Sunday, March 31, 2013

2013 read #43: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Translated by Olena Bormashenko
193 pages
Published 1972; English translation published 2012
Read from March 28 to March 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I've really slacked off my reading pace the last couple weeks, haven't I? This book was a good, brisk read, and brief, yet it still took me four days. Unconscionable.

Anyway, this book has seemingly been popping up everywhere lately... or at least several times on io9. I never expected my library to actually have a copy, so when I saw it on the shelf, I just had to grab it. Comparisons to Chernobyl are unavoidable, even though the original publication anticipated that disaster by fourteen years. The early descriptions of the Zone were eerie in that light, reminding me of footage from the robot cameras sent into the Sarcophagus. I wonder how much of that atmosphere was in the original text, and how much was massaged in through translation.

Other than that, I think I failed to see what was so magnificent about this book to justify such a brouhaha. It's a solid sci-fi book, quite enjoyable and vivid, with occasional absolutely chilling moments, but nothing earthshaking. Maybe I'm just a dull critic. Or maybe Red's climactic rant against vultures and how good people can't win against corruption seemed more daring and pointed when it was written, in Soviet Russia, during the Cold Frickin' War. Context can't be ignored.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

2013 read #42: Firebird by R. Garcia y Robertson.

Firebird by R. Garcia y Robertson
320 pages
Published 2006
Read from March 20 to March 27
Rating: ★★ out of 5

This started out as a cute, sweet bit of pseudo-historical fantasy fluff, its charm marred only by lack of focus and cohesion. It presented a thematically inchoate gumbo of influences, borrowing from history, the folklore of Eastern Europe, modern day lycanthropy pablum, steampunk, Arabian Nights, medieval romance, and classical mythology. We got Tartars in airships and Persephone riding a roc. At the center of it we had a standard modern fantasy heroine, plucky and inexplicably attractive to everyone around her. Everyone from knights to nuns to demigods wanted to sleep with her. Despite all that, though, I liked it, at first. The prose, aside from issues with repetition, read smoothly and enjoyably, and despite myself and my cynical attitude, I found myself liking the plucky heroine and her honorable knight, and wanting them to wind up together at the end. That's how it started out, at least.

By the midpoint of the book, sadly, that all changed. Garcia y Robertson inexplicably abandoned the fetching and whimsical fantasy adventure, confining his heroine to a tedious life in a harem right out of a straight guy's most boring and uncreative sapphic imaginings. The pervasive sexuality, at first so cute and even (surprisingly) sexy, turned eye-rolling and dull as everyone continually professed their love for and sought to bed the two leads, and Garcia y Robertson developed a silly love triangle around them, complemented by the most basic and uninteresting of political intrigue plotlines. The rampant male gaze and exploitative atmosphere didn't bother me nearly as much as the sheer boringness of it all. Which is a shame, because for the first 150 or so pages I really wanted to like this book.

2013 read #41: The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.

The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
220 pages
Published 1940
Read from March 20 to March 27
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

"A man ought to keep things to himself," a character says near the end of The Ox-Bow Incident, but that doesn't mean even the most virile and laconic rangehand lacks those feelings. This book was written in a fascinating style, what I might venture to dub "perceptive masculinity." This book is the apotheosis of pulp, refining pulp's terse, masculist sensibilities into something approaching blunt poetry. It might be a disgrace to even assert that this novel derives from pulp stock. It was a solid, powerful read, all the more tragic for its characters' inability to express or even fully define their inner fears, doubts, and emotions.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

2013 read #40: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
357 pages
Published 1931
Read from March 11 to March 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Buck makes the evocation of an unfamiliar culture -- its ideas, its assumptions, its rhythms -- seem almost effortless. Reading her simple, almost biblical prose, I felt absorbed by the daily life of her version of pre-revolutionary China, as well as the tastes and smells and intimate little details of the land. Personally, I found the depicted culture loathsome in every respect, but that doesn't blunt my appreciation for Buck's descriptive accomplishment, nor did it prevent me from being moved by the small tragedies of Wang Lung's life, selfish idiot I may have found him to be. I wish I could articulate a culture (and a life foreign to my own) so clearly as this. Seriously, I'm impressed.

Monday, March 18, 2013

2013 read #39: As Far as the Eye Can See by David Brill.

As Far as the Eye Can See: Reflections of an Appalachian Trail Hiker by David Brill
187 pages
Published 1990
Read from March 17 to March 18
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I may not be reading this at the tail end of the month, but I think this book makes a nice bookend to The Cactus Eaters, from the beginning of March. Instead of the ennui and small economic crises of the late '90s, which Dan White fled for the Pacific Crest Trail, Brill orients himself as a member of a lost generation, old enough to have observed the upheavals of the '60s and '70s but not old enough to have faced the draft-or-revolution test when he came of age. Here he presents his 1979 journey up the Appalachian Trail (AT) as a substitute test, a self-imposed challenge to stimulate "personal growth" at the cusp of adulthood. It's a predictable story, worn down to nubs and truisms today, but it's probably inevitable in a book like this. Why the sons of the middle class are so concerned about "finding themselves" I'll never know; you'd think spending six months hiking in the woods would be its own reward, without all this late adolescent philosophical mumbo-jumbo. But it comes with the genre.

Even though The Cactus Eaters got weird and far, far too personal, at least Dan White had a way with words. Brill plods through his story with all the grace of an undergraduate writing assignment, shoehorning a clumsy simile into every paragraph as if following some test prep center's guidelines for good writing. Which is hilariously apt, since at the time he published this book, Brill was "Coordinator of the Writing Center at Roane State Community College," something I didn't notice until after I made this comparison. In an additional contrast to The Cactus Eaters, which portrays White descending into poisonous, neurotic obsession with the trail, Brill maintains a tone of bright-eyed optimism and the romance of the backwoods. It makes for syrupy reading sometimes, but to be quite honest, it's exactly what I wanted out of this book. It may not be a particularly good book, but I can't be too hard on it.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

2013 read #38: My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
181 pages
Published 1959
Read from March 16 to March 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

This is another juvenile lit book I first encountered in one of my brother's English primers. I forgot all about it until I found it while looking for Julie of the Wolves. I didn't like this one so well as Julie. While charming for the most part, in places it gets mechanical, as if written by a real live 12 year old boy more interested in sharing the particulars of his subsistence than in telling a good yarn. Nevertheless, it was mostly charming. My one hike in the Catskills last June primed me to find this book especially winsome. I could picture Sam's woods and gorge perfectly. I'm glad Craighead George made a point of detailing how crowded the Catskills get with hikers and poachers; even a book set in the 1950s would have a hard time pretending the Catskills were outright wilderness. I did find it implausible that so many adults would casually aid and abet a young runaway, especially Bando the teacher, but what do I know? Maybe their indulgence seemed more plausible when this was written. And maybe my own personal sense of adequate parentage is far too civilized and soft, because I kind of felt that Sam was a dick to leave his family for no real reason, and his parents were assholes for letting him. But the author basically proclaimed this was her wish-fulfillment fantasy in her preface, so maybe I shouldn't read into it too much. I just thought Julie was a better book because Julie actually had, you know, a reason to be among the wolves.

I find it interesting that "running away to the woods" is (or was?) a common childhood fantasy, not just mine. The idyll of Tom Sawyer on the island and Huck Finn on the raft were always my favorite portions of their respective books; by the time I was 14 or so I was certain that after I left my father and made a lot of money from my best-selling novels and long-distance hiking narratives, I would retire to build my own shack in some remote corner of the deep woods in the Montana wilderness. I didn't know then that hikers get everywhere, of course, but it was a persistent fantasy. I clung to it for at least a couple years. I didn't plan out the little details, like how I would feed myself and survive the -40°F winters, but it was my little mental refuge for a time. Sometimes the idea still has undeniable appeal, even if I'm more likely to wish for a summer vacation cabin instead.

Now I'm tempted to see if my library has a copy of Krakauer's Into the Wild handy. That would be a funny-ironic pairing.

Friday, March 15, 2013

2013 read #37: Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George.

Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
170 pages
Published 1972
Read March 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Finally tracked this one down. Embarrassingly, it was in the library the whole time. I was looking in the juvenile section; it turned out to be in the juvenile paperback section. All I had to do was take five seconds to look in the online catalog again. Oh well, it's not like I've been lacking for other things to read. I have twenty-seven other books checked out right now, and mountains of unread books I've accumulated over the years. I'll have enough to read until November without checking out another book, if I so chose. But I'm still glad I got the chance to read this one.

I liked it a lot. Giving books subjective scores as I do, I feel a bit odd rating this more generously than I did Heart of Darkness. No one, me least of all, is trying to imply Julie of the Wolves is a superior work. I just really really enjoyed this one. It was a simple tale fetchingly told.

2013 read #36: Sisters of the Raven by Barbara Hambly.

Sisters of the Raven by Barbara Hambly
466 pages
Published 2002
Read from March 7 to March 15
Rating: ★★ out of 5

There's an essay to be written here regarding intersectonality in feminist fantasy, by someone whose brain is currently firing on all cylinders. Hambly uses this novel as an unapologetic soapbox against the subjugation of women -- a laudable if obvious theme -- yet builds it on a racially-tinged foundation. I suppose this is far from the worst case of Orientalism I've encountered in modern fantasy, but it's nonetheless unmistakable. Setting your "Women cast off sub-human social status to claim power in society" novel in a pseudo-Arabic context kind of makes sense, I suppose, but it brings with it troubling overtones; I can't shake the feeling that feminist critiques of Arabic culture, at least in fiction, are probably best addressed by writers within those cultures, you know? Add to that the fact that the ruling class of this pseudo-Ottoman fantasy land are blond-haired and fair-skinned, which never draws much comment in the text, and you have yourself the starting point of that possible essay. But I don't feel like writing it right now.

This book was competently written but a bit unfocused. The first 65 pages (one-seventh of the book) are spent introducing six viewpoint characters, not staying with any of them long enough to establish lasting interest or emotional investment in any of them. I like multiple viewpoint characters, but give me a chance to get to know them, jeez. This process isn't helped by character names like "Corn-Tassel Woman" and "Pomegranate Woman" and "Summer Concubine." Yes, I get the point of the naming system -- women are property to be named at the pleasure of their husbands or keepers -- but that doesn't change the fact that it doesn't make it easy to keep track of the welter of characters. Worse, after I got them sorted out in my head, I didn't much care what happened to them. I never felt emotionally invested in any of them, or anything that was going on. Though I might make an exception for Pomegranate Woman and her spirit pig, who seem to have wound up in this book after getting lost on the way to a Gaiman novel.

I will say I liked the structure and execution of magic in this universe. At one point a spell is worked on two soldiers by making them eat papers with the spell on them. How Old Testament is that?

If I had to sum up my impressions, it would be "A Star Wars author tries to write a Big Important Novel, with predictably middling results." Sisters of the Raven was never an outright chore to read, but it lacked much to keep me interested, as you can tell; it took me for-fucking-ever to finish it.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

2013 read #35: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
110 pages
Published 1902
Read March 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I found myself with an alarming lack of things to say about this book. Maybe it's best to get inoculated with it in high school, that way its effect isn't diluted through exposure to movies and jokes and pop culture osmosis, and as a bonus you get someone holding your hand as you putter through its motifs and meaning. Not that I don't get the gist, you understand; I just think I'd get more out of it in a literature course or something like that. Knowing the punchline ahead of time, as it were, what I mostly noticed was the appalling racism endemic to Conrad's time and place. It's still an interesting and tolerably well-written book for all my familiarity, but yeah, a lot of the impact was wasted on me. It doesn't help that I burned through this book in an afternoon, only giving it half my attention.

2013 read #34: Sweetwater by Lawrence Yep.

Sweetwater by Lawrence Yep
201 pages
Published 1973
Read March 9
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Outside of a few scattered weeks of first grade, I never went to school. And aside from a few halfhearted runs through exercise books immediately before and after first grade, my father never bothered teaching me at home, either. He bought my brother and I textbooks for two or three years, but after a while he never bothered to make us sit down and do the exercises. Instead, I taught myself from a very early age, reading those textbooks -- and everything else I could get my hands on -- on my own initiative, for my own pleasure. As luck would have it, I was always curious, with a nerdy bent. Bored of my stupid workbooks with their friendly bears, I plowed through my brother's English and social studies textbooks, four grades ahead of mine and thus far more stimulating. Those early '90s grade school textbooks (bought at wholesale prices from the Oklahoma City schoolbook depository) nurtured my early love of reading with short stories and extracts from books like The Hobbit, Kon-Tiki, and some random Pern novel. One of the extracts that made a particular impression on me came from Sweetwater, a book which, until now, I have never gotten the chance to read in its entirety; I graduated to abridged dollar store editions of Verne and Twain by 8, and then to the unabridged versions and Michael Crichton by 10, without bothering with juvenile / young adult material whatsoever. Nonetheless, after all these years, images of a creepy bug dude (who always reminded young me somehow of Mr. Miyagi) teaching a boy to play the flute, and the friendly old fiddler asking for sweet water, have lingered, as vivid in my imagination as things that actually happened to me. Reading the first chapter now was more than a bit surreal -- it's been at least twenty-two years since I read these words, yet every incident and turn of phrase still felt recent and familiar, so much so that the odd word or paragraph expurgated by those long-ago textbook-compilers felt entirely out of place. Memory is unsettling like that.

Skipping from English primers directly to cheap editions of the classics, I haven't had much exposure to juvenile literature. The only ones I know, I read as an adult: the Harry Potter series (good), His Dark Materials (started strong but ended abysmally), and Hatchet. Compared with all of those, Yep seems to be writing for a younger audience. There's just a hint of talking down to his readers, something I found entirely lacking in the other juvenile books I've read. It didn't bother me as much once I got into the story; either that or Yep's prose found a better balance once the bulk of the backstory and scene-setting was out of the way.

I was pleasantly surprised that the alien bug dude actually had his own motivations instead of being a Mr. Miyagi of the flute for the visiting white boy. The plot wasn't intricate by any means -- in fact it was positively trite, in the "traditionalist family faces off against rapacious developers" mold, something I never guessed from that long-ago excerpt. Nevertheless, all in all Sweetwater was cute and sweet in a simple way. It isn't a lost classic by any means, but I'm glad I finally read it after all these years. My rating here gets something of a boost from the nostalgia factor. Also, Julia Noonan's illustrations were delightfully, unabashedly 1970s, as you can see here. (My caption: "I am so high right now.")

Now if only my library's copy of Julie of the Wolves would reappear...

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

2013 read #33: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells.

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
278 pages
Published 2011
Read from February 26 to March 6
Rating: ★ out of 5

I'll be honest, I thought this book was going to be something else entirely, and this time it's my fault. My eye was drawn to the cute little airship on the back cover, and I somehow didn't entirely register the goofy-as-fuck winged gargoyle demon dude smack dab on the front. (Maybe it was so goofy looking that my eyes refused to acknowledge it.) Based on the ship, I figured this would be a fun little steampunk-magic yarn, instead of a tedious creature fantasy. I almost abandoned the book after the first chapter. But I figured I should try to put aside my prejudices and give it a shot.

This is some hardcore fantasy nerd shit right here, all talking about "turns" instead of years, "second day-meal" instead of lunch, "draughtbeasts" and "herdbeasts" and "riverbeasts" and "skylings" and "treelings" instead of shit anyone would actually say, populated by innumerable dumb races that never get developed or explored to any degree. The main character is the goofy-as-fuck winged gargoyle demon dude from the cover, only he's also a totally bad-ass loner who can shapeshift and has a totally sad and compelling backstory, yo. And also he's like totally a prince who didn't know he was of royal blood. (Okay, so technically he's just a fertile male in a dumb pseudo-colonial, hierarchical species, but that's more or less the same idea -- that he's marked out and special and totally gets the princess in the end.) The only way you could get more fantasy nerd is to throw together some elves and dragons and bearded wizards in stars-and-moons robes. Honestly I'd probably be happier reading something like that rather than this. It would be less embarrassing to read in public, for sure.

The cover blurb, from Fantasy & Science Fiction, no less, claims that Wells is "One of the more graceful wordsmiths currently writing fantasy." Maybe that applies to her short stories or her other books (I wouldn't know). It sure isn't evident here. The writing isn't bad, exactly, but it's anything but "graceful." It has a smack of amateurishness to it, a certain over-confident swagger that the quality doesn't justify. The dialogue, on the other hand, is execrable. The characters dish out attitude in every verbal exchange. Huddling together for warmth, one character smirks to another, "I'll try not to molest you in my sleep." Seriously, every single character is sarcastic and belligerent toward everyone else. The characters are hazily defined at best; their actions and dialogue do nothing to distinguish them, because they all act like adolescents who think they're the coolest fucking thing in the room. You expect all of them to pop onto skateboards and flip you the bird after every sarcastic remark, even the ancient elders of the colony. It reads like something I would have written at 15.

If you strip away the stupid parts, there's a serviceable (if rote) adventure novel in here somewhere, but yeah. It's almost all stupid parts. As you can see, it took me forever to read the damn thing. After a certain point I kept reading only out of a perverse sense that it would be fun to write a rant for a review. Even that thought ceased to be entertaining by the halfway mark, and it became an uninterrupted slog. I only finished it under the influence of sunk cost fallacy.

This kind of story needs an interesting or at least companionable narrative voice. Linda Nagata's Memory, whatever its other flaws, at least had a narrator who seemed worth spending time around, at least at first. It was the same even with Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death?, which was a terribly written disappointment to me. The main character here, Moon, starts out as a slow-witted and suspicious teenager-equivalent, and ends up as a smug but moodily aloof nerd empowerment fantasy who leads from the front; queens fight over him, but naturally he gets the younger, hotter one, and the only people who don't like him are idiots and jerks. That doesn't make for pleasant reading. This type of story also benefits immensely from compelling villains, and even there, The Cloud Roads fails utterly. It's never a good idea to turn your unstoppable evil race (named "the Fell," for fuck's sake) into mere cannon fodder by chapter three. Why spend two chapters building them up as this inexorable threat overrunning all the peaceful goofy-as-fuck races on land and in the air, only to have your totally bad-ass shapeshifter princeling moody hero dispatch like five of them just to work up an appetite? In fact, none of the numerous battle scenes carry any sense of stakes or danger; Moon and his cohorts slice through Fell after Fell with the ease of velociraptors at a Juggalo wedding.

It was pretty blatant by the end of the second chapter that Moon's people share a secret kinship with the dastardly Fell; by the fourth chapter it was obvious that interbreeding of these two kinds of goofy-as-fuck winged gargoyle demon creatures was going to be a major plot point. It's no good to have the general course of the entire novel sussed out by page 50. I like to be kept guessing about some things, you know? Not that I even gave a shit by that point, but I'm talking general principles here.

Maybe my eyes were glazed over when the title was explained, but I have no idea if we ever find out what "the cloud roads" are.

This -- this is the kind of book that gives SF its old reputation as worthless escapist dreck. I did it to myself, but I kind of really want the last nine days of my life back.

Monday, March 4, 2013

2013 read #32: The Woman Who Walked to Russia by Cassandra Pybus.

The Woman Who Walked to Russia: A Writer's Search for a Lost Legend by Cassandra Pybus
238 pages
Published 2002
Read from March 3 to March 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

This book lacked the powerful beauty of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, as well as the off-putting exhibitionism of Dan White's The Cactus Eaters. Overall it was pretty good and largely unremarkable, a competent travelogue wrapped in a thin coating of historical biography, ending with a too-pat, unsatisfying, and (to me) unsupported "She lived happily ever after."

Not much to add to it, beyond my nonplussed discomfort with how much space is devoted to the body image and eating disorders of Pybus' traveling companions. Not at all what I expected. It's an important topic to address with unflinching honesty, sure, but this is supposed to be a book about following the footsteps of a semi-legendary figure and researching her history. During the middle portion of the book, eating disorders completely take over the narrative. I won't say something so androcentric and privileged as "Why is she even talking about this at all?", but damn, I seem to have hit a streak of somewhat misleadingly packaged books lately.

I will say Pybus' depiction disabused me of my naive romantic idea of the British Columbia hinterlands; those alluring blank spaces on the Rand McNally are trashy clear-cut wastelands more often than they are trackless, unspoiled wildlands, it would seem. I still want to head up the Al-Can Highway one day, but at least now I know not to expect pure uncut majesty.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

2013 read #31: The Cactus Eaters by Dan White.

The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind -- And Almost Found Myself -- On the Pacific Crest Trail by Dan White
374 pages
Published 2008
Read from February 27 to March 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5

This is a book about an enthusiastic but under-prepared writer who hears about a nation-spanning footpath and, with a bosom companion, sets out to hike it end to end -- and fails spectacularly. So, basically A Walk in the Woods, except not as funny or charming, and set way out West. Also, the writer's companion is his girlfriend, and much of the book -- most of the book -- centers on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) as a test of their relationship.

At one point I peeked ahead to see whether Dan White and "Allison" (probably not her real name) do indeed fail spectacularly, and I found out they do, in a manner of speaking: they have an altogether commonplace breakup and go their separate ways. Which made reading the stuff in between really, really weird. I'm here to read funny tales of the author bumbling his way up the PCT, not the author's extended paean to a relationship that crumbled a decade before. I especially don't want to read about the sex. Maybe I have vestigial conservative tics buried deep in my brain, but I just don't see why the general public needs to know about your trailside lovemaking, or read you going on at length about sex with your ex, or get regular updates on how all the hiking firmed up her ass. It's like a casual acquaintance telling bland anecdotes about his California vacation and then leaning in close with milky breath and telling you all about the hard drive loaded with stag shots of his college sweetheart. It's just... weird. I'm trying to imagine White's pitch to his agent. "We'll sell the book on the idea that it's Bill Bryson fumbling around in the desert, but really it'll be about me fucking and fighting with this girl I used to go out with back in the day. Did I ever tell you how hot she was? Let me describe her for you one more time."

So that was kind of tedious and strange. And except for a few chuckle-worthy incidents in the first part of the book, overall it just wasn't that funny. Which is a damn shame. Of all the National Scenic Trails, the PCT has always been my favorite. It is the only one I still wish to hike end to end. My fondness for the locale and the trail itself (together with White's competency with words) is all that kept this book from an abysmal rating. There was just enough PCT flavor to keep me reading and engaged through all the ex-to-be melodrama and tedious dollar-store existential angst. I just feel that I was misled about what this book was gonna be like.