Book 63. The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie? 

Well, another excellent fantasy series begun. Curse you nerds.  This one’s the first of the First Law Trilogy — the first law being “Don’t let them get wet.”  It’s solid fantasy, much like the Kingkiller trilogy it feels like it has to be three books long.  The story’s just that massive in scope.  However, Abercrombie’s really excellent about knowing how to juggle characters.  He keeps the story focused on three major threads:  the Inquisitor Glokta — a former champion of the Union who was tortured by enemies and is now a crippled mess torturing suspects for the Inquisition, Jezal dan Luthar — a spoiled noble who’s set to become a fencing champion for the Union, and Logen Ninefingers — a Northern barbarian wandering the countryside after he and his cohorts are beset by savages.   The rest of the characters are drawn into their wake as the story unfolds.  Then each of these three end up crossing paths.  It’s deftly done, even when a fourth character comes in the second half of the novel, and is also drawn into the story.  It combines the magic of Wheel of Time with the savage politics of Song of Ice and Fire.  It’s brutally violent, and the language is savage.

And that’s weird to me.  Fantasy always felt like a safe area for me.  You could expect some violence, and maybe some romance, but never any overt sexuality or foul language.  Every other word in The First Law Triolgy is fuck or shit.  It’s kind of strange to me.  I don’t know.  It assuredly improves the story here, and adds to the gritty flavor.  But it’s strange to be reading this fantasy novel with knights and kings and hearing each other screaming about “fucking killing the fuck out of fuckers!”  It’s fucking strange.  I don’t know what other people’s thoughts are on this.  Even in the Song of Ice and Fire, there are a few cocks, cunts, and fucks, but it’s veritably Tarantino up in this piece.  However, the characters are so well developed, and the tone is so cruel and clever, it doesn’t make it a negative.  It’s just something to get accustomed to.  I always recommended fantasy books to ten and twelve year olds who were good readers, but not so much on this one.  

However, you Pajiban nerdlingers who like fantasy should jump all over this.  It’s brimming with war and scheming and unbelievable violence.  Someone explodes from a magic spell.  Into big dripping chunks.  Yup.  Get on that shit.

Book 62. Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris

Another Sookie Stackhouse novel down.  Book five in the series.  She’s starting to reach that point in her writings where she’s settled in for the long winter’s nap.  It’s now become episodic rather than a contained story.  It seems to be suffering from the same problems Lost and Heroes did when they were directionless and didn’t know how long they would have to sustain themselves.  

Harris won’t kill any of her principles at this point, so it’s become a case of advancing myth points.  She wrote this novel to deliver a major thorn in the side of Miss Stackhouse, which is a pretty brutal one at that and will have ramifications down the road, and then to set up a new relationship. But really, this felt less like a single solitary adventure and more like a stop gap until she works on the next one.  I don’t know how far Harris is planning on going with the Stackhouse series, but if she’s planning on keeping pace with her brother-in-arms Jim Butcher — who’s said he’s going into the late twenties at the very least with the Dresden Files — she’s going to really have to pick up the game.  Butcher keeps his cast of characters tight, and that helps.  We’re already dealing with over twenty in Stackhouse, with the introduction of ten more in this novel.  It’s falling dangerously into Anita Blake territory, so either Sookie needs to get some or Harris does.  

I’ve only got one more Stackhouse left in this batch of the hundred, so I’m probably saving that for late in the run as a sprinter.  I’ve still got ten or more 800+ novels facing me down.  I can use a quick 300 pager here and there.

Book 61. Hell House by Richard Matheson

What a strange little book.  I’ve never read I Am Legend, but was told to.  However, someone else got this rec into me before I could delve into any of Mr. Matheson’s other works, which I’m anxious too.  

Hell House was a devious little animal.  It almost read like Shirley Jackson, or Poe.  It’s a haunted house story, set in 1970, but it felt more like 1870.  It was weirdly anachronistic, almost like hearing about a Chrysler in A Merchant of Venice.  It felt simultaneously old world and fiercely modern.  The story lunges forward with this gruesome jabs where characters are suddenly calling each other fucking lesbians and becoming violently sexual towards one another.  The female characters spend their time alternating between histrionics and wanton nudity, and the men ponder and grouse.  It’s almost like a strange little off-broadway play of The Haunting of Hill House.

Embarrassing treatment of female characters aside, it’s a pretty ferocious little horror story.  The horror does not content itself with mere poltergeistery.  The medium gets sexually abused by haunts in a manner not inappropriate in a particularly un-censor friendly episode of Law and Order: SVU.  What Matheson loses in his characters, he makes up for in the wringer he puts them through.  For anyone who wants to write good horror, I would highly recommend giving it a gander.

Book 60. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

I don’t drink wine.  There are people who are conniesewers, those who devote cellars to the pursuit of fine vintage.  It’s usually a sign of culture and class to enjoy a nice red with a proper dinner, or to share a bottle with friends.  My family often has big dinners where several bottles are passed around.  Meanwhile, I sip my martini or whiskey and soda.  I understand and appreciate it.  I just don’t like it.

Such was the case with Roth.  I can appreciate that he’s a good author.  And he wrote an epic of alternative history without getting sci-fi.  In fact, it’s probably more frightening because it was palpable.  He wrote a semi-biographical fictional account of what life was like growing up during Charles Lindbergh’s presidency during an America that never entered WWII and instead brokered peace with Hitler, who Lindbergh admired.  It was an America where the Jews were slowly broken apart, not by outright pogroms, but under the auspices of a fascist state which sinisterly uttered the dissolution of Jewish America ever so gently and quietly.  It deftly blends fiction and fact, real personages with a fictional family.  It’s really well written, and it was interesting.  

I just didn’t like it. 

I couldn’t rightly say why.  I couldn’t give you a good explanation.  Maybe it just wasn’t the right time to read it.  Maybe it just the style Roth uses, sort of this odd blend of almost talmudic lecture, where he speaks omnisciently about himself or the greater picture, with a lot of repetition and phrasing.  It kind of felt like watching an episode of The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy, if there was a lot of nudity and swearing.  It felt dated and old, but with this new visceral language added in.  It felt strange to me, like hearing your grandparents fuck, or watching your great aunt call someone a cuntstain.  It’s not that that stuff doesn’t happen, it’s just that it feels so far removed from the now that it’s almost false.  

Weirder still is that I feel compelled to read Roth again.  I never bothered reading any John Irving or any of that ilk.  I don’t know how I was permitted an English degree without it, suffice it to say I stayed mostly Southern and British in my fiction.  I never traipsed to the Northeast or even the greater west with my contemporary Americans.  Which explains my love affair with Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain, and my disdain for The Cider House Rules and Snow Falling on Cedars.  

It was the strangest feeling reading the book.  I would equate it to being hungover during a particularly fascinating college lecture.  You’re absorbed in what your hearing in the background, but you just want this to fucking end.  You just don’t want to hear anymore, and you want it to be over where you’ll be safe away from this important and captivating material.  Sorry, if I disrespected you, Mr. Roth.  I feel the same way about chianti.

Never Leave A Man Down

For those of you who don’t know, we lost our champeen. Amanda Foley Amos, known to most of us as AlabamaPink on Pajiba, passed away from complications to leukemia. She was the original combatant, taking me on before there even was a Cannonball Read, telling me how she’d totally whoop my ass. Every time I’d get even the littlest bit sentimental or sappy, she’d tell me to knock that shit off. 

We had plotted out our trophy long before anything terrible was going to happen: a pink machete. Because how can you fight something with a ribbon? 

It’s a sad thing to lose a friend, even one you never met in person. But she’d tell me to buck up, stop being a chump, and soldier on. So that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna fight on. 

“After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realised that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.” — Langford Wilson, 5th of July

Book 59. Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

Upon recommendation of Meister TK, I decided to peruse Connolly’s works.  Almost all of TK’s recs have been disposable, pulpy action/thriller/mystery novels, so I tend to enjoy them.  As much as I love biting into the heady dense literature of some of the deeper authors, there’s something to be said for some popcorn face smashers.  

Connolly’s Charlie “Bird” Parker makes for an interesting hero.  I’ve been reading a lot of detective series as of late, and as Dan Carlson and I have discovered it is possible to fly for at least four hours while always watching an episode of Law and Order, so I’ve got sort of a taste for the macabre.  Connolly delivers, if with a few grease spots on the paper bag.  He reminds me of his homophonic contemporary Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, except with a lot more gruesome violence — sort of Peter Straub-y.  He has this strange tendency to fuck with his timeline, fracturing events and leaping all over the place with his story.  It’s painfully distracting, but once you acclimate yourself to the jarring events, it’s pretty easy to sink your teeth into.  

And Connolly doesn’t fuck around with plot.  It’s a goddamn punt-your-nuts-into-your-stomach story.  Parker sits on the porch of his home, where he came home drunk after a fight with his wife, only to find his daughter and wife butchered and layed out in a horrific tableau, with their faces cut from their corpses.  It’s a hell of a way to open, but Connolly delivers it in almost dry scientific delivery as if he were also in shock.  The story then goes from there with Parker leaving the force to become a detective who hunts down his family’s killer.  Parker isn’t a very likable character, so when the love angle gets played, it’s less than believable.  Also, the story is a bit choppy.  It’s almost like watching two different cross-over cop shows back to back.  It’s a pretty large unwieldy story, and it does get a little sloppy at times.  But it’s still like watching the lesser non-Orbach Law and Orders.  It’s not great, but it’s still damn good.  And I will certainly be following this series further.

Book 58. UR by Stephen King

I got me a Kindle. Or more specifically a Kindle 2. 

I read all the friggin’ time, and constantly bounce between books, finding myself sitting around on public transportation or waiting before the movie starts, so I wanted some way to cut down on my need to lug four or five books with me.  I was tempted by the discount on book purchases, plus the ability to own a book presumptively at will, by downloading it in minutes to the device.  Yeah, it’s nearly $400 dollars, but so are most videogaming systems, and you pay $50+ a game for those.  But yes, it’s true.  I’m paying mad amounts of money for what I can get from the library for free. 

To pimp their device, Amazon optioned Stephen King to write a novella exclusively for the Kindle.  King took the project to heart (and wallet) choosing to write a story that itself was about the Kindle.  At times, it actually feels like one big complicated commercial, like the Mini Coopers in the Italian Job or Snapple on 30 Rock.  King takes the Kindle and creates a story around it.  But like a song written for Build-A-Bear Workshop or a webisode, it feels crassly like prostitution.  Which is to say, I got what I paid for, but it wasn’t necessarily as enjoyable as the real thing.  At least this time I don’t have most of a dead Kindle rotting in my trunk.  What?

The novella might be over 200 pages.  That’s one of the problems with the Kindle.  With an adjustable font size, there really aren’t page numbers.  Instead there are “locations” at the bottom of the book, which add to a status bar that tells you percentage wise how far you are into the book.  My brother and I sort of guessed that every 9 locations is about a page.  So UR seemed to come in at around 220 pages.  But even if it’s less, I’m cranking through 900+ page books, so I’ve earned a fucking gimme.  However, without the page numbers, you find yourself reading faster.  The text is delivered in bite sized chunks, so I breezed through UR in a matter of hours.  Which is about how long Stephen King mad-libbed this junk food novella together. 

UR is about Wes, a college professor teaching English at a small low tier Kentucky university.  Wes bought a Kindle for revenge, a justifiable reason for any large purchase.  His ex-girlfriend, Ellen, the coach of the successful women’s basketball team, accused him of being a bookworm.  She taunts “Why don’t you read off the computer like the rest of us?”  Which prompts Wes to purchase a Kindle.  Which is just one of a number of weirdly advertisory notions raised in the book — like a girl telling her mom she could really go for a Fanta because she’s feeling not so fresh.  

Of course, because it’s Stephen King, and he already blew his advance for the haunted lamp book on Fenway Franks, the Kindle is “haunted”.  In fact, Wes’s Kindle’s not just haunted, it’s “Dark Tower” haunted.  Yes, Vagina, UR is of Childe Roland’s adventures to the Dark Tower.  I think 65% of King’s books are now retroactively about the Territories and Roland following the man in black.  I’m waiting for him to announce how 7 or 8 of his Entertainment Weekly CountryTime Lemonade porchsit articles are secretly DaVinci coded with Dark Tower lore.  Dada-chum, didda-chee?

So naturally, I ate it with a spoon.  I’m a fucking sucker for the damn Dark Tower lore, even if he burned me like a fat girl on prom night.  My brother — who purchased his Kindle at the noble permission of his understanding fiancee for just this express purpose — is strumming through the King pantheon of the Dark Tower for this purpose.  Which is why when I read UR, I was going, “Ahhhh.” And his response was the hyper “What? What? What am I missing?”  

For you see, Wes’s unique pink Kindle has special functions.  It allows him to download UR Books, books from one of the 10 million alternate universes that span the Dark Tower.  In these alternate worlds, Hemingway wrote a dog book, Poe lived to publish 6 novels, and Faulkner doesn’t even exist.  Again, it gives King a chance to namedrop — and schoolyard slam (suck it Patterson!) — some authors.  Whose books — like our own Stipe42’s Katorga — you can purchase and read on the KINDLE!  

Yet it keeps getting stranger, as Wes explores the other functions of his uber Kindle.  The problem with the story is that it itself feels a bit like another author doing an UR version of King.  Except for his hallmark ineptitude with writing dialogue for anyone under twenty anymore and the strange turns of phrase — Maine aphorisms are not meant for Bluegrass lips — I would suspect that it was an experiment in the guise of The Green Mile (his chapbook publish) or even Desperation/The Regulators.  

And that’s the thing.  Even with this goofyass Papa John’s style novella, King’s doing shit that’s out there.  What other author would pull this off?  Or could?  I would actually love to see Amazon take advantage of the instant gratification and exclusivity of the Kindle and hire some authors to do subscription installment books.  You pay $5 and James Rollins prints a new story in eight installments each month.  Or better yet, some one like Palahniuk, who’s blogsplatter style would rule in bitesize chunks fisted into your gullet.  

Anyway, the novella’s incredibly sitcomish, but for devotees of the exploits of Roland, you’ll be giggling with glee.  And I dig reading on the Kindle.  I find myself reading faster.  Also, thanks to the advantages of the public domain and some generous torrents, I’ve already filled my Kindle with over 100 books.  Yeah, granted, I’m probably not clamoring to pound through Du Maurier or Dumas immediately, but the point is Now I Can. Also, this was how I read Dustin’s memoir, and how I’ll be able to read anything people .PDF me.  Which is a boon for a poor ass scribbler like me.

Book 57. Boomsday by Christopher Buckley

Chris Buckley reads exactly like Christopher Moore or Tim Dorsey if they dipped themselves in shit and rolled around in MSNBC.  I don’t necessarily say this like a bad thing, it’s just that I tend to have fuckall interest in politics, so it’s not my cup of tea, but his delivery is right in my postal code.  I enjoyed the movie of Thank You For Smoking, but this was the first book of Buckley’s that I read, on the recommendation of my friend Wolfe.  (I swear, I will remember who recommended what and star kudoing you in the reviews.  I went up over 100 recs by November, and I’m already overwhelmed with enough to surpass 100 more for next year.)

Boomsday is definitely a fascinating concept, if a little weak in the portrayal.  Because of the massive amounts of baby boomers, plus the tacit refusal of the greatest generation to go to that great Normandy in the sky in a timely manner, the government is doling out Social Security benefits like Paris Hilton spreading herpes.  (That’s my 1000th Paris Hilton dig in my reviews.  I would like to officially retire it here, today.  My hack writing thanks her for being an easy target.  Thanks, Miss Hilton.  Your wayward cooze has gotten me miles of easy metaphors.)  77 million boomers are due to start deploying golden parachutes, to the point the government must start raising dividends on Generation X, Y, Z, Douchebag, and Bromo.  50% of thirtysomething paychecks will go to fund the Boomer bailout.  

An angry blogger, Cassandra Devine, who’s also a PR rep, writes up a manifesto demanding that angry youth take to the golf course and retirement communities and then start tearing up the place.  She then suggests the government sponsor Voluntary Transitioning — where they offer economic subsidies to people willing to commit legalize suicide by age 70.  An act that would save the government trillions of dollars.  And which sparks mad outrage.  

The crux of the novel deals with how this modest proposal gets spun into politico hijinks which involves the requisite wacky cast of characters.  And that’s where the fit is awkward.  Whereas Dorsey and Moore tend to keep their wackiness to California or Florida — bastions of batshittery — D.C. seems to be less apt to the fit.  It’s not to say it’s not an entertaining read, because it truly is amusing as all hell.  It’s just his cavalcade of characters — after working up through Senate hearings, presidential elections, and numerous scandals involving a sexual romp through a minefield in Bosnia and Russian hookers blackmailing religious leaders — suffer from having no exit strategy.  The novel totally deflates by the end, almost apologetically sweeping the remains of itself under the carpet to avoid scandal.  

Buckley’s prose kind of feels like a professor in penny loafers sitting around a group of high school students to have a “rap” session, to see “wtf is up, yo.”  He’s a little less attuned to the world of the blogosphere than he thinks, but he doesn’t delve into the hipness enough to make it overtly embarrassing.  He’s the dad who asks his daughter if she’s getting any in front of her friends, but quickly erasing the gaff by buying everyone pizzas and then leaving to go see a movie.  The story defies rationality, which is a shame, because I think if he tempered his screwball comedy, his message would have been funnier.  

Still, I dug it.  I’d probably pick up another Buckley if given the chance, but I’ve got plenty of better things to read.

Book 56. The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan

Robert Jordan’s earned it.  I mean, the back of the book has one reviewer claiming that he is owning the land that Tolkien began to reveal.  And I think that’s true.  Jordan kind of co-opted ol’ J-double-R’s land and made it his own.  At this point, Jordan feels like a branch in the family tree of Fantasy.  It’s why people still read the classics.  Because you should know from whence you came.  If it feels lesser than some of the more recent fantasy out there — and I still think Messer Martin, also of the double-R fame is tops right now — it’s just because it’s also been co-opted by the newbies.  The Wheel of Time is all over any fantasy began beyond the 1990’s, just like any horror author beyond 1985 pretty much owes credence to Stephen King — regardless of whether or not he’s still floating deadmanstyle during kiddie swim, pissing in his giant Bermuda shorts.  

I will fight through every book of the Wheel of Time, because it’s an excellent tale, and even if he’s like your old grampa who repeats some stories ad nauseum, you still dig it.  Fires of Heaven ends well — even if it leaves out the Faile/Perrin storyline — and Jordan’s getting into killing off major characters — which is something that I enjoy in literature.  Heroes would be a better show — and to some extent Lost — if they started icing principal players.  A lack of safety increases the drama.  

Anyway, book 5 down, and looks like either 7 or 8 more to go, depending on whether Sanderson opts to divvy Memory of Light into two tomes rather than one epic.  And odds and numbers favor Book 12 coming out this September/November and Book 13 coming out in 2010, which is the 20th anniversary of the series.  Plus, c’mon, thirteen?  It’s not just the number of Aes Sedai required to still someone who can channel.  Yeah, I typed that sentence.  Eat me.  Also, who wouldn’t want to claim the ability to have created a triskodekology.  That might be the word.  Fuck you, I have books to read.

Book 55. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer

Jonathan Safron Foer can break your heart while your clutching your sides with laughter.  I fell in love with Everything Is Illuminated, which is easy when you’ve got a narrator like Alex with his seeing-eye bitch Sammy Davis Jr., Jr.  

Foer manages to tap into the same vein and recreates all of the same glory of his first novel which breaching another gruesomely poignant topic.  Oskar Schell, our nine-year-old narrator, is kind of a weird kid.  He’s like a young Tom Wolfe, wearing only white, a vegan, devoted to collections, painfully direct in his questioning.  His father was killed when the towers went down on 9/11, and Oskar has decided to cope with this by trying to find the lock for a key he finds in his father’s closet.  

It’s a story about grief and loss and the love of parents, told through the eyes of Oskar, who might have even managed to surpass Alex for narrative charm. We also learn about Oskar’s lineage — through his Grandmother and the mute sculptor grandfather who loses all his ability to speak.  I think the grandmother and grandfather portion of the novel might be the only weak part, but Foer capitalizes on it by weaving it in with Oskar’s adventures.  

The story is beautiful, absolutely gorgeous and totally heartripping.  There’s a portion, where Oskar’s father tells him the story of the Sixth Borough of New York, which might very well be the best thing I’ve read in a long time.  The novel is packed with pictures from Oskar’s camera, as well as a particularly haunting image of one of the towers, and a body toppling from one of the higher floors.  This novel came out just a few years after the attacks, and it handles the topic with a startling grace.

It’s also a furiously quick read that will stay with you.  I can still feel parts of the novel resonating within me a few hours after I closed the cover.  It’s a jarring story, but only because it’s delivered with such exquisitely awkward humor.