Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
259 pages
Published 2005
Read from June 22 to June 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Another thoroughly engaging history book / travel memoir / snarky NPR segment from Vowell, this one tracing the physical sites associated with (and the coincidental connections between) assassinations of three nineteenth century presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Along the way we learn about the Oneida Community and the slow diminution of the Republican party, from the grand old party of Lincoln to the Southern Strategists of the Bush/Rove/Ashcroft era. As with all Vowell books, the central draw is more the entertainment value than the depth of didacticism; nevertheless, I feel like I learned quite a bit. My tastes in history tend toward the ancient and the primeval -- when it comes to American history, I check out around the close of the Seven Years' War -- so I was unexpectedly engrossed by Vowell's breezy overview of the naked corruption and boss politics of the Gilded Age, an era I really should learn more about.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
2016 read #52: Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente.
Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente
142 pages
Published 2015
Read from June 21 to June 22
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
A fairy tale retelling by Catherynne M. Valente, set in a magical hotel in Prohibition New York, starring a fairy named Al who makes liquor out of stories and art and kisses, and two mixed up human kiddies named Zelda and Frankie. Sound awesome? Prepare to be disappointed.
Unlike another disappointing novella by an author I admire, Connie Willis' D.A., Speak Easy doesn't fail by abandoning everything that made its author great. No, Speak Easy fails because it's almost a parody of Valente, as if she got stuck in high gear and couldn't tone down the narrative winks and prosical flourishes and oh-so-fucking-precious scene-setting until the whole thing careened off the road like a speeding jalopy with a few bolts left off in the factory. You don't read Valente for plots and characters, you read her for her prose poetry and her whirlwinds of imagination, yet even there, this book is something of a dud, reading for much of its length like half-finished notes for a rejected spinoff of her Fairyland series. Gone is the staggering lyricism of A Dirge for Prester John (1, 2), gone is the burnished postmodern puzzle box of Radiance. Certain details and ideas are worth salvaging; I'd read a whole novel about vaguely saurian fairies teaching cavemen to make music and dance, and the denouement, while predictable (would a book about a Zelda and a Frankie end any other way?), was solid storytelling. But as a whole, Speak Easy was an awkward combination of overstuffed and underpolished, a promising idea Valente just didn't take the time to realize in full.
142 pages
Published 2015
Read from June 21 to June 22
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
A fairy tale retelling by Catherynne M. Valente, set in a magical hotel in Prohibition New York, starring a fairy named Al who makes liquor out of stories and art and kisses, and two mixed up human kiddies named Zelda and Frankie. Sound awesome? Prepare to be disappointed.
Unlike another disappointing novella by an author I admire, Connie Willis' D.A., Speak Easy doesn't fail by abandoning everything that made its author great. No, Speak Easy fails because it's almost a parody of Valente, as if she got stuck in high gear and couldn't tone down the narrative winks and prosical flourishes and oh-so-fucking-precious scene-setting until the whole thing careened off the road like a speeding jalopy with a few bolts left off in the factory. You don't read Valente for plots and characters, you read her for her prose poetry and her whirlwinds of imagination, yet even there, this book is something of a dud, reading for much of its length like half-finished notes for a rejected spinoff of her Fairyland series. Gone is the staggering lyricism of A Dirge for Prester John (1, 2), gone is the burnished postmodern puzzle box of Radiance. Certain details and ideas are worth salvaging; I'd read a whole novel about vaguely saurian fairies teaching cavemen to make music and dance, and the denouement, while predictable (would a book about a Zelda and a Frankie end any other way?), was solid storytelling. But as a whole, Speak Easy was an awkward combination of overstuffed and underpolished, a promising idea Valente just didn't take the time to realize in full.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
2016 read #51: Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb.
Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb
581 pages
Published 1996
Read from June 15 to June 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Already fantasy series bloat has set in. This is just the second book in what would become a still-ongoing series, yet it's well over two hundred pages longer than the first book, and much of that extra length felt like unnecessary bulk, impediments rather than plot development, faffing about instead of making stuff happen. The narrator mentions at several points that this seems to be the longest winter of his life, and at times it seems like the reader is forced to experience this first-hand. With so much dithering, the series' weaknesses become harder to ignore, in particular a primary villain stamped ready-made from the "simpering, sneering, sadistic, not-quite-manly, if you know what I mean" cliché that has been unfortunately coded into fantasy fiction since the days of Robert E. Howard. There's also a double-barreled cliché in the form of a Magical Albino who is also a jester speaking in prophetic nonsense, and a world imperiled by a mysterious race from a far land who seem motivated only by wanton chaos and destruction.
(Permit me a moment to note how many strands of this series are reminiscent of its near-contemporary, A Song of Ice and Fire: The Red-Ships vs. the Others, Forging vs. ice zombies, the Fool vs. Patchface, the Wit vs. Warging, the general tableau of petty dynastic politics against a background of existential annihilation. The cover of the third Farseer novel suggests that dragons will have a role in saving everybody in the end, as well. Thanks for the spoilers there, cover artist. Anyway, the Farseer Trilogy pulls its punches almost every time -- no one stays dead, so much like the later Ice and Fire books, nothing that happens seems to have any stakes behind it, but that does differentiate Farseer from the first three Ice and Fire books, at least.)
Despite all that, Royal Assassin didn't seem like that much of a step down from the first Farseer novel. Largely I credit the fact that when the payoffs do come, however long delayed, they satisfy. Fitz has too many psychic superpowers to be at a disadvantage for long, and for much of the book his greatest nemesis is his own adolescent obtuseness, but the wider plots swirling around him have a sort of compelling inevitability, setting our heroes back despite all their easy victories close to home. Fitz's royal opponent is a preening fantasy novel sadist, the threat to the world is a ravaging cliché from a thews-and-sinews serial, yet Hobb's prose -- never flashy, but quietly confident -- gives it an air of dignity and tragedy.
581 pages
Published 1996
Read from June 15 to June 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Already fantasy series bloat has set in. This is just the second book in what would become a still-ongoing series, yet it's well over two hundred pages longer than the first book, and much of that extra length felt like unnecessary bulk, impediments rather than plot development, faffing about instead of making stuff happen. The narrator mentions at several points that this seems to be the longest winter of his life, and at times it seems like the reader is forced to experience this first-hand. With so much dithering, the series' weaknesses become harder to ignore, in particular a primary villain stamped ready-made from the "simpering, sneering, sadistic, not-quite-manly, if you know what I mean" cliché that has been unfortunately coded into fantasy fiction since the days of Robert E. Howard. There's also a double-barreled cliché in the form of a Magical Albino who is also a jester speaking in prophetic nonsense, and a world imperiled by a mysterious race from a far land who seem motivated only by wanton chaos and destruction.
(Permit me a moment to note how many strands of this series are reminiscent of its near-contemporary, A Song of Ice and Fire: The Red-Ships vs. the Others, Forging vs. ice zombies, the Fool vs. Patchface, the Wit vs. Warging, the general tableau of petty dynastic politics against a background of existential annihilation. The cover of the third Farseer novel suggests that dragons will have a role in saving everybody in the end, as well. Thanks for the spoilers there, cover artist. Anyway, the Farseer Trilogy pulls its punches almost every time -- no one stays dead, so much like the later Ice and Fire books, nothing that happens seems to have any stakes behind it, but that does differentiate Farseer from the first three Ice and Fire books, at least.)
Despite all that, Royal Assassin didn't seem like that much of a step down from the first Farseer novel. Largely I credit the fact that when the payoffs do come, however long delayed, they satisfy. Fitz has too many psychic superpowers to be at a disadvantage for long, and for much of the book his greatest nemesis is his own adolescent obtuseness, but the wider plots swirling around him have a sort of compelling inevitability, setting our heroes back despite all their easy victories close to home. Fitz's royal opponent is a preening fantasy novel sadist, the threat to the world is a ravaging cliché from a thews-and-sinews serial, yet Hobb's prose -- never flashy, but quietly confident -- gives it an air of dignity and tragedy.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
2016 read #50: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip
217 pages
Published 1974
Read from June 14 to June 15
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I have something of a quixotic quest: finding "lost classics" of genre fiction. The internet is full of lists of the best SF novels and the best fantasy novels, ranging from useless ones crowd-sourced from internet polling (thereby skewed, inevitably, in favor of Ayn Rand and Terry Pratchett), to dedicated websites compiling the tastes of their forums users, to Buzzfeed listicle/quiz hybrids, but all such endeavors have two failings in common: none of them reflect the current literary revolution in fantasy, and they all draw from the same muddy well of epic fantasy series that, frankly, aren't any good. If one were to believe most of these lists, fantasy fiction consists primarily of Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan, with the occasional Ursula K. Le Guin or Robin Hobb thrown in to make it look less like a poorly written sausage party. From my own readings I can testify that any list-maker who includes some stale multi-volume Tolkien imitator from the '90s at the expense of Catherynne M. Valente, Jo Walton, or Sofia Samatar probably thinks Star Wars novels are high literature.
For more recent fiction, I have (or had) io9 and Goodreads to give me more recommendations than I could possibly keep up with. But I have this conviction that the Goodkinds, Jordans, and Anne McCaffreys of the world weren't the only fantasists of the '80s and '90s worth remembering, and I've made a conscious effort to uncover authors and novels forgotten by mainstream fantasy fans -- making me something of a fantasy fiction hipster, I suppose. I've had a couple successes discovering lost classics. Wizard of the Pigeons and War for the Oaks both were thoroughly enjoyable; Swordspoint was excellent; Sideshow was good enough to redeem an entire trilogy of mediocrity before it. Long before I began keeping a reading blog, I happened upon A. A. Attanasio's Last Legends of Earth and found myself bedazzled by its structure and vocabulary (though whether I would be quite so impressed nowadays remains to be seen -- I plan on reading Attanasio's Radix tetrad sometime this year). Goodreads is not so useful for finding more books from a particular phase of the genre's evolution; I can't really type in "find me more books from the early years of urban fantasy or the New Romantics movement, something with that ineffable Thomas Canty/Siouxsie Sue vibe" as a search term.
One obvious recourse: lists of award-winning novels! I'm toying with the idea of reading through all the World Fantasy Award-winning books (and possibly even the more promising runners-up). Which is an exceptionally long-winded way of introducing this book, winner of the first-ever World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
The fantasy of the 1970s is a weird beast, a transitional form between the Tolkien/Howard/Leiber/Unknown school of the 1930s-60s and the New Romantics/Epic Fantasy Trilogies/new urban fantasy of the early- and mid-'80s. Most of my exposure to the decade has been via Lin Carter's largely abominable, occasionally brilliant Year's Best anthologies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), with a smattering of Earthsea. Nonetheless I've gotten a general sense of some '70s fantasy trends. Much of it is still anchored to rusty cliches of heroic fantasy -- wizards and swordsmen, sketchy old gender norms, musty or stilted prose, fantastic beasts that risk verging on the corny, and of course naming schemes cornier than a field in Iowa. The better stories struggled against the limitations of this vocabulary, but few at this stage managed to kick free of it entirely.
Some spoilers ahead.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is a fairly standard '70s fantasy in this regard, though hints of something deeper and more ambitious twist and tense beneath the surface. Gender norms are toyed with (the central character is a powerful woman of magic; the central conflict is instigated by an obvious metaphor for rape and the violence of gendered subjugation) but never seriously challenged (the powerful female wizard, age 16, can't resist the allure of taking care of a baby; a strong man who listens to his romantic "needs" instead of her emphatic "nos" turns out to be her happy ending). Questions of love and hate, revenge and forgiveness, are contemplated with more sophistication than I would have expected. The denouement cleverly averts a war by spiriting away the warlords, leaving the land confused but peaceful. The fact that this was marketed as a juvenile novel at the time (as were the earlier Earthsea books) makes it all the more remarkable.
Overall, the limitations of '70s fantasy drag Beasts down, but I appreciated the nascent complexity and ambiguity, and I'm always pleased to have another datum for my mental picture of how fantasy fiction evolved and became how awesome it can be today.
217 pages
Published 1974
Read from June 14 to June 15
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I have something of a quixotic quest: finding "lost classics" of genre fiction. The internet is full of lists of the best SF novels and the best fantasy novels, ranging from useless ones crowd-sourced from internet polling (thereby skewed, inevitably, in favor of Ayn Rand and Terry Pratchett), to dedicated websites compiling the tastes of their forums users, to Buzzfeed listicle/quiz hybrids, but all such endeavors have two failings in common: none of them reflect the current literary revolution in fantasy, and they all draw from the same muddy well of epic fantasy series that, frankly, aren't any good. If one were to believe most of these lists, fantasy fiction consists primarily of Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan, with the occasional Ursula K. Le Guin or Robin Hobb thrown in to make it look less like a poorly written sausage party. From my own readings I can testify that any list-maker who includes some stale multi-volume Tolkien imitator from the '90s at the expense of Catherynne M. Valente, Jo Walton, or Sofia Samatar probably thinks Star Wars novels are high literature.
For more recent fiction, I have (or had) io9 and Goodreads to give me more recommendations than I could possibly keep up with. But I have this conviction that the Goodkinds, Jordans, and Anne McCaffreys of the world weren't the only fantasists of the '80s and '90s worth remembering, and I've made a conscious effort to uncover authors and novels forgotten by mainstream fantasy fans -- making me something of a fantasy fiction hipster, I suppose. I've had a couple successes discovering lost classics. Wizard of the Pigeons and War for the Oaks both were thoroughly enjoyable; Swordspoint was excellent; Sideshow was good enough to redeem an entire trilogy of mediocrity before it. Long before I began keeping a reading blog, I happened upon A. A. Attanasio's Last Legends of Earth and found myself bedazzled by its structure and vocabulary (though whether I would be quite so impressed nowadays remains to be seen -- I plan on reading Attanasio's Radix tetrad sometime this year). Goodreads is not so useful for finding more books from a particular phase of the genre's evolution; I can't really type in "find me more books from the early years of urban fantasy or the New Romantics movement, something with that ineffable Thomas Canty/Siouxsie Sue vibe" as a search term.
One obvious recourse: lists of award-winning novels! I'm toying with the idea of reading through all the World Fantasy Award-winning books (and possibly even the more promising runners-up). Which is an exceptionally long-winded way of introducing this book, winner of the first-ever World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
The fantasy of the 1970s is a weird beast, a transitional form between the Tolkien/Howard/Leiber/Unknown school of the 1930s-60s and the New Romantics/Epic Fantasy Trilogies/new urban fantasy of the early- and mid-'80s. Most of my exposure to the decade has been via Lin Carter's largely abominable, occasionally brilliant Year's Best anthologies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), with a smattering of Earthsea. Nonetheless I've gotten a general sense of some '70s fantasy trends. Much of it is still anchored to rusty cliches of heroic fantasy -- wizards and swordsmen, sketchy old gender norms, musty or stilted prose, fantastic beasts that risk verging on the corny, and of course naming schemes cornier than a field in Iowa. The better stories struggled against the limitations of this vocabulary, but few at this stage managed to kick free of it entirely.
Some spoilers ahead.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is a fairly standard '70s fantasy in this regard, though hints of something deeper and more ambitious twist and tense beneath the surface. Gender norms are toyed with (the central character is a powerful woman of magic; the central conflict is instigated by an obvious metaphor for rape and the violence of gendered subjugation) but never seriously challenged (the powerful female wizard, age 16, can't resist the allure of taking care of a baby; a strong man who listens to his romantic "needs" instead of her emphatic "nos" turns out to be her happy ending). Questions of love and hate, revenge and forgiveness, are contemplated with more sophistication than I would have expected. The denouement cleverly averts a war by spiriting away the warlords, leaving the land confused but peaceful. The fact that this was marketed as a juvenile novel at the time (as were the earlier Earthsea books) makes it all the more remarkable.
Overall, the limitations of '70s fantasy drag Beasts down, but I appreciated the nascent complexity and ambiguity, and I'm always pleased to have another datum for my mental picture of how fantasy fiction evolved and became how awesome it can be today.
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
2016 read #49: Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
293 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 11 to June 14
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Way back when I first began this blogging project / reading more project, one of the first books to make a powerful impression on me was Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. At the time, dazed by her elegant fluency and my emotional resonance, my sense of kinship, with her ruminations on life, love, and the American West, I marveled, "Solnit, more so than almost any other author whose words I've happened upon, speaks to me, articulating thoughts and feelings my fingers are too clumsy to share." I stand by that initial enthusiasm for Getting Lost, despite three subsequent years of books both wondrous and inane, but nowadays I might add the caution that it was Getting Lost as a work, as a statement I interpreted through my own filters of background and experience, rather than Solnit as an author, that spoke to me so meaningfully.
My to-read list is crowded with Solnit's other works and essay collections, yet it's taken me until now to read another. I wasn't avoiding her work, precisely; I attempted The Faraway Nearby but, at the time, found myself confounded by the literary density of what I faced. I opted for some disposable fantasy novel or other in its place, and just haven't gotten around to trying again. Perhaps there was some half-conscious pessimism involved, a suspicion that Getting Lost was an anomaly, an accidental congruence of outlook and identification, irreproducible, an island microenvironment isolated at the crest of a desert range.
Where do I begin with Wanderlust? It is a work of tremendous ambition and erudition, a marvelous display of traced connections and cogent inferences. The chapter on mountaineering alone nearly made Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind superfluous three years before its publication, sketching in much the same history with the addition of non-Western perspectives, such as the Japanese tradition of Shugendō, which Macfarlane (so far as I can recall) didn't even mention. But Solnit explores so much more than the cultural history -- from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Muir, from formal gardens to English gardens to walking clubs -- of Romantic nature-worship and Anglophone conceptualizations of the virtue of outdoor recreation. She swerves into compelling tangents on gender and sexuality, on cultural partitions of "acceptable" spaces, on histories of public assembly and revolution. Why is it that, despite all the histories I've read that have touched on the French Revolution, I didn't learn about the march of the market women on October 5, 1789, until I found it in a history of walking? Why is it, for that matter, that I never heard of the popular protests and demonstrations against the First Gulf War until now? With the Orlando massacre and the threatened ascendancy of reactionary fascists in the public sphere, the poignancy and eloquence of Solnit's passages on oppression and resistance sank deep into me.
As with any conceptual history of such breadth and ambition, there were inevitably some chapters that didn't interest me much, various passages of dry material between my particular highlights. Nonetheless, this book is a tremendous achievement and a compelling thesis on the vital importance of public spaces and civic pedestrianism. Despite the more recent social movements toward "walkable cities," Solnit's closing chapters on the automotive deserts of suburbia remain as direly insightful as they were sixteen years ago.
293 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 11 to June 14
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Way back when I first began this blogging project / reading more project, one of the first books to make a powerful impression on me was Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. At the time, dazed by her elegant fluency and my emotional resonance, my sense of kinship, with her ruminations on life, love, and the American West, I marveled, "Solnit, more so than almost any other author whose words I've happened upon, speaks to me, articulating thoughts and feelings my fingers are too clumsy to share." I stand by that initial enthusiasm for Getting Lost, despite three subsequent years of books both wondrous and inane, but nowadays I might add the caution that it was Getting Lost as a work, as a statement I interpreted through my own filters of background and experience, rather than Solnit as an author, that spoke to me so meaningfully.
My to-read list is crowded with Solnit's other works and essay collections, yet it's taken me until now to read another. I wasn't avoiding her work, precisely; I attempted The Faraway Nearby but, at the time, found myself confounded by the literary density of what I faced. I opted for some disposable fantasy novel or other in its place, and just haven't gotten around to trying again. Perhaps there was some half-conscious pessimism involved, a suspicion that Getting Lost was an anomaly, an accidental congruence of outlook and identification, irreproducible, an island microenvironment isolated at the crest of a desert range.
Where do I begin with Wanderlust? It is a work of tremendous ambition and erudition, a marvelous display of traced connections and cogent inferences. The chapter on mountaineering alone nearly made Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind superfluous three years before its publication, sketching in much the same history with the addition of non-Western perspectives, such as the Japanese tradition of Shugendō, which Macfarlane (so far as I can recall) didn't even mention. But Solnit explores so much more than the cultural history -- from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Muir, from formal gardens to English gardens to walking clubs -- of Romantic nature-worship and Anglophone conceptualizations of the virtue of outdoor recreation. She swerves into compelling tangents on gender and sexuality, on cultural partitions of "acceptable" spaces, on histories of public assembly and revolution. Why is it that, despite all the histories I've read that have touched on the French Revolution, I didn't learn about the march of the market women on October 5, 1789, until I found it in a history of walking? Why is it, for that matter, that I never heard of the popular protests and demonstrations against the First Gulf War until now? With the Orlando massacre and the threatened ascendancy of reactionary fascists in the public sphere, the poignancy and eloquence of Solnit's passages on oppression and resistance sank deep into me.
As with any conceptual history of such breadth and ambition, there were inevitably some chapters that didn't interest me much, various passages of dry material between my particular highlights. Nonetheless, this book is a tremendous achievement and a compelling thesis on the vital importance of public spaces and civic pedestrianism. Despite the more recent social movements toward "walkable cities," Solnit's closing chapters on the automotive deserts of suburbia remain as direly insightful as they were sixteen years ago.
Friday, June 10, 2016
2016 read #48: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
196 pages
Published 2014
Read June 10
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I have the impression, nurtured from io9 lists and book recommendation threads and news of movie deals, that VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy is regarded as one of the hot new sci-fi properties of the present day. The blurbs on the back, all by au courant rising stars in the genre world, certainly don't stint on adjectives of wonder and transcendence and dread. Yet for me, while I found it an entirely adequate and engrossing little novel, this first installment lacked "the force of myth" that so struck Charles Yu. Much of the blame rests with VanderMeer's brisk, airport-ready prose, simple descriptives and declaratives tasked with hurrying us through a sort of bog-standard chthonic transformation horror. I may have mocked the self-serious youngauthorstyle of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Threshold, but at least that had presence.
Comparisons to Threshold are inevitable: Both books deal with intrusions of mind-bending horrors-from-beyond, take place (in whole or in part) in the swamps of the Florida Panhandle, and find thematic inspiration in various creeping marine invertebrates (trilobites for Kiernan, starfish for VanderMeer). The central characters of both books happen to be young female scientists, as well. Mostly, though, Threshold is the most recent of my limited encounters with pseudo-Lovecraftian jibber-jabber -- of course it's going to be the first thing I think to compare this to. Threshold tells a more emotional, impactful story with its characters, whereas the plot of Annihilation makes at least a modicum more sense overall, and is blissfully free of magical albinos. I think the two books average out to be equally enjoyable -- memorable, but perhaps not classics of the genre.
So why is Annihilation goddamn everywhere, snapping up sweet movie deals and generating constant internet chatter, while Threshold appears essentially forgotten? I suspect it's that airport-novel prose -- exactly the sort of thing primed to appeal to a large fan-base.
196 pages
Published 2014
Read June 10
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I have the impression, nurtured from io9 lists and book recommendation threads and news of movie deals, that VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy is regarded as one of the hot new sci-fi properties of the present day. The blurbs on the back, all by au courant rising stars in the genre world, certainly don't stint on adjectives of wonder and transcendence and dread. Yet for me, while I found it an entirely adequate and engrossing little novel, this first installment lacked "the force of myth" that so struck Charles Yu. Much of the blame rests with VanderMeer's brisk, airport-ready prose, simple descriptives and declaratives tasked with hurrying us through a sort of bog-standard chthonic transformation horror. I may have mocked the self-serious youngauthorstyle of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Threshold, but at least that had presence.
Comparisons to Threshold are inevitable: Both books deal with intrusions of mind-bending horrors-from-beyond, take place (in whole or in part) in the swamps of the Florida Panhandle, and find thematic inspiration in various creeping marine invertebrates (trilobites for Kiernan, starfish for VanderMeer). The central characters of both books happen to be young female scientists, as well. Mostly, though, Threshold is the most recent of my limited encounters with pseudo-Lovecraftian jibber-jabber -- of course it's going to be the first thing I think to compare this to. Threshold tells a more emotional, impactful story with its characters, whereas the plot of Annihilation makes at least a modicum more sense overall, and is blissfully free of magical albinos. I think the two books average out to be equally enjoyable -- memorable, but perhaps not classics of the genre.
So why is Annihilation goddamn everywhere, snapping up sweet movie deals and generating constant internet chatter, while Threshold appears essentially forgotten? I suspect it's that airport-novel prose -- exactly the sort of thing primed to appeal to a large fan-base.
2016 read #47: Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb.
Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
356 pages
Published 1995
Read from June 5 to June 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
It's been a while since I've finished a book, hasn't it? After the astounding badness of The Wind Whales of Ishmael, I floundered for a few days, unable to lose myself in any of the mediocre fantasy novels I had on hand. I sunk quite a bit of time into struggling through Emma Bull's Bone Dance before admitting defeat. (Maybe I'll finish it later on, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.)
Lots of people have recommended Robin Hobb's Assassin novels to me, the Farseer trilogy in particular, so to get out of this slump, I decided to give it a go. It's interesting to compare Apprentice to Hobb's earlier work, as well as to the state of epic fantasy in general circa the mid-'90s. Wizard of the Pigeons (written as Megan Lindholm) was an early urban fantasy novel published nearly a decade previously, but nonetheless there are certain strands of continuity between the two, most evident perhaps in Hobb/Lindholm's preoccupation with drug use as a coping mechanism, and the way the central characters' minds can be turned against them, manipulating their sense of reality. It surprised me not a bit that the author of Pigeons would produce a book like Apprentice when she turned to more traditional, secondary-world fantasy. (I should note that I haven't read the more traditional fantasy novels written as Lindholm.)
Epic fantasy was undergoing something of a boom in the '90s, with Apprentice coming onto a scene newly populated by The Eye of the World (1990) and Wizard's First Rule (1994), followed soon after by A Game of Thrones (1996). Apprentice's focus on dynastic politics nudges it a bit closer to Game of Thrones than to the others, and Hobb's prose quality, while not profoundly literary, blows the rest of them out of the water. Its relatively small cast of characters and focus on a single strand of plot, however, give it the feel of an older fantasy novel -- a perception heightened by the villainous mind-altering marauders on their Red-Ships, which could have sailed almost unimpeded out of a midcentury sword-and-sorcery serial. The book's Big Bads, despite the existential peril of turning innocent villagers into libertarians, kind of hold Apprentice back; I was most engaged when Fitz was relating the quotidian dramas and small details of a bastard child's life at court, and found my attention wandering whenever the magical threat sailed into view. Our bastard-born narrator's mastery of multiple forms of magical mind-power felt a bit cheap, as well. We get it already, he's a magical superhero. He was more interesting living in the kennels and barely speaking a word.
Perhaps it isn't fair to reduce Apprentice to a point of comparison, as it deserves high praise by epic fantasy standards: It has a unique feel and stands on its own, unlike the Tolkien fanfic of Jordan or the Randian masturbation of Goodkind. I don't know how many of these books I'm going to read -- Hobb has written a lot of them -- but I look forward to finishing this trilogy, at the very least.
356 pages
Published 1995
Read from June 5 to June 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
It's been a while since I've finished a book, hasn't it? After the astounding badness of The Wind Whales of Ishmael, I floundered for a few days, unable to lose myself in any of the mediocre fantasy novels I had on hand. I sunk quite a bit of time into struggling through Emma Bull's Bone Dance before admitting defeat. (Maybe I'll finish it later on, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.)
Lots of people have recommended Robin Hobb's Assassin novels to me, the Farseer trilogy in particular, so to get out of this slump, I decided to give it a go. It's interesting to compare Apprentice to Hobb's earlier work, as well as to the state of epic fantasy in general circa the mid-'90s. Wizard of the Pigeons (written as Megan Lindholm) was an early urban fantasy novel published nearly a decade previously, but nonetheless there are certain strands of continuity between the two, most evident perhaps in Hobb/Lindholm's preoccupation with drug use as a coping mechanism, and the way the central characters' minds can be turned against them, manipulating their sense of reality. It surprised me not a bit that the author of Pigeons would produce a book like Apprentice when she turned to more traditional, secondary-world fantasy. (I should note that I haven't read the more traditional fantasy novels written as Lindholm.)
Epic fantasy was undergoing something of a boom in the '90s, with Apprentice coming onto a scene newly populated by The Eye of the World (1990) and Wizard's First Rule (1994), followed soon after by A Game of Thrones (1996). Apprentice's focus on dynastic politics nudges it a bit closer to Game of Thrones than to the others, and Hobb's prose quality, while not profoundly literary, blows the rest of them out of the water. Its relatively small cast of characters and focus on a single strand of plot, however, give it the feel of an older fantasy novel -- a perception heightened by the villainous mind-altering marauders on their Red-Ships, which could have sailed almost unimpeded out of a midcentury sword-and-sorcery serial. The book's Big Bads, despite the existential peril of turning innocent villagers into libertarians, kind of hold Apprentice back; I was most engaged when Fitz was relating the quotidian dramas and small details of a bastard child's life at court, and found my attention wandering whenever the magical threat sailed into view. Our bastard-born narrator's mastery of multiple forms of magical mind-power felt a bit cheap, as well. We get it already, he's a magical superhero. He was more interesting living in the kennels and barely speaking a word.
Perhaps it isn't fair to reduce Apprentice to a point of comparison, as it deserves high praise by epic fantasy standards: It has a unique feel and stands on its own, unlike the Tolkien fanfic of Jordan or the Randian masturbation of Goodkind. I don't know how many of these books I'm going to read -- Hobb has written a lot of them -- but I look forward to finishing this trilogy, at the very least.
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