Friday Review Post 9/2/2011

If I have set this up properly, this will post automatically. I'm actually writing this on Wednesday night, because I'm leaving for Chattanooga tomorrow for a wedding, and won't be back until Tuesday. Since my laptop is still feeling poorly ("I'm not dead yet! I don't want to go on the wagon..."), I probably won't have internet access until I get back on Tuesday either, so there will be no Library Tuesday next week. :( Maybe there will be a Library Thursday; we shall see.

Anyway, as of Wednesday, I have read two books:

Michael Carroll - Super Human


A very pleasant YA super hero novel. A disease is immobilizing all the adults, so a small group of teens, 3 superhuman, one a human con artist, must band together to stop the people who are trying to take over the world. Highly satisfying villains, a slightly shallow character arc (which isn't surprising, given the genre), and generally good writing.

I like super hero stories. Once you've given a character some sort of super power, you have the luxury to play with their other foibles - indeed, the necessity, if you wish them to be a readable character. Carroll has done an excellent job in that regard, making human characters out of superhuman ones.

Two objections. 1) Carroll is Irish, but the novel is set in the US. There are one or two points where the dialogue of the teens felt off; just their use of words and syntax which were not American. A small thing, and easily ignored. 2) Carroll clearly sets himself up for a sequel (indeed, I know that there is one). The book has a solid ending, but I was left feeling a little "so, what now" about it. "You've defeated an Assyrian superhero brought back to life by crazed followers of a cult - what are you going to do now?" Carroll doesn't offer an answer here.

Jasper Fforde - One of Our Thursdays is Missing


So, Jasper Fforde is a dangerous man. This is the fifth Thursday Next book (sixth, if you include The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, which, as of this point, doesn't actually exist), and they keep getting more and more complex and complicated. The premise of the books is that Thursday Next works for SpecOps - a branch of the British police that handles odd stuff. She also, sometimes, works for Jurisfiction, a group which serves to maintain order within Bookworld - the place where the characters in books live when we are not reading their books; or the bits of their books when they are "on stage" so to speak. Fforde has been playing with this very odd meta concept for 5 books now; this idea that characters within books have a life of their own when they are not actively pinned down on the page by us, the readers. This creates a delightfully confusing series, as the denizens of Bookworld have to deal with things like low readership, and the problem of ensuring a realistic characterization, and what to do with the whole mess caused by reader feedback (like the fact that, although Doyle never wrote Sherlock Holmes in a deerstalker cap, there is a general view of Holmes as wearing such a hat, and so he must, whether he wants to or not. Or, the fact that Harry Potter is stuck forever looking like Daniel Radcliffe.)

This book begins with a grand reorganization of Bookworld - from a basically library type setting to an actual world - a collection of islands (for the various types of books which might exist; fiction, non-fiction; owners manuals; foreign books, etc) floating around on the inside of a giant sphere. With a world comes environment, and the possibility of genre wars - the major focus of the novel is an impending war between the genre of Racy Novel and its neighbors; Comedy, Women's Fiction, and Dogma. Also of significance, the potentially dangerously low levels of raw metaphor. And, Thursday Next, who was supposed to serve on the peace commission, is missing. Taking her place in this novel is the written Thursday Next.

Ok, that needs explaining. In the novels, Thursday Next is both a character in the novel we are reading AND a character in a novelization of her life which exists in the world that she is a character in. The "written" Thursday Next is the characterization of Thursday Next in the novels which exist in the world that Thursday lives in. Which is not at all the same world as our own. We don't have highly competitive croquet teams, for one, and the Crimean War ended in 1856 here (there, it continues to simmer). Anyway, with Thursday missing, the written Thursday (who is somewhat more hesitant and less gung ho) has to step in. She does an excellent job, and acquires a robotic butler along the way.

All in all, the book is a hoot. As an added bonus, it has pictures! The pictures are drawn by Dylan Meconis and Bill Mudron. Meconis I know from her excellent Vampire French Revolution Farce (Bite Me!), her website is here - she contributed a short graphic novel to Welcome to Bordertown, and is disgustingly good at what she does. Mudron is new to me, but you can find his stuff here.

So, will you like this book? If you have already discovered Thursday Next, then probably. You might want to re-read some of the earlier books, though, just to catch up. If you have not, and you like deeply bafflingly complex meta-novels (by which I mean novels which are basically turned inside out - these are novels about the characters who populate novels), you might want to check these books out. This may not be the place to start, though - find a copy of The Eyre Affair and start there. The Eyre Affair is the least meta of the books - fewer self aware characters, for one thing.

Hickey of the Beast Wednesday, 8/31/2011

(linkedy link link)

Chapter 25

The girls decide that all of the evidence pointing to Edward is highly circumstantial. Plus:

Besides, a guy named Edward being some sort of energy vampire? How cliché could you get?

So Connie decides that she has to break into Edward's bedroom and see if there's anything solid there; and possibly some way of stopping him if he is summoning demons from his dorm room. Most of the chapter is sort of cloak and dagger stuff as Connie gets a cover for her being in Edward's dorm building, and then the skeleton key her parents have so that they can get into dorm rooms in case of an emergency. It's all very nail-bitey, and exceedingly well written. But it's also only chapter 25 - we need further complications! So, maybe Connie's mom has caught Connie in the act...

Library Tuesday, 8/30/2011

An odd grab bag of random stuff this week.

Robert Jackson Bennett - The Company Man


It looks like its sorta noirish. Eleven union men are killed on a subway car between one stop and the next. Cyril Hayes has to find out why.

Jonathan Kay - Among the Truthers


An exploration of conspiracy theories post 9-11. My Master's thesis was on conspiracy theories, so this is right up my alley.

E. Archer - Geek Fantasy Novel


This looked promising - young boy offered a chance to do some computer work for distant relatives finds himself trapped in some sort of fantasy game - but having read a bit of it a the library, I suspect that it takes itself far too seriously. We shall see.

David Liss - The Twelfth Enchantment


I have yet to be disappointed by a David Liss novel. This book seems to have a noble heroine, a book which may be magical, and Lord Byron.

Scheduling Change

For this semester (at least) Library Monday will be on Tuesday. This is due to scheduling reasons - largely, I am done at 4, which means picking the girls up at 4:30, which means picking my wife up at 5, which means there is no time for a library visit. Tuesdays, however, are completely open, and so work much better.

Friday Review Post, 8/26/2011

Two books this week. Actually, only one, because I cheated. I started a book sometime a week and a half ago, and didn't finish it. I read the last chapter today. So, that counts, right?

Terry Eagleton - Why Marx Was Right


So, you've had this experience, I'm sure. You're engaged in a vigorous debate - possibly online - and you make a proposal about something that society needs; something that government, perhaps, could do. And someone else says, "no, that's socialism, and if we do that, we'll end up like the Soviet Union, and etc etc, blah blah blah." And you have no good response, because a) it might actually BE socialism, you're not sure and b) no one wants to end up like the Soviet Union. Well, I've got the perfect book for you! Eagleton is a Marxist scholar, and an entertaining author. He has assembled the ten most prominent critiques of Marxism ("it doesn't work", "it engenders laziness", "it renders everyone the same", "there's no time for art", "we'll all end up like the Soviet Union", etc) and refutes them. It's a slim little book, entirely readable, and utterly entertaining. It is a little Brito-centric, because Eagleton is British, but he explains the one joke which doesn't make sense unless you've been British for the past couple of decades, so that's ok.

The key thing I learned from the book is that Marx (and Engels!) wrote a LOT of books. Most internet critics of Marxism have read The Communist Manifesto - or not even that, you don't need to KNOW anything about a thing to be an internet critic of it - and that's not a good source of Marxist thought at all. Marx was alarmingly prolific, and many of his bigger ideas are only fully explained in some of his less accessible works. So, pick this up instead - you don't want to become a Marxist scholar, after all, you just need some solid points so that you can respond by saying, "no, that's NOT socialism, you stupid troll, and the Soviet Union is not a good example of a socialist society anyway, so nyah." And, probably, it won't help, because the sort of person who calls things socialism on the internet is unlikely to respond well to any sort of reason anyway. But at least you will have enjoyed Eagleton's dryly amusing presentation, and will have expanded your understanding of one of the most important (because influential) philosophies of the 20th century. Which is all to the good.

So, that's the book I had only 1 chapter left to read in. The book I actually read this week was

George R.R. Martin - A Clash of Kings


As you know, I'm re-reading this series before I read the most recent addition. (I'm not watching the show on HBO, because I don't have access to the show. I understand it's brilliant, and I'll probably see it on DVD at some point in the future, which is how I watch most of my TV these days. That, and in waiting rooms.) As with the first book, I don't really have much substantial to say. The series is overwhelmingly gloomy. You can tell who the good guys are, because they're the ones who are getting betrayed and killed by their friends and allies. There is no way to tell who the bad guys are. Martin has no qualms about killing off a character you've been following for 500 or 1000 pages; but the death toll in this book is substantially lower than in the first book. Martin continues his practice of turning villains from one book into sympathetic figures in the next book. And then killing them, naturally.

What I really wanted to do with this book, though, was look at the female characters. Specifically, I posted Julie McKenna's thoughts on roles for female characters last week, in which she says the following:

     Thankfully there have long been fantasies with strong female characters taking the initiative to drive plots forward, making their own choices and dealing with men as equals, even when their cultures frown upon it. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books, Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince series andAnne McCaffrey’s Pern novels are all notable as such pioneers.
But this is still not enough. Those writers are all women, and research has shown that men and boys’ reading is so often unconsciously biased towards books written by men. The representation of women in fantasy is an issue that should concern all authors. We need a substantial list of male authors to cite after Sir Terry Pratchett, when the question of men writing effective, convincing women comes up.
     I want to read those stories myself. But this doesn’t mean I want to read about feisty servant girls who wake up, throw off a lifetime of cultural conditioning along with their blankets and decide it’s time to invent feminism. Any more than I want to read about honest farm boys who discover they’re a lost heir and regain the throne thanks to a great mage’s help, who won’t claim it for himself because he’s a decent chap.
     So somewhat paradoxically, the representation of women in fantasy must still include women leading circumscribed, subordinated lives, to remind all of us reading, male and female, why our grandmothers, mothers and aunts campaigned for the vote and marched for equal rights. To remind us what women’s lives are like today in so much of the world where their human rights are curtailed by culture and poverty. 

So, how does Martin hold up? Well, there are LOTS of women in these books. That's because there are simply lots of people. When you're writing thousand page books, you can have a cast of millions, and Martin does an excellent job of spreading the characters around - he has lots and lots of good strong characters in both genders. But what are the roles of women like in these books? There are queens and princesses - more on queens in a moment - whose lives are relatively circumscribed by duty and position. At one point, Tyrion Lannister argues that it is the purpose of his niece, the princess, to be married off for dynastically significant reasons. (This was, of course, true, during the period in human history when kings and queens and such were heads of government. Calling your daughter "princess" is an insult, or it should be.) There are wives, mothers and sisters (and incest - lots and lots of incest all over the place). Wives, mothers and sisters are largely significant due to the place of their husbands, brothers and sons, but Catelyn Stark is clearly a force to be reckoned with in her own right, and Arya Stark is an interesting character entirely separate from her brother, Robb. There are whores (lots and lots of whores) and rape victims (it's a war, and rape has been a tactic of war for most of human history.), and sometimes those categories cross over into wives and mothers, and often they do not. Martin often uses rape as a short hand to show that a character is, actually, not very nice - this is problematic, because it removes agency from some of the female characters in a way that male characters never suffer. Also, there are women warriors sprinkled through the books - Arya Stark is one, Brienne of Tarth is another, and Asha Greyjoy is a third. There are also women warriors with the wildlings north of the Wall.

So, that seems a fairly broad range of roles for women within the book, and not all of them are in "traditional" women's roles as keepers of the hearth and warmers of the bed (although there are plenty that are). But let's consider the women who fall outside those "traditional" roles. Let's look first at Queen Cersei and Queen Daenerys - two very different women. Cersei, widow of King Robert, and mother of King Joffrey, is conniving and manipulative. She considers that women have two weapons - their tears and their sex - and she uses both to full effect. She operates in the shadows, she intimidates, she uses her access to wealth to buy people, she uses people. She is, in many ways, a classic female villain - the Dragon Lady comes to mind.

Daenerys is a Queen because she commands loyalty through her actions. She is not content to sit back and manipulate circumstances - she is leading a band of people, she plans to lead an army from the front - she plans to have the assistance of a trio of dragons to do this, but she is not the femme fatal figure. In fact, I would not be surprised if she ends up being the big winner in all of this; the figure who imposes order on Martin's world at bloody war, and bring peace; even if that peace is under threat of dragon fire.

Let's also consider the way in which the female warriors are presented. Being a female warrior is clearly a transgressive act for much of the world. Brienne is able to be a knight because she is so clearly unsuited to be a lady - she is described as ugly and mannish, with no breasts, broad shoulders, and course facial features. She is mocked by her detractors as Brienne the Beauty (but never to her face; or at least, never twice). Asha Greyjoy, who is a viking princess with her own long boat, presents herself as married to her battle axe, and mother to a dagger she keeps in her bodice. This is clearly transgressive - she is not living out the proscribed life of a woman, and she knows it, and revels in it. Arya is largely out of the view of polite society for most of this book - and also, disguised as a boy for most of the book - but her mother despairs (from a distance) of Arya ever becoming a lady, like her sister. (Not that being a lady has done anything good for Sansa, but that's a different issue.) The only women who are presented as warriors in such a way that they are accepted by their larger society as the women wildings, up North past the Wall - barbarians who threaten to overwhelm civilized society if they can escape the confines of their frozen wasteland - and even they are described as "spearwives", which implies a certain transgressive relationship, married to a spear instead of a man.

So, the strong women, Martin suggests, are the ones outside of "civilized" society; indeed, they may actively be seeking to destroy that civilization. But, as I say, it's entirely possible that the destruction of civilization is the ultimate ending of the series of books - and, given the violence and rape and just plain brutal nastiness of this book, it's possible that the destruction of civilization should be seen as an entirely joyous thing, at least in the context of these novels.

Whoa. That's pretty heavy for a Friday night. Clearly, I need to go back to work - I'm in full lecture mode. That starts on Monday, incidentally - so I'll be taking it out on my students instead of you all.

Hickey of the Beast Wednesday, 8/24/2011

(Linky!)

Chapter 24

Hmmm. Well, the girls are all back together again, and discussing what Connie learned over Thanksgiving. They come to the conclusion that kids can dream of the incubus because they are more likely to scrape themselves on the ground, and thus more likely to bleed on the ground, which connects them to things. Or something of that nature. This raises some questions:

Does this guy have the same connection to the land that Connie does? Does sacrificing an animal give you a weird version of the connection or something else? Why didn't Connie get an incubus?"
"Because I didn't want one—"
"Well, now I'm going to have to return your Christmas present," Jenny said.

They try to warn the current victim - but she's already in the hospital - the incubus is taking more out of the victims, more quickly. With some further discussion, the girls decide that the summoner must be a guy.Having deduced that, they figure he must be getting something from the incubus. Based on Connie's impression of him from her dreams, he's probably an upperclassman - so they decide to look for upperclassmen who were losers last year but have suddenly blossomed this year. And they conclude that the summoner must be Edward Tinsley. I knew we couldn't trust anyone named Edward.* But, as a reader, I'm thinking this is only Chapter 24 of a 33 chapter book, so maybe this is a red herring. Maybe it's too obvious. We shall have to see.

*Yes, that's a Twilight reference. No, I haven't read it.

Monday Library Post, 8/22/2011, plus remedial review

Two today, both YA.

Trisha Telep, Ed - Corsets and Clockwork


13 Steampunk romances. It looked promising. Mind you, I didn't actually read the last teen steampunk romance that I brought home (my lovely wife did, and proclaimed it entirely too fluffy, and I never quite got to it before it was due back.) We shall see.

Michael Carroll - Super Human


Superhero fiction - I like superhero fiction, as it happens. The villain is an immortal Assyrian, and the beginning was quite promising (I started it while at the library, as I often do.)

That reminds me, did I actually review After the Golden Age? I read it. It seems I never reviewed it. I will correct that lapse now:

Carrie Vaughn - After the Golden Age


This is a surprisingly deep story of  the non-superpowered child of super heroes. Vaughn has put a lot of thought into the story. What happens to a city when there are super heroes present? How do the police react, when some flying person, or someone faster than sight, or someone who can throw flames, or whathaveyou is likely to show up? More, how can mortal cops handle the possibility of supervillains? Some nice moral dilemmas. Like Watchmen, but much much less depressing.

The protagonist is Celia West. She is heiress to the West family fortune and business, and the daughter of Captain Olympus and Spark - the Olympiad. Captain Olympus is Superman, basically, and Spark can manipulate fire and heat. Celia ... Celia is a forensic accountant. She can do accounting.

The Olympiad (which includes, in addition to Captain Olympus and Spark, Dr. Mentis [telepath] and Bullet [speedster]) has fought for many years against the machinations of Destructor - a supervillain who enjoys destroying things. One of the things he has destroyed is the secret identity of The Olympiad - everyone knows who they are. He has recently been arrested for tax evasion. Celia is asked to help with the accounting by the District Attorney. There are some obvious complications as a result.

In the midst of the trial, a series of odd thefts take place - rare musical instruments; rare koi - and the police are baffled. The thefts correspond with attempts to kidnap Celia, which means that the Olympiad are distracted. This further complicates things.

Anyway. It's a nice book, with a sufficiently twisty plot. There's a certain amount of flashback narrative, but it's done well. Celia learns things about her family and about herself that she didn't know, and that's all to the good. It has a nice, satisfying ending (although I doubt it would be difficult to revisit the setting), good character development, a believable villain with a suitably twisty motive ... it's a good book. I recommend it.