2013 read #16: On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
307 pages
Published 1957
Read from January 29 to January 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

To understand my impressions of Jack Kerouac, you have to start with my brother.

Randy, so far as I can remember, never explicitly mentioned Kerouac, or anything Beat-related, but from the very beginning he romanticized chump-change criminality. At 11 he entertained bizarre notions of running a grade-school "co-op," a proto-mafia where tots could pool their money and somehow accomplish great things under the noses of the adult community, as if reality were some kind of direct-to-video sequel to The Sandlot. He shoplifted GI Joes at age 12, giving me (and possibly believing) the excuse that we two were "owed" more toys than our father would buy us. He would steal our grandmother's tip money and buy us boxes of Little Debbies whenever the grownups were gone. By 13 he was shoplifting cassette tapes, Nirvana and Ugly Kid Joe and Pearl Jam; he had me transcribe the lyrics with him, because he was certain that the act of writing them down ourselves somehow made them original productions, which we would record and thereby become international superstars. Also by 13, he argued and bullied me (however much I cried, because I was only 9) into acceding to his plans to kill our father.

Brotherhood is a strange symbiosis -- we fought viciously, and he pulled a knife on me more than once; I baited him constantly; yet we never, ever ratted on each other to our father, and in some corner of my brain I worshiped him. I imitated his shoplifting predilections with much less success. (Much later, I shoplifted just to have food in my stomach, but that's another story, way beyond the scope of this review.) I began writing because of him, too, putting our GI Joe characters into stock sci-fi scenarios (aliens, time travel, a violent potty-humor sequel to Jurassic Park). But there were places I wouldn't follow him. From age 14 on he got wrapped up in narco-romantic fantasies, fueled by daily clandestine trips up the street to our maternal family, who kept him supplied with cigarettes and alcohol. No matter how much he enticed me, no matter how much he bullied me, I never went up the street with him, never met our sisters, never met our mother, never met our uncles. And I never got into his affectations of dissipated Bohemianism.

Randy ran away once and for all when he was 16 and I was 12. I got stuck in delayed adolescence, a fugue of years blurring one into the next, living on the road with my father, sleeping in rest stops and national forests, escaping my father's paranoid delusions by writing the same derivative science fiction stories. I didn't see Randy again until I was 16. My grandmother and I were waiting in a shopfront doorway for a bus, huddled from the cold, when this short skinny blond dude stalked by, sucking a cigarette. I was taller than him now and his hairline was prematurely receding; we barely recognized each other. But we struck up a brief reacquaintance. During the month or so that we stayed in touch, I typed up a chapter from one of my novels for him to read, craving his approval just like old times. I forget exactly what he said; it was something like "I thought you'd have developed more than this." And then Randy blew up at our father and that was that.

We made a third and final attempt to be brothers shortly after I got out of the army. A few years of harder drugs, absentee fatherhood, periodic homelessness, and flailing attempts at alternative rock stardom contributed to my brother's... special... writing style. Even in his personal emails he affected this painfully artsy try-hard prose, full of hard drink and hard living, quoting dead philosophers and dangling out off-rhythm digressions. In style he was closer to the hobo-chic ramblings of Godspeed You! Black Emperor liner notes, though in content he made himself out to be some latter-day rust-belt Ginsberg. Our reemergent relationship, never sturdy, eroded after I refused to let him come to New York and crash indefinitely on our couch. His subsequent schizotypal diagnosis confirmed my prejudices.

So when I think of Beat writers, that's the image in my head: The oh-so-artistic try-hard indulging in dissipation and narco-romantic cynicism, exactly conforming in his rush to be nonconformist -- the very art and philosophy of protracted adolescence. But perhaps that isn't entirely fair. For one thing, I based that impression on latter-day basement hipsters like my brother. I have never read anything by Kerouac or Ginsberg or Burroughs. I've never been drawn to that sort of thing, if you couldn't tell by my snide talk of "narco-romanticism." Getting wasted and wasting away isn't my game, pops. Yet I've always felt I should probably give the Beat dudes a chance, if only so I know what I'm talking about when I scoff at their modern followers.

(Incidentally, do kids still read Kerouac? At this point, I feel Beat aesthetics and sensibilities are so thoroughly integrated into the substance of teenage intellectualism that there's a good chance today's kids don't feel the need to imbibe from their philosophical prototypes directly. Kids with a taste for philosophy and self-importance are just expected to indulge in drugs and petty anti-establishment manifestos while angsting over "meaning." Or at least that's my expectation. I haven't interacted with many young would-be intellectuals since I was that age myself. I'm a child of the late 20th century, raised in a time of inward-looking optimism; I have no idea what kids of the early 21st century think or expect.)

On the Road was well-written and occasionally appealing -- the parts actually set on the road in the pre-interstate West were big favorites. The inevitable and oft-repeated excursions through hard drinking and burned out hedonism and philosophy, though, were boring. Reading about someone's bender is, to me, exactly as entertaining (and illuminating) as an account of someone's night on the sofa watching NBC. I just can't seem to give a damn.

Lines like "[I wished] I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America" do Kerouac no favors in my eyes, unless there's a "Holden Caulfield is the biggest phony of all" angle I didn't pick up on. What intrigued me the most was the scarcely mentioned subtext of World War II, the psychological stain of it between the words, resignation under the terrible light of the Bomb. I know exactly nothing about Kerouac's views on how his generation got so damn beat in the first place, or his own wartime experiences (the about the author page said he was a merchant marine), but it's certainly something my late 20th century mind picked up on. It added a more sympathetic dimension to all the drugged-out soul-searching and sentimentalism.

If you're done with young men getting strung out and indulging adolescent melancholia, On the Road is about half of a good book. I can safely assume that I have never gotten, and will never get, the appeal of the other half, even if it would've been obvious to someone like my brother from day one.

2013 read #15: The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay.

The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
309 pages
Published 1984
Read from January 27 to January 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Just the other day I was thinking how much I liked science fiction (and fantasy) from the 1980s. "Much" here is a relative term -- I haven't read a whole lot of it -- but I dig the way the mainstream SF of that decade sorted through and incorporated certain elements of experimental New Wave science fiction, reinventing the genre without going completely daffy with it. Pretty much everything I've read from that decade shares a particular flavor, as comfortable and as comforting in its own way as Pat Benatar or Jefferson Starship, pairing relatively down-to-earth, human-scale stories about "ordinary people" with bonkers backdrops and the apotheosis of pulp art covers to produce the comfort-food reading of a generation. "Post-New Wave" might be a better descriptor than "from the 1980s," as the narrative sensibilities arose during the '70s New Wave and continued well into the '90s, but the Reagan Decade definitely contributed to the style and sensibility of the era's speculative fiction. Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle (1980), Julian May's The Many-Colored Land (1981), Harry Harrison's West of Eden (1984), Greg Bear's Eon (1985), A. A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth* (1989), Gordon R. Dickson's Time Storm (1991)... I told you it wasn't a long list, but I stand by the point I'm making here, damn it, which is that 1980s spec-fic was pretty awesome, and I really should just bookmark this list for future reading.

The Summer Tree (yet another one of Jory's recommendations) is consummately '80s, right on down to the DeLorean silver shade of the cover, and the open-chested shirt and straw hat on the author's photo. It fits comfortably within my ordinary-people-in-bonkers-backdrops pigeonhole. In fact, it's a straight-up wardrobe/looking-glass fantasy, where five ordinary white collar kids get snatched up and taken to a realm of wizards and elves and dwarves and shit. In the early going all I could think of was Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, which (albeit tolerable) is not my favorite book. I'm not a huge fan of wardrobe fantasy in general. It took a while, possibly half of the way through the book, but eventually Tree surmounted its awkward beginnings and became adequately engrossing. Part of the long delay was the characters: introduced all at once, the five white collar kids didn't resolve into distinct entities until well into their Fionavar adventures. Also part of the problem was Fionavar itself. I'm pretty much over elves and Dark Ones and their ilk, and I'm completely over personified evil and baddies motivated solely by hatred of "the Light." I always love a good fantasy-world crucifixion, though, so without spoiling anything more, I can say that was when the book truly grabbed my interest.

While the Fionavar Tapestry isn't close to my favorite fantasy series (so far), I'm invested enough at this point to continue with the next two books. It's always nice to go into a fantasy series knowing it has a definite ending, and won't take eleven massive volumes to get there.


* I had no inkling of this until I wiki'd it for this entry, but The Last Legends of Earth -- long one of my favorite books -- turns out to be the last volume of a four book series, the Radix Tetrad. I'm feeling cautiously delighted by this discovery. Hopefully the first three volumes will live up to the conclusion. Unfortunately, my library doesn't have any of the preceding three books, so I'll have to see if they can request Radix, In Other Worlds, and Arc of the Dream from elsewhere.

2013 read #14: Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton.

Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
309 pages
Published 2009
Read January 24
Rating: ★ out of 5

There was a time, strange as it may seem now, when the general public and the political organism in this country accepted the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. It was a time when Newt Gingrich appeared on television with Nancy Pelosi to warn of the dangers of global warming, when serious discussions were held at the highest levels to control carbon emissions and develop alternative power sources. It may seem like an age of legends and heroes to us now, but it was not so long ago.

The change, of course, was dictated from the top down. Right-leaning politicians discovered how much money automotive and fossil fuel industry lobbyists were willing to part with, and just like that, even the anemic Kyoto Accords were abandoned, and the national press "discourse" was suddenly full of dubious scientists on the petroleum industry's payroll and other would-be debunkers. At the time I figured no one could be stupid enough to believe a "scientist" employed by a massive multi-billion-dollar industry, when the scientific consensus was unambiguous and easy to understand. I mean, the basic ideas behind anthropogenic climate change are literally high school chemistry: CO₂ absorbs energy in the infrared range and retains it. If you have more CO₂ in the atmosphere, the atmosphere retains more solar radiation in the form of heat. Humans have been dumping prodigious quantities of CO₂ (and methane and CFC's) into the atmosphere at unprecedented and accelerating rates. The precise effect that will have on Earth's climate is a matter of complex computer simulations based on a wide array of paleoclimatological data. Such simulations will inevitably shift as we gather more data and models improve, but that's how science operates. You'd have to be some kind of total idiot or ideological infant to ignore the basic science and its implications.

But as I have so many times in life, I overestimated the reasoning abilities of the American public. When the conservative media machine manufactured "doubts" about climate change, lifestyle Republicans -- those who practiced Republicanism as an identity badge and lifestyle choice rather than a coherent ideology, which is to say, most Republicans -- ate it up. And right around the time that public opinion turned from "Let's all believe the scientists" to "Let's all believe the fossil fuel industry lobbyists," all-star airport novelist Michael Crichton published State of Fear.

I'm not saying Crichton was party to the massive industrial misinformation campaign that bamboozled half the American public, but all the same I've never forgiven him. Crichton had been one of my childhood heroes. Jurassic Park was one of the first unabridged, unexpurgated grownup books I ever read. Throughout my 'tween and teen years, I read and reread Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Congo, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain. For years my stories bore the unfortunate stamp of his prose style. Timeline was the very last birthday-cum-Christmas present I ever asked from my grandmother, the last innocent moment of my childhood. But the existence of State of Fear soured me on him overnight. (Nowadays I just find it kind of funny that in his seminal "Humans aren't affecting global climate" novel, the villains employ a literal weather-changing machine. Which I guess is somehow more plausible than basic atmospheric chemistry, as various HAARP conspiracy theorists suggest. Sardonic amusement is the only comfort left for a 21st century rationalist.)

My attitude toward Crichton hasn't softened since 2004. If anything, after years of reading superior fiction, I dislike him all the more: I realize his books weren't all that good. I still like Jurassic Park, and I haven't bothered to revisit Congo or Sphere, but The Lost World is simply terrible, Eaters of the Dead was stupid, and (sentimentality aside) Timeline was hilariously bad. Every time I scoff about "airport novelists," I have this fucking guy in mind. (Well, Crichton, Koontz, Clancy, Brown, etc.)

All that was simply a segue into this book: Pirate Latitudes. It's a Michael Crichton novel about pirates. As much as I dislike the man and his prose style, his blow-up doll characters, his "dramatic" sentence fragments, his tell-not-show descriptions, it's a Michael Crichton novel about pirates. Come on. If that doesn't spell "entertaining trainwreck," I don't know what would.

Well, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong: There was scarcely anything entertaining about Pirate Latitudes.

I want to say the prose was particularly graceless and insipid, even for Crichton, but I can't be sure -- years of reading good books, and half a year of reading the dishwater dreck of those who emulate airport fiction, may have left me particularly averse to Crichton's paint-by-numbers storytelling. This is the fast food of fiction, and not even the satisfying kind you might indulge in once in a while. This shit is KFC chicken strips withered into dry stringy shingles at the end of the business day, served up with a hard tasteless biscuit and a watery half-cup of mac and cheese; the kid in the drive-thru didn't give you any dipping sauce, and your soda is bubbly tap water that maybe once held some Pepsi in it before it was retrieved from the trash and rinsed out for your use, and you're eating it alone in your car because no one loves you. Far from a welcome break from more serious reading, this book made me long for something brainy and substantial to relieve the monotony of flat interchangeable characters and "Everyone nodded"-style storycraft. It was bad, man. It was bad. Call this a low blow if you like, but come on -- even Crichton had the sense to hide this manuscript away for all those years.

I'd type up some specific criticisms, but this rant is already three times longer than it should be, so I'll just leave it here.

2013 read #13: The Tree by Colin Tudge.

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge
413 pages
Published 2006
Read from January 20 to January 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

At one point, natural history was my favorite subject. When I was a 'tween and teen I read and reread every book on dinosaurs I could get my hands on (even a college textbook, which I found very impressive indeed at the time). E. O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life, which I first read when I was 13 or so, was long one of my favorite books. As an adult, though, I haven't been motivated to pursue that interest outside of a couple college courses. (And even then I tended to judiciously skim the reading assignments.) Over the last twelve years I've read a handful of pop-science books on geology, a couple more on Cenozoic paleontology, and that's pretty much it.

I'm not sure why I can't seem to marshal the interest. One possible reason: Every pop-science book that treats with biology or paleobiology invariably devotes space to explaining babby's first basics of evolution -- useful if you're trying to educate the general reader, tedious if you've been reading basically that same chapter in dozens of books since you were 11. (The Tree adheres to this rule to the letter.) More to the point: There just aren't that many good natural history books out there to grab my interest. With dinosaurs, my knowledge base exceeds anything I'm likely to find in a pop-science title (and in any case I've already read most of them anyway). With biology, the available books either focus on the mechanics of evolution (kind of boring) or on one tiny particular topic within the field (sea turtles, for example, or dung beetles) -- or worse, on some stupid irrelevant bullshit about Darwin's religious inclinations. With geology or non-dinosaur paleontology, there are vanishingly few pop-science books period.

So it's always a treat to discover a natural history book that covers an interesting, seldom-visited topic -- and even more of a treat when that book is well-written and engaging. The Tree has its flaws, but it's probably one of the better natural history books I've read as an adult. It's not in the same league as John McPhee's terrific (and Pulitzer Prize winning) Annals of the Former World, but what is? The point is, I enjoyed it, and came away from it feeling like some learning took place.

My main complaint about The Tree has to do with the treacly religious sentiment Tudge kneads through the book, particularly in the early chapters. As long as you accept the reality of reality, I don't give a damn what your religious views are. Which means I'd appreciate it if you leave them out of your natural history book altogether. I'm here to read about trees, not for your thoughts on God and Jesus and Moses.

Something that didn't bother me so much, but might bore you if you decide to pick it up, was the book's entire middle section, an occasionally arid list of select families and genera of notable trees. Tudge's winsome prose handily sped me through all 158 pages of this overview, but even I'll admit I bogged down a bit in the chapters on the familiar, conventional groups. I want to learn more about cycads, nipa palms, grasstrees, and araucarias, the weird stuff with funky adaptations, not read page after page of how pear wood and maple wood are employed in home furnishings and woodcuts. The book Tudge decided to write and the book I wanted to read didn't overlap entirely. Like I said, though, he kept it from getting tedious.

As with all popular science books, this one would've benefited enormously from lavish color illustrations of basically every species mentioned in the text. Googling grasstrees was an absorbing pursuit (seriously, Google grasstrees if you don't know what I'm talking about), but the book would've been better if it illustrated its subjects. Maybe bundle it with a companion coffee table book, or do the popular thing these days and re-release it as a special illustrated edition. I know it isn't economical to illustrate every book like a top-of-the-line textbook, but it would be nice. Even a dozen color plates would've helped.

2013 read #12: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
182 pages
Published 1929
Read from January 18 to January 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

This book wasn't what I expected it to be. When I hear that a novel is going to be about "political corruption and gang violence in a western mining town," I picture labor struggles and company towns and hired guns shooting up strikers, or leftist agitators making trouble for the bosses. I knew Hammett's "Continental Op" books were hardboiled pulp detective fare -- I don't think Hammett wrote anything else -- but I was eager to read a pulp story that dealt with one of my pet topics. I had high hopes when, on page four, a man was introduced wearing a red tie. But then the leftist guy disappeared and the rest of the book was about conventional thugs and bootlegging and such. What with the title being Red Harvest, I figured the red tie guy had to come back and play a central role in the denouement (why else would he be introduced first thing in the book?). In the same way, I figured the dame would turn out to be a bad seed in the end. It's a pulp detective story, damn it. All the broads are ears-deep in the racket. But no. I was wrong on both accounts. I guess the guy was just a... red herring.

My main beef with this book is that it was too twisty. Little more than halfway through I gave up trying to keep up with the twists and red herrings and false accusations and lies and double crossings and who was stabbing whom in the back. I'd need a sheet of graph paper to keep it all straight. Maybe hardboiled detective stories aren't my game.

As with The Maltese Falcon, this was an entertaining slip of a book and I don't have much else to add about it. I want more well-written pulp, but maybe not another hardboiled detective yarn just yet. Any good hardboiled Westerns out there?

2013 read #11: Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes.

Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes
463 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 10 to January 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I became infatuated with Robert Hughes' writing last year when I read his biography of Goya. That book presented a richly detailed tapestry of Spain and its court figures in the waning decades of the Inquisition, and of their resistance to "francesas" Enlightenment ideas; Goya's life and work were merely the compositional lines of that depiction. Goya was Hughes' magnum opus, the book he had always wanted to write but shirked until a near-fatal car accident and years of grueling physical therapy made him determined to undertake it once and for all. That passion made for compelling reading. The fact that the book had color reproductions of Goya's works on practically every other page was pretty cool too. That one book was enough to make me gravitate toward any other Hughes titles I come across -- enough to make me a fan of his, as it were.

Rome is the first Hughes book I've tackled since my Goya infatuation. (I owned The Fatal Shore at one point, years ago, but I never read it, and now I can't find it.) It's a bit of a disappointment, I have to confess. Dabbling through three millennia of art and history, without a central figure like Goya to focus on, Rome is often rambly and disconnected, retreading the same subject in separate chapters. Hughes' heart doesn't seem to be in this book, especially in the early going -- his enthusiasm clearly perks up in the Renaissance and peaks during the Settecento, but by then it's too late. Worse, his editor didn't seem to be invested in it so much, either; a paragraph from Tacitus regarding Nero's persecution of the Christians is quoted at length on page 108, and then the same paragraph (albeit worded differently, so possibly a different translation of the same paragraph?) is quoted at length on page 140. This isn't done to highlight a different aspect of the subject or to emphasize a point. It reads as if Hughes simply forgot he'd already talked about the persecution in his section on Nero, so he went into it again in his chapter on early Christians in Rome, and his editor didn't bother to fix it.

Without anything comparable to the narrative urgency of Goya's biography, Rome is often a rather dry recital of names and works. (Again, I can't emphasize how much of a difference it makes to have full-color reproductions of pretty much every work named in the Goya book; Hughes will rhapsodize in detail about a Caravaggio or a Velázquez, which hardly seems fair when you're left to imagine it. I suppose I could look up the works individually on the internet, but I'm reading mostly for pleasure, not for homework.) At one point I literally fell asleep reading Rome, something I don't recall doing with any previous book. As I slept, my brain kept on nattering away in imitation of Hughes' blunt and summary style. No wonder it took me ten days to read the damn thing.

Lest you wonder why I gave this four stars when all I've done is criticize it, I should mention that Hughes' prose is always a treat. One reviewer calls it "muscular yet elegant," which is pithy enough, ignoring its masculist implications. Despite the rambling, despite the lack of passion for anything before Brunellischi and obvious contempt for everything after Canova, Hughes' way with words made this a worthwhile read. Just not the classic I found Goya to be.

2013 read #10: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
387 pages
Published 1974
Read from January 14 to January 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

The Left Hand of Darkness -- commonly included in lists of science fiction's best novels, often cited as proof that genre fiction can be serious literature -- was my first exposure to Le Guin, and still numbers among my personal favorite books. In fact, when I'm pressed to name favorite authors (as I've had to do in the two interviews I've given as Scareship's editor), Le Guin usually finds her way onto the list. This despite the fact that the only other Le Guin title I've read was Rocannon's World, a thoroughly forgettable Silver Age sci-fi book, so thoroughly forgettable that I haven't been able to remember a single thing about it aside from its awesomely trashy pulp cover. I've had this copy of The Dispossessed since '06 or so, but it's languished on shelves, in boxes, or in the book graveyard downstairs until now.

The first thing I took from The Dispossessed is an impression that Shevek is a familiar New Wave science fiction protagonist, an outsider accustomed to living in his own head, long of hair, functionally bisexual, a one-man embassy between cultures and reluctant revolutionary and messiah figure. Valentine Michael Smith comes to mind, though thankfully without any of Heinlein's free love and cannibalism baggage. I shouldn't complain about the protagonist's familiarity, though; writing this review, I got sidetracked into researching New Wave science fiction, which made me realize how very little of it I've read. Thanks to the library, I have two volumes of Dick at hand (eight novels all told, of which I'll probably read two or three, depending on what else grabs my interest in the meantime), but I haven't even begun to look into Ballard, Russ, Farmer, Ellison, Delany, Aldiss, or early Silverberg, and I've barely scratched the surface with Le Guin. I'm in no position to declare what's a stock New Wave character or element and what isn't. So enough about that.

I liked this book a lot, but didn't find it as satisfying as Left Hand. I suppose it's because abstractions of gender and sexuality interest me, whereas abstractions of politics and ethics -- utopian fictions -- are innately dull. I enjoyed the culture encounters, and portions of The Dispossessed were moving (anything to do with a parent having to be separated from his child touches a tender spot in my brain), but the frequent discussions of abstract philosophy and make-believe physics made my eyes slide off the page. I was somewhat mollified when the (spoilers) slow internal collapse of the anarchist utopia became a central plot point -- it was a relief to learn Le Guin was being honest and simply using the culture to tell a story, and not advocating it as an ideal option. Frankly, living the Anarres lifestyle would be a total bore, preferable though it may be to the misogynistic and exploitative capitalism of Urras.

2013 read #9: Dracula by Bram Stoker.

Dracula by Bram Stoker
389 pages
Published 1897
Read from January 13 to January 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

When I first asked for book recommendations, Jory said, "If you haven't read Bram Stoker's Dracula, consider that an October reading goal." Here we are in the middle of January, but heck, I can't be bothered with such petty trifles as the calendar.

Fans of the book are quick to assert that it's legitimately scary, even if its contributions to popular vampire mythos have become cliches and props for comedy: the superstitious peasants, the creepy old castle, the pallid Transylvanian dressed all in black, the garlic, the crosses, the mirrors, the bats, the fainting maidens. It doesn't help that Stoker emerged before such prose innovations as "Begin with a hook" and "Keep your action rising to the climax." When the first four pages were nothing but talk of train schedules and paprika chicken dishes, I set my teeth and expected a grim Victorian slog through pointless minutiae. I also craved paprika chicken in the worst way.

On page five, however, I got hooked. When he wants it to be, Stoker's prose is as crisp and modern as Wells at his acme (and I've long told anyone who will listen that The Invisible Man, despite its pacing issues, was the first and best modern technothriller). Dracula is a brisk read, in parts -- the tension builds steadily and pulls you along, etc. Standard review copy crap. But only in parts. The Victorian vogue for caricaturing working class accents is tedious even in the most expert hands, and Stoker does not number in that company. If I have to slow down and carefully translate the implausibly long speeches of Yorkshire sailors and Cockney zookeepers, I get annoyed. I had to put the book aside and read something else for a while whenever I got to one of the "newspaper articles," just to recharge my motivation. (If they're representative of authentic Victorian news-copy, Wells' relative talent for getting to the point is all the more remarkable.) And to be quite frank, my love of the epistolary novel died sometime in the mid '90s. I'm sure there are good epistolary novels out there, but it's far from my favorite structure. After a climactic scene halfway through, Dracula ground to a halt for something like twenty pages so that the surviving main characters could talk about typing up and reading each other's letters and journals, and press each other's hands and tearfully swear eternal friendship. These catching-up-on-journals and swearing-eternal-friendship motifs are repeated with enervating effect every few pages for the rest of the damn book.

Speaking of the mid '90s, the scene where (spoilers? can you spoil a 116 year old book?) Lucy gets a stake driven through her heart felt oddly familiar. When I was a kid (10 to 12 years old, roughly), Walmart sold these 50¢ editions of various classics. Getting our father to buy even the cheapest of books was like pulling teeth, but my brother and I (mostly I) managed to accumulate a miniature classics library in a couple years. Dracula may have been one of the books my brother picked out. I'm fairly certain I never read it myself, but that one scene is maddeningly familiar, and associated with the cheap paperbacks of my youth. Did my brother make me read it to see how scared I'd get? Or did it simply remind me of some other 50¢ book I read back then? Maybe a scene in Frankenstein is similar; I haven't read that in about fifteen years, so who knows.

I'm not sure how I feel about Gothic horror as a genre. "Overheated" would be an obvious but apt adjective for its sexualized-yet-repressed moralizing. Personally I favor comparisons to the era's ghoulish medico-cultural obsession with blood: Dracula is at turns flushed and pallid, Stoker's plots and characters swollen purple or drained sallow. The endlessly repeated Victorian truism about gender roles -- men must be the strength, women must be the pure hope and inspiration for their deeds -- was fucking tedious. But it comes with the territory. Dracula wasn't bad. My interest just... wandered. Which is why I've been reading three other books alongside it, a bad habit that's doubtless slowing down my reading.

2013 read #8: A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Tales, gathered and retold by Lawrence Millman.

A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Tales, gathered and retold by Lawrence Millman
191 pages
Published 1987
Read January 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I love folklore and fairy tales, but I never read enough of them. During the course of this reading project, I expect to visit just about every book in my library's folklore section. I picked this one first because it was small and the stories brief; I'm reading four other books at the moment, two or three of them fairly dense, and a brief interlude of grim whimsy (grimsy?) is just the restorative I need. If anything, the tales here are just a little bit too insubstantial, the read just a bit unsatisfying. But many of them are delightfully fucked up, and that's all I ask.

One of my favorites was "The Birth of Fog," told by a man named Nattiq during a seal hunt in modern Nunavut. I won't transcribe the entire story (though it barely fills a page), so strain your eyes to read it here: http://i.imgur.com/Go7ct.jpg

I also love this droll affair: http://i.imgur.com/U4AyM.jpg

Not sure what else there is to say about this one. It feels like cheating to even add it to my tally, it's such a slight volume. Half of those 191 pages are filled with no more than a paragraph or two. I finished the whole thing in maybe an hour of reading. But it's done and it's on the list now, damn it.

2013 read #7: Lost Horizon by James Hilton.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton
262 pages
Published 1933
Read January 13
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I don't know exactly where I got this impression, but I've always had the idea that Lost Horizon was on its way to becoming an ex-classic. That is to say, it was considered a classic for most of the 20th century, but in the last ten or twenty years there's been a backlash against it, a growing consensus that it really wasn't all that remarkable, and maybe we should all quietly forget about it. Maybe I heard that from one person a long time ago and it colored my understanding of the book all these years. Either way, I find myself kind of agreeing with that imagined zeitgeist. Lost Horizon was a cute trifle. It was an okay read, but not all that special.

Come to think of it, many years ago I felt the same way when I read Siddhartha, which is probably borderline blasphemous. Maybe the early 20th century Orientalist mystic novel isn't my kind of genre.

Amusingly, Lost Horizon describes a White Man's Burden variant of Orientalist mysticism, where "the Nordic and Latin races of Europe" are most suitable for the great white lama's discipline. (Maybe that's why Lost Horizon might be unfashionable these days?) I also find sardonic amusement in the line "We may expect no mercy, but we may faintly hope for neglect," when the Euro-American mythology of the transcendental Eastern mystic -- exemplified in books like Lost Horizon -- has helped bury anything special or worthwhile in the region under hordes of tourists and Beatles and Ivy League students trekking Nepal on summer break. Only Bhutan exercises strict entry control, so naturally travel magazines and agencies advertise its charms as "the last Shangri-La." It's only a matter of time before Bhutan too falls under the inexorable crush of the moneyed nations.

There's ample room here for any number of sociological theses analyzing the intersection of pop culture, pop mythology, and pop mysticism in the West, and the loss of native cultures under the swell of globalization. But honestly, all I could think of when I read this book were the Indiana Jones novels I loved as a kid. The only differences are Hilton's somewhat superior prose and his insistence that we take his pseudo-mystical hokum seriously.

2013 read #6: Parrot & Olivier in America by Peter Carey.

Parrot & Olivier in America by Peter Carey
381 pages
Published 2009
Read from January 9 to January 12
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

I love literary fiction, and I don't. I love the idea of it, I love its rhythm and melody, the delightful frolic of language used well. Yet I know in my heart I have a hard time letting go of spells and rockethips. I would call it a weakness of mine, but I know I'll get shouted down by half a dozen fellow nerds who wish me to be proud of my geekdom. Nerd culture is trendy enough these days without it needing my unwavering allegiance, but it's 3 am and I'm in no state to belabor the point. Suffice it to say that, as beautiful and eloquent as this book was, I found myself bored in a few spots, wishing Carey would stop luxuriating in words and images just this once and get to the point of the scene. Now that the book is done and filling my head with its whiskey-warm instruments, I find myself making a poor imitation of its cadence like a servant boy in a distinguished house, and thinking a couple hundred more pages would've been a treat. It helps that it was a historical narrative; a book set in, say, modern Napa Valley would've got tossed aside ten pages in. I need some element of the exotic in my fiction.

It being 3 am, I'm not sure I have anything insightful to say about this book. I liked it. I really liked it. Carey's prose is playful and assured -- I wish to anatomize and taxonomize it, peeling its syllables apart to reveal what makes it go. My own prose is a blunt instrument, something to get the job done; I've always admired (but also shrank from) the words of the eloquent, probably according their authors the reverence and sour envy reserved for aristocracy. Set a literate book before me and I feel like an urchin caught and turned out by his betters. No doubt Parrot & Olivier's themes of democracy and aristocracy have fogged my brain, but I can't help but draw the parallel. I'm easily impressed by prose that does more than function. It's a soft spot of mine.

My one gripe with the book is Carey's occasional reference to democracy leading inevitably to the rule of an "ignoramus." As much as I agree with his sentiments -- democracy is always at the mercy of the stupid and the willfully ignorant -- such asides always feel ham-fisted to me, instantly dating any work to the early 21st century. Those thoughts do have a place in the themes of the book, but I felt unsatisfied each time, my vanes ruffled.

I should shut up, because I can't not write this way right now (like Parrot, I tend to imitate what I hear), and I sound more like a carnival sharp or a common buffoon than I do a master of refined English. To bed.

2013 read #5: Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel & Adventure from National Geographic.

Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel & Adventure from National Geographic, edited by Mark Jenkins
439 pages
Published 2006
Read from January 4 to January 10
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

As soon as I read Mark Jenkins' introduction, I knew this book was going to be a disappointment. When I found it squeezed randomly into the chaotic mess of my library's travel section (the inconsistent and possibly inebriated application of the Dewey decimal system at my local library deserves an entire rant of its own, so I won't mention it further for now), my heart filled with glee. I adore old National Geographics, especially from the classic Grosvenor eras (1910s to late 1970s). I have a soft spot as wide as Africa for the romance of early twentieth century exploration and world travel, even as I despise its implicit and overt racism, sexism, colonialism, and patriarchal tone of benign "improvement." Worlds to Explore's cover blurb promises "more than 50 stories from the magazine's first half-century," implicitly suggesting (to my mind, at least) the inclusion of more than fifty complete articles, written by such motor-, airplane-, and rocket-age luminaries as Teddy Roosevelt, Roy Chapman Andrews, Joseph F. Rock, and many others. A quick flip through its pages revealed original maps and photographs from the articles. I didn't stop to think how they could squeeze fifty complete articles into a scant 439 pages; I guess I just figured the font looked pretty small. I was too busy immediately checking out the book and placing it at the very top of my reading pile to think such thoughts.

But the introduction quickly deflated my dreams. "The following selections," I read -- and my heart sank to my knees. Sure enough, Teddy Roosevelt's massive East African safari -- the source of the Smithsonian's African dioramas -- gets slimmed down to eight and a half pages, including one map and one picture. The first motorized crossing of Africa, from Lagos to the Red Sea by 1930s motorcycle, gets crunched down to a handful of paragraphs about improvising bike repairs out of dental plates and antelope hide -- fascinating stuff, but mere crumbs of what must have been a spectacular article. Jenkins eviscerated each of the fifty-plus articles that fell into his hands, ripping out a quick anecdote or two for his Frankenstein abomination of a book and discarding everything that makes the rambly Grosvenor-era travelogues so charming. I like the rambly bits, the contextual bits, the scene-setting, that weird and uncomfortable section where the author has a lovely formal dinner with a tyrannical dictator, the paternalistic comments on the plucky women of the grass-hut village. I don't want anything edited down or massaged to soothe modern sensibilities. I want the authentic experience, horrible social attitudes and all. Without context, Worlds reduces socio-geographical history to a keepsake of yarns. What could have been the most amazing book I read all year becomes a slumping disappointment.

I want to use the entire buffalo, as it were. Jenkins shoots dozens of them just to get at their spleens. I'd have been 100% happier with this book if it were a collection of, say, a dozen complete articles with original maps, photos, and illustrations. I know I could just get the complete National Geographic archives on disk, but hey -- if that's an argument against my idea, then what's even the point of Worlds to Explore?

Out of all the articles butchered apart for this collection, the only one I'd read before was "Triumph on Everest," by Sir John Hunt and Sir Edmund Hillary, which appeared in the July 1954 National Geographic. That was a wonderful article, a signal conquest, a resounding victory of the jet age, gleaming with the manly sheen of 1950s optimism. The selection just made me wish I had the complete issue again, with all its fabulous pictures and its full account of the climb. My favorite selections were those regarding travel by "motor" (or, even more charmingly, "flivver") across Africa, Asia, and Mexico in the 1920s and '30s. I totally want to invent "flivverpunk" as a science fiction subgenre now. The romance of the early motor age is one of my very favorite species of romance. But that's a whole other story.

An aside: My late grandfather had accumulated Geographics in an old army-ration water barrel in the basement (to preserve them from damp, I guess?). Most of the collection was from the late '50s, '60s, and early '70s, but there were a couple anachronisms, issues so old the color plates were printed separately from the articles and bunched in between them. The oldest was the July 1932 issue, with its dazzling color photos of Ford Model A's climbing the new motor-roads into the Colorado Rockies. I also remember the January 1952 issue -- not so anachronistic, perhaps, but memorable for the article "Solving the Riddle of Chubb Crater" (now Pingualuit). You can't find a more iconic image of 1950s privilege than the bottom picture here: Caucasian men's men grinning away on their boy's life adventure, "solving the riddles" still left undiscovered in the remotest corners of a jet-shrunken globe. You can't find a more iconic caption for the 1950s dominant culture attitude than the subtitle of the next article, "America's 'Meat on the Hoof'": "Because housewives want smaller beef roasts, bigger and leaner pork chops, scientific breeders remodel the steer and hog." In a world smothered by anthropogenic climate change and global environmental catastrophe, there's a lurid fascination in watching it all begin.

I could go on and on, picking out little details from every issue scanned in on that site. I think I'm steadily talking myself into purchasing the digital archives, actually.

Anyway. Yeah. This book. It was okay. Could've been a lot better. It's worth a peek, especially if it's in your local library and you need ideas for jungle incidents and oriental encounters in your a steampunk or flivverpunk or atompunk story. But the complete digital archives would be a far superior investment if you're in the mood to buy something.

Next up (and already in progress): Parrot & Olivier in America by Peter Carey.

2013 read #4: Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer.

Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer
292 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 6 to January 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Okay, so that Tad Williams book, The Dirty Streets of Heaven? I couldn't even get through two pages. I love Tad Williams, I really do -- I've read eight of his books, which places him (in raw numerical terms) among my all-time favorite authors. But Dirty Streets was godawful. For whatever reason Williams chose to write it in that self-consciously hip and "self-aware" too-cool-for-school voice that sophomore creative writing students favor, at least when they're 19 year old boys who think they're going to set the literary world on fire and then piss on its ashes. One of the first stories I ever rejected from Scareship was written in that same painfully uninteresting voice. I don't author worship, so I'm not subjecting myself to that trash for Williams' sake.

Instead, I started on this book here after letting it sit in the pile for two months. It's a short story anthology. I always say I need to read more short fiction, and lately I've wanted to write more dark fantasy, so finding this on the shelf was a stroke of fortune... or so I thought. As it proved, the stories were rather subpar, ranging from godawful to actually pretty good. Most of them closer to godawful, sadly.

Since this is my first short story collection of the year, I shook things up and snarked on each contribution as I read them.

"Wolverton Station" by Joe Hill. This was a middling, unremarkable story told in middling, unremarkable prose. Michael Swanwick went down similar tracks in 1998 with his story "Midnight Express," albeit with significantly more originality, style, and delicious perversion. Plus Swanwick didn't drag in a soapbox and repeat stale gibes at American economic imperialism and vulture capitalism. In fact, seriously just go check out Swanwick's Tales of Old Earth right now, if you don't mind a hefty helping of male gaze in your literary SF.

"The Passion of Mother Vajpai" by Jay Lake and Shannon Page. Scope this opening line: "The scent of sandalwood cut through the hot, humid Kalimpuri night like a knife through a disgraced courtesan's wrists." Seriously? With an opening like that I assumed this would be a tongue-in-cheek parody of some kind, but unless my satire sense is failing, I'm afraid this was written in all seriousness by not one but two published, paid, professional authors. No wonder I get so many luridly overwritten submissions at Scareship, if this is the sort of shit getting published these days. At one point someone's vagina is referred to as a "sweetpocket." Oh lord. Prose issues aside, this was a forgettable bit of Orientalist assassin guild fluff. I'm not sure what makes it "dark" fantasy; fumbling attempts at sexuality and romance aside, it would have fit right in with Sword & Sorcery magazine in the late '90s.

"Chivalrous" by Kelley Armstrong. Another lycanthropy story? Really? Okay, so maybe "Wolverton Station" was technically an anthropomorphic animal story, but still. Booooring. This one's also doing the tired old forbidden romance angle, so I'm doubly sick of it. The big "twist" was obvious not even halfway through. I'm having serious thoughts of ditching this book already, but damn it, I'm almost a third done with it now, I may as well struggle on. Sunk cost fallacy and all that.

Snarking as I go is fun and keeping up my motivation.

"Smelling Danger: A Black Company Story" by Glen Cook. Oh lord, a short story with a subtitle. One type of submission I'm guaranteed to reject at Scareship is the serial short, where the author writes a string of sequential short stories about the same characters in the same universe and tries to publish them separately instead of just writing a novel already. Some people like serial shorts. Not me. This story, of course, is military fantasy. I'd rather read supernatural romance than military SF. Military SF is possibly the most derivative of SF subgenres, a collection of monochromatic cliches where men's men gamble, whore, and fight, where the prose is as graceful as hammers falling in mud, where the emotional compass points only to anxiety, duty, hate, and lust. Don't get me started on the nicknames. The narrator is named Croaker because he's the doctor. Get it? Boy howdy, that's clever, that is.

Yawn.

"The Dappled Thing" by William Browning Spencer. A standard-issue Ancient Horror story with standard-issue steampunk stage dressing. But I don't dislike steampunk entirely, not yet, so I found this one merely mediocre instead of terrible.

"Not Last Night but the Night Before" by Steven R. Boyett. Holy shit, this one's actually pretty good. This is the first story in this collection that I would accept for my own magazine without a second thought, and the first one I can actually recommend you should read. It's nothing original, but it's the sort of intimate, human-scale story that gets me every time, told with delightfully bleak humor. Even if the second half of the book is as terrible as the first half, this one story makes the entire read worthwhile.

"Hydraguros" by Caitlín R. Kiernan. I think I've seen the term "crustpunk" tossed around for stories like this: ambitious young street toughs narrating in stupid "futuristic" slang and doing odd jobs for drug-fueled criminal syndicates. That shit bores me. It reminds me of sophomore creative writing students. This story crams that together with tired old Invasion of the Body Snatchers cliches and contrail conspiracies into a completely underwhelming amalgam. It also ends abruptly, leaving half the story untold, but I'm not complaining.

"The Parthenopean Scalpel" by Bruce Sterling. Wait, the Bruce Sterling? What's he doing slumming with this crowd? Granted, I haven't read any of his stories so far as I know, but he's won like awards and shit. He's the first one of these clowns I've heard of. This story was satisfyingly entertaining. I still like the Boyett story better, but this one was pretty decent.

"A Pulp Called Joe" by David Prill. I found the magical-realism conceit here charming. Another pretty good one.

"Vampire Lake" by Norman Partridge. The title made my heart sink as soon as I turned the page. That and the fact that it's the longest damn story in this collection. How are there that many words left to write about vampires? But hey, at least it begins with this hardboiled pulp Western thing going on. I can get down with that. Fantasy western is kind of my bag -- that fact can override even the presence of vampires. This story got a little wordy and dull in spots, but otherwise it was surprisingly fine -- a lot of fun, even. They really backloaded this collection, didn't they?

"A Room with a View" by K. J. Parker. The last half of Subterranean 2 has been worlds better than the first, but here we are at the last story and I must admit, I'm about ready to be done with this book. This one appears to be (or is trying to be) a wry tale of bureaucratic wizardry. It was occasionally amusing in a wry way, I guess I'm just disappointed that there wasn't a mindblowingly creative and original story in this mix. I'm realizing there are only so many ways you can introduce variety into a story about wizards, really. You play with the setting, you play with the rules of magic, and of course you go the "funny" route and make magic as humdrum and regulated as plumbing work. Still, I liked this one too.

I was going to give this book an abysmal score, but the string of solid stories in the last half convinced me to bump it up at least a little bit. I can't recommend this book, but not all the stories were bad, so take from that whatever you like.

2013 read #3: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
194 pages
Published 1930
Read January 5
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Jory recommended this one to me way back when I first asked for book suggestions. A mere three and a half months later, here we are. I picked this up on a whim when we went to the library today, and sped through it in just a few hours, the first time since my teen years that I finished a novel in a single day. I had to check several times to assure myself this wasn't an abridged edition.

For whatever reason I always assumed The Maltese Falcon was Serious Literature. I'd never seen any of the film adaptations, and probably conflated it in my head with The Great Gatsby, another 20th century classic I haven't gotten around to reading yet.

In reality, of course, Falcon is pure unadulterated pulp, an entertaining slip of a novel that invented or refined countless cliches of hardboiled detective fiction. In keeping with its period and genre, Falcon's prose is too mechanical and descriptive for my tastes, but that rarely interfered with my enjoyment. I've been meaning to read more pulp -- I want to write something sizzling and fun for BEAT to a PULP magazine, and hope to capture through osmosis the tone and rhythms of good pulp storytelling -- and obviously Falcon did not disappoint. The ending was deliciously cynical.

Beyond that, I don't have much commentary. I'll probably read Hammett's novel Red Harvest soon, as it's bundled together with the library's copy of Falcon and I have a thing for stories set in mining towns. (Hey, maybe my hypothetical pulp story will be set in a mining town! I could write a more red-blooded version of a certain fairy story I'm writing, full of oil-black revolvers and the tiny fists of dames connecting with chiseled jaws to satisfactory effect.)

2013 read #2: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
336 pages
Published 1997
Read from January 3 to January 5
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

There are some spoilers scattered through this, just a warning.

I like Neil Gaiman. I think he's overrated, a lifestyle brand and idol of Blogspot intellectuals, but I do like his work. (I loved American Gods, but I read that years ago; I have no idea if it would impress me as much nowadays.) Gaiman's prose is above the level of other airport novelists but well short of prose-poetry, to say the least -- the climactic scene where an unhinged billions-of-years-old angel reveals his inner fury was rendered (deliberately?) comical when the angel was described as "crazy-scary," completely deflating any terror or awe that concept by rights should have carried. Gaiman's concepts can be neat in a Volvo Gothic sort of way. The Earl's Court scene, for instance, was charming, beguiling, delightful. Gaiman certainly has a skill for vignettes, little scenes of theatrical fluorish and adventure that pad out his somewhat thin plots. My primary disappointment with Gaiman is how the sum product tends to be flimsier than the strength of its parts. And much of that has to do with his characters. The side characters are often memorable, but his central protagonists tend to lack a certain spark. Neverwhere's male lead, Richard, is an authorial stand-in, an everyman played for laughs, muddled and mumbling beneath the suspicious perfection of his "rumpled, just-woken-up" hair -- until he inevitably passes his road of trials and achieves competence. Door, the female lead, is every teenage Tumblrite's mental conception of herself (or perhaps every middle aged hetero man's ideal of a younger girlfriend), an impossibly kick-ass magical pixie girl with a boutique wardrobe and a dark past.

While archetypes aren't bad tools in and of themselves, they leave me feeling an emotional disconnect from the story. What Gaiman does is a more flamboyant and whimsical elaboration of the aiport novel, telling simple and colorful stories with simple and easily relatable stock types. Again, I have absolutely nothing against that. It just doesn't seem enough to justify Gaiman's vast and vocal following. You can't go two clicks on the internet without someone producing Gaiman on a list of favorite authors. I don't know, fannishness has always felt a little weird to me.

(I love the Game of Thrones books, but I know they're clumsily worded and sweatily exploitative fantasy trash. I have no special fondness for George R. R. Martin as an author.)

To Gaiman's credit, the two leads don't wind up romantically linked at the end. I kind of guessed they wouldn't, but I was pleased by it all the same. I predicted pretty much every other "twist" except for Islington being a fallen angel; honestly I expected the Big Bad would be Mr. Stockton, the billionaire behind the angel art exhibit, the one Jessica and Richard were going to dine with in the first chapter. In a lesser novel he almost certainly would have been the one holding the leash on the hired killers.

I don't know how I felt about Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar. On one hand, the thin man and the fat man (the brains and the muscle) is an incredibly common stock pairing in everything from literature to comedy duos. The thin man and the fat man played to sinister effect in a strange, twisted, labyrinthine world that's more than it seems? Tad Williams did that already in Otherland, the first volume of which predates Neverwhere. (I'm not saying Gaiman pilfered from Williams -- it is an ubiquitous pairing, after all -- but I just now noticed the neologistic similarity of the two titles. Lol.) On the other hand, I feel Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar may edge out the Twins for the title of best thin man and fat man played to sinister effect in a strange, twisted, labyrinthine world that's more than it seems (in books published in the mid-'90s, at any rate).

Enough sniping. I liked this book.

2013 read #1: Memory by Linda Nagata.

Memory by Linda Nagata
416 pages
Published 2003
Read from January 1 to January 3
Rating: ★★ out of 5

I haven't read much hard science fiction -- an Iain M. Banks novel, a few issues of Analog, one or two other books I've mostly forgotten about. Mostly I liked what I read, but the genre never really clicked with me. It tends to be dry, impersonal, predicated on specific technological configurations rather than the character interactions and social implications that really draw me into speculative fiction. The concepts are neat sometimes, but since only so many things are technologically feasible, it can feel a bit repetitive even after the handful of titles I've read. Nanotechnology, geoengineering and terraforming, ringworlds, super AI's, intelligent ships, human consciousness technologically enhanced with godlike powers -- hard science fiction is as dull and cliched in its own way as vaguely medieval fantasy with its princesses and brigands and dragons. Or else I've been reading the wrong stuff.

Memory seemed intriguing enough at first. I liked the scattering of Nahuatl names in the geography, the "truckers" driving across the lowlands to take shelter in "temples" every night, and imagined that interesting cultural worldbuilding would be a central draw of the novel. Alas, it wasn't to be. The meat of the narrative was a generic travelogue through a grassland and a forest and a desert, no different than any C-list fantasy novel. The bulk of the plot centered on the dry mechanics of Nagata's fake technologies, again like any C-list fantasy novel. In fact, in every respect Memory could be a C-list fantasy novel. The desert portions, especially, reminded me of some lackluster Fable sequel or novelization. That I think was the biggest disappointment. I've read more than enough generic fantasy. I had hoped that a hard science fiction story would offer something fundamentally different. But really, if Nagata had invoked magic instead of magical nanotech, nothing of substance would have changed. Even the main villain -- dressed in black, laughing bitterly, immortal, driven to destroy the world for some stupid arbitrary reason -- is a stock dark wizard character.

Nagata's prose was meh, the characters one-dimensional and dull, the interpersonal conflicts predictable and kind of silly. One thing that especially bugged me was Nagata's method of dropping loads of background information. At least twice, a concept would be introduced in one chapter and suddenly be everywhere the next. We went about eighty pages before the concept of "cessants" was introduced, but in the very next chapter and from then on throughout the book, suddenly every other new character is a cessant. There are whole monasteries full of them, and nobody cares.

I also hate it when a major "twist" is obvious from like the second chapter. When your characters all refer to themselves as "players," and mention all the prior lives they've lived, there isn't much of a mystery; when the main character finally realizes what she and her fellow players are, it doesn't carry nearly as much emotional impact as the text seems to think it should. I'm not spoiling that for you, because seriously -- it's right there from the second chapter or so.

Also, your big climactic final chapter shouldn't have page after page of your cardboard characters walking around looking for something and chit-chatting as if they were comfortable at home. It shouldn't feature the line "We walked and walked, and I began to think we would walk forever through that flat, featureless terrain." Just sayin'. There was pretty much zero tension in this book, mostly because the characters were that uninteresting, partly because the pacing is kind of terrible.

I didn't hate Memory as much as you'd think, but it was entirely unremarkable in every way. At least it was a fast read.