Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
A translation from the Gĩkũyũ by the author
768 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 20 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I've
had this book checked out from the library for almost a third of 2013. I
first took it out sometime in September, renewed it, returned it only
to check it out again, renewed it, returned it, checked it out again a
few days later. I wanted to read it, but other books kept distracting
me, and especially since October, my reading pace has slowed
considerably, making it harder to squeeze such a huge tome (the biggest
book I read all year!) in between the others.
I don't know why it
took so long for me to finish it once I started. It's a bitterly
hilarious satire, sweeping together painful and depressing views of
neocolonial economics and globalism, racism and corruption, exploitation
and "traditional" wife-beating, the IMF and a "Global Bank" all too
happy to award loans to a dictator so long as his nation is politically
stable enough to crush the poor and working class under the terms of
repayment, told in an allegorical magical-realist mode. Like with all
satires, its characters have a tendency to feel like cartoons, and the
faux-documentary narration creates an additional level of emotional
distance, which wasn't to my taste, but this is the sort of story more
people on the "receiving" end of global capital -- which means basically
all of us in the West -- need to read.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Friday, December 20, 2013
2013 read #151: Kushiel's Avatar by Jacqueline Carey.
Kushiel's Avatar by Jacqueline Carey
702 pages
Published 2003
Read from December 10 to December 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Eleven days without finishing a book. This might be a 2013 record. Part of the blame is mine: I've largely given up on waking up early to go to the gym, using my customary evening reading time for working out instead; when I've had the time, I've used it to play Civilization or plan hiking adventures or veg out. But a lot of the blame goes to this book. I'm stubborn; Kushiel's Avatar is the conclusion of a trilogy, and I was going to see this series through no matter how rough it got. But it got pretty damn rough, and the gym and Civilization both felt like better uses of my time.
Spoilers ahead, brief mention of fictional sexual assault, etc.
My main problem with this book was structural, though thematic and prose elements contributed much to my dislike. Structurally speaking, Avatar read like assorted B-plots got scraped together to fill up the expected 700 pages of running time. For the first 200 pages or so, it looks like we're heading into a romantic fantasy Raiders of the Lost Ark -- Phèdre is off to find a lost tribe of Israel in the wilds of Ethiopia, rumored to have taken the Ark of the Covenant, through which she hopes to learn the Name of God and thereby free her friend from an angel's curse. But then for the next 200 pages we get detoured into a grimdark and not especially interesting Temple of Doom sequence, as Phèdre remands herself into sex slavery, infiltrating the seraglio of some two-bit Dark and Crazy Fantasy Villain to rescue the son of her enemy/lover. Trading in romantic fiction cliches for fantasy cliches was not a wise move, to my mind. I would rather Carey trot out yet another barbarian prince (or princess, if we need some variety), rather than a tedious evil sadistic king who leads a literal dark-worshiping cult and plans to Take Over the Wooooorrrld. That whole act of the novel was a huge misfire, and brought down an otherwise middling and unremarkable book to something below average. The potentially interesting opportunity to examine how various characters might move on from sexual degradation, assault, and slavery is resolved much too simply, and the whole thing felt problematic and ill-considered.
The rest of the book, before and after the sex dungeon, reads like an overly detailed fantasy travel guide, listing the accommodations and foodstuffs and means of transportation as if Carey's narrator was hired by a travel agency to advise potential customers. The prose was bland and standoffish, lacking affect for all but a few of those 702 pages. The opportunity to spend some time in a fantasy version of Africa, always a rare treat, was nice, but kind of spoiled by the travelogue nature of Carey's depiction, and the easy inevitability of what's supposed to be a climactic victory. (Come to think of it, Phèdre's defeat of the Evil Dark Lord and his Dark Cult of Darkness was ridiculously easy, too, as was the confrontation with Rahab. And as soon as Phèdre began musing on children and her reluctance to bring any into the world, I knew Imriel would become her surrogate son and teach her What It Really Means to Love and all that. Terribly predictable.)
So, now 2100 pages of this series are behind me -- more time than I've spent in any other fictional universe, aside from A Song of Ice and Fire and possibly The Wheel of Time. But I think I'm done with it now.
702 pages
Published 2003
Read from December 10 to December 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Eleven days without finishing a book. This might be a 2013 record. Part of the blame is mine: I've largely given up on waking up early to go to the gym, using my customary evening reading time for working out instead; when I've had the time, I've used it to play Civilization or plan hiking adventures or veg out. But a lot of the blame goes to this book. I'm stubborn; Kushiel's Avatar is the conclusion of a trilogy, and I was going to see this series through no matter how rough it got. But it got pretty damn rough, and the gym and Civilization both felt like better uses of my time.
Spoilers ahead, brief mention of fictional sexual assault, etc.
My main problem with this book was structural, though thematic and prose elements contributed much to my dislike. Structurally speaking, Avatar read like assorted B-plots got scraped together to fill up the expected 700 pages of running time. For the first 200 pages or so, it looks like we're heading into a romantic fantasy Raiders of the Lost Ark -- Phèdre is off to find a lost tribe of Israel in the wilds of Ethiopia, rumored to have taken the Ark of the Covenant, through which she hopes to learn the Name of God and thereby free her friend from an angel's curse. But then for the next 200 pages we get detoured into a grimdark and not especially interesting Temple of Doom sequence, as Phèdre remands herself into sex slavery, infiltrating the seraglio of some two-bit Dark and Crazy Fantasy Villain to rescue the son of her enemy/lover. Trading in romantic fiction cliches for fantasy cliches was not a wise move, to my mind. I would rather Carey trot out yet another barbarian prince (or princess, if we need some variety), rather than a tedious evil sadistic king who leads a literal dark-worshiping cult and plans to Take Over the Wooooorrrld. That whole act of the novel was a huge misfire, and brought down an otherwise middling and unremarkable book to something below average. The potentially interesting opportunity to examine how various characters might move on from sexual degradation, assault, and slavery is resolved much too simply, and the whole thing felt problematic and ill-considered.
The rest of the book, before and after the sex dungeon, reads like an overly detailed fantasy travel guide, listing the accommodations and foodstuffs and means of transportation as if Carey's narrator was hired by a travel agency to advise potential customers. The prose was bland and standoffish, lacking affect for all but a few of those 702 pages. The opportunity to spend some time in a fantasy version of Africa, always a rare treat, was nice, but kind of spoiled by the travelogue nature of Carey's depiction, and the easy inevitability of what's supposed to be a climactic victory. (Come to think of it, Phèdre's defeat of the Evil Dark Lord and his Dark Cult of Darkness was ridiculously easy, too, as was the confrontation with Rahab. And as soon as Phèdre began musing on children and her reluctance to bring any into the world, I knew Imriel would become her surrogate son and teach her What It Really Means to Love and all that. Terribly predictable.)
So, now 2100 pages of this series are behind me -- more time than I've spent in any other fictional universe, aside from A Song of Ice and Fire and possibly The Wheel of Time. But I think I'm done with it now.
Monday, December 9, 2013
2013 read #150: Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd.
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
217 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Seductive, almost gleeful evil, lustful revulsion at the stink and "corrupcion" of human existence, shadows and dust and blood -- the tale of a paranoid architect laying in a symbol and invocation to occult powers in the churches of London, with the help of a few human sacrifices, and the parallel tale of duplicates or echoes or metempsychotic rebirths of those characters, the architect now a detective in the twentieth century investigating murders mirroring the old sacrifices in the churches around London. Repulsively beautiful, filled with the fecal lust of a chaste hypochondriac, Ackroyd's descriptive powers slither and stroke and foul through the Georgian-set chapters in a wonderful evocation of period-perfect prose and exquisite characterization. The modern day chapters aren't as compelling after the first two parallel victims are dispatched; Hawksmoor the detective has potential as a character but sags under thematic expectations, shuffling inertly where his pseudo-historical doppelganger (inspired loosely by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor) twists and strangles and dominates his narrative, Ackroyd at the audacious height of his history-glutted powers. Maybe detectives and murders aren't my favorite genre staples.
The history of literary speculations around the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor, before and after this book, is pretty interesting, at least as Wikipedia sets it out. One early "promoter" of the occult geography of London (perhaps the one who originated Hawksmoor's position in the myth, though Wiki is vague about this) was Iain Sinclair, whose poem "Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches" inspired Ackroyd. "Both Sinclair and Ackroyd's ideas in turn were further developed by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in their graphic novel, From Hell," says Wiki, "which speculated that Jack the Ripper used Hawksmoor's buildings as part of ritual magic, with his victims as human sacrifice." I haven't read (or seen) From Hell, but I can see how this book is part of that lineage of ideas. It's neat to see how the literary milieu of "occult London" arose and developed over time, to the point where now it (or its variations) feels like a go-to cliche in, say, steampunk.
217 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Seductive, almost gleeful evil, lustful revulsion at the stink and "corrupcion" of human existence, shadows and dust and blood -- the tale of a paranoid architect laying in a symbol and invocation to occult powers in the churches of London, with the help of a few human sacrifices, and the parallel tale of duplicates or echoes or metempsychotic rebirths of those characters, the architect now a detective in the twentieth century investigating murders mirroring the old sacrifices in the churches around London. Repulsively beautiful, filled with the fecal lust of a chaste hypochondriac, Ackroyd's descriptive powers slither and stroke and foul through the Georgian-set chapters in a wonderful evocation of period-perfect prose and exquisite characterization. The modern day chapters aren't as compelling after the first two parallel victims are dispatched; Hawksmoor the detective has potential as a character but sags under thematic expectations, shuffling inertly where his pseudo-historical doppelganger (inspired loosely by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor) twists and strangles and dominates his narrative, Ackroyd at the audacious height of his history-glutted powers. Maybe detectives and murders aren't my favorite genre staples.
The history of literary speculations around the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor, before and after this book, is pretty interesting, at least as Wikipedia sets it out. One early "promoter" of the occult geography of London (perhaps the one who originated Hawksmoor's position in the myth, though Wiki is vague about this) was Iain Sinclair, whose poem "Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches" inspired Ackroyd. "Both Sinclair and Ackroyd's ideas in turn were further developed by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in their graphic novel, From Hell," says Wiki, "which speculated that Jack the Ripper used Hawksmoor's buildings as part of ritual magic, with his victims as human sacrifice." I haven't read (or seen) From Hell, but I can see how this book is part of that lineage of ideas. It's neat to see how the literary milieu of "occult London" arose and developed over time, to the point where now it (or its variations) feels like a go-to cliche in, say, steampunk.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
2013 read #149: Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper.
Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper
467 pages
Published 1992
Read from December 5 to December 7
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I am very glad I persevered through the Arbai Trilogy.
The preceding volumes, Grass and Raising the Stones, were audacious but ultimately flawed novels, both sunk by a tendency to swarm with nonessential, scarcely defined characters and to get bogged down in the middle with dull material. Sideshow avoids those problems, maintaining a relatively streamlined cast of characters and a conventional (but effective) sci-fi quest structure. A definite note of satire is present, or at least more pronounced than in the first two books, but the occasional touch of flippancy doesn't undercut the dramatic potential or my emotional investment in the characters. In fact, Sideshow was at times quite affecting.
Some spoilers ahead.
Where Grass brought us techno-jousters battling sadistic alien stegosaur-horses, and Stones brought us a world overgrown with a fungal god, Sideshow delivers a quadripartite computer-consciousness that is also a psychotic god, manifesting through nanomachinery, that slices a pair of conjoined twins into their component parts and places them in boxes where their consciousnesses can only scream, said boxes then getting broken down and reconstituted by the Stones fungus into a humanoid bird and otter-man, respectively. Awesome as that is, of course, any time you say "psychotic computer consciousness," you start running into trouble -- cliche trouble. The four "villains" were my least favorite part of Sideshow, an indulgence of genre convention that I think weakened the whole book.
Nonetheless, this was solid overall, and the ending did not disappoint. I am left to mourn the fact, however, that I will never be able to read a series on the adventures of Marjorie Westriding and her pal Great Dragon as they warp through time and space via Arbai doors with their occasional companion Sam Girat. I picture such a series as a more inventive alternative to new Doctor Who, full of whimsy and new worlds and daring escapes as well as allegory and basic humanist philosophy. Oh well. Probably it's for the best. Regardless, I'm a little sad now to reach the end of this series, something I never expected to say as I was wading through the arid wastes in the middle of Grass all those months ago.
467 pages
Published 1992
Read from December 5 to December 7
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I am very glad I persevered through the Arbai Trilogy.
The preceding volumes, Grass and Raising the Stones, were audacious but ultimately flawed novels, both sunk by a tendency to swarm with nonessential, scarcely defined characters and to get bogged down in the middle with dull material. Sideshow avoids those problems, maintaining a relatively streamlined cast of characters and a conventional (but effective) sci-fi quest structure. A definite note of satire is present, or at least more pronounced than in the first two books, but the occasional touch of flippancy doesn't undercut the dramatic potential or my emotional investment in the characters. In fact, Sideshow was at times quite affecting.
Some spoilers ahead.
Where Grass brought us techno-jousters battling sadistic alien stegosaur-horses, and Stones brought us a world overgrown with a fungal god, Sideshow delivers a quadripartite computer-consciousness that is also a psychotic god, manifesting through nanomachinery, that slices a pair of conjoined twins into their component parts and places them in boxes where their consciousnesses can only scream, said boxes then getting broken down and reconstituted by the Stones fungus into a humanoid bird and otter-man, respectively. Awesome as that is, of course, any time you say "psychotic computer consciousness," you start running into trouble -- cliche trouble. The four "villains" were my least favorite part of Sideshow, an indulgence of genre convention that I think weakened the whole book.
Nonetheless, this was solid overall, and the ending did not disappoint. I am left to mourn the fact, however, that I will never be able to read a series on the adventures of Marjorie Westriding and her pal Great Dragon as they warp through time and space via Arbai doors with their occasional companion Sam Girat. I picture such a series as a more inventive alternative to new Doctor Who, full of whimsy and new worlds and daring escapes as well as allegory and basic humanist philosophy. Oh well. Probably it's for the best. Regardless, I'm a little sad now to reach the end of this series, something I never expected to say as I was wading through the arid wastes in the middle of Grass all those months ago.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
2013 read #148: Traitors' Gate by Kate Elliott.
Traitors' Gate by Kate Elliott
574 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 30 to December 5
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Spoilers for the entire Crossroads Trilogy ahead.
One thing I forgot to criticize in my review of Shadow Gate was the aimlessness of certain characters' movements. Journeys, it almost goes without saying, are the bread and butter of Tolkienist fantasy (and the Arthuriana and romantic traditions Tolkien drew from). Handled well, they can be routine but effective storytelling frameworks, providing momentum to an adventure tale, raising the stakes as the heroes near their goal or get driven back from it. Handled poorly, wanderings can be baldly obvious means of forcing awkward exposition or unneeded worldbuilding detail into the story, or -- worse -- a way for characters to kill time and remain occupied until the plot finally needs them. That last scenario was painfully obvious in this series.
For instance: A character named Keshad is introduced in Spirit Gate, the first book, in a caravan returning to the Hundred, finally able to buy himself and his sister out of debt slavery. Once they're free, Keshad prevails upon his sister to accompany him with no specific destination in mind, so long as it's away from those who have held them captive -- even though, in this case, it means wandering stupidly and stubbornly deeper into a war zone. Then a dude on an eagle catches up with them and tells them Keshad bought their freedom with something he couldn't sell because Plot Reasons, so after chapters of traveling, Keshad and his sister simply turn around and head back to the city they just left. Nothing really happened in those travelogue chapters, from a storytelling perspective. Sure, Keshad learned his sister had changed over the years (into a fearless and impossibly skilled sex assassin, because Fantasy Fiction), but that could have been revealed in one scene, maybe as he was securing her freedom, and nothing else in those chapters furthered the story. And then (I forget whether this happened in the first book or the second, but regardless), Keshad -- now stuck reluctantly with our heroes -- volunteers to go spying in a pseudo-Seljuk empire, the very place he was leaving at the beginning of Spirit Gate. Almost as soon as he's back again, he penned up with other outlander traders during some sort of dynastic commotion, his spying mission foiled as easy as that, thanks for playing, have a copy of the home game. At the start of this book, he gets turned around yet again and sent as an escort right back into the Hundred, where he proceeds to dither around in that selfsame first city, bellyaching about being in love with someone he saw for a split second. Add the fact that the character is annoying as well as useless, and you begin to see some of the deep structural problems with the Crossroads Trilogy.
Yet... I dunno, I can't bring myself to wholly dislike this book. Keshad's loop-de-loops were particularly annoying; the unimaginative "every woman looks the handsome man up and down and licks her lips" introductions could inspire a drinking game; the setting and the supernatural possibilities of ghosts and giant eagles and immortal Guardians got tapped of their potential, after a fashion, and kind of sputtered out with increased familiarity. Much of the dialogue is cluttered with forced exposition. ("Hey captain, you remember our plan, which we are currently carrying out, and we are currently doing this, right now, as I'm speaking, as part of that plan." Not an exact quote, but you get the flavor.) Almost all the characters were annoying in one way or another: Joss for being such a one-note womanizer-with-a-sad-backstory, Anji for being a controlling jerk toward his wife (though he became more interesting as he made his not entirely unexpected Genghis Khan move), Mai for being a robot most of the time, Shai for not living up to his potential as a dude who can see and hear friggin' ghosts, everyone else for being so one-dimensional and either being flirty or stoic all the time, depending on their racial background. Yet there were genuinely exciting moments sprinkled through Traitors' Gate, and maybe one or two moving scenes as well. So... part of me still kind of liked it.
This book wasn't all that much worse than Shadow Gate, except in the matter of excessively expository dialogue, but I've noticed a trend in my ratings: The final volume in a trilogy gets saddled with something of an overall grade for the series. I don't quite hate the Crossroads Trilogy, but it did not meet my expectations.
574 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 30 to December 5
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Spoilers for the entire Crossroads Trilogy ahead.
One thing I forgot to criticize in my review of Shadow Gate was the aimlessness of certain characters' movements. Journeys, it almost goes without saying, are the bread and butter of Tolkienist fantasy (and the Arthuriana and romantic traditions Tolkien drew from). Handled well, they can be routine but effective storytelling frameworks, providing momentum to an adventure tale, raising the stakes as the heroes near their goal or get driven back from it. Handled poorly, wanderings can be baldly obvious means of forcing awkward exposition or unneeded worldbuilding detail into the story, or -- worse -- a way for characters to kill time and remain occupied until the plot finally needs them. That last scenario was painfully obvious in this series.
For instance: A character named Keshad is introduced in Spirit Gate, the first book, in a caravan returning to the Hundred, finally able to buy himself and his sister out of debt slavery. Once they're free, Keshad prevails upon his sister to accompany him with no specific destination in mind, so long as it's away from those who have held them captive -- even though, in this case, it means wandering stupidly and stubbornly deeper into a war zone. Then a dude on an eagle catches up with them and tells them Keshad bought their freedom with something he couldn't sell because Plot Reasons, so after chapters of traveling, Keshad and his sister simply turn around and head back to the city they just left. Nothing really happened in those travelogue chapters, from a storytelling perspective. Sure, Keshad learned his sister had changed over the years (into a fearless and impossibly skilled sex assassin, because Fantasy Fiction), but that could have been revealed in one scene, maybe as he was securing her freedom, and nothing else in those chapters furthered the story. And then (I forget whether this happened in the first book or the second, but regardless), Keshad -- now stuck reluctantly with our heroes -- volunteers to go spying in a pseudo-Seljuk empire, the very place he was leaving at the beginning of Spirit Gate. Almost as soon as he's back again, he penned up with other outlander traders during some sort of dynastic commotion, his spying mission foiled as easy as that, thanks for playing, have a copy of the home game. At the start of this book, he gets turned around yet again and sent as an escort right back into the Hundred, where he proceeds to dither around in that selfsame first city, bellyaching about being in love with someone he saw for a split second. Add the fact that the character is annoying as well as useless, and you begin to see some of the deep structural problems with the Crossroads Trilogy.
Yet... I dunno, I can't bring myself to wholly dislike this book. Keshad's loop-de-loops were particularly annoying; the unimaginative "every woman looks the handsome man up and down and licks her lips" introductions could inspire a drinking game; the setting and the supernatural possibilities of ghosts and giant eagles and immortal Guardians got tapped of their potential, after a fashion, and kind of sputtered out with increased familiarity. Much of the dialogue is cluttered with forced exposition. ("Hey captain, you remember our plan, which we are currently carrying out, and we are currently doing this, right now, as I'm speaking, as part of that plan." Not an exact quote, but you get the flavor.) Almost all the characters were annoying in one way or another: Joss for being such a one-note womanizer-with-a-sad-backstory, Anji for being a controlling jerk toward his wife (though he became more interesting as he made his not entirely unexpected Genghis Khan move), Mai for being a robot most of the time, Shai for not living up to his potential as a dude who can see and hear friggin' ghosts, everyone else for being so one-dimensional and either being flirty or stoic all the time, depending on their racial background. Yet there were genuinely exciting moments sprinkled through Traitors' Gate, and maybe one or two moving scenes as well. So... part of me still kind of liked it.
This book wasn't all that much worse than Shadow Gate, except in the matter of excessively expository dialogue, but I've noticed a trend in my ratings: The final volume in a trilogy gets saddled with something of an overall grade for the series. I don't quite hate the Crossroads Trilogy, but it did not meet my expectations.
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