I've been off books for a couple weeks now and can't seem to figure out why. After Chabon, I polished off A Farewell to Arms which my junior/senior class was reading in school. I've been wondering if Hemingway is the cause of my literary doldrums. I've always loved the beautiful simplicity of The Old Man and Sea - I can see why it got him the Nobel. And I've heard amazing things about A Farewell to Arms. In fact, it's the only Hemingway I've managed to finish in the last decade; For Whom the Bells Tolls fell by the wayside twice and The Sun Also Rises never got off the runway.
So, I more or less enjoyed AFtA - the ending is just so damn brutal but beautiful at the same time, but I haven't gotten into anything since then. I'm reading a non-fiction book (yes, it does happen from time to time) about the Templer Knights. It started out brilliantly, but I've since lost interest (as happens with most non-fictioners). And I haven't felt anything about books since. And this lack of feeling has got me worried. I usually have an aching need to be reading something, to be living in someone else's world or just their head even if it's only for 20 minutes a day. I even have a Didius Falco mystery, my standby series for the last 3 years, sitting on the table ready to go at a moment's notice, yet I haven't so much as looked at the cover.
I went through my comics recently to see if I needed a change of milieu, so to speak, but I haven't really gotten into any of the oldies or any of the unreads yet either. What is wrong? Perhaps nothing is wrong and my mind just needs some sort of reading vacation, though I feel like this explanation is a bit of a stretch. If anyone is reading this and has any insights on the situation, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think. Otherwise, I shall just go around blaming Ernest's overly-stoic depiction of manhood for a while, until I finally find something worth perusing or give up on literacy altogether.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Gentlemen of the Road
Michael Chabon manages to both amaze and annoy on a regular basis. Navigating his dense prose suggests something akin to Odysseus as he made his way past Skylla and Karybdis. Or perhaps the Sirens are a better example since they are enticing much in the way that Chabon's novels are. Among other things, he has taken on Sherlock Holmes, comic books, and professional writers and college, all of which are quite dear to my heart. And like the Sirens, he deftly manages to suck you in via temptation before you realize that he's secretly out to drown you. The man is the William Faulkner of the 21st century. Ernest Hemingway would punch him in the nose rather than buy him a drink. And yet, and yet, like those damnable Sirens, he is hard to resist.
I recently picked up Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon's slightly cynical homage to the adventure tales of authors like Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. Like his predecessors, Chabon's story is episodic, each chapter is fairly self-contained and has a plot all its own. In fact, the novel was serialized in the New York Times Magazine before it was collected together and released in novel form (though I didn't know this when I picked the book up). He even got a comic artist to draw occasional pictures from the text in black and white. I particularly loved this touch since many of my earliest reads, including handed-down Big Little Books, used black and white sketches to compliment the narrative. In fact, I wish more books had pictures, especially for high school readers whose visualization skills seem to be weaker than previous generations.
But I digress. Gentlemen of the Road is a great action-adventure book, even if the prose is murkier than Mexico City on a summer day. Chabon's story focuses on two brilliant and inspired characters who thieve and connive their way through 9th century Khazaria (think of the region North of the Black and Caspian Seas). Yet a dethroned and predominantly annoying princeling manages to worm his way into their hearts and bring out the best of their morality and their derring-do. The characters - Amram and Zelikman - are a disneyfied version of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction. They roam their world with a deeply ironic morality that nonetheless includes frequent use of violence and occasionally drugs to keep things lively. Their horses have names, which aren't nearly as cool as the names and lineages of their weapons. Yet both are crucial as they navigate through marauding Vikings, a disenfranchised Moslem army, and various encounters with elephants. There's also a brothel that offers occasional respite, which no action-novel should ever be without - the brothel that is, though respite too is necessary. Not bad for a contemporary serialized novel. There's even a little redemption in the end. All in all, a highly recommended read from one of the finest if slightly loquacious authors of the last 20 years. [Just so you know: on one page I looked up no less than 6 unknown words, and I had to go to the internet for 3 of them.]
I recently picked up Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon's slightly cynical homage to the adventure tales of authors like Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. Like his predecessors, Chabon's story is episodic, each chapter is fairly self-contained and has a plot all its own. In fact, the novel was serialized in the New York Times Magazine before it was collected together and released in novel form (though I didn't know this when I picked the book up). He even got a comic artist to draw occasional pictures from the text in black and white. I particularly loved this touch since many of my earliest reads, including handed-down Big Little Books, used black and white sketches to compliment the narrative. In fact, I wish more books had pictures, especially for high school readers whose visualization skills seem to be weaker than previous generations.
But I digress. Gentlemen of the Road is a great action-adventure book, even if the prose is murkier than Mexico City on a summer day. Chabon's story focuses on two brilliant and inspired characters who thieve and connive their way through 9th century Khazaria (think of the region North of the Black and Caspian Seas). Yet a dethroned and predominantly annoying princeling manages to worm his way into their hearts and bring out the best of their morality and their derring-do. The characters - Amram and Zelikman - are a disneyfied version of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction. They roam their world with a deeply ironic morality that nonetheless includes frequent use of violence and occasionally drugs to keep things lively. Their horses have names, which aren't nearly as cool as the names and lineages of their weapons. Yet both are crucial as they navigate through marauding Vikings, a disenfranchised Moslem army, and various encounters with elephants. There's also a brothel that offers occasional respite, which no action-novel should ever be without - the brothel that is, though respite too is necessary. Not bad for a contemporary serialized novel. There's even a little redemption in the end. All in all, a highly recommended read from one of the finest if slightly loquacious authors of the last 20 years. [Just so you know: on one page I looked up no less than 6 unknown words, and I had to go to the internet for 3 of them.]
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Good Idea, Creative Genius(es), Failed Final Product
The book you see above is the third book in a trilogy conceived by George Lucas and written by comic genius Christ Claremont. To start: George Lucas is a brilliant storyteller. He combines the best of world mythology and good old fashioned serial action/adventure. He has an amazing capacity to tell a yarn better than just anybody alive today. No, I'm not joking. He's that good. Chris Claremont is several rungs lower on the creativity and brilliance ladders respectively, but he's still good. He's the guy behind the Uncanny X-Men, and his 15+ years on the comic are unparalleled. We get to watch Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart on the big screen as Logan and Professor X because of what Claremont did with the Uncanny title. The X-Men, Marvel's biggest moneymaker, is alive and well because Claremont took Stan Lee's team of heroes idea and ran a double marathon with it. I love comics. I think Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman are brilliant, but I'm a comic fan because of Chris Claremont - 'nuff said.
The story in the book above is the continuation of the movie "Willow." George Lucas and Ron Howard made "Willow" in the 1988. It was a commercial flop, but it retains a cult-like following to this day. I watched the movie on cable as a 9 year old kid and loved it. "Willow" is probably the only reason I ever picked up "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." It was a great movie by kid standards. I would juggle my plastic sword like Madmartigan and fight imaginary Kael's all day long. Great stuff.
So you'd think that the book above and it's two predecessors would be full of brilliance that an imagination-starved adult like myself would feast upon. The story is average. The re-characterization by Claremont is impressive. But the writing is absolutely horrific. And that kills the books for me. I still recommend them to fans, but I use examples from the book to teach kids how not to write. It's not just the comma splices and the run-ons, which are annoying; rather, it's Claremont's attempt to novelize what he has conceived of as a comic. The gaps in the story are absurd. I can only attribute this to Claremont's long-standing ability to tell great stories utilizing both text and images. These books are built to utilize both texts and images too, but Claremont has no art to help him tell his story. So, he ends up rambling endlessly trying to describe in intimate detail what a good comic artist can do in a frame. And the books suffer. Claremont jumps from episode to episode in the novel as if he could rely on comicbook time and pacing; this destroys the narrative flow. And the books suffer.
Some of the most creative minds alive are writing in sci-fi/fantasy. The fans are knowledgable and demanding, more so than in other genres even. Given this, I have yet to meet a reader who has anything good to say about the Shadow War books. And that, in and of itself, is the most revealing criticism of all. It's a damn shame too, because George Lucas's idea is still good, Chris Claremont's additions are pretty good , but things just don't work out in the end.
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Road
The Road is a small, but powerful, stretch for Cormac McCarthy who tends to write about the brutality and savagery of the US borderlands much like Martin Scorcese writes about the mob on the East coast. The setting is a dysmal post-apocalyptic world in which a father and son walk down the road towards an imaginary better life.
On the road, they meet bandits, cannibals, and other unsavory characters. In all this, the father is trying to teach the son the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. The conflict comes from trying to teach morality in a world that is not immoral so much as it is amoral. We all know the central ethical question of Les Miserables - is it okay to punish one who commits a crime to feed a child? But in McCarthy's twisted world, people are food for others, so the question is no longer relevant. Instead, we are left to wonder: can there be an ultimate good in a primal state of nature? And if so, can good be learned by a child?
In their quest for survival, the father and son attempt to answer these questions. And in the journey of the book, McCarthy has written something eloquent, beautiful, and ultimately redeeming about mankind.
I first read this book before my child was born. I imagined myself as the son and my father as the father in the story. The book became for me an examination of my relationship with my father. I asked myself what he taught me and what I ultimately learned. A later reading, after my child was born, had me switching characters. I empathized more with the father on the second reading, and it made me consider my own role in shaping my child's life. In both cases, I had to wonder about the decisions I make in life, just as the characters are forced to endlessly examine their own choices.
On the road, they meet bandits, cannibals, and other unsavory characters. In all this, the father is trying to teach the son the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. The conflict comes from trying to teach morality in a world that is not immoral so much as it is amoral. We all know the central ethical question of Les Miserables - is it okay to punish one who commits a crime to feed a child? But in McCarthy's twisted world, people are food for others, so the question is no longer relevant. Instead, we are left to wonder: can there be an ultimate good in a primal state of nature? And if so, can good be learned by a child?
In their quest for survival, the father and son attempt to answer these questions. And in the journey of the book, McCarthy has written something eloquent, beautiful, and ultimately redeeming about mankind.
I first read this book before my child was born. I imagined myself as the son and my father as the father in the story. The book became for me an examination of my relationship with my father. I asked myself what he taught me and what I ultimately learned. A later reading, after my child was born, had me switching characters. I empathized more with the father on the second reading, and it made me consider my own role in shaping my child's life. In both cases, I had to wonder about the decisions I make in life, just as the characters are forced to endlessly examine their own choices.
Friday, February 1, 2008
The Falco books by Lindsey Davis
There are works of serious literary nature. Books like The Road most likely fall into this category. And then there are books like The Historian and Wicked which take themselves incredibly seriously and challenge notions of linearity, good and evil, and things like that. And then there are good ol' fashioned books like the Falco series that are just plain fun.
Marcus Didius Falco is a private detective. He lives in Rome. The time: 70AD. Like the movie A Knight's Tale, Lindsey Davis's books (of which there are 14 or 15 at this point) transcend the time and place in which they are set without losing any of the authenticity of a period piece. Davis writes a thoroughly modern, thoroughly British tale that just happens to take place 2,000 years ago in the heart of the Western world. Her main character is a deliciously cyncial Roman plebian with a heart of gold and a patrician girlfriend/eventual wife. Like most mysteries, the Falco books usually involve corpses, corruption, and a heavy dose of hard-boiled Dashiell Hammet prose. At the same time, Davis has done her historical homework and creates realistic, believable locales for the action. The majority of her characters are one dimensional, which makes for quick reading, yet the situations she comes up with for each book are rich in detail and engaging enough to drive the series.
The first book is called Silver Pigs. It's a bit rough at the start. It takes a while to get comfortable with Davis' prose and the narration of Falco. But after a few books, the characters take over and the series is brilliantly executed. I've recently read The Accused, which brings Falco back to Rome after two novels set in Britain. Davis deftly renders the corruption that led to the Empire and ultimately the downfall of Rome. These are quick reads that will give you an enjoyable weekend or week. If, however, you're in for something a bit more historical and a bit less tongue-in-cheek, check out Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series. He too has a Roman detective, though he's going more for the historical fiction label rather than the mystery label.
Marcus Didius Falco is a private detective. He lives in Rome. The time: 70AD. Like the movie A Knight's Tale, Lindsey Davis's books (of which there are 14 or 15 at this point) transcend the time and place in which they are set without losing any of the authenticity of a period piece. Davis writes a thoroughly modern, thoroughly British tale that just happens to take place 2,000 years ago in the heart of the Western world. Her main character is a deliciously cyncial Roman plebian with a heart of gold and a patrician girlfriend/eventual wife. Like most mysteries, the Falco books usually involve corpses, corruption, and a heavy dose of hard-boiled Dashiell Hammet prose. At the same time, Davis has done her historical homework and creates realistic, believable locales for the action. The majority of her characters are one dimensional, which makes for quick reading, yet the situations she comes up with for each book are rich in detail and engaging enough to drive the series.
The first book is called Silver Pigs. It's a bit rough at the start. It takes a while to get comfortable with Davis' prose and the narration of Falco. But after a few books, the characters take over and the series is brilliantly executed. I've recently read The Accused, which brings Falco back to Rome after two novels set in Britain. Davis deftly renders the corruption that led to the Empire and ultimately the downfall of Rome. These are quick reads that will give you an enjoyable weekend or week. If, however, you're in for something a bit more historical and a bit less tongue-in-cheek, check out Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series. He too has a Roman detective, though he's going more for the historical fiction label rather than the mystery label.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman
This series drew my interest because of the Christmas release of the movie and because Pullman based the themes of these books off of Milton's Paradise Lost. Where Milton saw God as an ultimately good yet disinterested figure, Pullman envisions God (and the angels) as a malevolent force and religious institutions as ultimately destructive in their pursuit of policy and dogma.
Like CS Lewis, Pullman uses children as his primary agents in the quest for knowledge and adventure. Unlike Lewis, Pullman's underage protagonists retain their essential innocence pureness in spite of repeated attempts to lure them into an ideological stance. After reading these books, I was reminded of Polonius's advice to his son in Hamelet: This above all, to thine own self be true. Whereas the happy little tykes in Lewis's books all fall under the benevolent yet servant-like sway of Aslan, Lyra and Will follow their own path in this trilogy. They end up on one side in the battle between heaven and non-heaven, yet their path does not take them into a ruinous ideological position. They remain free in a sense that Satan never achieved in Paradise Lost.
Another delightful feature of these books is Pullman's ability to pull off the parallel universe cliche without killing his narrative. The parallel universe phenomenon has long ruled over the scie-fi/fantasy world, with varying degrees of success. The most infamous use might be the parallel universe in the first Star Trek series which featured an evil Spock. Pullman's parallel universe works for several reasons, the most notable of which is the replacement of human souls with animal daemons that exist independently of the human body yet inextricably with the human mind. These animals are the constant companions of every human and there are strict rules which govern their separate-yet-connected lives. Another feature of Pullman's parallel universe is a rigid class structure that has existed well into modern times. This allows Pullman to give his narrative an incredibly Victorian quality without all the baggage that such a social paradigm implies. Plus, there are witches and noble gypsy-like groups that give the book an imaginative dimension that has been lacking in most works of this type (Harry Potter excluded).
If you like Milton and writing that draws heavily from CS Lewis, JK Rowling, and even the Tolkien lineage, then this series will entertain you immensely. And in the end, it will probably get you to think about religious institutions and the freedom on the human soul whether you mean to or not.
Like CS Lewis, Pullman uses children as his primary agents in the quest for knowledge and adventure. Unlike Lewis, Pullman's underage protagonists retain their essential innocence pureness in spite of repeated attempts to lure them into an ideological stance. After reading these books, I was reminded of Polonius's advice to his son in Hamelet: This above all, to thine own self be true. Whereas the happy little tykes in Lewis's books all fall under the benevolent yet servant-like sway of Aslan, Lyra and Will follow their own path in this trilogy. They end up on one side in the battle between heaven and non-heaven, yet their path does not take them into a ruinous ideological position. They remain free in a sense that Satan never achieved in Paradise Lost.
Another delightful feature of these books is Pullman's ability to pull off the parallel universe cliche without killing his narrative. The parallel universe phenomenon has long ruled over the scie-fi/fantasy world, with varying degrees of success. The most infamous use might be the parallel universe in the first Star Trek series which featured an evil Spock. Pullman's parallel universe works for several reasons, the most notable of which is the replacement of human souls with animal daemons that exist independently of the human body yet inextricably with the human mind. These animals are the constant companions of every human and there are strict rules which govern their separate-yet-connected lives. Another feature of Pullman's parallel universe is a rigid class structure that has existed well into modern times. This allows Pullman to give his narrative an incredibly Victorian quality without all the baggage that such a social paradigm implies. Plus, there are witches and noble gypsy-like groups that give the book an imaginative dimension that has been lacking in most works of this type (Harry Potter excluded).
If you like Milton and writing that draws heavily from CS Lewis, JK Rowling, and even the Tolkien lineage, then this series will entertain you immensely. And in the end, it will probably get you to think about religious institutions and the freedom on the human soul whether you mean to or not.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Beowulf
So, there's this new movie coming out and Beowulf has become all the rage again after, oh, about a thousand years give or take. In the midst of all this literary craziness, I decided to read Beowulf with my tenth grade English class. It was completely unplanned, and I had to sneak it in between The Odyssey and The Diary of Anne Frank. But the poem is short, about 80 pages or so, and Seamus Heaney has provided a delightful rendering that is quite a lot better than the version I had to read in high school. We read it aloud in its entirety in about 4 class periods.
The students all liked Beowulf far more than The Odyssey. I can't fathom why, since The Odyssey is really brilliant and source material for nearly every narrative in the Western world, but that's what they said. The action in Beowulf is more clear than The Odyssey, and while it is difficult sometimes to keep characters straight due to the author's tendency to call characters by descriptions and allegiances rather than given names, there are fewer important characters to keep straight. Plus, it's difficult sometimes to see why Odysseus is a hero. He's vain, arrogant, and makes absurd decisions on occasion; whereas Beowulf is your basic badass with a sword, and he knows how to use it.
Odysseus doesn't kill too many enemies one on one. He's the thinking type who strategizes more than acts. Beowulf gives a few speeches, drinks gallons of mead, and then kills Grendel, his mom, and the dragon. And since Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay have determined what a hero is in the 21st century, it is far easier to see the heroism in Beowulf than in Odysseus, and as the narrator says about Beowulf, "he was a good king."
I like to do a bit of feminist rethinking of history in my classes. And in this area, Beowulf falls far short. Hrothgar's wife is the only female character of any significance, and she has just one important speech. Otherwise, she wanders around looking regal and serving meed to the thanes (that's warriors to you unknowing readers). Now The Odyssey, on the other hand, has a plethora of deeply complex female characters. They all take second stage to Odysseus, but combined they far outweigh his page time. There's Athena who ought to be the prototype of feminine slyness; she gets to out-think every mortal man as well as the gods. A bare fraction of a metre behind is Penelope who is perhaps the only woman in literary history to hold off a hoard of under-sexed, over-masculined, bitter, angry suitors for a decade or more. That, my friends, take guile. Not to be outdone is the young Nausika who sneaks the bedragled Odysseus into her father's house from the beach. And of course there are Kirke and Kalypso who ply their own feminine wiles throughout the text. Robert Graves has done an excellent job rethinking the text as the narrative of a young woman. It'll be interesting to see what the new CGI version of Beowulf does with Wealthow and Grendel's mom. Casting Angelina Jolie is certainly an interesting approach.
I took a chance with my class and gave them the standard college-level reading notes: Beowulf is three narratives - killing the monsters, Scandinavian politics, and a Christian conversion text. They grasped this pretty quick, and it made it easier to get through the long dry speeches on ancestral history and political manuevering as well as the frequent Christian theological moments interspersed with criticisms of pagan practices. It was a fun experience. I got to read the text in its entirety with the class, and aside from two students falling asleep on the last day, everyone seemed to enjoy it.
Now we can do what all literati do when we go see the movie - compare it to the text and bemoan its narrative failings. Brilliant!
The students all liked Beowulf far more than The Odyssey. I can't fathom why, since The Odyssey is really brilliant and source material for nearly every narrative in the Western world, but that's what they said. The action in Beowulf is more clear than The Odyssey, and while it is difficult sometimes to keep characters straight due to the author's tendency to call characters by descriptions and allegiances rather than given names, there are fewer important characters to keep straight. Plus, it's difficult sometimes to see why Odysseus is a hero. He's vain, arrogant, and makes absurd decisions on occasion; whereas Beowulf is your basic badass with a sword, and he knows how to use it.
Odysseus doesn't kill too many enemies one on one. He's the thinking type who strategizes more than acts. Beowulf gives a few speeches, drinks gallons of mead, and then kills Grendel, his mom, and the dragon. And since Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay have determined what a hero is in the 21st century, it is far easier to see the heroism in Beowulf than in Odysseus, and as the narrator says about Beowulf, "he was a good king."
I like to do a bit of feminist rethinking of history in my classes. And in this area, Beowulf falls far short. Hrothgar's wife is the only female character of any significance, and she has just one important speech. Otherwise, she wanders around looking regal and serving meed to the thanes (that's warriors to you unknowing readers). Now The Odyssey, on the other hand, has a plethora of deeply complex female characters. They all take second stage to Odysseus, but combined they far outweigh his page time. There's Athena who ought to be the prototype of feminine slyness; she gets to out-think every mortal man as well as the gods. A bare fraction of a metre behind is Penelope who is perhaps the only woman in literary history to hold off a hoard of under-sexed, over-masculined, bitter, angry suitors for a decade or more. That, my friends, take guile. Not to be outdone is the young Nausika who sneaks the bedragled Odysseus into her father's house from the beach. And of course there are Kirke and Kalypso who ply their own feminine wiles throughout the text. Robert Graves has done an excellent job rethinking the text as the narrative of a young woman. It'll be interesting to see what the new CGI version of Beowulf does with Wealthow and Grendel's mom. Casting Angelina Jolie is certainly an interesting approach.
I took a chance with my class and gave them the standard college-level reading notes: Beowulf is three narratives - killing the monsters, Scandinavian politics, and a Christian conversion text. They grasped this pretty quick, and it made it easier to get through the long dry speeches on ancestral history and political manuevering as well as the frequent Christian theological moments interspersed with criticisms of pagan practices. It was a fun experience. I got to read the text in its entirety with the class, and aside from two students falling asleep on the last day, everyone seemed to enjoy it.
Now we can do what all literati do when we go see the movie - compare it to the text and bemoan its narrative failings. Brilliant!
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Best damn book I've read in the last five years. More to come. Just thought you should know.
Best damn book I've read in the last five years. More to come. Just thought you should know.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
I tend to avoid most contemporary writers. I have several reasons: publishing houses, whether they admit it or not, are ultimately about profit and this has created an institutionalized push for predictability, copycat prose, and bland reading. But every now and then a writer with a spark of individuality tends to slip through. Elizabeth Kostova has that spark. And if she's lucky, the publishing houses won't put it out anytime soon.
Praise aside, Kostova writes a slow, methodical prose that is quite the opposite of someone like Dan Brown. This can be exasperating at times, particularly given the highly tense situations she creates for her charaters in The Historian. She is precise. Most settings are described in the perfect amount of detail to create a masterful image in the mind of the reader. This can be a challenge for all but the most Dickensian of readers. But it is a tremendous advantage when it comes to creating characters. She gives the goldilocks amount of information - just right - when it comes to giving her characters life. She doesn't tell too much or too little, which is hard yet necessary in a work built on drama and characterization as opposed to action.
The Historian is a tremendous book. It's writing must have been tremendous given its length and attention to detail, and reading all 650+ pages is a bit tremendous too. However, the book admirably takes on the challenge of three separate narratives presented simultaneously. There's a student, his mentor, and the student's daughter later in life. Oh, and a book-obsessed Dracula too. It sounds weird, maybe a bit confusing even, but Kostova pulls it off with so much grace and finesse that this book becomes a page-turning thriller despite the fact that it was written to be a melodrama/travelogue/ode-to-a-parent.
So without saying anything more about this book, except that it has Dracula, which is really quite cool when you think about it because nobody of note has taken the infamous Dracula and given him any depth or significance since good old Bram Stoker (though many have tried), I encourage you to go find a copy and read it right away.
This is one of those books that lets you know if you're a good reader or not. I'm sure that sounds pretentious. Nonetheless it's true. If you make it through The Historian, then it's safe to say that you are a good reader even if you started as a poor, uninterested reader. So ask yourself this: How many books can turn you into a good reader if you're not one already? This is one of them.
I tend to avoid most contemporary writers. I have several reasons: publishing houses, whether they admit it or not, are ultimately about profit and this has created an institutionalized push for predictability, copycat prose, and bland reading. But every now and then a writer with a spark of individuality tends to slip through. Elizabeth Kostova has that spark. And if she's lucky, the publishing houses won't put it out anytime soon.
Praise aside, Kostova writes a slow, methodical prose that is quite the opposite of someone like Dan Brown. This can be exasperating at times, particularly given the highly tense situations she creates for her charaters in The Historian. She is precise. Most settings are described in the perfect amount of detail to create a masterful image in the mind of the reader. This can be a challenge for all but the most Dickensian of readers. But it is a tremendous advantage when it comes to creating characters. She gives the goldilocks amount of information - just right - when it comes to giving her characters life. She doesn't tell too much or too little, which is hard yet necessary in a work built on drama and characterization as opposed to action.
The Historian is a tremendous book. It's writing must have been tremendous given its length and attention to detail, and reading all 650+ pages is a bit tremendous too. However, the book admirably takes on the challenge of three separate narratives presented simultaneously. There's a student, his mentor, and the student's daughter later in life. Oh, and a book-obsessed Dracula too. It sounds weird, maybe a bit confusing even, but Kostova pulls it off with so much grace and finesse that this book becomes a page-turning thriller despite the fact that it was written to be a melodrama/travelogue/ode-to-a-parent.
So without saying anything more about this book, except that it has Dracula, which is really quite cool when you think about it because nobody of note has taken the infamous Dracula and given him any depth or significance since good old Bram Stoker (though many have tried), I encourage you to go find a copy and read it right away.
This is one of those books that lets you know if you're a good reader or not. I'm sure that sounds pretentious. Nonetheless it's true. If you make it through The Historian, then it's safe to say that you are a good reader even if you started as a poor, uninterested reader. So ask yourself this: How many books can turn you into a good reader if you're not one already? This is one of them.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Califia's Daughters
by Leigh Richards
It's the future. Bad things have happened. Men are scarce, literally. It's a 12:1 female to male ratio on account of an unexplained genetically mutated virus. Women are in charge and they're trying to rebuild civilization one agro-community at a time. The premise is a bit far-fetched; though after seeing "Children of Men," my willing suspension of disbelief came a bit easier.
This is one of those books that I particularly enjoyed yet am hesitant to recommend. I stayed up late - 4am - one night just so I could finish it. I felt at times uncomfortable with the psychological makeup of the protagonist, especially in the latter half of the book when the heroine undergoes a brutal and sadistic initiation and consequently becomes brutal and sadistic. But it was powerful and necessary and more real than most authors are comfortable writing. The characters, particularly Dian the protagonist, were full and carefully considered and the plot was feasible. And that, when it comes right down to it, is all you need for a good read.
But. The book was painful to get into. It took me 3 separate starts which usually results in complete abandonment. But the author is one of my favorites (writing under a pen name), and she had earned my triple-try. However, my rough start was due to a poorly conceived beginning and a lack of necessary background information to get going. There were several other inexplicable elements that normally would have prompted me to cast this tome aside for the next one of my list.
Faux pas 1: Dian roams about with a pack of loyal, highly trainable dogs. Yes, I realize that Dian is symbolic of the ancient Greek goddess and yes I realize that the dogs are a necessary part of the symbolism. But in this case it just didn't fit. The dog conceit was taken too far and explained particularly poorly as some sort of feminine mystical bond; it was at odds with the relationships built and sustained in the rest of the book. Faux pas 2: Dian engages in a fascinating relationship with an enigmatic male and his young son, yet this relationship is completely abandoned in the second half of the book and never satisfyingly brought to a conclusion at the meager end. Faux pas 3: The second half of the book is built on the need for Dian to go and examine an isolated agro-community that wants to ally with her own small group. The need for her journey is built on a huge secret mystery that turns out to be rather insignificant, especially since the resolution to this huge secret takes a scant 2-3 pages to resolve and barely transitions into the second part of Dian's journey and her dark transition. This whole situation is an example of bad planning that tries to hide under solid writing. In this book, it simply doesn't work. Faux pas 4: The meager end leaves simply too many loose threads to leave the reader happy. I enjoy obscure endings, particularly when the author has prepared me. I have no problem with the notion that Dian's future is uncertain. I do have a problem with the complete ambiguity surrounding nearly every other character in the book.
Laurie R. King is a great writer, and this book has more than just glimpses of her talent. But somewhere along the way, perhaps in the editing shop, something went wrong and it shows. The book is worth picking up, but if you can't get into it in one or even two tries then it's probably time to put it down and move on to something different, or maybe just a different book by the same author.
It's the future. Bad things have happened. Men are scarce, literally. It's a 12:1 female to male ratio on account of an unexplained genetically mutated virus. Women are in charge and they're trying to rebuild civilization one agro-community at a time. The premise is a bit far-fetched; though after seeing "Children of Men," my willing suspension of disbelief came a bit easier.
This is one of those books that I particularly enjoyed yet am hesitant to recommend. I stayed up late - 4am - one night just so I could finish it. I felt at times uncomfortable with the psychological makeup of the protagonist, especially in the latter half of the book when the heroine undergoes a brutal and sadistic initiation and consequently becomes brutal and sadistic. But it was powerful and necessary and more real than most authors are comfortable writing. The characters, particularly Dian the protagonist, were full and carefully considered and the plot was feasible. And that, when it comes right down to it, is all you need for a good read.
But. The book was painful to get into. It took me 3 separate starts which usually results in complete abandonment. But the author is one of my favorites (writing under a pen name), and she had earned my triple-try. However, my rough start was due to a poorly conceived beginning and a lack of necessary background information to get going. There were several other inexplicable elements that normally would have prompted me to cast this tome aside for the next one of my list.
Faux pas 1: Dian roams about with a pack of loyal, highly trainable dogs. Yes, I realize that Dian is symbolic of the ancient Greek goddess and yes I realize that the dogs are a necessary part of the symbolism. But in this case it just didn't fit. The dog conceit was taken too far and explained particularly poorly as some sort of feminine mystical bond; it was at odds with the relationships built and sustained in the rest of the book. Faux pas 2: Dian engages in a fascinating relationship with an enigmatic male and his young son, yet this relationship is completely abandoned in the second half of the book and never satisfyingly brought to a conclusion at the meager end. Faux pas 3: The second half of the book is built on the need for Dian to go and examine an isolated agro-community that wants to ally with her own small group. The need for her journey is built on a huge secret mystery that turns out to be rather insignificant, especially since the resolution to this huge secret takes a scant 2-3 pages to resolve and barely transitions into the second part of Dian's journey and her dark transition. This whole situation is an example of bad planning that tries to hide under solid writing. In this book, it simply doesn't work. Faux pas 4: The meager end leaves simply too many loose threads to leave the reader happy. I enjoy obscure endings, particularly when the author has prepared me. I have no problem with the notion that Dian's future is uncertain. I do have a problem with the complete ambiguity surrounding nearly every other character in the book.
Laurie R. King is a great writer, and this book has more than just glimpses of her talent. But somewhere along the way, perhaps in the editing shop, something went wrong and it shows. The book is worth picking up, but if you can't get into it in one or even two tries then it's probably time to put it down and move on to something different, or maybe just a different book by the same author.
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