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What I Read This Month: October 2009

October 31, 2009 at 2:37 pm | In Books, Monthly Reading | 2 Comments
Tags: Dorothy Bryant, Fantasy, Madeleine L'Engle, Margaret Atwood, Nancy Farmer, P D James, Science fiction, Speculative fiction, Young adult

Cover of The Children Of Men

This was an excellent reading month. I started a new project to read more science fiction written by women (which I am blogging about), and that inspired me to read a lot of high-quality books.

First up, I actually bought and read a brand-new book, which is unusual for me. I finished Margaret Atwood’s excellent companion piece to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood. It is set during the same dystopian/apocalyptic period as Oryx and Crake but follows two female characters who are members of a religious-environmental cult called God’s Gardeners (there are even hymns). I have to say that I enjoyed this novel even more than Oryx, although it had the same kind of abrupt, unexplained ending that led me to believe a third novel might be planned. I wrote a much lengthier review here.

Two rereads this month: The Children of Men by P.D. James and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Both were as good as I remembered, although I was surprised to discover how much the film version of Children of Men veered away from the novel (it had been years since I read it). I was remarking to a friend that my 19-month-old son wasn’t really talking yet, and she compared him to Wrinkle’s Charles Wallace — definitely a compliment, that.

Some new books as well: The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant and The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. The first was billed as sci fi, but really it is a utopian fantasy. It was still quite good, although it struck me as a little naive. The second is intended for young adults, but I found it enthralling and not nearly as simplistic as most YA books I read.

I am currently taking a departure from this month’s trend and reading Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island for my book club. Since I am a bit of an Anglophile, and I love anything that gently pokes fun at the British, I am already enjoying it very much.

Roundup: 5 books read (click the titles for my full review or reading notes).

The Year of the Flood, The Children of Men, A Wrinkle in Time, The House of the Scorpion

The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You

My rating scale:

1 star: Abandoned before finishing. Don’t waste your time.
2 stars: Poor. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
3 stars: Average. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.
4 stars: Great. Push it on your friends and family.
5 stars: Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

Disclaimer: My ratings are very personal and may have little to do with the book’s artistic or commercial merit, or its place in the literary canon. Rather, the rating reflects how the story, characters and writing spoke to me and augmented my understanding of the world.

I Want to Live Forever: An Immortality Reading List

September 24, 2009 at 1:05 pm | In Books, Reading Lists | 6 Comments
Tags: Bram Stoker, Douglas Adams, Fantasy, Immortality, Jonathan Swift, JRR Tolkien, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, Orson Scott Card, Richard K Morgan, Science fiction, Tom Robbins

Image via Wikipedia

Not too long ago, I wrote a post on one of my other blogs musing about our eternal quest to live longer, preferably forever. While the search for the secret to immortality probably goes back to when we first figured out the whole death thing, and once took the form of such magical interventions as the Fountain of Youth and the Holy Grail, now it is on medical science that we pin our hopes for life everlasting. Just yesterday, some scientist came out and said he thought immortality was possible to achieve within the next 20 years via nanotechnology. I guess we’d better hurry up and do something about global warming, then, or we’re going to be not only immortal, but also uncomfortably hot and wet.

Speculative fiction writers have of course been writing about immortality since writing began. While the mechanics of how it is achieved is of interest, what’s even more compelling is the effect that becoming immortal would have on our essential human nature, which is defined by our consciousness of our own mortality. Here is a list of books that have tackled the theme of everlasting life and its ramifications.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels introduced the island of Immortals. Unfortunately, the Immortals continued to age, becoming more demented and debilitated until they were a great nuisance to everyone else. Too bad they didn’t have retirement homes back then.

The immortal vampire was brought to life (so to speak) by Bram Stoker inDracula. Everlasting youth and life is the reward, but the price is pretty steep: you have to drink blood, you never get to go outside in the daylight and basically you become an inhuman, evil monster. And so the great tradition of vampire fiction began, which continues unabated to this day (as tired as some of us may be getting of it).

Another type of immortal being, the Elves, are major characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Elf Galadriel falls in love with a human she must inevitably watch grow old and die, a terrible plight indeed (but I think I’d rather be the Elf than the human, personally). The Elves actually envy our mortality, since they can’t ever get away from millennia of bad memories of war and never-ending quests and wizards gone bad.

In Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins‘ characters simply decide to become immortal. They have a regimen that they follow, involving baths, beets and sex, but choosing not to die is the important part. There really is no downside, except getting tired of the whole routine after a while.

The question of what to do with all that free time is brought up in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, in which the character Wowbagger becomes immortal accidentally. He decides to insult every living thing in the universe, alphabetically. It’s important to have a project.

In Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, immortality is achieved by downloading all of your memories and knowledge into a new body, preferably a young clone of your old body. The rich have access to the technology, the poor not so much. And criminals may find themselves put in cold storage, only to wake up decades later in a completely unfamiliar body.

In The Mars Trilogy and Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson posits a treatment that continuously reverses the effects of aging, enabling people to live hundreds of years. This makes it possible for humanity to complete enormous projects, such as populating the solar system, but there are losses too. Relationships become less meaningful, children are increasingly rare and alien due to population controls, and precious memories are eventually lost. A lot of people get a wicked case of the blues as a result.

Immortality is achieved in Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga by just sleeping through long periods of life, and waking up for short periods. While living very long lives, these sleepers become disconnected from all meaningful relationships and even from their history and culture. Is it worth it to live a long time if you’re unconscious for most of it?

Finally, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut gives an alternate take on how immortality might work. When Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time,” he essentially relives his experiences over and over, in random order. There is no end to it, so no true death as we would think of it, but it’s not exactly an ideal life either. The aliens in the novel view a life as a whole all at once, rather than moving through it linearly.

Can you recommend any additional books about immortality? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

What I Read This Month: August 2009

August 31, 2009 at 1:02 pm | In Books, Monthly Reading | 2 Comments
Tags: Science fiction, Ursula K Le Guin, Fantasy, Nick Hornby, Essays, John Brunner, Ken Grimwood, Evan Wright, Valerie Martin, American literature

Image via Wikipedia

Hi there! I am trying a different format for my monthly roundup, because I was getting a bit bored with the old listy format. This is a bit more talky, and I hope you like it.

It was a very good month, as I read three books that I can highly recommend. Ken Grimwood’s Replay is contemporary science fiction that asks what if you could live your life over and over again (full review). I also reread the fantasy classic A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin and rediscovered a childhood favorite (full review). Property by Valerie Martin is an acerbic little novel that takes the point of view of a woman slaveholder in Antebellum Louisiana. All three are books you can down in one gulp, perfect for end-of-summer reading.

I have also been reading Nick Hornby’s last collection of essays about what he’s been reading, Shakespeare Wrote for Money. Hornby’s essays didn’t inspire me to start journaling my own reading — I was already doing that — but they did get me to take my journaling more seriously. While this final collection wasn’t as strong as the previous two volumes, The Polysyllabic Spree or Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, there were several genuine laugh-out-loud moments. Once again, I am struck by how much wittier Hornby is in this column than in his actual novels. All three books are available in handsome editions from McSweeney’s.

Back to science fiction, I gave John Brunner another try and read his ’70s dystopian classic The Shockwave Runner, which some say is the forerunner to cyperpunk. I don’t think I like Brunner’s writing style very much, unfortunately. He seems purposefully obtuse, and I don’t relish the feeling of things whizzing over my head. Still, there are some good ideas in Shockwave Runner, and I actually finished it (as opposed to Stand on Zanzibar). I can say that it is worth reading, just.

I only abandoned one book: Generation Kill by Evan Wright. It wasn’t because the writing wasn’t good; it was very good. But I couldn’t stand reading about all the horrible deaths of children. I have never supported the Iraq War; I don’t need to be convinced.

Roundup: 5 books read, 1 abandoned (click the titles for my full reviews/reading notes)

Replay, A Wizard of Earthsea, Property

Shakespeare Wrote for Money, The Shockwave Runner

Generation Kill (abandoned)

My rating scale:

1 star: Abandoned before finishing. Don’t waste your time.
2 stars: Poor. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
3 stars: Average. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.
4 stars: Great. Push it on your friends and family.
5 stars: Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

Worth Reading: A Wizard of Earthsea

August 30, 2009 at 11:42 am | In Books, Reviews | 3 Comments
Tags: Ursula K Le Guin, Fantasy, Series, Bildungsroman, Earthsea

Image via Wikipedia

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)

In this young adult fantasy, a young wizard releases an unnamed evil into the world of Earthsea during a spell that goes wrong and comes of age in a quest to defeat it.

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.

–from the Creation of Éa

I’m sure I read A Wizard of Earthsea as a young adult, although I didn’t remember it very well. But like the best novels written for young people, it holds up excellently in this second reading as an adult.

In Earthsea, Le Guin has fully realized a land of islands, where people live as much on the sea as on the land, where there are dragons and wizards and magic. As a young boy, Sparrowhawk discovers his talent for magic when he protects his village from invasion by creating an obscuring fog. He is apprenticed to a wizard on his home island, then goes to the school for wizards across the sea, where his powers become evident. But his hubris gets the better of him, and in attempting a dangerous spell, he looses a nameless shadow in the world, which is bound to him and determined to possess him.

The rest of the story describes Sparrowhawk’s coming-of-age quest to learn how to defeat the shadow, and to learn who he is. Le Guin’s simple but evocative prose brings her imaginary world of Earthsea to life, and while reading this short book, I felt like I was traveling along with Sparrowhawk among the islands’ rocky cliff faces, desolate moors and heaving oceans. Whether rediscovering Earthsea or visiting it for the first time, the trip is worthwhile.

The Dark Tower Series: From Start to Finish

July 21, 2009 at 11:56 am | In Books, Reviews | 12 Comments
Tags: Dark Tower, Fantasy, Horror, Metafiction, Series, Stephen King, Western

Cover of The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)

The Dark Tower Series Books 1-7 by Stephen King

If you didn’t read the Dark Tower books as they came out, entering the series now can seem daunting. While the first book in the series, The Gunslinger, is relatively slim, the books just keep getting thicker and thicker — and there are seven of them to get through. But I think the journey through King’s epic is well worth your time, especially if you enjoy novels that mix genres (science fiction, fantasy, western, horror), present a new spin on old tropes (the quest story, parallel worlds), and even experiment with metafiction. The Dark Tower is the pinnacle of King’s writing career, and I think the series incorporate the best of his ideas and themes (as well as some failures). Here is my guide to the series.

The Gunslinger was first published in 1982, but a revised and expanded edition was released in 2003 that restores a few cut scenes, adds some important foreshadowing and cleans up some inconsistencies with the later novels. The slimmest volume in the series, and the best written, The Gunslinger has one of the truly great opening lines:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

In The Gunslinger, we meet Roland, King’s antihero, and enter his world, a “world that has moved on.” We also learn of his quest to reach the Dark Tower, Roland’s obsessive goal that drives the entire series. The book is haunting and spare, and if you were only going to read one Dark Tower book, this would be the one. Just try not to continue, though, when you reach the end.

For me, the strongest books in the series after The Gunslinger are The Drawing of the Three (Volume II) and The Wastelands (Volume III). In these books, Roland is putting together his ka-tet, the group of people who will travel with him on his quest, and he first crosses from his world into ours (or a world very much like ours). The suspense in these two books is ramped up high; I have reread both several times and still could not put them down. Many readers would also name Volume IV, Wizard and Glass, as their favorite because it tells Roland’s back story: how he first became a gunslinger, his first love and what happened to her, and how his kingdom of Gilead was brought down. I find Wizard and Glass to be a little long-winded but still highly enjoyable.

The fifth and sixth installments, Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, are probably the weakest links. In Wolves of the Calla, King really crosses into metafictional territory, spicing it with cross-references — and even one major character — from his other works, as well as elements from Marvel comics, Star Wars and Harry Potter. There is a lot going on in these two novels, maybe a bit too much for some readers. But having journeyed this far, it seems a shame to stop now, and both are still great fun, especially Wolves, which features a spaghetti Western-style showdown at the end. I do have to say that these books introduce King’s most audacious twist of all, which I won’t spoil. Some readers see this as a shocking and arrogant bit of hubris, although I look at it not only as an interesting experiment with reality within fiction, but also a culmination of themes King has been writing about for a long time. It may not be completely successful, but it certainly is something new.

The last book, The Dark Tower, has deeply divided fans. It is the heftiest of all the volumes (with the possible exception of Wizard and Glass), but you can’t stop if you’ve made it this far. This novel is a mass of contradictions: absurd and moving, deeply satisfying and completely unsatisfying in its long-awaited conclusion to Roland’s quest, disappointing and ultimately redeeming. Of course, King kills off a bunch of major characters, which I am not spoiling because that was foreshadowed all along, but don’t forget Jake’s haunting line from Volume 1:

Go on, then; there are other worlds than these.

And there certainly are.

Several aspects of Volume VII border on the ridiculous. It does go on a little too long, and at some point, you’re ready for the Dungeons and Dragons escapades to stop and the serious story to resume. But the ending makes up for it, in my opinion. I won’t give it away, but I imagine I’m one of the few readers who didn’t howl in frustration and throw the book against the wall when we find out what happens to Roland. It takes quite a bit of musing to unravel the tangled web that King has spun of story upon story, world interconnected with world, and that’s good enough to satisfy me. I won’t say that The Dark Tower is my favorite in the series — the first three books are far better — but I will say that King wrote an ending I never saw coming, and that’s why I liked it so much.

The Comic Book Adaptations of Stephen King (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)
Hell Is Repetition: The Theme of Cycles in Science Fiction (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)
Damon Lindelof Compares ‘Dark Tower’ Adaptation Process To ‘Watchmen’ (splashpage.mtv.com)

Book News and Views

June 24, 2009 at 10:30 am | In Books, On the Web | 1 Comment
Tags: E-book, Fantasy, JD Salinger, Science fiction, Stephen King

Stephen King via last.fm

Here is where my web travels have taken me lately:

E-books again — people can’t stop talking about them. Now SF Signal discusses why e-book reader manufacturers are missing the point when they try to capture the experience of reading a “real” book.
The Biblio Brat has a nice essay about whether Holden Caulfield is still a relevant character for today’s young readers. I love Catcher in the Rye, but maybe it is time to update school reading lists with some more modern selections. The coming-of-age story is universal, so I am sure that there are many fine books that have been published in the last decade or so to choose from.
Things Mean a Lot has a great essay about why she reads fantasy. I could certainly say very similar things about why I read science fiction, another much-maligned genre.
Over at Bloggasm, there is analysis on whether sci-fi publisher Tor is positioning itself as a portal and bookstore for science fiction and fantasy from all publishers. If so, I think this is great news. Tor’s blog is fun to read, and I would love having a one-place stop to fulfill my genre needs.
Finally, the AV Club recommends some good entry points into Stephen King’s gigantic oeuvre. If you are unaware of who Stephen King is, he’s just this guy who writes horror books, you know? I agree with most of their recommendations, although I often recommend The Dead Zone because I think it’s fairly accessible to non-horror readers, with just enough supernatural stuff and a really gripping plot. By the way, don’t read the comments unless you want the endings of most of King’s major works spoiled for you.

Monthly Reading: April 2009

April 29, 2009 at 9:54 am | In Books, Monthly Reading, Reviews | 1 Comment
Tags: Dan Ronco, Fantasy, Food and cooking, Gregory Maguire, JK Rowling, Mark Bittman

Cover of "Food Matters: A Guide to Consci...

Cover via Amazon

This month was just average, considering I abandoned one book and another is intended for children. What can I say? I have a one-year-old. Click the title links for my reviews or reading notes.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire — fantasy

Food Matters by Mark Bittman — food and cooking

Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling — fantasy

Unholy Domain by Dan Ronco — abandoned

A note about Unholy Domain: I received this book for review from the author, and I did give it a fair shake. Unfortunately, the writing did not live up to my standards, and I decided not to finish it. For that reason, I will not be reviewing it. It is a techno-thriller written in a pot-boiler style. If you think you would like this book better than me, I’m happy to pass on my copy to you to review, so leave me a note in the comments; right now, it is posted in my inventory at BookMooch, so first come, first served.

My rating scale:

1 star: Abandoned before finishing. Don’t waste your time.
2 stars: Poor. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
3 stars: Average. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.
4 stars: Great. Push it on your friends and family.
5 stars: Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

Here are reviews of favorite books gathered from around the book blogosphere:

The Hours reviewed at A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao reviewed at Age 30+ A Lifetime of Books
Ender’s Game reviewed at At Home With Books
We Have Always Lived in the Castle reviewed at Book Addiction
Sentient Developments explores posthuman and technological themes in Watchmen

Worth Reading: Wicked

April 16, 2009 at 3:30 pm | In Books, Reviews | 3 Comments
Tags: Fantasy, Gregory Maguire, Oz, Parallel literature, Series

Cover of "Wicked: The Life and Times of t...

Cover via Amazon

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (1995)

Wicked, our book club’s selection this month, was not a book I expected to enjoy. It is a retelling of the Oz story from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West, beginning with her birth and childhood and ending with her infamous death by water bucket. I am not a fan of the whole Oz story-verse generally, but I did enjoy Wicked, very much.

Maguire has transformed his subject matter from children’s adventure to something much funnier, more satirical and definitely more adult. His version of Oz is a dangerous and corrupt place, ruled by a despot with an iron fist. The three Witches — Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who was born with green skin and a decidedly anti-social disposition; her sister, Nessarose, who was born without arms and grew up to be a religious fanatic; and her college roommate, Glinda, who is a bit of a dingbat — attend university together as young ladies. There they are manipulated by their headmistress into becoming Adepts, pawns of the Wizard who unwittingly help him maintain his control in the regions where they hold sway. Elphaba, even at the end, has no idea how she has been used, even when Dorothy, another stooge, quite accidentally douses her with that handy bucket. Wicked is, quite surprisingly, a novel filled with political intrigue and dark humor, and is a lot of fun to read.

Monthly Reading: March 2009

April 1, 2009 at 10:15 am | In Monthly Reading, Reviews | 4 Comments
Tags: Barbara Kingsolver, Chris Adrian, Fantasy, Historical fiction, John Brunner, John Gardner, Nancy Horan, Post-apocalypse

Cover of The Children's Hospital

The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian — post-apocalyptic

Grendel by John Gardner — fantasy

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan — historical fiction

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver — abandoned

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner — abandoned

My rating scale:

1 star: Abandoned before finishing. Don’t waste your time.
2 stars: Poor. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
3 stars: Average. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.
4 stars: Great. Push it on your friends and family.
5 stars: Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

Elsewhere on the web, here are some other reviews of a few of my favorites:

Book vs. Film: Watchmen (The A.V. Club)
The Remains of the Day (A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook)
Ender’s Game (A Striped Armchair)

Worth Reading: Grendel

March 29, 2009 at 9:46 am | In Books, Reviews | 1 Comment
Tags: Beowulf, European mythology, Fantasy, John Gardner, Mythology, Parallel literature

Image via Wikipedia

Grendel by John Gardner (1971)

The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant. I blink. I stare in horror. “Scat!” I hiss. “Go back to your cave, go back to your cowshed–whatever.” He cocks his head like an elderly, slow-witted king, considers the angles, decides to ignore me. I stamp. I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl a skull-size stone at him. He will not budge. I shake my two hairy fists at the sky and I let out a howl so unspeakable that the water at my feet turns sudden ice and I myself am left uneasy. But the ram stays; the season is upon us. And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war.

The pain of it! The stupidity!

Grendel is a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view. The monster is an outsider who spies on men from trees and cliffs, able to understand them and even speak a rudimentary form of their language, so he knows he is related to them. But when he tries to join them, he is attacked and driven away. He finds the cave of an ancient dragon, and they have a conversation. Because the dragon can see all time at once, rather than linearly, he shows Grendel his bleak fate, as well as mankind’s ultimate end, which he says no one can change or prevent. Caught in an existential malaise following this conversation, Grendel goes on a years-long killing spree and delights in humiliating his victims. Yet he seems almost relieved when an unnamed hero arrives from the sea with the sole aim of hunting Grendel down.

Although short, Grendel was a tough novel to get into. As a solitary character, the story takes place mainly in Grendel’s head, and sometimes his philosophical meanderings are hard to follow. But after Grendel talks to the dragon, I became fascinated. The discussion about time, fate and free will touches on themes I’ve been reading and thinking about a lot lately (such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Watchmen, The Children’s Hospital and even Lost). I could identify with Grendel’s inner turmoil, and I wanted to know how — or if — he would resolve it.

John Gardner is almost a mythical writer for me. I read and loved his dark but funny fairy tales as a children, such as Dragon, Dragon: “Dragon, dragon, how do you do? I’ve come from the king to murder you.” Gardner died young in a motorcycle accident, and now these books are very hard to find. Because of my childhood love for Gardner’s writings, I felt that his most famous novel, Grendel, deserved a very careful read, and I think it paid off.

You will probably most enjoy Grendel if you are already familiar with Beowulf. If you like books that expound on classic works of literature and present a different point of view, or books with challenging philosophical themes, then you shouldn’t overlook this gem.