Book Notes - 3 so far

 At the start of the year I had an idea for a book project I have been thinking about for some time. I don't think that I am going to go for it quite yet, but I have been wanting to get back into writing about books on this blog. I am going to keep the project under my hat for the moment in case I do decide to start it up in the near future. 

However, I do want to shake off some of the dust and start posting again, so I thought I would do a few quick notes about the books that I have read so far this year as a way to motivate myself to keep coming back.

 Kill Creek by Scott Thomas was recommended to me by a colleague who shares an interest in gothic and horror novels. This book is a few years old at this point but I had not heard of it or the author. I have been more interested in postmodern horror over the last couple of years and have been working on a couple of scholarly projects involving the genre lately (perhaps more on my conference presentation upcoming?). After reading the synopsis, I was excited to start reading this book.

This starts out as a haunted house story that brings in tech media and internet fame. A young tech bro running a horror fansite -- which he insists is so successful that it is actually just a pop culture site -- invites 4 horror authors to a curated event in this haunted house to livestream a group interview. Each of the authors brings their own personal baggage with them, experiences weird things, and then heads home. The novel takes a turn here in an interesting direction. Upon returning home, each of the authors becomes obsessed with writing a new novel about the house that they were in and, upon checking notes with one another, discover that they are all writing the same novel. 

I won't reveal what happens next here for the sake of anyone interested in reading this novel, but I will say that this was a suspenseful and exciting novel to read. Thomas' work plays with the conventions of the haunted house story, blending in the personal demons that each of the authors in the book contend with. The read is fun and the ending took me by surprise in a way that I have not experienced in a long time. Definitely worth the read.

 Famous is the latest work by Blake Crouch. I have enjoyed Crouch's work for some time. I think Recursion  was the first novel I read and I have worked my way through the Wayward Pines series and several other stand-alone novels. This novel breaks tone and genre from a lot of his prior work. I have come to expect carefully crafted time-travel plots or some other sci-fi adjacent work but Famous strays from this. To be honest, this read more like a Chuck Palahniuk novel than it did a Blake Crouch one. The cover of this novel boasted an A24 movie adaptation which, sorry to say, I won't be watching. This book didn't do it for me. I have read better from Crouch and I hope to see a return to form in future novels.

Finally, I took a recent read through an older book: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon. I have read a lot of Chabon over the years and have always liked his work for its attention to character and devotion to pop culture fandom. I was blown away by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay when I first read it in graduate school. This book is not a novel but a collection of essays loosely centering on the topic of a gen X author reaching middle age and reflecting on his life. This topic, as a somewhat younger member of gen X reaching middle age and considering my own relevance, is one that I find sympathetic. Chabon writes about his experience parenting and attempting to expose his children to art and music that he enjoyed, he writes about his first experience carrying a diaper bag while still wanting to appear masculine. One of the essays that hit me the hardest was one in which he describes briefly meeting David Foster Wallace at a Democratic party event. In all, the essays work as an expression of the time. Some have aged better than others but the book was worth a read, overall. It would probably work best for the demographic I fit comfortably into and might have limited returns venturing outside of that.

Book Notes, part 3

 Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are 5 more of them.

On Writing, by Stephen King

Pretty good book about writing.  King offers some folksy, but ultimately helpful, advise on writing.  There is a lot in this book about his own life, but that seems to be pretty common in these sorts of books.  Among the writing books I have read, King is most forceful in his admonitions to read a lot and write a lot.  Beyond this, he offers some pretty good practical advice on cutting unnecessary plot point and back story and avoiding adverbs.  This is the kind of direct advice many writers look for.  I had a snobbish time in my twenties when I didn’t want to admit that I liked King.  I am over that.  He writes good books even if he isn’t always a good writer.  This is a distinction that I think he could appreciate, given the content of the rest of his book on writing.

I have read this book before (it has been a while) and I was reminded of his candor about his own life, particularly about his alcoholism and about the van collision that nearly killed him.  He is a fearlessly honest writer who genuinely wants to tell good stories.  I can dig it.

Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Read the first book, Children of Time, a year or more ago for sf book club and really liked it.  I think I missed some key elements of this early on and didn’t really catch the full meaning.  This happens sometimes when I read.  I miss part of the beginning and the whole rest of the novel is just playing catch up.  Maybe this is why I like to re-read books so much.  

Anyway, it was good but I wish I had paid more attention at the beginning.

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

I read this book about 20 years ago when I was in college and thinking about a life of writing.  I don’t remember what I thought of it at the time, though I have taken at least one important lesson from it.  Lamott has one chapter called “Shitty First Drafts” and this was something that I would make my own writing students read.  It tells us that first drafts should, indeed, be shitty.  They aren't meant for public consumption and don’t have to look like it.  They are messy because they are a part of the process and can be a place to explore and take chances.  I like this a lot and have tried to use it in my writing and impart it to my students.

There are also a lot of references to god that I don’t find particularly edifying, or anything that might be even notionally helpful to beginning writers.  At one point, she wants us to get rid of perfectionism in writing, a fine goal.  However, there is some nonsense about this being easier if you believe in god and zero explanation of why this might be so.  These allusions to religion probably make sense to the author, and might work for other christian believers, but there needs to be more connective tissue between the concept and the work.  I didn’t see it most of the time.  I would like to at least see the concept in action.

Overall, I have one big like and one big dislike of this book.  I like the fact that, like Stephen King in On Writing, she pushes the axiom that writers must write.  They do it because they want to and because they find value in it and in stories.  Lamott encourages writers to find their particular audience (one writer’s audience may be a parent, a child, etc.) and to write for that audience without regard for publication.  I like this.  She provides one particularly useful exercise based on this.  When hitting a stumbling point in writing, she advises writing a letter to a friend that explains a character’s motivation or why a particular point is important, or whatever the sticking point is.  I do this a lot, not necessarily in letter form, but I write about my writing a lot.  The big dislike that I have is that Lamott keeps pushing a particular view of writing and perspective that doesn’t square with my writing or what I think should be a part of everyone’s writing.  Frequently she will question why a writer is writing if they do not share some quality, such as naive wonder, a belief in god, a kind of innocence, or somesuch.  This crops up a couple of times and I thought it was unnerving each time.  She writes that writers need to seek the truth, and I think that this is right, but not in the objectified way that I take her to mean it.  To me, this reveals too much of the personal drive to write and not a proper piece of advice on writing as such.  Coupled with this, and equally irritating, Lamott frequently posits her writing students as wide-eyed fame seekers who poo-poo real advice on writing.  She repeatedly warns the reader that publication will not solve all of their problems.  Why this piece of advice is in this book, I cannot tell.  It is something that may be worthwhile mentioning in an undergraduate writing workshop, but probably not anywhere else.  It isn’t so much that I think this is untrue as it is unhelpful.  Anyone who believes it will never trust someone saying otherwise and no one else really needs to hear it.  But I say obvious things, too.  So I don’t begrudge it too much.

I wrote the first half of this a week or so ago and just want to mention that I did like the book overall even if I am a little harsh about some of the points.  It works and it is likely that the things that I didn’t like would be helpful to others.  

Atmosphaera Incognita by Neal Stephenson

This story popped up last year and I just got the chance to read it.  I don’t know if this classifies as a short story or a novella, or what.  My kindle app puts it over 50 pages, so I am going to treat it more like a novella.  The narrative is a little difficult to follow because there is not a lot of story here.  Rather, this is more of a mediation on the idea of the complexities involved in building a 20km tall structure.  The main character has been involved in the planning and logistics of building the structure and she ends up participating in a rescue mission during an extreme weather disaster that rocks the structure.  The disasters acts as a venue to answer more questions about what it would be like to build a 21st century tower of Babel.  

This was fun to read and it seems to be an update to the “space elevator” technology used in other sf stories.  The story shares in the hopeful, technologically advanced hard-sf tradition that explores the capabilities of human ingenuity.  Though I am not sure what to make of the capitalist-industrialist Carl who conceives and funds the whole project. His role in the project seems a little out of keeping with other Stephenson that I have read.  I need to think about this aspect more.

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos

Innumeracy is one of those rare non-fiction books that I read because it catches my interest.  I try to read non-fiction as much as I can and in areas that that are outside of my norm.  In this case, this book is about mathematical literacy.  Two words about this before I continue.  First, I had first heard about this book from a math teacher in high school.  For whatever reason, this idea stuck with me and I am reading this more than 20 years later.  Second, I like math.  There was a time when I considered becoming a math major but I did not.  I think that I have a better-than-average layman’s understanding of mathematics.  I did dedicate a sizable portion of my doctoral dissertation to a literary rendering of Godel’s incompleteness theorem.  However, I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination and never followed up on that idea aside from a little bit of research and reading occasional books.

So, to the book itself.  It isn’t bad.  The book mainly wants people to understand probability and simple statistics better.  This isn’t a book arguing the importance of higher mathematical concepts in daily life. It just wants folks to understand when and why stats they encounter can be misleading or totally bogus.  

There are two major drawbacks in the book.  The first has to do with the writing and style, and the second has to do with my perception of the book’s goals.  

To take the first first, Paulos writes at one point that his prose is guided by a desire to skip needless exposition (my gloss).  But he ends up being guilty of what he charges other math writers, namely, glossing over important explanations.  Paulos likes to stack up examples without explaining the significance of them.  This is self-defeating.  His purpose is to explain the importance of math to folks who do not see the importance.  But without providing adequate layman’s explanations, the book just doesn’t answer the call.  Second, and probably more damning, is that this book doesn’t provide adequate explanation for its own goals at key points.  One example that irked me was a section that attempted to apply statistical probability to choosing a mate.  Paulos gives his standard equations and explanations, but with one big hole.  Why the fuck is the selection of a mate something that is probabilistic?  Sure, maybe it is best to choose one mate from among the first third of suitors, but how is one to know how many potential mates one is to have in a lifetime?  A bigger question might be why one would think that something emotional and personal should be left to stats.  Paulos provides some equations and probabilities but doesn’t give any sense of why it would be appropriate to apply them.  

Otherwise, there is some good stuff in this book.  He just runs off the rails from time to time and can give some dumb answers, or at least, incompletely explained ones.

Book notes, part 2

 Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are 4 more of them.

Artemis by Andy Weir

Andy Weir loves smart ass narrators.  The protagonist/narrator of Artemis shares a lot of personality traits with Mark Watney, the protagonist of Weir’s debut novel The Martian.  Like Watney, Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is foul-mouthed, resourceful, and ridiculously competent.  Jazz makes a living on Artemis, the first city built on the Moon, as a porter and sometimes-smuggler.  She gets drawn into a larger scheme of industrial sabotage that ends up endangering the whole city.  

Despite having a larger cast of characters who all seem to love Jazz, this novel has less heart than The Martian and Jazz’s antics are less endearing.  Whereas Watney struggled for his survival against tremendous odds, he did it through no fault of his own, so the more grating aspects of his personality were more forgivable, seemed more in keeping with the tone of the novel and the stakes of the narrative.  Artemis doesn’t have the same heart.  In some ways, Weir raises the stakes by putting the entire city in danger instead of one lone man, but this also abstracts it.  Rather than thinking of this as Jazz’s success in saving the city, it is hard to forget that she is also the one who brought the underlying dangers to a head.  It is true that there were some criminal elements that would likely have brought about a similar end, but then it would have been someone else’s fault.  Just because it could have been someone else’s fault doesn’t mean that Jazz is any less to blame.  

Weir does balance out the thriller narrative with the same kind of hard science detail that made The Martian successful.  He also creates an interestingly layered city in Artemis.  Perhaps the most interesting parts of the novel are those in which Jazz describes the living conditions and the ultra-capitalist founding of the city.  The populace is also deeply stratified and Jazz is constantly aware of the socio-economic realities that make a city on the Moon possible, namely tourist dollars, exploitation of natural resources, and exploitation of immigrant labor.  

I liked the book overall but look forward to the Weir novel that has a more down to Earth narrator.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders

This collection of short stories and one novella by George Saunders is pretty typical fare for those familiar with his work.  Usually the stories involve some sort of speculative of soft sci-fi premise, people with some sort of physical deformity, or some kind of mental deficiency.  He recombines a lot of elements that can, at times, be very defeatist.  About halfway through this book I thought it might be getting a little too down for me, which was an odd feeling for me because there was a time in my life when this would have fired a lot of synapses for me.

But I got to Bounty, the novella at the end of the novel and it turned around a bit.  The story is about enslavement of “flaweds,” people with physical mutations, in a post-collapse America.  This story is about the escape of one of these flaweds, his search for his sister, and his eventual journey to join an armed rebellion.  The content of the story didn’t differ so much from many of Saunders’ other works but the overall approach was different enough and struck just enough of a hopeful chord that it turned me around on the book.

The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

I have gotten more interested in reading books about writing in the last few years.  I read a number of these back when I was taking creative writing classes in college (undergrad years) but had strayed from it since then.  Dillard’s book is short and ponderous.  She uses observations and personal stories to write about the experience of writing.  There are some powerful moments in the the book and I found portions of this to be very inspiring.  One of the things that stuck out to me is the way that she builds writing into daily life and also the way that she views this life as one of artistry that is removed form experience.  For Dillard, the writer is someone who is separate from the romanticized image of a worldly person experiencing all of life, but is actually a person who spends a lot of time alone in a room imagining these experiences.  

The best piece of advice that I took from this book is to put everything into the current project.  She advises against holding back for the next project or for some later date.  Use it up, I am paraphrasing, and the next project will take care of itself.

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders

Not a bad book.  There is a lot of really creative world-building in this novel about human life adapting to a new planet.  Anders sets the novel in the late stages of an Earth settlement on January.  The people of two cities, Xiosphant and Argela, survive in very different ways, according to the customs of the city and the Earthly heritage of the occupants.  But things are on the decline as the environment deteriorates around them.  One of the central characters makes contact with an alien intelligence, and rebellion starts breaking out everywhere.

There is a lot of adventure in this and the descriptions are lush.  This book might edge a little closer to fantasy than I normally care for, but it was a good read.  

Book notes, pt. 1

Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are four of them.

Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

John D. MacDonald is one of a handful of pulp detective fiction authors who I have spent a lot of time reading.  Writing in the hard-boiled style, his work is similar to that of Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, and others.  They all wrote these short novels about tough-guy detectives who work just outside of the law, sometimes cooperating with police.  The characters are all pretty similar, they are all imposing men who are perpetual bachelors.  They are war veterans who we would probably recognize now as suffering from PTSD.  They all present extremely macho/masculine facades but are well-intentioned and can sometimes expose a domestic or feminine streak.  Their attachments with women are either idealized and distanced or short and intense.  

This novel contains a scene that I have come to find pretty common in these novels.  Travis McGee, MacDonald’s central detective character, is helping the younger sister of a friend of his.  The plot doesn’t matter much because it follows a pretty similar arc to many of these novels.  At one point, McGee helps the sister, Nina, prepare a meal and then clean her apartment.  Nina remarks on McGee’s domestic abilities and how it undercuts his tough guy image.  Then, when she throws himself at him he resists her advances, for a time at least.  

This scene recurs in these pulp novels.  The male figure in these novels is hyper-masculinized to the point that he is able to adopt stereotypically feminine attributes as a point of proof of masculinity.  McGee is so big and tough that he can cook and clean and it doesn’t detract from his properly masculine image.  Also, that act of resisting female advances, which McGee does throughout the book from different women, serves to prove his value at the expense of the women in the book.  He gets to maintain his virtue and good intentions while also eventually sleeping with the woman he desires.  

The Stranger beside Me by Ann Rule

This is the true crime book that sets the standard for a lot of modern true crime stories.  Ann Rule knew Ted Bundy before he became famous for his killings and her book follows much of the investigation through his conviction.  The copy I read has several updates with the last one detailing his execution.

Parts of this book were interesting but I thought it was a bit longer than it needed to be.  Because Rule follows the case chronologically, many details are repeated as investigations and trials in various states commence.  

This book also treads a line that I can find a little worrisome in contemporary true crime stories.  It comes very close to lionizing the killer-subject.  Rule has to walk a fine line because of her friendship with Bundy and can seem at times to tip toward being too complimentary.  She is careful to explain that this is part of Bundy’s game and what makes him dangerous: he was able to hide his dark side and be both disarming and charming.  Then again, I may just be projecting my own ambivalence about the subject.  After all, I did just finish reading a 600-page book about a serial killer.  If Rule is fascinated by this subject, so are a lot of other people (myself included), and a bit of ambivalence to temper the interest/enthusiasm may be the right course.

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol is the third installment in Martha Wells’ Murderbot saga.  These stories follow a SecUnit that has gained its own autonomy and travels around the galaxy on its own missions, but who ends up helping out humans in need along the way.  Back at the beginning of the plague, tor.com gave away the first 4 novellas in this series to their readers and I scooped them up.  I had already read the first two and just now got to this third one.  

I enjoyed reading it but am a little fuzzy on the details of the book because I read it on my phone during lunch breaks and while standing in line.

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

The third book in the Dune series left me a little cold.  This novel takes up the lives of Paul Atreides’ family that he has left behind when he went into the desert to, ostensibly, die at the end of Dune Messiah.  The principal family members include: Paul and Chani’s twin children Leto II and Ghanima, who are pre-born, or abominations, depending on the side of mythology you happen to follow; Alia, Paul’s younger sister who is also a pre-born abomination; Duncan Idaho, an Atreides loyal who died in the first book, comes back as a ghola, mentat in the second book, and who is now married to Alia; Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother who has been off-world for a while but returns to Arrakis; Princess Irulan, House Corrino daughter who married Paul at the end of the first book; and Farad’n, the heir apparent of House Corrino who may have designs on the Atreides Imperium.

There is a lot of talk in this book, and a lot of intrigue.  Many of the players are vying for control over the Atreides twins, which would provide control over the Imperium.  There is also some infighting among the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen, and other factions in the Dune world.  A lot of the talk gets further confused by the phenomenon of the “pre-born.”  Alia and the Atreides twins all possess within them the consciousnesses of all of their ancestors.  They have broader views of history and “remember” things that happened before they were born.  Occasionally two characters will dialogue but as different personalities.

One of the more interesting uses of the “pre-born” is to throw personal identity into question.  If Leto II is the conglomeration of all of his ancestors, is there room for his own personality?  Leto II ends up following a path similar to his father, Paul, so he comes to learn his place.  The use of the pre-born trope is also interesting as it plays with destiny and the ability to see the future.

This ability to look into the future using the spice and the effect that it has on people is one of the more interesting aspects of this series.  The Atreides twins are careful to avoid using spice in the beginning of the novel because they fear what it will do to their personalities.  Leto II also begins to fear that knowing the future will doom him along a certain path.  This means that the character is constantly pulled in two directions: toward the past and the influence of the ancestors living inside of his consciousness and toward a future that he wants to carve out on his own, separated from the spice melange.  

In the end, I have to say that I am getting a little bored with this universe.  I think that there are some interesting things going on, but there are also too many things going on.  Like in the preceding books, the reader must keep track of a lot of things that are not really well explained.  Herbert jumps around in his writing and seems to work out details as he goes.  This makes for some confusing reading at times.  

I think I have a copy of God Emperor of Dune somewhere in my office.  If I do, I will read it but otherwise I might be done with the series — though I will probably return to the first book, Dune, and read that again at some point in the future.