Friday Review Post, 10/21/2011

I wish to note, should I not finish this this evening, that I am actually sitting down to write it on Friday.

Four books this week.

First up, I found that I could not resist the allure of:

Simon Garfield - Just My Type

This is a book about fonts. It is, perhaps to some, surprising in its goodness. Garfield presents a history of fonts from Gutenberg to the present. He also highlights several specific fonts in a series of "font breaks" - interstitial chapters devoted to several fonts (plus one on the interobang, which Garfield describes as the Esperanto of fonts - something which clearly needs to exist, and yet which no one actually wants to use). Each of the font breaks features the font in question in the first paragraph of the break, which is a nice touch.

This is an interobang

Fonts, it turns out, are fascinating. At least to me, anyway. This kinda fits into my existing experience of things I find neat. I took a class on material culture (the history of objects - using objects as primary sources. Archaeology for historians, perhaps), and since then have been noticing architectural elements in my built environment - particularly the American Gothic window (not the painting - the iconic architectural style for which the painting is named - the house behind the couple has an American Gothic window in its peak.) and the Mansard Roof.

Fonts, it turns out, are the same for me - having read the book, I'm finding myself noticing fonts a lot more. Which is neat, but also a little frustrating. This would seem to be one of those cases in which ignorance is, actually, bliss. I ... I had dreams about fonts as I was finishing the book. Which is just, frankly, odd. I - guys, I changed the fonts on the computer. All of my icons, all of the tags at the top of my browser, the URL, even the clock on my desktop - all are now in Poor Richard font. Because it's pretty. (especially the ampersand! Did I mention that there's a whole chapter on ampersands? There is!) This is, perhaps, not healthy.

Case in point - My new favorite font? Doves. Which doesn't exist. Because the designer, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, was so obsessed with the idea that lesser type setters than himself would use his typeface for projects to which it was ill fitted that he threw the entire collection of type into the Thames.* I wouldn't have known about the typeface if it weren't for this book - but, given that I can't actually USE the typeface (thanks ever so, Mr. Cobden-Sanderson!), perhaps I would have been better off as a result. Thanks, Mr. Garfield?

Anyway, if you are geekily inclined - that is, inclined to take odd things entirely too seriously - this book might tickle your fancy. If you are already a font geek - and you know you're out there - this is a must read. 

*I am not alone in have been struck by the typeface. Here's a lovely essay on the type face, on the nature of beauty, and on why it's a shame that Unitarian Universalists should be less inclined to reject the Bible. There's a lovely image of the first page of the Bible, printed in Doves typeface, in the middle of the essay. Perhaps you'll be captivated too... If so, sorry.

Second book -

Alison Goodman - Eon: The DragonEye Reborn


This book was amazingly good! It had so many things that I like in books. It had a strong female character (although, you know, she spent most of the book pretending to be a guy - more on that in a minute), it was inspired by Asian narratives instead of Western ones (more on that in a minute too), it had a strong transgendered character (who wasn't the main girl-pretending-to-be-a-boy character), it had great heaping gobs of politics, it had dragons (Asian style dragons) - lots and lots of really great stuff. Plus, it was really well written - a plot which just pulled me in and dragged me forward. Over 500 pages, and I finished in in just over a day - simply marvelous story telling.

So, I really really liked the book. But, having finished it, I started pondering. (Actually, that's probably the sign of a really good book, isn't it? It makes you keep thinking about it after the fact?) I pondered two things. First, I had just had a conversation with a friend about how we wished there were more fantasy/sci-fi books based on narratives traditions other than the Western tradition. I mentioned Lloyd Alexander's The Iron Ring, which is set in India, but we really couldn't think of many books where a strong non-Western tradition informed the story. So, I was excited by this book, because it is clearly inspired by Asian traditions. But, when I started thinking about it, I didn't have a strong impression of the characters as Asian. Which makes me wonder - to what extent is that my fault as a product of white privilege (characters in books, unless clearly denoted otherwise, default to white, because I, the reader, am white, and I assume that the characters look like me), and to what extent is that Goodman's fault in that she didn't denote the characters as Asian? Which, what more could she have done? I mean, the book is clearly set in an Asian background - why am I seeing Eon/a as white? So, question to ponder: how can an author denote a character as non-white without hammering the reader over the head with the character's non-whiteness? To what extent should the author be responsible for doing this anyway?

So, that got me pondering the gender tropes in the novel. Gender and gender identity are a big deal in this book. Eon/a is masquerading as a boy because the position she aspires to, Dragoneye, can only be held by a male. This, ultimately, becomes a major plot point, as Eon/a is forced to make a decision regarding her gender presentation - I think I can say that without spoiling anything. Beyond that, however (because "girl pretends to be boy" is an ancient plot device - look at Shakespeare, for instance), Eon/a interacts extensively with a eunuch, Ryko, who is recognized as serving a male role in society (forcing consideration of what it means to be male - how much of it is biology, and how much of it is performative?) and a transgendered individual, Lady Dela (a male to female trans). Dela forces Eon/a to confront her own sense of gender, and in the end (and, again, I hope this doesn't spoil anything) Eon/a is forced to make a decision between being Eon and being Eona. Dela's strong sense of who she is, regardless of biological gender, aids Eon/a in making her decision.

Dela, I think, is an excellent character. She's fully rendered, with a realistic approach to her situation. Goodman indicates that Dela has not merged seamlessly into the society she inhabits - she has been attacked for her nature. She also has Eon/a ask Dela if Dela has ever considered surgery (Dela has). Eon/a experiments (for magical reasons) with some drugs which enhance and/or diminish various elements of her gender identity (it's magic, and magic works differently depending on your gender in Goodman's world - this is internally consistent, even if I'm not explaining if properly). My overwhelming impression is that Goodman has done an excellent job depicting issues of gender, and transgender. Moreover, she has done it without making those aspects the entirety of the characters in question - these are fully realized people.

At least, that was what I thought when I finished the book. But my musings on racial identity forced me to wonder how well equipped I, a cisgendered male, am in assessing these things. So I went looking for a review from a transgenered point of view. I found this essay, which seems to agree with me re: Dela, but suggests that Eon/a is more troublesome, gender-wise. I'm not sure that I fully agree with the final assessment (that Eon/a plays with gender for reasons of convenience - I think it's deeper than that), but the essay gave me some food for thought. That being said, I remain convinced that Goodman has done something significant with her portrayal of Lady Dela. Dela doesn't quite approach the stage of being trans just because she's trans** - her transgendered nature serves the plot, and the character would not work in her role as anything other than trans - but it's certainly a good first step.

One significant complaint - the book doesn't end. Instead, it clearly leads into the sequel (Eona). However, since I really really want to read more, and since I know the sequel exists (I'm not going to be left hanging), I'm willing to forgive, just this once.

Highly recommended to anyone who likes really well written YA fantasy.

** We never ask "why is this character straight or white?" Indeed, we assume, unless otherwise indicated, that a character is straight and white, even if there is no clear reason to think so. Thus, the ideal situation, vis a vis a minority character, is for the reader to be willing to accept them as trans, or gay, or a person of colour, without wondering why they have been written that way. This, of course, requires a change on the part of the author/publisher, but also (and more difficult to achieve, I think) on the part of the reading public in general.

After two hefty novels which gave me deeply complex dreams and ponderings, I wanted something a little lighter, so I went with

John Sandford - Bad Blood


First up, a great big trigger warning on this book, and possibly the review - the book is about ritual sexual abuse, including rape and incest. There aren't significantly graphic presentations of this abuse, but there are several scenes with fairly hefty implications.  Those aren't things which a triggering for me, and I found places in the book where it was hard to continue. So, you have been warned.

Sandford, as you know, is a guilty pleasure of mine. The plots are fairly straightforward. The good guys are good - they sometimes bend the law a little (a judicious use of judicial wrangling to ensure that critical evidence ends up in the right place at the right time - that sort of thing), but they never break it completely. Plus, the bad guys are so clearly bad that some bending feels kosher. (even though, on an intellectual level, I register that it isn't.) Sandford doesn't push any of my personal buttons - his villains are villains for individual reasons, and not because they belong to a particular racial and/or religious group. That is, Sandford sometimes writes black villains, or gay villains, or Arabic villains, but they are villains because of what they do, not because they are black, gay, or Arabic. His cops seem willing to accept different genders, different sexual orientations, different races, and different religious views, provided that those elements don't get in the way of doing their job. His characters are reasonably well written, and the plots are hook-y enough that, if you like the sort of stories he's telling, you don't mind that the characters are only reasonably well written. I feel like I'm defending my literary choices - I guess I am. I know that the books are trashy; that's why I read them.

Anyway, Virgil "that fuckin'" Flowers is called in to look at a suspicious prison cell suicide, which turns into a multiple murder investigation, which uncovers a deep, and deeply sordid, local secret involving a local religious sect which uses sex in its idiosyncratic version of Christian worship. The whole thing ends, as this sort of story often does, with fire, and blood, and highly trained psychological counselors.

The only musing this book prompted was some thought on the nature of police procedurals, and the possibility that there are two sorts: one where we follow the detective as he plods through clues, and thus unravel the crime at the same rate as he does; and one where we, the readers, have a clearer sense of what's actually happening than the detective, and so we get to watch him piece the bits together in such a way that he arrives at the place that we've already seen. I know Sandford writes both kinds, and I greatly prefer the former type. This book was decidedly the latter, alas. That, and the dreadful subject matter, kinda left a bad taste in my mouth.

Finally, a rare graphic novel:

M.K. Reed and Johnathan Hill - Americus

This was a book clearly written more or less exactly for me. It tells the story of an attempt to remove a series of books from a small town library. The books tell the story of Apathea Ravenchilde, who is a witch. A conservative Christian group decide that the books are having a negative effect upon their children (with no evidence of this, naturally) and decide that they have to be removed from the library. The main plot focuses on this struggle, with Neal Barton (young reader, and library page) and Charlotte Murphy (youth librarian) organizing the champions of the library.

The book is also about Neal's transition into high school, without his best friend, who has been sent to military school because he is caught reading an Apathea Ravenchilde novel. Neal feels true to me - awkward teen in a somewhat foreign environment, trying to figure out who he is and how he will make his way in the world. Yeah, I identify with him.

The book also features snippets of the Apathea story. These, oddly enough, seem more realistically drawn than the drawings of "reality" - very interesting.

It's a black and white comic. The art is excellent, I found the lettering a little tough to read, but that may have been the light and the tired conspiring against me. A great book for anyone working on growing up (especially if they are awkward teens who like to read fantasy), and anyone who loves libraries. Here's a poster that Hill and Reed did for Banned Book Week - you can find the original here:

That would be Apathea on the left, and Neal on the right. Just, you know, FYI.

Look at that - it's only just 11 pm, and I'm done. I can post reviews on a Friday, I really really can!

Friday Review, 11/19/2010

Laney Salisbury, Aly Suju - Provenance



The best book on art forgery I've read in a while. Ok, that's not fair - it's not like I read a lot of books on art forgery. This was a good book. The background - in the late '80s and early '90s, a con man in London, with the help of a gifted artist, sold a large (possibly in the hundreds) number of fake pictures. The artists whose work was faked tended to be modern - cubists, expressionists, and abstracticists (is that a word?). These pieces of art were veted by serious art experts at major galleries and auction houses - people who should have been able to catch them as frauds - but the con man (John Drewe) went beyond acquiring fake pictures. Drewe's con was brilliant, because he also faked the provenance of the paintings - the paper trail which showed who owned the painting, when it was sold, and where it was displayed. Drewe inserted fake pedigrees for his fake paintings into the archives of prominent museums in England, like the Tate Gallery. Many experts, although sceptical about the painting in particular (elements were off, the artist usually used such and such a brush stroke, which was missing from the fake, etc), were convinced of the authenticity of the works because the paper looked good. A very small group of experts overrode the strength of the paper, and showed that the paintings were too new - the paper was wrong, the paint was wrong, the colours were wrong, etc.

One of the things that I found particularly interesting was the underlying sense that the forger - John Myatt - and Drewe saw that they were addressing weaknesses in the way that we percieve modern art. Myatt, after serving his term in jail, has gone on to be a popular and successful artist by paitining "genuine fakes" - carefully registered paintings in the style of the masters. Someone comes to him and asks for a portrait in the style of Picasso, for instances, and Myatt paints it. He tags it as a Genuine Fake, and everyone is happy. In the afterword, Myatt suggests that this allows people to judge the painting on its own merits - they don't feel compelled to like it because it was painted by Picasso, they can like it because of how it was painted, or how it makes them feel. The sense here - and the authors do nothing to diminish it - is one of deliberate anti-elitism. Art experts are snobs, and Drewe and Myatt took the air out of them.

The format of the book was part history, part police procedural, part caper novel. Salisbury and Sujo use moderately extensive footnotes (for a piece of popular writing, anyway), and have conducted considerable research into not just the specific case of Drewe and Myatt, but into counterfeiting in general, and there are numerous digressions into broader discussions of art, art forgery, and the psychology of con men. I found those fascinating. Salisbury and Sujo have made it easy to feel sympathy for Myatt, and for the ordinary people that Drewe's con took in, while maintaining a sense that, on some level, the art experts had it coming. Drewe comes off as a bit of a jerk, although there is some sympathy there too - of all the people he conned, perhaps he conned himself first.

In the end, an enjoyable read which uses a specific case to delve a little way into a fascinating subject. 

John Sandford - Storm Prey

So, another Sandford. He twists the police procedural a bit here - under normal circumstances, in a procedural, the reader is as much in the dark as the protagonist. Sandford, in this book, lets his readers see the criminals - this makes it harder to twist the plot; to suddenly reveal that the criminal is someone that you never expected. In that regard, Sandford is setting himself up in a situation where it is difficult for him to cheat.

Sandford novels, while well written, tend not to have a great deal of depth. I've said this before, and this book is no different. Lucas Davenport is still God's gift to police investigators, there's a crime, his family is threatened, he and the rest of the cops track down the bad guys, and the real villains end up dead. I was a little bothered by the inclusion of a pair of Middle Eastern characters, one of whom is really bad and one who is not. There's a fair bit of stereotype there. Sandford plays with it - these men are not Arabs, and they are not terrorists - but they both end up dead, and neither are really all that well developed as characters. Mind you, none of the characters are that well developed - and on some level, you shouldn't pick up a John Sandford novel expecting a group of highly developed characters. It was quick, it was a fun romp, and that's what I was looking for. Hard to complain when you get what you were looking for.

Mark Keating - The Pirate Devlin

This is Mr. Keating's first novel, and it's a good start. It's an historical novel, and Keating includes a nice author's note - something that I look for in an historical novel. Keating is writing about the "golden age" of piracy, in the late 18th century, just before the American Revolution. His pirates are true to the historical record - Keating has clearly done his research. The author's note clearly deliniates - and justifies -  the places where Keating has deviated from the historical record. Additionally, the book is packed with swashbuckling action and naval battles - all good stuff. Keating is clearly a writer to watch for, as he continues this series.

Some things I didn't like all that much. Devlin - the titular character - is fairly brutal in his outlook on the world - quick to violence as a solution to problems. Keating gives us a few snippets of Devlin's backstory which would seem to provide motivation for this violent outlook, but I'd like a little bit more depth. Second, Keating makes use of a lot of sentence fragments.  I suspect this is to project a sense of breathless action, and it works fairly well in the context of actual action scenes.  It's a little distracting in a passage of general description, and I found it tripping me up a little. I should stress, I'm not a huge grammar maven or anything of that nature, but, in this instance, it was quite noticable and it bugged me.

Friday Reviews for 05/14/10

Melina Marchetta - Finnikin of the Rock - I found this to be very dark for a Young Adult novel. YA has become a very exciting place to be in recent years, and this book shows why - there is room for edgy material, deep characters with believable flaws and character traits, and a plot that doesn't necessarily resolve according to a formula. Why can't we have these in non-YA fiction? That is a question that I leave to the ages. The things I liked very much in this book: Marchetta writes good characters, and has a plot which considers the huge question of "what happened next?" - after the heroes are big damn heroes, what happens to them? Marchetta includes a good, lengthy, and entirely necessary, denouement. Things I did not like: the names - I mean, Finnikin? Seriously? Hero of a Beatrix Potter book, perhaps. Hard to take seriously as the hero of a fantasy/romance. Evanjalyn was a little too cute too. That's a minor thing, though. Bigger was a lack of basic research into terms - for instance, one does not "cock" a long bow, nor does one load it with "bolts" - those are things that you do with crossbows. And yet, the weapons being used were clearly long bows - filling the air with arrows is a long bow type thing.  These are fairly basic terms of the fantasy genre. This is the author's first foray into fantasy (her other stuff is contemporary fiction - school girls and growing up type things - not my cup of tea), and some mistakes are forgivable - even these ones, as it turns out, because I would be happy to read another fantasy novel by Marchetta - but, really. This is pretty basic stuff.

John Sandford - Rough Country - Yes, another Sandford. Yes, it's still slush. But! Virgil Flowers a) does not kill the evil bad serial killer at the end - indeed, I think that as this particular series goes forward, the differences between Flowers and Lucas Davenport  (Sandford's other detective) will be revealed more clearly; Flowers is not a serial killer in a cop's uniform, while Davenport kinda is - b) does not get laid! So, it's nice when an author stretches himself a little. There's not a lot of room in these novels to stretch - the hero has to solve the crime, and the bad guy has to be brought to some form of justice - but Sandford isn't a hack. There's a new Davenport out on the 18th, so watch for a review of that.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench - Very nicely written historical fiction about slaves in the US, circa 1852-55, with a lengthy interlude into the 1830s and 40s. The action focuses primarily around a resort hotel called Tarawa, which actually existed. It was a hotel in Ohio (a free state: slavery was illegal in Ohio) which was frequented by Southern gentlemen, often with their slave mistresses. Slavery is bad, but also complex. It is bad because of the complexities, really - human beings will behave like human beings, regardless of the unnatural constraints you place upon them. Even an institution designed to make mothers forget their children and lovers forget their sweethearts cannot succeed, not much more than part of the time. Perkins-Valdez keeps the complexity of human life in mind throughout this work, and does so fantastically.

One thing - from our perspective as readers, we know that slavery is about to meet its end in the Civil War. Perkins-Valdez must surely know this too - but she does not go out of her way to foreshadow that fact, which is very nice. She lets the book be a book about human beings doing human things; not a gloating book about the foolishness of the Southern gentry.

The book was fascinating, it was very well written, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

reviews for Friday, April 30, 2010

 John Sandford - Dark of the Moon

Sandford writes a very nice Mary Sue. That is, in the "Prey" novels and in these Virgil Flowers novels (which are a spin off of the Prey novels), Sandford writes about righteous, hard-nosed cops tracking down brutal serial killers in the Twin Cities and environs - and there's a strong sense that these hard-nosed cops are more or less who Sandford would like himself to be, somewhat. We get lovely descriptions of the vehicles and weapons used by the protagonists, and they always solve the crime, frequently by killing the serial killer. The novels are very nice police procedurals, good description of how cops do what they do and think what they think. Not a lot of deep material here, though. Fluff reading; but very nice as a change from a deeper work. You know what you're going to get when you pick it up, and  you might be able to solve the crime before the cops do, which is always a nice treat.

Chris Anderson - Free: Future of a Radical Price

Anderson is an editor for Wired, and this book read like a series of magazine articles strung together. They chapters flowed nicely into each other, but each of the chapters could easily have been read by itself.  Anderson gives a brief history of the concept of Free (as in beer) in the United States - thumbnail; think of Gilette, giving away razors so that he could sell razor blades at a profit. Anderson contends that, in the Internet era, free is increasingly the marginal price for products - and, in a competitive market, prices tend to devolve to the marginal price. (The marginal price is the lowest possible price that the product can be sold at while not losing money for the seller - the price which covers production costs, basically). Because a great many things which the internet is good at distributing are produced for very little cost, they can be given away, and profit can be derived through different means.  Anderson highlights a large number of different ways in which this process works, and explains why older readers have trouble grasping the idea and younger readers have trouble thinking of the idea as anything other than normal. Interesting topic, format was a little tough.

One thing I have discovered recently is that I find reading non-fiction to be very much like work. I read fiction to avoid work, perhaps, but reading non-fiction is what I'm "supposed" to be doing on some level - keeping up with the current research, perhaps, or being ahead of where my students are (often a long way ahead). I don't even really like reading the news, although I do it. Anyway, I read A LOT more fiction than I do non-fiction.

Karen Miller - Innocent Mage

I stopped reading this book on Monday or Tuesday. I couldn't finish it. I didn't like any of the characters at all.  The "hero" is supposed to forthright, not cowed by society, capable of speaking his mind to all walks of society, and so he comes across as a jerk. Central to the plot is a prophecy which people around the hero are aware of, but requires not telling the hero about his role in the prophesy. Other characters - supposedly the hero's friends -  be-moan the fact that this means he might get hurt because he doesn't know what is happening.  My overriding feeling was "good, he probably deserves it," which is probably not what the author had in mind. Finally, it wasn't clear what it was the hero was supposed to be doing. He was a member of an underclass in his society - the ruling class have magic, the underclass does not - but there was no real sense of burden. The ruling class maintain a well protected realm with nice weather and good growing conditions. They limit childbirth, but they place the same limits on themselves as on the underclass. Perhaps I would have found some abuse the further into the book I went, but I honestly felt that if the prophets had told the hero that he was destined to overthrow the ruling order, he would have said, "but why?" Which, perhaps, was the point of not telling him what was going on.

Miller committed one of those egregious faults early on - she injected exposition baldly into dialogue - "as you know, this is why we're doing this thing, because this is the concise history of how things came to be the way they are, blah blah blah." Exposition, I think, is one of those things we only notice when it is done badly.

Julie Halpern - Into the Wild Nerd Yonder

This was a pleasant little trip back to high school. Halpern describes the plight of a sophomore in high school as she discovers that her friends are poseurs and generally unpleasant, and goes seeking new friends. She discovers a group of D&D players - nerds - but enjoys the experience, and falls in love. It was a little cheesy, but it was enjoyable. It was possible for me to recognize the titular nerds, and it felt very true to its material - that was what high school felt like. Finding yourself is always a tricky adventure, and Halpern describes it well.

In the same vein, this essay got tossed around my small circle of internet friends this week, and it fits very nicely into Halpern's description of high school.

Big busy weekend for me this week, so I don't really know how much reading I'll have done for next Friday. I suppose we'll see when we get there, won't we?