Books

Library haul

Posted on by Patrick

Went down to the pub­lic library tonight, since my copies of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and John Scalz­i’s  The End of All Things were due back.

(Reviews: The Ocean at the End of the Lane was a spooky com­ing-of-age/mem­oir tale from a mas­ter of eerie fan­ta­sy; The End of All Things fur­ther solid­i­fied my view of John Scalzi as my gen­er­a­tion’s Joe Halde­man (though it might have been smart of me to read The Human Divi­sion first).)

So I went in with­out any plans as to what I want­ed to check out. I did check the cat­a­logue for the sta­tus of Emi­ly St. John Man­del’s Sta­tion Eleven, which has been checked out every time I’ve gone look­ing for it. Tonight was no excep­tion. One day (shakes fist at the sky).

But by and large I had no agen­da. I checked the New Releas­es sec­tion, and snagged Chuck Wendig’s After­math. Then I wan­dered over to the SF/F sec­tion, which is where I usu­al­ly end up. Grabbed anoth­er vol­ume there — a four-nov­el omnibus of Philip K. Dick nov­els, which either a) has fan­tas­ti­cal­ly small print or b) serves as a reminder of how short nov­els could be back in the 60s. And then I took a gan­der at the graph­ic nov­els, where I grabbed my third and final vol­ume: Scott McCloud’s Sculp­tor.

I’m look­ing for­ward to all of these. I just can’t decide which should be first.

Help?

The Once and Future King

Posted on by Patrick

For many years I fobbed it off, since it was fan­ta­sy, and I was for a long time a snob about such things. (Sci­ence fic­tion was good; fan­ta­sy was not. Thanks, Sir Ter­ry Pratch­ett, for final­ly show­ing me the error of my ways.)

For years I’ve meant to read it, but nev­er got around to it.

Now I’m read­ing it, and I’m won­der­ing two things:

  1. Why did­n’t I read this years ago?

  2. Why did no one ever tell me how fun­ny it is?

Cur­rent read: The Once and Future King by T. H. White.

(Well, so far it’s fun­ny, but I’m only get­ting near the end of Book I (of IV).)

A lesson in a line

Posted on by Patrick

Read­ing in bed last night, I came across this gem:

It is always a temp­ta­tion to say that such feel­ings are inde­scrib­able, though they sel­dom are.
— Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lic­tor (vol. III in the Book of the New Sun tetral­o­gy), chap­ter XXII: “The Skirts of the Mountain” 

In a sin­gle line the author evis­cer­at­ed a fair­ly com­mon trope in SF/F writ­ing. Now and for­ev­er after, when I read a sen­tence stat­ing that X was inde­scrib­able or refer­ring to an inde­scrib­able colour or an inde­scrib­able feel­ing, I’m going to won­der: Is it real­ly inde­scrib­able, though, or is the author sim­ply not inter­est­ed enough to describe it to me?

I’ve tak­en the les­son to heart, though: from here on out I’ll be doing my best to excise inde­scrib­able from my own lexicon.

Series: Gene Wolfe

The entire series: The Gold­en Sen­tence; A les­son in a line; Inde­scrib­able; My head­’s swim­ming now; The Island of Dr. Death.

Review: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

Posted on by Patrick

I can’t remem­ber the sec­ond-last book that I read in a sin­gle day, but I can tell you what the last one was: Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead.

Thanks, Doug, for sug­gest­ing that I check out this author.

Claire DeWitt is hired by Leon to find out what hap­pened to his uncle Vic, the DA in New Orleans. Vic has van­ished; Leon isn’t sure if he’s alive or dead, though he sus­pects the lat­ter. Leon hired Claire because she’s the best, but she’s far from ordi­nary. A dis­ci­ple of a lit­tle-known French inves­ti­ga­tor, Jacques Silette, who wrote a sin­gle book on his inves­tiga­tive prin­ci­ples, Détec­tion, back in the ’50s. Silet­te’s style of detec­tive work is only part­ly about find­ing out who done it; it’s more about solv­ing the mys­tery of one’s own self. Every­one already knows the solu­tion, he claims; it’s just that very, very few are will­ing to accept and admit the truth.

Claire DeWitt remind­ed me of both Sher­lock Holmes and his lat­ter-day avatar Dar­ryl Zero1. She has the uncan­ny abil­i­ty to con­struct entire truths out of the thinnest of clues; after learn­ing that one young man’s sis­ter used to call him Nee-Nee, she not only divined his name (Nicholas) but also his place of birth, the num­ber of sib­lings he had, and the ice-cream par­lour where he’d most recent­ly worked. Like Holmes, too, she has a fond­ness for the drugs: booze, weed, var­i­ous mush­room-based com­pounds — heck, at least once, she smoked a joint laced with embalm­ing flu­id. (No kidding.)

But Claire is a com­plete­ly orig­i­nal cre­ation. She’s a fatal­ist, a men­tal case, a per­haps-mur­der­er. She’s a deeply flawed char­ac­ter, an anti-hero who grew up in a decay­ing man­sion, a blood-sis­ter who gave up look­ing for her best friend when she van­ished. Her men­tor was mur­dered in a ran­dom act of sense­less violence.

The set­ting, too, is key. The nov­el is set in New Orleans, post-Kat­ri­na, and the city itself is a char­ac­ter: it’s a wound­ed beast, per­haps mor­tal­ly so, try­ing des­per­ate­ly to recov­er, but it’s not clear if it can recov­er, or even if it’s worth recov­er­ing. It’s not a city for hap­py end­ings, a fact that is repeat­ed sev­er­al times, by dif­fer­ent peo­ple. It’s a warn­ing to the read­er, too: This does­n’t end well. (Does it end well? You’ll have to read it to find out.)

The sto­ry itself is taut­ly plot­ted, and moves along at a great clip. Claire’s leaps of log­ic are (most­ly) explained to the read­er, and they (most­ly) make sense in the end. The sto­ry kept me immersed, com­plete­ly — like I said, I read it in a day, some­thing I haven’t done in a long time.

I loved this book, and I eager­ly look for­ward to read­ing its sequel, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemi­an High­way.

Get it from:
McNal­ly Robinson
| Chapters/Indigo
| Ama­zon

  1. If you haven’t seen Zero Effect, hunt it down. ↩

The Martian Chronicles

Posted on by Patrick

The first time I read Ray Brad­bury’s The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, I was 16 or 17, in high school. All the dates were in the future, then.

The sec­ond time I read The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, I was 40, Ray Brad­bury had recent­ly died, and only the last three chap­ters were in the “future”.

I’ve grown a lot in those twen­ty+ years. I’ve matured as a read­er and as a writer. I’ve actu­al­ly had one of my short sto­ries com­pared to Brad­bury’s writ­ing, which I thought was an immense honour.

When I was a teenag­er — heck, into my thir­ties — I was a sci­ence fic­tion snob. I sniffed in dis­dain at fan­ta­sy (except­ing, of course, Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s oeu­vre and the then-ongo­ing Dark Tow­er saga from Stephen King — yes, I was a hyp­ocrite.) The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles was the first thing I read that meld­ed sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy — not the swords-and-sor­cery type that I was so dead-set against back then (and still am not a huge fan of), but the sub­tler fan­ta­sy that allows a rock­et launch to turn win­ter into flow­ers-bloom­ing sum­mer for a day. The fan­ta­sy that has a trav­el­er on a lone­ly road meet­ing up with a Mar­t­ian mil­len­nia dead, a Mar­t­ian that views him as the ghost instead. A John­ny-Apple­seed fig­ure that plants oaks that grow large enough to pro­vide shade in a sin­gle night.

There’s a poet­ry to Brad­bury’s writ­ing, the same sort of poet­ry that I find in William Gib­son’s writ­ing, though in a very dif­fer­ent way. They both have a tal­ent for find­ing le mot juste, that elu­sive turn of phrase that makes every­thing clear in the read­er’s mind.

If you haven’t read The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, go, do so.

The Golden Sentence

Posted on by Patrick

My friend Don­na came up with the idea of the Gold­en Sen­tence, and I think it’s great.

Pick a book at ran­dom (or not-so-ran­dom), check the total num­ber of pages, and divide by φ (aka the Gold­en Ratio, aka 1.618…).  Now go to the page you get, count the num­ber of sen­tences, and divide that num­ber by φ.  Count the sen­tences till you get to that one.  That’s your Gold­en Sentence.

I’ve been mak­ing my slow, savour­ing way through Gene Wolfe’s Wiz­ard Knight duol­o­gy, and so here are the gold­en sen­tences for those two books:

I would have liked to have Hob there, too; and in a way he was, because he was what the rest of us were think­ing about.

—The Knight

“We told her we had no sub­jects, that the Angr­born fol­low King Schild­starr, that though a queen we do not rule.”

—The Wiz­ard

(Some con­text: in The Knight, Hob was­n’t there because an ogre had eat­en him, which was sort of why they were all think­ing about him; in the snip­pet from The Wiz­ard, Queen Idnn of Jotun­land, new­ly-mar­ried to King Gilling, is speak­ing, using the roy­al “we”.)

What’s the Gold­en Sen­tence for your favourite book?  (Or even the one near­est you?)

Series: Gene Wolfe

The entire series: The Gold­en Sen­tence; A les­son in a line; Inde­scrib­able; My head­’s swim­ming now; The Island of Dr. Death.

Shelf Awareness’ Q&A

Posted on by Patrick

On your night­stand right now:

Fic­tions by Jorge Luis Borges, thanks to an essay in William Gib­son’s Dis­trust that Par­tic­u­lar Fla­vor.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Strange­ly, it was prob­a­bly The For­ev­er War by Joe Halde­man.  I grew up in a house where my father’s sci­ence fic­tion nov­els dom­i­nat­ed every book­shelf — and there were a lot of book­shelves.  I did­n’t under­stand a tenth of what was real­ly going on in the book, but I read it over and over all the same.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Shelf Aware­ness’ Q&A” →