Book 11. His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

I was thoroughly impressed with this book.  I came into it expecting it to be some sort of Dungeons and Dragons-like swarm-fest of thee’s and thou’s, and I was secretly dreading reading it.  It immediately captured my attention from the beginning and proceeded to blow my mind.  It’s quite an ambitious series, and I wouldn’t have expected it to work.  But there’s where I was wrong, and I look forward to tackling the last two books in the Temeraire Trilogy.  

You see, instead of pure fantasy, this turned out to be more along the lines of historical speculative fiction.  It was a deft blend of Master and Commander epic shot through with straight fantasy.  The premise is that during the Napoleonic Wars, the countries all have an air corps consisting entirely of dragons.  It would be the equivalent of Jane Eyre climbing to the attic and instead of finding the insane wife, there squats Hoggle about to steal a baby for the Goblin King.  

Several things impressed me immediately.  Novik starts the story as if the dragons existing is a completely natural element, which draws you in right away.  The story itself is done in the style of a Bronte sister, focusing mostly on Laurence, a former navy captain and British lordling who finds himself a dragon handler, which is not as noble a prospect as one would think.  So you have this sort of parlour manner story, with gentlemanly behavior, but set during the Napoleonic Wars with fucking dragons.  It’s as if midway through Atonement, Smaug swung down and started scooping up doughboys.  It is truly unlike anything I’ve ever read, and it’s well done and imaginative.

The best part of the story, however, is the dragon Temeraire.  Dragons come out of the egg speaking intelligently, but curious.  So it’s amazing to see the dragon interact with Laurence, and the conversations they have.  The only thing remotely that it recalls might be Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh.  Just this innate curiosity and maturation.  It’s unbelievably darling, and it was fascinating to read.  How the dragon reacts to the situation and the protocols of the service, from being anxious to participate in battle to finding out what his dragon powers might be.

Dragons don’t all breathe fire, and offensive capabilities are rare.  Some spit acid.  Mostly, they have crews who ride on carabiner riggins around harnesses and fire muskets from the backs of the whirling dragons.  Some throw bombs down on the enemies.  Some are smaller and better at maneuvering, some are giant beasts who can crush the others.  It’s so cleverly done, most of the time you find yourself marveling at what Novik comes up with in the universe of the story.

Book 10. The Last Oracle by James Rollins

James Rollins, not to be confused with the excellent Phillie, can be blamed on Dan Brown.  When The Da Vinci Code came out, a whole slew of authors sort of came out of hiding in his wake, creating a series of semi-Indiana Jones-ish adventures, follwing the knights Templar, or seeking out grail memorabilia.  The Spear of Destiny, the Holy Grail, the Shroud of Turin, the Apple of Discordia, basically anything that you hunted after when playing Wolfenstein.  I read many of these, and they were spectacularly awful.  Note to self, if it’s pimped by USA Today, it’s probably gonna suck a goat cock.

Well, Rollins was slightly better than most, because his group was called Sigma, and they were a top secret cabal of scientists who also had military training.  You know, smart people who know how to use guns.  Often, Rollins would pull a Law & Order when mixing his Kool-aid, take some semi-factual information or theory and use it to make his pulpy action.  The stories were usually pretty entertaining, and involved the intrepid heroes of SIGMA battling against The Guild, their nefarious archrivals. 

There’ve been like four SIGMA novels, and they’ve gotten progressively lamer.  Well, The Last Oracle takes the cake.  First of all, he completely abandons The Guild, except for an odiously bad attempt at a cliffhanger at the end of the book.  Secondly, it’s as if he read a Discovery magazine article on autism got all excited, and just packed his novel full of the factoids.  And while the source material does factor for some intriguing stuff, it doesn’t fit in his world of melodrama and cheesy action. 

Rollins really overdoes it this time through, overdoing his usual overwrought sensationalism.  He loves to write short paragraphs with what are supposed to be very deep thoughts but come off more like badly written suspense.

Then he writes a dunh-dunh-dunh.

What’s that?  It’s a short sentence that’s supposed to pack a forceful wallop, but it’s really more like one of those moments in a bad television cop serial where someone makes a riveting statement and the music plays a dramatic swell.  Gabrielle couldn’t have been sleeping with Bradley.  Because he’s her son.

Or could she?

Dunh-dunh-dunh!

Rollins loads his books full of either those, or internal monologues that are shamefully leading.  He’s assuming his audience is partially autistic themselves, and he keeps leading them by the nose just in case they can’t follow his typical fiction. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he was capped the write the novelization of the newest Indiana Jones atrocity.  He’s been essentially attempting to do that his entire career, especially with his early non-SIGMA novels.

The Last Oracle proposes that the Oracle of Delphi was actually a series of autistic savants who suffered from gas fume hallucinations, and then escaped to India to propagate the Gypsy race.  Hence their abilities to fortune tell.  All of which is allegedly true.  In the novel, a Russian task force has harvested this bloodline of incestuous psychic gypsy children in order to use their autistic savantism to foretell world events and cause a cataclysmic world destruction by utilizing the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl.  It’s SIGMA against this cabal, and it’s really weak storytelling of a really weak story.  There’s zero drama, and there’s zero suspense.  And this is even with the murder of a member of the SIGMA squad.  It’s not even a payoff for anyone who’s been following the series.  And the torrid love stories are getting really tepid and mediocre.  It’s almost bad enough for me to relinquish my recommendation for people to read James Rollins.  I seriously am not sure whether I’ll bother to continue the series anymore.

Book 9. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Well, holeeeeee sheeeee-it.  I feel like fantasy tends to be a genre like country music.  Most people just turn their nose up and sniff, “NEEERRRRRDDS!” while others absorb it with an obsessive compulsion.  There are so many different flavors to fantasy, and it’s really important to set your world within the first couple of pages.  I mean, within the realm of fantasy, alone you must decide if there are going to be otherworldly creatures and how dominant they will be (dragons, pixies, elves, trolls, orcs) and you need to decide if there’s going to be magic, and how it will be done (elementalists, lightning bolts and none-shall-pass fireballs, healing spells, witches and whatnot).  Most fantasy is within the realms of your average ren-faire/night out at Medieval Times: sword fights, jousting, crowns and lords.

I’ve been reading a shitload of fantasy lately, and it has truly run the gamut, from Robert Jordan’s godling of destiny Wheel of Time series to Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera with the Avatar-esque furies which help people control the elements.  Most of the fantasy you read tends to be of the Sword in the Stone school, which is to say a commoner suddenly finds themselves becoming lord of the realm through mysterious powers and the such.  They rely heavily on the wizarding powers and delve into a world of mythic beasts and fantastic powers. 

Then we’ve got The Song of Ice and Fire series, which is on a plain of greatness unto itself.  From the first jarring utterances of the words “fuck” and “shit” to the non-stop fucking about, both in the biblical and sociopolitical stance, this was not the kiddie fantasy series I had grown accustomed to.  Most of the fantastical beasts are reserved for the periphery, or stuff of legends.  It’s a story of the game of medieval politics, lords battling lords, friendships and backstabbing, and warfare worthy of Aaron Sorkin.  I takes a damn long time to get into the actual story, because there are just so many fucking characters to introduce. 

There are so many threads to be woven, and Martin manages ably.  It’s a bear of a book, coming it at just over 800 pages, but once you’ve gotten far enough into the story, it’s off and running.  Essentially it’s the story of a kingdom battling against itself, and we are focusing on the family of the Starks, a hardscrabble winterlands nobility where each member of the family is coping with a different strain.  And I mean each family member, as we get a taste for all eight of the Starks, from the father Lord Eddard to the youngest boy, Rickon.  But while we start with the Starks, quickly we spread through the entire kingdom, with the king and his devious in-laws, The Lannisters. 

The closest thing I can compare this to is The Wire, in that there are so many camps, and we’re given story perspective from everyone, where there are no clear cut good guys or bad guys.  Some the bad guys are good, but not really, and some of the good guys are horrible.  It’s a major cast of perhaps twenty or twenty five characters, but at no point are you questioning or confused by the plot progression.  And the ending of the first book has totally changed all the rules of the universe.  There are supposedly going to seven books in the series, and four have been written. 

It’s fantasy that I would highly recommend to people who might have been turned off by the hobbitosity of the rest of the genre.  This is more political than anything, and while names like Daenerys and Joffrey might be off-putting, the non-stop head and limb chopping, swindling and backdooring will more than make up for it.

I won’t say this is so much better than Robert Jordan, because they are very different series.  The Wheel of Time is more of a Christ allegory, the reluctant heroes having to fight fate, whereas The Song of Ice and Fire is a complex chess game of crowns and swords.  Truth be told, I’m enjoying the Codex Alera best of all, because I just love Jim Butcher’s writing style, and the main character of Tavi has proven to be lots of fun. 

I’m starting to get a little bloated on fantasy right now, truth be told, as I’m also reading His Majesty’s Dragon.  But honestly, that series is less straight fantasy as it is almost historical fiction.   It’s set during the Napoleonic Wars, but with the French and English using an air corps comprised of dragon riders.  Yeah.

Book 8. Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian

Until I had seen Atom Egoyan’s Ararat I had never heard of the Armenian Genocide.  It was one of those events that was never mentioned in the textbooks or history lessons.  It inspired Hitler’s purging of the Jews in the Holocaust.  And it was perhaps one of the most harrowing events in World History.  

Balakian’s memoir uses his own personal history and life to enter into the greater story of the Armenians.  While I find his writing to be highly self-indulgent (he never once lets you forget that this is HIS story about HIS family) it’s an excellent way of finding an entry into a story that is bigger than you (no matter how hard you try to put yourself into it).

Balakian talks of growing up in a New Jersey suburb with his stolid immigrant family.  While they tried really hard to fit in with the Protestant culture around them, the Balakians were also incredibly firm in their traditions, which of course is grating to a young teenage boy trying to find his own identity.  His extended family included many aunts and his grandmother, who used to adore/pester him by constantly asking “Eench, eench, eench.”  (What? Are you okay?  What?)  They would always have massive many-course meals that would last hours while other families were firing up Swanson TV dinners.  

Balakian slowly unravels his past, but only later in his life, after college, when he begins to embrace poetry.  He begins to realize the stories that his grandmother told were parables meant to sneak bits of history into his life.  He begins to understand why there weren’t many male elderly relatives around.  He digs into a past that his family doesn’t want to delve into, but when they finally do answer him, the response is horrifying. 

What happened to the Armenian people at the hands of the Turks in 1915 is virtually unspeakable.  I would rather let Balakian’s solid narration cover the monstrosities.  To call the Holocaust humane would be a travesty, but at least they used gas to kill people.  Here, the Armenians were set on death marches, where they were subject to rapes, and beatings and random killings.  They didn’t want to waste bullets, so often they would let roaming herds of Kurdish rebels slaughter the Armenian women and children with sickles and saws and cleavers.  They would leave the dead to rot, steal money from them, starve them, torture them for their own amusement.  There’s a chapter called “Dovey’s Story” that will haunt me the rest of my days.  That human beings could do this to other humans is disturbing, that the Turkish government still to this day denies the wholesale slaughter of an entire race of people and the abolishment of a nation from history is disgusting. 

The first part of the memoir deals mostly with Balakian growing up, and aside from the familial interactions with his grandmother, is boring and unnecessary.  But it’s worth the wait, once you end up in the actual retelling of the genocide.  Here, Balakian works backwards, talking in generalities and statistics, before narrowing the scope to his own family’s hardships and survival.  It’s a frightening thing to know that this was still being denied as late as the Reagan presidency, because of fear of losing military bases and Turkish airspace privileges.  The Turks managed to wield their influence over the US well into the late 1990’s.

Once more, it makes me lose faith in government in general, and humanity as a whole.

Book 7. If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell

I usually don’t care for memoirs or autobiographies of people who are middle-aged.  Especially actors.  It’s like, seriously kid?  You’re going to tell me about your life when most of it isn’t over yet?  Why should I care about how you were destined for fame and you made it?

But this.  Well this is fucking Bruce Campbell.  It’s neat reading about his exploits, because the book is done in his typical self-deprecating, blue-collar folksy charm.  I imagine the entire thing being read from behind a piano while wearing a smoking jacket.  It’s got that cadence and that lack of total bullshit.

Bruce Campbell was not a cool kid.  He was a dork, awkward, who liked to torment his neighbors, run around causing trouble (but not jacking cars, more like hitting trucks with water balloons) and was lame with the ladies.  He and his friends used to make stupid films with a Super 8.  It helps though, that one of his friends was Sam Raimi.  

In fact, that’s the neat part, is watching all of his catalog grow alongside his friendship with Raimi, who was also influential in getting the Coen Brothers their start.  Bruce admits he made bad movies, which is nice.  

He’s also less of a bullshitter about his acting.  He doesn’t pretend to be method, and he mocks people that have trouble releasing their characters.  He bitches about how hard the process is, how much the Hollywood machine sucks, and how annoying and frustrating the acting/filmmaking life can be.  But you also feel how grateful he is to be a part of it.  He knows he’s lucky, and he’s worked hard to get where he’s at.  He’s scraped and scrimped, worked shit jobs, divorced wives, and almost died to get movies made.  The entire process of making Evil Dead — all three in fact — are hilarious.  

It’s like listening to the commentary on Swingers.  They set out to make a movie like four guys jerking around with their friends. And that’s what they make.  I like reading stuff like this, about how the industry is bullshit, but if you work hard, you might make it.  You can have a career without being an asshole, and without letting the LA culture eat you alive.  

It gives me hope.  It makes me want to pick up my pen and my camcorder and start working again.  I’ve been going through a crisis of faith out here.  Is it worth working my shitty job if I’m not writing?  What’s the point of crapping all over shitty movies if I’m not making movies of my own?  Why should I bother being in LA if I don’t get it enjoy myself?  Do I really want to subject myself to all this rejection?  Am I strong enough to handle this?  Do I have the talent, and does it matter?  

Bruce Campbell didn’t have my answers.  But if you’re a fan of his work (and why wouldn’t you be — motherfucker was in my favorite Coen Brothers’ movie of all time) definitely pick this up.  I’ll probably be getting Make Love The Bruce Campbell Way soon.

Book 6. Dead to the World by Charlaine HarrisIw

I was about to give up on the Sookie Stackhouse series in its entirety after books 2 and 3.  It started to take this dangerous Anita Blake turn to the left, where it was more about Sookie and her relationship with Bill the Vampire.  It started to look like they were going to start to porn Sookie out.  This is interesting, because Sookie is the exact opposite of Anita Blake, in that she was a virgin, she believes firmly in monogamy, and she doesn’t kill people.  She tries to avoid violence.  So far, she’s only iced one person in the series, and it was well done.  Most of the time, she gets hurt.  I like that about her.  She’s an unreliable narrator, and that’s what makes the stories interesting.  

Well, they started putting Sookie on Fonzie’s bike, sending her around the south to get involved in other affairs.  Harris established her own rules about weres and shifters, who exist in this world, but are not out of the supernatural closet, so to speak.  Book 2 involved a coven of vampires in Dallas, and more about the only thing that’s going to potentially save True Blood on HBO, the Brotherhood of the Sun, an anti-vampire church that tries to butcher vamps.  It’s a great invention, and they’ll get tons of mileage out of it.  Book 3 introduced the character of Alcide Herveaux, a were from Mississippi and all around heroic fella. 

Book 4 takes place back in Bon Temps (which sounds like a french retard when pronounced on True Blood).  Sookie has banished all vamps from her life, and has made the New Year’s resolution to “not get beat up this year”.  Anyway, while driving home from work, she comes across Eric, the vamp ruler of her little area of the world, naked and mind erased on the side of the road.  She takes him home and tries to help him.  Meanwhile, her brother disappears, and they are trying to find him.  All of this involves a band of witches that have come to Louisiana to demand a cut of everyone’s action.  Not only are they witches, but they are witches who are also shifters, who drink vampire blood to get super strength.  Magic vampire-strong werewolves.  Fuck and yeah.

The action is pretty nice, and Harris finally manages to de-porn the story.  After Anita Blake, I’m really sick and tired of reading about vampire loving.  It reads like a section from “Fat Lonely Housewife in the Grocery Store Has Hot Sex With A Highlander” or any other romance novel.  All vampires apparently fuck for hours, give seventy three orgasms to women two houses over, and are the most gentle and gracious lovers ever. Just once, I would love to see a movie or novel where the character humps awkwardly for two or three minutes, grunts, rolls over and falls asleep or demands a sandwich.  And not for comedic effect.  Or, you know, a woman in anything who can’t give head.  I guess everyone’s just amazing at oral sex.  God bless america. 

The action is fun, and there are a bunch of clever twists and surprises.  My only beef is with the climactic final battle with the coven of witches. But it’s not even a complaint really.  It’s actually handled like a real battle scene. The action is chaotic and disturbing and frightening, and it’s really well written.  So I guess I don’t have a beef.  

Later down my list of paperbacks (I can carry these easier on the bus and into the bathrooms with me at work to read while doing my business), I have book 5 coming up.  I’m anxious to read it, it seems promising.  I’ll stick out the series a little longer.  As for the television series, you’d be better off listening to The Waterboy while anally violating yourself with a copy of the hardback.

Jorb: Those Aren’t Pillows!

Those Aren’t Pillows!: A John Candy Retrospective

I have no idea how this came about, but then next thing I knew, I was writing a Guide on John Candy movies.  I don’t know what it is, but I just love that dude.  I’ll watch just about anything and everything he was in.  Plus, my dad got me hooked.

5. Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer

I fell in love with this series in the midst of the Harry Potter novels, trying to quench my thirst for children’s fantasy novels and not finding it in the Jesus Kitty Litter Box of Narnia or the disappointing finale of His Dark Materials.  Fantasy was my staple growing up.  When I wasn’t reading Stephen King, I was reading David Eddings or the Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft books.  I’ve just started with the Robert Jordan and I plan on moving on to the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin.  Fantasy can be violent without swearing or involving sexuality.  It’s got all the danger and intrigue and I love starting kids on series they’ll love. 

Artemis Fowl was a great find as a bookseller.  It’s about an Irish master criminal who’s not quite a teenager.  He makes an attempt to steal fairy gold.  Only these fairies aren’t wands and wings.  They’re part of a military tactical police force called LEPrecon.  It’s got a fantastic cast of characters, and at one point they were dallying with a movie, which is allegedly in the works.  I weep for it, because I can totally see this going the way of The Seeker, the odious attempt to do bludgeon my fond memories of The Dark is Rising series.  

I’ve been pretty impressed with the shelf life of this series.  I would preach the gospel of this to small children, since not only is it a cool story, but there’s actually a translatable code that runs along the bottom of the book.  Each stories gotten progressively more interesting, but this is sort of turning into all series when you get five or six books, or television programs six or seven years into the making.  What do you do with a criminal mastermind once you’ve sent him on missions to find his long lost father, into the center of Limbo, and pitted him against a pixie criminal genius?  Well, you start in on the whole time travel.  

Once someone starts talking time travel in series, my eyes roll up into my head, and I’m done for.  Just once, I’d like to see someone totally nuke the space-time continuum and have to exist in a world beyond their own understanding.  I don’t want everything wrapped up nice and neat.  I’m definitely going to be there when they release a new series, but I can’t get as excited about this as some of the other series I’m reading.  Particularly it’s paling in comparison to the excellent Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.  It’s essentially about a young boy who discovers he’s the son of a Greek God, and half-mortal himself.  So with it comes strange powers, and the discovery of a camp of other sons of immortals.  And an entire series about trying to stop Kronos from destroying Mount Olympus.  It’s really fun, and it plays a lot with the whole Greek myths.  It’s a fun series, and it’s already up to book 4.  I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in children’s lit.

4. Hurricane Punch by Tim Dorsey

I hate to say it, but this series is starting to wain.  It doesn’t necessarily jump the shark so much as stuff someone full of nitroglycerin inside a shark and then blow it up at Sea World.  But it’s starting to suffer the same trend of many long running series.  There’s nothing fresh they can do.  The last book, The Big Bamboo, they took it out to Hollywood, and it worked. 

This one took place back in Florida with Serge racing through the eyes of hurricanes while a second serial killer was trying to replicate his acts.  He was furious with the news coverage, so he tries to up the ante.  He doesn’t randomly thrill kill, he just murders assholes.  Like a Hip-Hop Redneck who’s blaring Rap-Metal in his shitty little car.  The guy mouths off to Serge, so Serge converts a hotel room into a giant amp, by wiring magnets and metal around the room and then nailing up plywood.  Then, using a wireless transponder on his guitar, he starting playing Sympathy for the Devil.  The resulting sound waves force the guy to hemmorhage from his pores. 

But the deaths are fewer and farther between.  Granted, after the sheer insanity of the first book, where a cast of 35 dwindles down to 4 or 5, it’s hard to top.  But this book should have been a non-stop onslaught of awesome.  Instead it was kind of, meh. 

There are two more coming out soon, Atomic Lobster and Nuclear Jellyfish.  I’ll still read them, but I’m not clamoring for them like I was early in the series.

3. City of Bones by Michael Connelly

Harry Bosch is pretty much what you think about when you think about the murder police.  He’s a jazz listening, old detective in the LAPD, who’s kind of aging with the times.  The entire series follows him and his somber attempts at writing the wrongs against him against the backdrop of the riots and the earthquakes that have plagued the city over the past decades. 

City of Bones is a really labyrinthine story, progressing slowly through the mire of the story.  A dog finds a bone in the woods, which turns out to be the bones of a teenager buried over twenty years ago.  As it follows through, the detectives are running up against dead ends, and chasing down leads that prove fruitless, having to practically start over at points.  It’s very procedural, and people’s lives are lost, and that’s what makes it kind of dark and interesting. 

Connelly writes complete pulp detective novels, with the hard nosed cop running up against the wild dame and falling in love.  It’s a quieter story, and what’s interesting is how Connelly chooses to end it.  I feel like things from now on are going to take a wild change, and I’m curious to get my hands on Lost Light, which is the next book.  I know the one beyond that ties into an old stand alone, and I’m anxious to read through it. 

Again, one of those breakroom books, beach read style.   It’s an older series, but it’s still plodding along.