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Rob’s favorite books »

One year, twenty-six books, 10,902 pages. Not including however many dozens of articles and short stories read in Wired, The New Yorker, and online…

In many ways, I’ve started to come to believe that you can’t go wrong with a John Joseph Adams’ collection. Wastelands was incredible, The Living Dead was great, and Federations…? Also very very good.

The “dust jacket description” of this anthology pretty much sums it up… It collects a few different modern takes on the classic science fiction trope: What does it take; what does it mean for a civilization to be interstellar and/or pan-galactic?

My take of Federations, it gets a composite rating of 3.9130 (individual stories below)

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SCENE: Samuel R. Delany, sitting at his writing desk, surrounded by books (some on shelves, but most piled on the floor), circa 1973; a man walks into the room.

- Delany and the man stare at each other. They both stroke their beards.

Delany: “Who are you?”

The Man: “Don’t you know? They sent me.”

D: “Who? Who sent you?”

TM: “It doesn’t matter. I’m here to tell you that it’s OK. They told me to tell you that we’re not really competing. Not really.”

D: “And who are you…?”

TM: “I told you, didn’t I? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Nice place. With the books and all that.”

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A number of reviews that got posted to Goodreads.com earlier this year but never made it to here:

1. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil;
2. Ficciones;
3. Stranger in a Strange Land;
4. In Persuasion Nation;
5. Plays Well With Others;
6. An Obedient Father; and
7. Theodore Rex

We regret this error.

…or, what really happened in the woods that winter:

In a cave in the woods
in his deep, dark lair
through the long, cold winter
sleeps a great brown bear.

Cuddled in a heap
with his eyes shut tight
he sleeps through the day
he sleeps through the night.

The cold winds howl
and the night sounds growl

but the bear snores on.

A filthy little mouse
pitter-pat, tip-toe
creep-crawls in the cave
from the fluff cold snow.

Mouse squeaks
“Too damp.”
“Too dank.”
“Too dark.”

So he lights wee twigs
with a small hot spark.

The coals pip-pop
and the wind doesn’t stop

but the bear snores on.

Two glowing eyes
sneak-peek in the den
mouse cries “Who’s there?”
and a wolf eviscerates him.

“Ho Mouse!” says wolf
“Long time, no eat!”
So he gobbles him down
as a tasty treat.

Mouse gasps deathly rasps
Wolf slurps bloody burps

but the bear snores on.

A badger scuttles by
sniff-snuffs at the air
“I smell yummy-yums,
perhaps we can share?”

“I’ve brought honey nuts,”
badger says with a grin.
“Let’s divvy them up,
cozy down, and drink gin.”

So they nibble and they munch
with a chew chomp crunch

but the bear snores on.

A gopher and a mole
tunnel up through the floor
then a wren and a raven
flutter in through the door.

Mole mutters
“What a night!”
“What a storm!”
Twitters wren.

And everyboy clutters
in the great bear’s den.

They chat about cripples
they tweet and the tipple

but the bear snores on.

In a cave in the woods
a slumbering bear
sleeps through the party
in his very own lair.

Wolf stokes the fire
over seasoned mouse stew
when a small pepper fleck
makes the bear

RAAAAAAAAAAA-CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

He blows and he sneezes
and the whole crowd freezes.

And the bear wakes up!

And the bear devours the other animals.

THE END

Apologies to Karma Wilson for this parody of her marvelous children’s story, Bear Snores On.

A few thoughts as I step away from Theodore Rex:

(1) “Teddy” was a really and truly fascinating character and (like him or not) an important figure in American history.

(2) Given when I was reading this (i.e., more/less at the height of the health care reform debates of the Obama administration), it gives me some perspective and perhaps a little hope, viz. that a popular but politically controversial President can get quite a bit accomplished.

(3) Morris paints a pretty vivid picture of the turn-of-the-century United States in addition to painting a vivid picture of Roosevelt. One of the things that got me through the book’s 555 pages (viz., I don’t care about who is winning delegates!) was the sense of pageantry and drama. Big things were happening and the world was a well-appointed stage.

A version of this review appears on Goodreads.com.

The write-up on the back of the edition of An Obedient Father that I read describes Sharma’s protagonist as a bit of a Dostoevskyian anti-hero. This makes sense: Sharma gives us a corrupt, alcoholic, child-molesting bureaucrat as the vehicle through which most of the story is told. And—call me old fashioned—this makes the story just that much harder to get through; any time you have a protagonist so wretched, so miserable, so abhorrent that you are viscerally—even physically—angered by them… Well, good luck finishing; you’re unlikely to enjoy the story.

So where does that leave us? Is this worth reading? Yes, perhaps.

The catch is that there is a fine line between what’s gratuitous and what is simply graphic. Fortunately, Sharma gets all (or at least most) of this out of the way in the first 50 pages or so. But you may find that you need a strong stomach to get through those first 3 or so chapters. That said, if it weren’t for chapter 2¹, I might have abandoned it.

At the heart of this story is a tale of the consequences that follow corruption and moral ambiguity. It is gripping and powerful at moments but kind of shambling and listless at others.

A version of this review appears on Goodreads.com.

1. Sadly (and confusingly) one of only two where the first-person narrator is not Ram; and that final dangling chapter in the third-person… how does that fit in? [↩]

When I read Angela Carter, I imagine her as the literary grandmother to someone like Kelly Link¹.  There’s an eccentric tone of fantasy, an unabashed outlandishness and roguish word-play; a challenge runs through the narrative as a thread, sometimes cleverly concealed at the seams and sometimes out in front like so much gaudy embroidery.  Carter is a master storyteller with a remarkable gift for language and a willingness to take risks on any front.

But all of the above I already knew from my introduction to Carter, her short story “The Loves of Lady Purple”².

Nights at the Circus goes beyond the expectations set by “The Loves of Lady Purple”.  It is more fantastic, more surreal, more political, more challenging, more graphic, and though more forceful, also much more subtle.  The traveling circus of Colonel Kearney provides such a splendid backdrop for Angela Carter’s handiwork that I would not be at all surprised if this is her finest novel³.  The notion of the circus opens up every possibility for her — literate monkeys taking over their own care and negotiating their own compensation, a fortune-telling pig, abject and sociopathic alcoholic clowns⁴…  And most of that (despite providing its own commentary) seems on the surface to primarily help provide color to a narrative that focuses on a struggle to reconcile independence/individuality with the desire to mate and bond with others.  Carter cleverly leads the reader along her characters’ paths via totems and proxies⁵, and accelerates us through their worlds-in-crisis when those totems become threatened and lost.

This is one novel that is as brilliant as it is lyrical.  And is probably one of the most “quotable” books I have read in quite some time.

A version of this review appeared first on Goodreads.com.

1. Or: “…as the literary more-demure-but-less-forgiving sister to Kathy Acker“? [↩]
2. Check it out in Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (q.v., my review, on Goodreads.com), a collection that she edited. [↩]
3. Vide supra, as of this writing, I have only read this novel and one short story.  Though I may (perhaps) be biased by the strength of the recommendation that J.M. made when suggesting this particular werk in the first place. [↩]
4. Not to mention the thorough deconstruction of clowning. [↩]
5. P.s., this is the bit that I found most interesting (the totems and proxies) but haven’t really had time to fully unpack.  There is some powerful stuff going on in there:  Fevvers and the sword, Lizzie and the clock, Kearney and the pig, the Princess and the piano…  There’s a lit class essay in there somewhere but I haven’t scraped all the dust off the nugget quite yet. [↩]

Micro review:   in Plays Well With Others, Gurganus has a great, somewhat lyrical style that propels the tapestry of vignettes that comprise this novel; that said, he tips his narrative hand in the first 30 pages and you spend the next 450 pages playing a sort of emotional defense.

A few miscellaneous points:

(1) RE: “vignettes” (v.s.): it took me a while to see how the different scenes fit together into a novelistic arc. It isn’t that the vignettes are unrelated or disconnected (viz. they’re unified by narrator and (for the most part) by place) just that a few feel like non-sequiturs.

(2) RE: “emotional defense” (v.s.): spending the first section relating to us the final comic catastrophe of one beloved friend dying of HIV means one (and only one thing) when followed by a deep flashback: it means you’re going to spend hundreds of pages telling us in fine-grained detail the life stories that might otherwise be relayed in a hundred. And you drag it out and fill it with detail because you want me to get emotionally invested in this motley group that we already know is going to die, one by one.

(3) But Gurganus does have a good style, and it comes across here pretty strongly.

A version of this review appears on Goodreads.com.

In lieu of an actual review (short version: it was good but a little challenging and took at least 2 reads to “get it”), a couple of observations about China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station:

(1) On the appeal of steampunk: I remain convinced (and in large part because of this book) that the big appeal of “steampunk” as a genre has to do with the archetypal Inventor/Tinkerer. Here we get this in Miéville’s Isaac. In many ways he’s an unlikely protagonist: a little hefty¹, nerdy, self-aggrandizing, cowardly, and a bit of a pervert²; but incredibly brilliant. He occupies a mental space with our real-world Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and (perhaps more so?) Benjamin Franklin. Our modern (20th/21st century) concepts of science are so laden with litigation and patent applications and funding cuts and notions of proprietary information… It makes sense to cast Isaac as a radical; it’s as if he can see through the veil of the page into our own world, can see how science is encumbered by business and process, can see how disconnected the individual is from his work. There is no more Lone Tinkerer puttering about his basement workshop assembling the next great innovation. And something in our cultural consciousness years for that.

(2) On protagonists: Though I’ve (above) alluded to Isaac as the protagonist, Miéville’s Yagharek serves as our narrator and by extension of convention this grants him a kind of protagonist emeritus status³. But in Yagharek we’re given an interesting bridge between the novel and the reader. Yagharek is, in so many ways, the opposite experience of what I imagine a “typical” fantasy reader is after in his narrators: Yagharek is not heroic either; he is a rapist and a cripple and he is in many ways frustrated and impotent. Our vehicle into the story is hardly a vehicle for escape, hardly a means of escaping our own “real world” anxieties and limitations. What’s more, Yagharek’s ultimate fate (i.e., to desplumarate himself and “go as a man” into New Crobuzon) is a way of turning to the reader and saying: “Now get back to your life just as Yagharek has done.”

1. The references to “his bulk” being a little bit mixed in that regard; but for the sake of argument, he could (in the parlance of our time) stand to lose a few pounds, for sure. [↩]
2. Though let us not judge him here since his “perversion” is really just analogous to an interracial relationship (though that comparison is on par with calling the space shuttle an airplane). [↩]
3. To be honest though, Yagharek is enough of a protagonist to not need the “emeritus”. [↩]