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April 9th, 2013
10:27 pm - The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
 The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Yikes. I was feeling like another childhood nostalgia reread adventure, though I should confess up front that I was never more than lukewarm on Narnia even as a wee thing. But I was pretty excited about it until the collection I grabbed put this book first. It was written sixth, but is chronologically the beginning, telling as it does the story of the creation of Narnia.
And look, I never got all bent out of shape about the Christian allegory the way a lot of my peers apparently did. It is what it is, even in this late volume where it frankly swallows much of the story.
But I do get bent out of shape by just how Conservative this book is. Stop laughing. Thematically, this book is about how evil consists centrally in believing that there are rules in the world, but that they do not apply to oneself. Digory's Uncle believes this – he's a genius, therefore he is not bound by morality – and the Witch believes this – she just doesn't give a fuck. And Digory's central act in this book is to be the inadvertent author of great and spreading evil by way of – you guessed it -- ignoring explicit strictures.
So rules are good, and following them is good, everyone got that? Okay, so then we get to the creation (I keep wanting to write 'founding,' but, uh . . . no) of Narnia. A pristine world born from nothing. But born with defaults. Rules, if you will. Software pre-installed. And it is really telling stuff about Lewis and his world. Like 'male creatures are invited by the creator to attend councils of state, female creatures are not.' And 'the natural state for a female creature and a male creature is marriage.' And here's a biggie – 'there is a natural hierarchy in which certain types of creatures are superior to other types by virtue of anointment by the creator, and the superior types must rule.'
It is what it is. He was what he was. And oh man, how much do I wish they hadn't put this book first.
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March 30th, 2013
09:54 pm - Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane
 Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Urban fantasy about a ghost debunker in an alternate post apocalypse universe where no one believes in God anymore, but everyone believes in the afterlife.
Oh, man, so many bad decisions. That was the best part for me – our narrator works for the successor to the church, but spends this entire book taking orders from her dealer (yes, like that), and then his competitor, and then it gets worse. She's making genuinely awful decisions, is what I'm saying. As opposed to the usual run of urban fantasy bad decisions, which are more like oh woe is me, I have to decide to save the world or save my lover, what will I doooooo?. Yawn. Whereas this chick is more like yeah, so, I've gotta take care of this ghost threat or else my dealer will cut me off and fuck my shit up. Jesus, where's my stash? I plan to keep reading almost entirely to see what life-destroyingly awful thing she ends up doing next. Aside from all the speed and the uppers and the downers, I mean.
Could've done with less boyfriend, honestly, but then again it's not like that was actually romantic, since it was just another set of awful, awful decisions.
…I'm totally not selling this, am I? Look, it's standard urban fantasy but with a way more fucked up narrator, whose fucked uppedness – her assorted addictions, her rotten upbringing – are not at all glorified or sexy or meant to be a lesson. Or fixable. They're just part of who she is. It was surprisingly nice, actually.
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March 17th, 2013
12:37 pm - God's War by Kameron Hurley
 God's War by Kameron Hurley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Bounty hunter and occasional gene pirate takes a job that puts her squarely in the middle of the centuries-long internecine religious war.
Interesting as hell, but also frustrating and unsatisfying. It would be too obvious to call this gritty, so I'll go the extra mile and explain that I kept asking questions of the world building like okay, seriously, you've been massacring your populations for a hundred years at the front, and yet both societies are still built around sending bodies out to fight? Bodies from where? And then Hurley told me where the new population growth comes from in a nearly casual aside, and I went . . . oh, swallowed hard, and moved on. This is a bloody, awful world, vividly drawn, and pretty close to fascinating.
Unfortunately, the character work was done with a much heavier hand, and I found myself impatient with a lot of it. Also with the gender politics – this is one of those worlds where women are far more likely to survive than men, so you have most of the problems of the patriarchy but in reverse, plus a few extra. That aspect, like much of the work regarding the religious conflict itself, felt like pieces of machinery put carefully together and then not connected up to anything else. I don't know, I wanted more out of it than I got.
Basically, it's a debut, and it interested and annoyed me in shifting proportions. I felt much more cheerful about it when I realized that I don't really want to read the next two books in this trilogy. But I really do want to read Hurley's sixth or seventh book, somewhere around there, because she's got something here and I really want to know what it's going to grow up to be.
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12:11 pm - Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie
 Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
School teacher divorces her husband, and promptly gets shot at and dragged into his embezzlement case, except she also lands herself a cop for protection.
Not feeling it. The whole thing felt rushed and phoned in, but more to the point, this is one of those romances where all two people have to do is meet. Everything else just happens. I realize this is, like 80% of the romance genre, but I was just not in the mood for a story about how all you need to do to achieve lifelong romantic happiness is show up. As opposed to, I dunno, work hard at it and compromise and be thoughtful and your best self. Everyone who knows the story of how my girlfriend and I got together is now pointing and laughing, and okay, fair. But I still have a point!
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March 15th, 2013
10:04 pm - The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson
 The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
American teenager goes to British boarding school, gets involved in the hunt for a supernatural Jack the Ripper copycat.
I made some assumptions based on the text, so I was feeling condescendingly pat pat about this book, all, aw, it's your debut, how nice. And then I googled the author, realized this is actually her ninth, and went . . . oh. Oh dear. Whatever, it's not terrible, I've just seen all of this before, and I've definitely seen it all done better.
But the thing I actually wanted to say was that this story takes place in a strange alternate universe that looks exactly like ours in every respect, but in which Harry Potter was never written. Nothing else could explain the pathological lack of references from our narrator as she, you know, attends British boarding school and learns about a magical world. Even on the Doylian level, Johnson feels it necessary to explain to us what school prefects are, as if there's a single American reading this book who hasn't picked that up. It was so glaring and bizarre a choice, and so patently ducking engagement with the still dominant magical British boarding school story, that it overshadowed nearly everything else for me. I dig texts that engage with other texts, so you can see how I didn't respect this choice.
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March 8th, 2013
10:36 pm - Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
 Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
About 15% in, I said in tones of astonishment to my girlfriend, "dude, the book your dad got me for Christmas is actually good." Bless his heart, but this is the man who unironically and wholeheartedly believes that Smallville is good television and Twilight is a wonderful series. Not like there's anything in the world wrong with loving things. It's just really surprising the number of otherwise intelligent people who have never realized there's a difference between 'pleasurable' and 'good.'
Not actually a tangent. This is an ostensible spy novel about a beautiful woman working for the British security services in the early 70's who begins an affair with the author/target she's cultivating. She's not terribly bright and she's the sort of reader who enjoys most things and understands almost none of them. The book is about that, largely, reading the narratives around you. Or in her case, failing to.
It's beautifully written, if there was any doubt. McEwan reminds me of Margaret Atwood on the level of sheer making-words-sing talent. Which is not an idol comparison. The last Atwood I read was an intimate first person portrait of a somewhat foolish woman's life and loves and mistakes while playing point-of-view head games, and it struck me as beautiful and kind and cutting and true. Sweet Tooth is an intimate portrait of a somewhat foolish woman's life and loves and mistakes while playing point-of-view head games, and it struck me as unkind and, uh. I'll just come out and say it. Some women's literature studies grad student is going to get a hell of a thesis out of analyzing female sexuality as the subject of the male gaze in this book. Female everything, actually.
Right, glad I tore that bandaid off. I read a bunch of reviews when I was done, and a lot of them were really interested in talking about how McEwan was writing from a female point-of-view, and judging how well he did it. Men writing from the pov of women being a departure from the default male pov, apparently, and also writing from a female pov being like some moderately tricky dance routine. And I just kept gaping because -- you know what, I'm just going to spoiler cut the twist in this book, because ( spoilerCollapse ) Yup. Let that sink in for a minute. Like I said. Great feminist literature thesis unpicking the many, many layers of creepy/weird here, and the occasional bit of interesting.
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March 7th, 2013
10:25 pm - Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson
 Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Neal Stephenson existed to me entirely through his novels before, since he doesn't have any of the modern authorial infrastructure – no twitter, no blog, no Goodreads, etc. And apparently I had come to a number of conclusions about him based entirely on his books, which is one of those things we like to pretend we don't do, but, I mean, come on. I figured this out when I was trudging through the opening salvos of this book and thought, ug, what a fucking asshole, with a complete lack of surprise. So I ran an informal poll of some of my friends who have also read and greatly enjoyed his books (all women, come to think of it) along the not at all respondent-biasing lines of "Neal Stephenson, gut check, asshole or not asshole?" and got 100% "asshole" back without hesitation. Yeah. We all do it. It's just funny when we come to the same conclusion.
Anyway, this was really rocky. I dug the fiction, because even when he's writing about stuff I'm tired of hearing about (monetary systems) he's just so damn snappy and hilarious. And the (excerpts?) from the long piece on the fiendishly mad engineering endeavor of laying transoceanic cables were fascinating.
But the shorter nonfiction pieces. Save me. In the intro he puts an "I own this" stamp on everything by explaining it's a curated collection, it's the stuff he basically still stands by. So okay. He stands by the reductionist and defensive and obnoxious commentary on geek culture. I could write 500 more words on this, but suffice it to say he uses a lot of "we geeks all know" and "we geeks all feel," type of rhetorical gestures, and I? Yeah, I'm a queer disabled geek and I am really, really not in his "we all." And he stands by the way he never met a criticism rooted in the portrayal of people of color (or the lack thereof) in art that he actually understood and didn't have something snide to say about. And he stands by all the rhetorical us versus them cultural game-playing and the lecturing and the general obnoxiousness laid thick enough to make me want to argue with him when I totally agreed with something he was saying.
So basically I will never ever read his nonfiction again, and on the bizarre chance he ever gets a twitter, I'm blocking it instantly. But the fiction and I will still probably get on like gangbusters.
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March 6th, 2013
10:09 pm - A Stir of Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
 A Stir of Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Thirteen-year-old Susan slips out from under the thumb of her abusive father through friends and communing with a haunted house. Slight, strange, more horror than fantasy. By which I mean that the supernatural elements feel as though they are . . . extensions? Reflections? Of-a-piece? . . . nearly inextricable from the story of internal psychological strife – the fear and depression and self-destruction. Rather than being moving elements for their own sake. Quibble with my definition, whatever, I'll just change it again in a few months anyway.
Put it this way -- a central character is the ghost of a boy who suicided many years ago, and they find his skeleton in a closet. It's that kind of book.
Two anti-climactic to really get me. I'm confused about why this, out of all of her catalog, is the only title I can find in audio. I'm not intrigued enough to put myself to the extra brain effort of text-to-speeching a novel of hers. (When you must absorb tens of thousands of words in artificial voices every day in professional settings, the desire to do it for leisure basically vanishes. Which is a shame given only a tiny fraction of a percent of the books in the world are in audio, but part of the problem is I'm usually too tired to care.)
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09:48 pm - Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer
 Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Cranky food columnist collides with hitman while trying to plan a wedding; sparks and flamingos fly.
Fun, zaney. There's no serious internal relationship conflict here, just a shrieking heap of mob enforcers and difficult relatives and frying pans to the head. And flamingos. This book is one half domestic hilarity and one half cartoonishly violent splatterfest, which was a bit odd, I will admit. But having read only two Crusie books, I already know that she is a no-brakes funny lady who has the skill and restraint to spin a ridiculous, so far over the top it's in orbit story like this, and then bring it when it comes to personal insight so subtly that I almost miss it. This time it was Agnes with her anger management and her court-appointed psychiatrist to prove it. And Agnes and her best friend talking to each other like only best friends can, in the middle of all this nonsense and splatterfest, and calmly saying to each other that it's not that they need to kill a man. They just need to know that if they had to, they could. Because they both know that this is the sort of world where it can absolutely happen that they'd have to.
The Bob Mayer sections are not nearly so good, but whatever. Flamingos, cupcakes, making room for angry women, cool.
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February 19th, 2013
07:44 pm - Timing by Mary Calmes
 Timing by Mary Calmes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So to put this book in context, on the morning of Valentine's Day I was huddled in bed when my girlfriend brought me a box. Inside it was a black and gold pendant necklace, a statement piece that will go really well with my charcoals and cranberries and other usual work colors. And it was interestingly textured, which is important for us compulsive fiddlers, and all around sweet and beautiful and romantic without being overbearing, and and and.
And I said, "Thank you. Excuse me, I have to go throw up now."*
All of which is to say, this book could have been terrible, and it probably wouldn't have mattered much. I read it on the train into work, tucking my head down to try and minimize the spinning dizziness. And I read it when I gave up the fight and came back home in the middle of the afternoon and curled up under a fuzzy blanket with the dog and intermittent cats. And I finished it there, with the world still revolving gently around my head.
It could have been terrible. It wasn't, though it also wasn't what I would call "good" either. Enjoyable as fuck though.
Calmes usual protagonist – long-haired, extroverted, nearly universally beloved for his beauty and general awesomeness – goes to Texas for his best friend's wedding, and discovers that what he thought was an ongoing feud with the best friend's brother is something else entirely. It's a "have loved you always" story with bonus cowboy and calmes usual run of "only you can manhandle me right, I'm saying no but I don't mean it" thing. And basically it was the one good thing about an entire day. So that's pretty cool.
*Not pregnant.
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