage to live together under different circumstances. Often the results of his ponderings are dystopic; unlike the classic dystopias, though, Brunner almost always allows for a thread of hope in his broken worlds.

Brunner had a ten-year period, roughly centered around 1970, of banging out one classic novel after another. Probably his best known are the award-winning Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which looks at population pressure, and The Shockwave Rider (1975), which now looks like an immediate precursor to the cyberpunk movement. I've been finding and reading other Brunner books from this period, and a little while ago I picked up The Squares of the City.

Squares deals with mind control: not in the sense of direct thought control or zombification or anything like that, but through more subtle vectors. Advertising and propoganda. Subliminal imagery. Base manipulation. The protagonist's craft is that of "traffic engineer", and he's brought to a Latin American utopia of a city in order to eliminate certain unplanned, undesirable features of the city. Throughout the story one finds chess imagery, echoing both the main character's profession (of subtly manipulating circumstances to desired ends) and the discussions of the role of media in shaping public opinion.

The story works on several levels. At its base, it's a narration of a conflict where neither side seems to be entirely pure or correct, and so it's interesting purely for the reason. At the same time, it's a meditation on freedom and manipulation and responsibility. And above all that, is a beautiful bit of structural play which reveals itself as the book progresses. It's worth reading, but do yourself a favour: if you grab a copy of it, skip over the preface (written by Emmanuel Laskar, a chess-master); it doesn't say much that Brunner himself doesn't say in the afterword, and it gives away something of the game.

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Posted 14 Feb, 2005 at 15:18 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

I've tried writing this review several times in the past few days, and it just hasn't been gelling. Let's see if this time goes any better.

The first thing you should know about OMW: John Scalzi has clearly done his homework in Heinlein 101. And 102. Probably all the way up to the graduate-level. This novel -- his first to be picked up by a publisher -- has been compared to Starship Troopers by numerous reviewers, for a number of obvious reasons. There's a similar setting, for instance: Earth has colonized space, found that it's not all friendly out there, and so there's a kind of space-marine force. If you (as an Earth-born) want the stars, then you have to join up to fight for some period of time.

Which brings us to the first point of bifurcation: as the title suggests, the Colonial Defence Forces are only interested in the elderly: people who've lived life, survived to a ripe old age, and thus might have some store of wits and wisdom. They can -- and will -- rebuild you.

OMW also touches on some of the same themes as Starship Troopers: the value of a strong military (as well as its drawbacks) and its relations with civilian life, war as a transformative force, comradeship. I've seen some refer to this as an anti-war book, which I don't think is entirely accurate, though I certainly wouldn't characterize it as hawkish.

The writing itself is a joy. The narrative is first-person, matter-of-fact about wonders and absurdities alike. (I can remember laughing out loud at least twice while reading the book.) While the main character isn't a stand-in for the author, certain aspects of the perspective will seem familiar to any readers of Scalzi's blog.

Even the drawbacks of the book are Heinleinesque. One of my principal complaints about Heinlein is that his characterizations tend to be sketchy at best; given a block of dialogue with attributions removed from any of his books, I would probably be unable to tell you which character was saying what. (F'rinstance, can anyone tell Jubal's women apart in Stranger in a Strange Land by their speeches alone?) Scalzi's got some of the same sorts of problems here, I feel; his principal characters have quirks that stand in for personality traits. (By contrast, the "bad guy" characters, the ones that we're not supposed to sympathise with, all stand out in my mind very distinctly. This could be because it's easier to describe what you don't like about a person than it is to describe what you like.)

Still, highly recommended. There's one major head-scratcher in the plot (which, admittedly, I only picked up on after reflection) that'll probably be explained in the sequel, The Ghost Brigades; I, for one, eagerly await.

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Posted 05 Feb, 2005 at 15:10 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

For all of you out there who're wondering what I'm reading these days...

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Posted 13 Dec, 2004 at 17:49 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

So we haven't had any Books entries in far too long (considering how much the lot of us read); I'm trying to put off grading; and I see Wendy's reading Haruki Murakami stories again. And thus: an excuse to blog.

I can't remember whether Wendy introduced me to Murakami's work, or whether we were both introduced by our mutual friend, the Former Ponytail-Boy. In any event, I ended up reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles a few years ago, and I was... a little overwhelmed. Probably because I was doing a lot of the reading on airplanes, buses, and the like; I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I think this was around the time of Thanksgiving and/or Christmas vacations, and I wasn't driving around that year. Anyhow, it's a book that I think would reward more concentration than I was capable of giving it, I think. Unexplained things kept happening, characters would appear that we may or may not have already seen, and I kept feeling that I was continually half a lap behind.

I didn't think about Murakami again for another few years, until I found myself in Illinois about a year ago, waiting around at a friend's place with nothing particular to do while he was away doing his job. Lying on the side-table by the sofa was another Murakami novel: Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The name rang a vague bell, the title intrigued me, and so I spent the morning on the book. And it was, I thought, fabulous. The chapters alternate, as the title suggests, between hard-boiled Wonderland -- the real world, imagined through a noir, vaguely cyberpunk sort of lens -- and the End of the World, which isn't a place so much as a dreamlike state. Gradually the connection between the two worlds becomes clear; it's a book that I think I'll have to read again sometime, just to re-evaluate the earlier chapters using later revelations as a guide.

Both of the books I've mentioned are more or less surreal, but some of his earlier novels are more naturalistic. Norwegian Wood is a coming-of-age story that feels very autobiographical, at least in parts; it's about young love, and music, and death, and lots and lots of sex. South of the Border, West of the Sun partakes of many of the same elements, but whereas the former novel is about an adolescent becoming an adult, Border is more about settling into one's adult life: making the choice to settle, put down roots, eschew the temptation to throw it all away when something shiny comes along.

I agree with Wendy that most of his perspective characters (all of the novels I've mentioned are wholely or partially in first-person) seem very much the same; for the most part, they tend to be acted upon in the stories, and are rarely protagonists in their own stories. His depictions of women, as well, seem to fall into a small number of basic categories. I'm not sure to what extent all this is deliberate -- autobiographical, as Wendy suggests, or maybe he's playing games with archetypes and perspectives.

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Posted 05 Oct, 2004 at 16:50 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

Last week I gave a talk to the undergraduate math club here, and was rewarded with a gift certificate to Borders. So last night I go to take advantage if it, and happened upon a novel that I've heard good things about: Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Between the gift card and the discount coupon I had, the book was more or less free, so I figured why not?

So far it's a lovely read. I've got something of a weakness for pastiches of nineteenth-century English literature -- as readers of my other blog have seen -- so I was predisposed to like this book. If I had to choose a single adjective to describe the work, I'd pick meticulous; Ms. Clarke is engaged in writing a totally fictitious history, complete with footnotes and references to other (nonexistent) works, and her attention to detail in this endeavour is astounding.

Like Steven Brust's Phoenix Guards books and Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, the narrator is as much a party of the story as any of the characters, while not actually being part of the action. The witty comments about the characters and the action, dropped blandly into the narrative flow... the underlying assumption that much of what we're reading about, say, the Raven King (a magician who ruled northern England for three hundred years) is well-known fact, taught in schools... to me, these little touches are nearly worth the price of admission all by themselves.

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