September 2009

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The worst book we’ve ever (tried to) read.

September 30, 2009 in Book, Novels by Emera | 3 comments

The Ill-Made Mute, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton (2002) E

Date read: 4.23.05
Read from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

To celebrate our 50th posted review, Kakaner requested that I post one of my oldest reviews, which is of the worst book that both of us have more or less read. “More or less” meaning that Kakaner couldn’t finish it, and I only finished it in the loose sense of having turned every page in the book, with at most a 75% probability of actually having read the material on each page word-for-word.

Hoo boy. Where to begin.

Once upon a time, new books were very very precious to Kakaner because she wasn’t allowed to buy any, and was not yet empowered by the wonders of an independent income. Then came the glorious day when Kakaner was allowed, for the very first time, to buy one book. One book! Hands trembling with the fevered anticipation of a junkie about to score, she turned to me for recommendations. I offhandedly suggested Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s The Ill-Made Mute, a fantasy novel that I’d heard of here and there, about a mysteriously mute and disfigured waif who must make her way through a faerie-riddled landscape of phantoms and flying ships. Sounds fun, right? Strange worlds! Colorful reimaginings of Celtic mythology! “Netted with golden prose”[™ cover blurb]! And so, alas, Kakaner plunged ahead, unaware of the outrageous injustice I had committed in encouraging her to squander her first purchase thusly.

Now, bear in mind that I’ve read a fair number of prosaically bad books, from The Da Vinci Code to any number of mass-produced YA series about princesses with jewel-themed names or suburban kids who discover magical kung-fu powers that enable them to battle insidious Aliens in Disguise*. I have even sampled from the pages of that dainty of dainties, Twilight. However, I still have yet to encounter anything quite so self-indulgently, toe-curlingly, consummately, orgiastically bad as The Ill-Made Mute, a book that exists to define “fascinatingly horrible.”

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Two reviews of reviews (sort of)

September 27, 2009 in Book porn, Curiosities by Emera | 2 comments

Ursula LeGuin wrote a very useful review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood that I just finished reading, in which she touches on one of my favorite conundrums: what does it mean to call oneself “genre” versus “literary”? Atwood apparently likes rejecting the sci-fi designation, based on an arbitrary definition that I frankly find bewildering. (The dynamics of of genre/literary “tribes” are discussed in greater and amusing detail on Jeff Vandermeer’s blog here. This, of course, is all following the enormous brouhaha made by Lev Grossman’s bizarre less than carefully argued* editorial  in the Wall Street Journal about the so-called Victory of Plot in contemporary fiction. Sorry to link-fling if you haven’t been following this from the beginning, but I find it all pretty engrossing.)

Anyway, LeGuin provides a great review of the book, as well as very delicately, very incisively nailing Atwood for her fallacy in evading the designation of sci-fi. Being considered as a work of science fiction, LeGuin tells us, is not a limitation, but something that enriches the experience of reading a novel, gives us another dimension from which to analyze and celebrate a book’s creativity, fullness, and success.

Damn straight.

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Separately, The Mumpsimus has become my favorite blog for reviews and discussion of speculative fiction. That its author, Matthew Cheney, is an English professor (as well as a writer of assorted fiction and nonfiction, and editor of Best American Fantasy) is not surprising: his reviews are lucid, accessible, and literary, filled with useful allusions and fun, thoughtful analyses. Every time I read a review of his of a book or story that I’ve already read, I want to go back and read the work again.

The excitement in his reviews is tangible – reading them is like sitting with a good friend and discussing the story at hand, tossing ideas back and forth and unraveling knotty plot points together. I also think that he tends to appreciate a lot of underappreciated and misread works. Case in point: his ecstatic, playful review of Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” (which I loved and briefly reviewed here). Judging from the comments following, said story was not so well-received by many readers; I think it’s a shame that none of them seemed to get anything further from Cheney’s review. Note that his review is somewhat spoiler-y.

Unfortunately, his blog is also rather unwieldy to navigate, but the material is all so good that I don’t mind trawling.

*correction made following the reading of Grossman’s comments in response to all the heated criticism.

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Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom (1997)

September 26, 2009 in Book, Nonfiction by kakaner | No comments

Date Read: 9.24.09
Book From: Neha
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Morris Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Brandeis, discovers he has ALS and begins his journey to death. Mitch Albom, the author, learns of his professor’s condition and begins to visit him regularly on Tuesdays for his “one last class”. Tuesdays with Morrie chronicles Morrie’s last days through the eyes of Albom and relates Morrie’s philosophies outlooks on life, love, and death.

Review

Morrie’s tale is touching and admirable; his philosophies are noteworthy and brave.Morrie taught the importance of relationships and love above all else in this world, and used his struggle with death to examine how one should approach and embrace the end. The edition I read claims that Tuesdays with Morrie has changed millions of lives and, well, I can certainly believe that many people have been impacted by this book. I feel like Morrie and I would get along because I share the same views as him and can only hope that when I reach his age, I will be able to be an example of my beliefs.

However, I found Tuesdays with Morrie very hard to enjoy. The writing was incredibly spare and simple to a fault, and all in all, incredibly dramatic. The prose (if you could call it that) reads like Dan Brown’s and the italicized entries are reminiscent of Lifetime programming. Morrie’s story is already beautiful and it does not need added dramatism or overstatements. I do not doubt that Albom is a great journalist because I can tell his writing style is great for that field, and especially for sports. It just felt like a cop out because each chapter was so clearly a simple transcription of audio tapes, and edited so as to push the reader’s emotional buttons. I wish Albom had added more literary meat and interpretation. Reading this novel devolved into a plodding journey and my enthusiasm was gradually buried by mediocrity.

I honestly tried really hard to read past the writing and into the content, but everytime I hit yet another cheesy and dramatic chapter-ender I would cringe a little and put the book down. I’m sure picky readers will encounter the same experience, in which case I would definitely not recommend reading Tuesdays with Morrie. But I suspect for the most part, people will enjoy this and people should read this, if not only to increase ALS awareness and for a mature prospective on life.

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Mitch Albom

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“When the Gentlemen Go By,” by Margaret Ronald (2008) E

September 24, 2009 in Book, Short stories by Emera | No comments

Date read: 8.15.09
Read from: Clarkesworld Magazine
Reviewer: Emera

“When the Gentlemen Go By” (title and concept after a Rudyard Kipling poem) is a mildly creepy tale of a mother who lives in a small English town that keeps a peculiar bargain with the nocturnally riding “Gentlemen.” It’s elegantly written but based on a well-trodden and predictable premise, and its psychological basis is shaky to boot, as discussed in the magazine’s comment section. And that’s really all I have to say about it.

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Margaret Ronald
Clarkesworld Magazine

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Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay (2004) K

September 24, 2009 in Book, Film/TV, Novels by kakaner | 3 comments

Date Read: 11.26.08
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Short version: Dexter S1.
Long version: Dexter, a serial killer of serial killers, works in the Miami Metro Police as a blood spatter analyst alongside with his foster sister Deb. We learn that Dexter was taken from a violent crime scene and raised by a cop. Upon learning that Dexter was prone to murderous intentions, his dad taught him the art of killing. Suddenly, a new wave of killings crop up and are accredited to the “Ice Truck Killer” and Dexter recognizes that these killings are somehow a message to himself. Using his skills as a killer and resources at the police department, Dexter helps track down the killer while trying to keep those that matter to him safe.

Review

Unfortunately, I have to say this is exactly what I expected. I watched two seasons of Dexter before picking up one of the novels (much to my shame), partly due to the horrible things I had heard about the books. Unsurprisingly, the writing was entirely mediocre, unsophisticated, and wholly disappointing.

dexter-s1-dexter-killing

Naturally, I couldn’t help but compare Darkly Dreaming Dexter to the TV series. The novel is told from Dexter’s point of view, and really does try hard to achieve the same dark, cynical, wry atmosphere that the TV adaptation manages to accomplish so well… but just falls short. The pacing of the book was alright, as in there was always some action each chapter to propel the story forward. I feel like I’m really at a loss for what else to say about the novel. It was just unremarkable (again, comparison to the TV series). There are some minor plot differences between the novel and show, except for the ending; however, I don’t really care because I’m not reading anymore books.

dexter-in-blood-lab

At the least, reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter has made me appreciate the TV adaptation immensely. You really begin to gain an understanding of the skill involved in developing Dexter’s character for the screen, piecing together the soundtrack and film style for that perfect cynical criminal atmosphere, and the screenplay is just impeccable. The TV show has really come a long way from the novel and certainly shaped a masterpiece from raw materials.

Go To:

Jeff Lindsay

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The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) E

September 21, 2009 in Book, Novels by Emera | No comments

Date read: 1.4.06
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Stevens is the quintessential English butler: dignified, humorless, and obsessively devoted to his work, he defines his life through his service to the late Lord Darlington. Convinced for decades that he has contributed to humanity by serving a great man, Stevens begins to reevaluate his experiences as he embarks on a country drive through postwar England. As he does, he finds that many of his memories – of his unthinking adulation of Lord Darlington, and of his difficult relationship with Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper – begin to take on a disturbing cast.

The Remains of the Day, like all Ishiguro novels, is intimately psychological and beautifully, beautifully written. Ishiguro always strikes a balance between wandering reminiscence and tight, artful construction. Reading one of his novels is like opening a tiny box to find an intricately meandering labyrinth inside. It takes patience to make your way through, but the delicate tension throughout presses you onward and lends a sense of direction and quiet urgency to the narrative. I haven’t read a novel of his in several years (this is an old review), but I have always had the sense that he paints with light and shadow: my memories of scene from his books are suffused with soft light and atmosphere, like dreams or out-of-focus photographs.

Ishiguro’s characters often seem to exist in voids of their own creation, set adrift in their memories until they are finally driven to seek out real contact and attempt resolution. For the first half of The Remains of the Day, you meet almost no other characters except through the lens of Stevens’ recollections, so that you half-believe his immaculate persona – until Miss Kenton appears on the scene as a disruptive force and exposes his pettiness and hypocrisy, both to the reader and himself. This is a novel about self-delusion, history and personal history, and the ways in which we can be reconciled with them – again, themes central to most of Ishiguro’s works.

The only disappointment to me in reading The Remains of the Day was actually the last two pages. I found the ending was a little too abrupt and pat, too suddenly transformative, almost out of character. Perhaps it will sit better with me with a re-read and a reintroduction to Stevens’ character, especially since a lot has changed in my understanding of people since my first read.

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Kazuo Ishiguro

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Slam, by Nick Hornby (2008) K

September 21, 2009 in Book, Novels by kakaner | No comments

Date Read: 6.14.09
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Well. Sam is a normal teenager obsessed with skateboarding and sports crushes here and there. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, and suddenly, he has a world of responsibility and decisions to face.

Review

Overall it was meh. Straight off I’m going to say I don’t think Hornby should be a YA writer. I felt like it was very clear he was an adult fiction author writing a YA novel. It didn’t feel effortless and simple like I think YA books should feel– it was almost as if he wrote the book as an adult novel, then went through and edited down each sentence, but in the end, you could still feel the weight of words meant for an older genre underlying the novel. That is not to say the writing is bad (*quite* the contrary), but it wasn’t quite natural.

I think the main thing I want to talk about is Tony Hawk. So Sam is well…. obsessed with skateboarding and Tony Hawk. And guess what? Tony Hawk is Sam’s imaginary friend! During about half the book, Sam talks to the Tony Hawk in his head, asking him life questions and advice for decisions, and “Tony Hawk” responds. Sam formulates these responses for himself based on what he knows of Tony Hawk from his autobiography. And I have to say, it is a rather cheesy concept and very apparently something that screamed “I AM A CHARACTERISTIC YA PLOT ELEMENT! I PROVIDE A ROLE MODEL AND SOURCE OF COMFORT FOR THE MAIN CHARACTER.” And of course, there’s the obligatory “run away from home because you feel overwhelmed and need to find yourself” chapter.

I think all my gripes stem from the fact that Sam is simply an uninteresting main character. He has no quirks, he’s a typical American teenage skater, and I am simply not sympathetic to his plight. He is boring as boring gets. And maybe that is supposed to be the appeal of Sam, that he’s Sam Everyboy, but there is definitely a way to pull that off and Hornby did not do it.

I guess I just wasn’t swept up by many elements which I’m sure others found mature and insightful– the premise of teenage pregnancy and the admittedly realistic ending. Even though I ripped it apart, it’s still a decent book, solidly constructed, though not memorable.

Go To:

Nick Hornby

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The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16, ed. Stephen Jones (2005) E

September 19, 2009 in Book, Short stories by Emera | No comments

Date read: 8.3.09
Read from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

I picked this and #15 up at a used book sale, partly out of a fit of pique that I couldn’t find anything else to my taste – even though I didn’t know anything about the actual quality of the anthology series. Luckily, every story in this was well written and solidly above average, which is more than can be said for half of the anthologies I’ve read in my life.

To begin with the best, my absolute favorites, in no particular order:

  • Kelly Link’s feverish, extremely unnerving “Stone Animals” (come on, even the title is creepy). Young couple with poor communication and two small children, including a sleepwalking daughter, moves into a new house where all is not quite well – classic set-up for horror, and Link plays it gleefully. I imagined her whooping maniacally while writing the story, truth be told.
  • Lisa Tuttle’s “My Death,” the story of a recently widowed writer who travels in search of new inspiration, and becomes strangely entangled in the legacy of an early 20th-century painter and his muse. This builds slowly, but goes places that are increasingly strange and tap into very primitive, raw forces. The ending was completely unpredictable and bewildering in the best way possible. Masterfully executed, all in all.
  • Michael Marshall Smith’s supremely atmospheric and ever-so-delicately frightening “This Is Now.” Describing it would ruin it, so I won’t. This gave me the most chills-down-the-spine read, yet the fear is so deliciously subtle and evanescent.

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Pompeii, by Robert Harris (2003) E

September 17, 2009 in Book, Novels by Emera | No comments

Date read: 1.22.06
Read from: Public library
Reviewer: Emera

Attilius, newly appointed aquarius (engineer) to the great aqueduct Augusta after the disappearance of the previous aquarius, is charged by the scholar and general Pliny to repair the disrupted aqueduct. With the water supplies of nine cities at risk, Attilius travels to the corrupt and vice-filled Pompeii to investigate the mysterious break, near Mount Vesuvius. As he travels, he finds that the damaged aqueduct and missing aquarius are only two of many strange omens – sulfur contamination, strange smoke, earthquakes, and inexplicable sounds like those of “walking giants,” all issuing from Mount Vesuvius.

Pompeii was very well-written and full of fascinating historical detail, but it simply failed to hold my interest as a novel. I pin this on a lack of interest in the characters, who seemed like afterthoughts of the historical research: realistic in their various roles of Roman citizenry, but psychologically uninteresting. The heroine, for example, was a rather generic  “No, father, I shall not marry without love!” type. The atmosphere is satisfyingly gritty and ominous, however, and gathers strength as the book continues, culminating in a fantastically powerful description of the volcano’s final eruption.

In sum, Pompeii is a readable, carefully researched record of the last days of Pompeii, but lacks in character development and emotional involvement.

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Robert Harris

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Affinity, by Sarah Waters (1999) K

September 15, 2009 in Book, Novels by kakaner | No comments

Date Read: 12.26.07
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

Margaret Prior becomes a “Lady Visitor” at the Millbank prison. There, she takes in the prison experience, from the food to the garb to the treatment of the prisoners and takes steps to befriend and be a source of comfort for many of the inmates. As her visits progress, she finds herself drawn to one girl in particular, a spirit medium Selina Dawes, convicted of spiritualistic fraud and assault. Soon, between her own declining health and the nature of her friendship with Selina, Margaret finds herself hopelessly committed to the Millbank prison and tangled up with mysterious spirits.

Review

Well, I don’t really know how to approach this review. I could either review it superficially and not give away the story, or try to convey everything I want to and ruin everything by implication. I’ll… just… charge ahead as best I can and see where it takes me.

Overall Affinity was a much easier read than either Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith because it was so linear and set in one place– the prison and Margaret’s house were the only settings and the prison was the only plot. As a result, the circumstances definitely called for a slow, steadily snowballing story.

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