1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

1Q84 is a long, sprawling novel by Haruki Murakami that fans of Haruki Murakami will like. That probably sounds like the stupidest sentence ever written, but I will elaborate. If someone says to you “I am reading a novel by Haruki Murakami,” you should immediately have the following thoughts. “There is some girl who has strange abilities, and some boy who loves her, and she will probably go missing. Also: cats. Crazy things will happen in a very normal world, and only the people directly involved will notice that anything has changed.” You are correct in nearly every particular. There aren’t any important cats, just a cat metaphor.

Three Murakami novels have come out since I started reading him: Kafka on the Shore, After Dark, and now 1Q84. 1Q84 definitely has the worst title, and after a few chapters, when you understand the significance of it, you may find yourself in the really tedious position of explaining it. The two protagonists each have a different understanding of the way their world has changed, and one of them uses 1Q84 to describe the new reality. The other refers to it as the Town of Cats, after a story he reads on a train. That would have been a lousy and misleading title, too.

But you guys, it’s amazing. Read it and read it again and never stop reading it. There are some creepy and offputting things, and it’s 900-odd pages long, but it’s fantastic. And then we’ll talk about it. Because I have a lot of things to say but I don’t know anyone who is going to read this.

The Alchemyst by Michael Scott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hey, guess what? Once again, all myths are true.

Ok, so this is a pretty harmless book, I don’t want to harp on it much, but at one point a vampire character scoffs at the idea of not having a reflection, because after all she is a physical being, but move back 50 pages and she’s explaining that she can’t come into a room unless she’s invited in.

I don’t advocate living your life this way, and I understand that it may be evidence of a mental illness, but that was almost enough to make me put the book down.

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I’m going to talk a little bit about two children’s series I read over the last few weeks, the (ongoing) Tapestry series by Henry H. Neff and the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull. These are fantasy books, which aren’t usually my jam, but hey, isn’t that where all the good writing for kids is going these days? I had some fairly heavy hitters on my currently reading list, including Ulysses, the autobiographies of Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin, a couple of nonfiction books about imperial Chinese warfare, and the latest Banana Yoshimoto, and my fiancée had been on a fantasy kick post Harry Potter 7.2, so I picked up her kindle and started reading.

The Tapestry

The Hound of Rowan is a story about a troubled orphan boy who discovers that he is a wizard when he is invited to join a secret wizarding school out in the countryside. Along the way he makes friends with a talented know-it-all and a mischevious underachiever, explores a world of magical creatures in which all myths are true, and sneaks out under the nose of his teachers to have wild adventures. Unfortunately Max McDaniels’s education will not be a normal and happy one, as he lives in dark times: a long vanquished enemy of incredible power is returning.

So… Harry Potter?

Yes. Yes it is. The first book is almost point for point Harry Potter. This is maybe smart. Harry Potter was big. Bigger than Big. Huge. But it is not inspiring. Luckily it’s not the last book in the series.

The Second Siege, book 2 of the series, diverges from the Harry Potter mold significantly. The school of witchcraft and wizardry paradigm falls away, as danger comes to the world much faster than in the Potter books. The stakes are raised, the writing is stronger, and this is where the first really new ground is laid. But then…

In The Fiend and the Forge, the Harry Potter themes creep back in. The hero abandons the relative safety of his magical environment and goes out into a hostile world on his own. He gathers magical items and allies and has a direct confrontation with the big bad. The difference from the Harry Potter books here is that this is the middle book in a planned series, not the end, so the story isn’t over.

And hey, these were pretty solid. If you read these as an adult, you don’t have to kill yourself afterwards. I’d give these things a solid B-.

But…

Fablehaven

Fablehaven is the story of a young boy and girl discovering that they are heirs to a secret magical world in which all myths are true, and of course they cannot simply explore and enjoy their new discovery, because the world is in immediate peril from long-vanquished enemies. I get that it sort of has to be this way. You can’t have a series where the protagonists have always known about the magical world, because you get left with enormous exposition problems (if everyone knows what’s happening, why would they ever explain it?). And you can’t have three extremely boring books about a magical world running efficiently with no threats, because no one would care, even if you somehow dropped hints that shit was about to get unreal in book 4. So… eh.

Where Tapesty gets off to a rocky, derivative start, Fablehaven is strong from the get go. The writing is better, the characters are better, the plot is better, the universe is more interesting, &c.

Rise of the Evening Star does most of the work of establishing the various players, factions, and ideologies in the universe, at the expense of a slightly less interesting plot than the other books in the series. It’s good, but it’s a bridge to the main arc of the story, which begins in…

Grip of the Shadow Plague – by this point the protagonists are discovering their abilities, the factions are established, and the danger to the world is looming larger. The first two books were interesting, this one is actually good, sturdy solid.

Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary is the fourth book, which has a great climax. It’s questy, with desperate moments and solid characters. It’s probably the best book in the series, though I’m sure there are readers who prefer book 5…

Keys to the Demon Prison – Now this is still a solid book, a good read, &c., but I can’t understand why this wasn’t split into two books. So much of what goes on in the middle two thirds is hurried, skipping from day to day, leaving out details and character moments to race from set-piece to set-piece, that it’s easy to come up with some divisions that would have made sense and allowed a more measured pace and some better character work. There’s an afterword in which the author explains that he always envisioned a 5 book series, but if he crammed this all together in blind adherence to a 5 year-old outline, that seems like doing the series a disservice.

Taken all together, this series is the stronger of the two, although the Tapestry books aren’t all in yet. It’s B+/A- territory. I read most of it in big chunks, hours at a time.

So What Can We Do Better?

If you’re sitting down to write a children’s fantasy series, let me ask you a few questions:

1.) Does all the exposition have to be done in dialogue?

If you didn’t write the world as it was being discovered by the protagonist (if your protagonist had grown up in the magical world), what would be different? Are we worried that children won’t read passages without dialogue to learn the backstory? Is this fish-out-of-water trope really necessary to keep people engaged, or can we assume that an interesting magical world will be worth ferreting out? Is this half monkey-see and half “if the protagonist doesn’t kn ow anything about magic I don’t have to know anything about magic until it comes time to write the relevant sections”?

2.) Does there have to be a crisis that threatens the entire magical world?

If the enemies are small-time and their goals are small, does that mean the story will be boring? Would you expect every Poirot mystery to be a Regicide? Aren’t Hardy Boys mysteries interesting even though no one ever dies? Does magic automatically raise the stakes?

3.) Do ALL myths have to be true?

Do you have to have wizards and werewolves and vampires and satyrs and phoenixes and nagas? Do the norse myths and the indian myths and african myths all have to be concurrently true? Isn’t it conceivable that the magical world could be made up of only a few mythical creatures, or creatures outside of myth altogether? Is this a nod to multiculturalism (as in: if we put in greek monsters we’d better throw in some african ones, too, we can’t judge one culture’s myth as more valid than anothers)? Is it lazyness (as in: why should I think of magical entities when I can go to wikipedia and type in “zoroastrianism”)?

4.) Does the protagonist have to have special powers beyond those of the rest of the magicians around him?

Can’t we read about a team of competent magicians with normal magical powers? Does every hero have to be a genetically predisposed hero? Can’t these skills be learned? Isn’t there room for teamwork and strategy? Would you believe a story about a real world conflict that was only solved because one member of one faction was born with a special ability?

I don’t think the fact that these books are written for children means they have to follow any of the tropes I’m asking about. I don’t think the fact that they’re written about magical worlds means there’s no room for realism in plotting. I’m not even convinced that smaller stakes books wouldn’t be just as interesting.

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I’ve been reading some other things, too, and I owe some reviews for them, but maybe they’ll be quicky goodreads reviews and not whatever this garbage became. Stay tuned.

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So, this is the second book of a trilogy, and then there’s another trilogy, and then some other books, and when you’ve tallied it all up, you have something like 27 books in the series. And I’ve read the first two, but unless I get pneumonia and my reading time suddenly quadruples, I’m probably done, and I feel strange about it, because when all is said and done, I don’t hate these books.

The setting is imaginative. The stories move along at a good pace. The stories are interesting. If that was all their was to a book, this would be a pretty decent read.

But it isn’t.

The characters are garbage. They’re cardboard. The heroes never make any mistakes, but they also never do anything interesting. If anything they do is surprising, it isn’t genuinely surprising, it just wasn’t foreshadowed.

The writing, the style? Also largely nonsense. When I got to the end of the book, and I found myself wondering what happened in the next one, I had a flash of inspiration: I would much rather read the plot summary than the actual plot.

What I like about this series is the hierarchy, the relationships between people, the structure of the world, and how the events in the story impact that society. But since I don’t like or care about any of the individual people, it’s more than enough to just read what happened next, in bullet points or on a timeline.

So fuck it.



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Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Surprisingly solid. I had pretty low expectations going into this, because I wasn’t a huge fan of the revisionist history return to the Ender’s Game timeline, but I just read it from cover to cover, or, since I’ve been doing a lot of reading on kindle for my iPhone, I tapped the right side of the screen until the book was done. There’s just something I like about post-war Ender, and this covers a really critical part of that story. So: good! Read!

(In an effort to post more often, I’ve decided to automatically repost my reviews from goodreads here. At the moment there aren’t a lot of reviews there, since all I’ve really done is rate books and mark that I’ve read them, but if this works out, you may eventually want to pick me up there, as well.)

my currently-reading shelf:

I was looking for something light earlier this year. Something definitely for adults, and something with the potential to keep me occupied for a while, probably a series, and something I’d never read, but it had to be light. I wasn’t about to throw in Proust with Ulysses and the Autobiography of Mark Twain. I don’t remember exactly what made me think the James Bond books would be a good plan, but when I went to check them out, and discovered that they had been written by multiple authors over the years, I was a little dismayed. I decided I only wanted to read the real James Bond, the original, who had formed before the movies and was a creation all his own. So I decided that I would only read the books by Ian Fleming, or at the very least, I would consider the end of those books the end of the project. That meant, in order:

1. Casino Royale
2. Live and Let Die
3. Moonraker
4. Diamonds are Forever
5. From Russia, With Love
6. Dr. No
7. Goldfinger
8. For Your Eyes Only
9. Thunderball
10. The Spy Who Loved Me
11. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
12. You Only Live Twice
13. The Man with the Golden Gun
14. Octopussy and the Living Daylights

I think that I was excited to start these because Casino Royale was the last bond movie I actually saw in the theater, and I knew I’d be starting there. And Casino Royale is an interesting story, and has a lot of action and drama, but I was totally unprepared for the level of terrible writing I was about to encounter. For what it’s worth, this was the first novel, and Fleming’s writing gets better as the series goes on, but in Royale it’s just a train wreck.

It also set a trend for the first few books: it’s a little unsettling to have to hear James Bond’s thoughts. You’re spared this in the movies, and I think helps make Bond a cool, charismatic character. You don’t have to come to terms with the fact that he’s a racist, a misogynist, obsessed with clothing and restaurants, and frankly, a bit of a bungler. He isn’t a master spy, his cover is perpetually blown. And he isn’t a master planner, he just gets lucky a lot. The only thing he’s really and consistently good at is gambling, but of course even there he prevails by luck. He’s simply a lucky man who brute forces his way through everything.

He’s also a very transparent author insertion fantasy for Ian Fleming, who was an unimportant dabbler in intelligence and an inveterate womanizer. When he talks about how all women want to be raped (it comes up a lot), it just feels like Fleming talking. So do the outmoded 1950′s racial ideas.

There are high points to the series — Thunderball and From Russia, With Love are pretty ok — and low points. Live and Let Die is dreadful. Two of the titles above (For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and the Living Daylights) are short story collections, and they have a different tone than the novels. One, The Spy Who Loved Me, is told from the perspective of a Bond girl, and bond is only in the climactic middle chapters.

There are also some things that you know if you’re reading them now that you might not have known then, and they take away the suspense. Ultimately, no woman in any of the books is important, and I found myself constantly hoping that Bond would just ignore them and we could get on with it. Also, because Bond can’t die, a lot of the scenes that put him in personal danger are ineffective.

So 14 books in, and what do I think? I prefer movie Bond. He’s just a better secret agent. He’s cooler, he’s more likeable, and he’s less of a blunderer. Maybe Ian Fleming wanted a more flawed character, but once you have 14 books about someone, they are going to become a hero and you’re going to want to see them do well, go about their business competently. Because it isn’t as if Bond fails to stop the villain in Dr. No and we know that he can lose. Even when Bloefeld survives two novels and lives to have a final confrontation with Bond in the third, his plots have been foiled all along. So if Bond wins every time, and everyone he runs across knows his reputation as a crack agent, then showing him as a bungler is just unsatisfying.

In the end I’d recommend them if you’re looking for what I was looking for: light, fast-paced books you can get through in a night or two. They don’t have much literary merit, and they’re uneven in quality, but they’re good enough to read on the can.

A quick heads up that I’ve been co-hosting a weekly podcast with my younger brother. Episode 8 is available now, and you can get them all on iTunes, or over at the website, onemorepodcast.com.

In a little bit here, I’ll be reviewing a series of novels that almost everyone will know a little something about. Here’s the super short teaser: they’re not great, but I keep reading them.

But here’s today’s quick hit:

Bossypants, by Tina Fey, is part autobiography, part cry for women’s equality in film and television. It’s a series of vignettes, most of which are entertaining, in more or less chronological order. Tina Fey is a good writer and she’s lived a reasonably interesting life, but this thing is kind of a non-starter. It’s short, but it still feels padded. It also feels rushed, like someone finally convinced her that she needed to write this thing now, while people still knew her name, and not like a labor of love. It could have been longer and it could have been better.

Maybe I feel that way because I like Tina Fey. I liked her on weekend update and I liked her in Baby Mama. I love her on 30 Rock and I really enjoyed her with Steve Carell in Date Night. And this isn’t as funny as Tina Fey as Liz Lemon. Sorry.

The Sea Wolf, by Jack London, was an attempt to get back to fiction after my miserable sojourn in formulaic non-fiction. I was talking to one of my reading friends about Moby Dick, and how I prefer the first 45 chapters, which is mostly before the story gets going, and he recommended The Sea Wolf. But really for me it was the same story again, I liked the first half a lot, and the second half a good deal less. I thought it would make good review fodder, until I saw that wikipedia already contains the best and most accurate review of the book, attributed to Ambrose Bierce:

The great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen… the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime… The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful.

And there you have it. That is the exact, perfect review of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf.

Since the new year, my reading has been mostly non-fiction. I got several books for christmas, and without any fiction books in my queue to intersperse with them, I’ve been working through them one after the other. What I want to know is this: is there a non-fiction school that these authors are going to? Is it a single class? Is it just the result of one or two popular biographies, or some other popculture zeitgeist? Somehow the authors of modern day nonfiction have hit upon a standard format, and it is an irritating one.

Chapter One – The End

The non-fiction book begins at the logical end of the story. This apes the television trope of beginning an episode at the end, and then showing the entire story in flashback. This is, to be kind, overused in television drama, and makes even less sense in a work of written non-fiction. All non-fiction is inherently in this format to begin with, since we usually know what happens at the climax of the story before we begin. It isn’t necessary to start a book about the sinking of the Titanic disappearing below the surface of the water. We know what happened to the Titanic and we feel the sense of impending doom without this artifice, because it really happened. This is a trope that belongs in the world of fiction.

Exempli fucking gratia: Halsey’s Typhoon, telling the story of the U.S. Third Fleet’s encounter with Typhoon Cobra at the end of World War II, begins with the examination of Admiral Halsey during the subsequent investigation. The rest of the book is told in chronological order, but the authors have decided to set the scene for us by starting here because they want us to reflect, throughout the rest of the story, whether Halsey bears personal responsibility for the ships and men lost in the typhoon.

Chapter Two – Chapter One

It is important to jump back to the beginning of the story here, because this is also how it is done on TV.

Chapter Three – Autobiography

Once the non-fiction writer has begun the narrative of the book, it is essential to shift to a second, related story. This is the self-indulgent metastory of how the author came to write the book. The main story is notable, and this second story is not, but they are treated with equal gravity. Now we have a story that we don’t care about tied to the story we actually wanted to read. It saves the author the trouble of writing a second book patting himself on the back for writing the first book, I guess.

For instance: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – which is fully half about the author’s difficulty getting access to the family for interviews. The titular story makes up maybe a quarter of the book, which is actually the most interesting quarter, despite the author’s efforts to portray the story of the effects on the Lacks family as the interesting part.

Remaining Chapters – Alternating stories 1 and 2

It’s important not to stay with one story for too long. Non-fiction feels dry to stupid people, but especially to writers and editors who are convinced that their audience is stupid people. It’s as if a story told in usual chronological order of non-fiction will read like a history book, which reminds people of school, which reminds people of failure and shame. But again, I feel like the influence here is also the way stories are presented in movies and television. Cutting from one storyline to another in fiction promotes drama, because we inherently desire a linear narrative where we will learn what comes next, and by subverting that, tension is created. This makes a lot of sense in fiction, but it fails for a lot of reasons in non-fiction writing.

First, the reader of non-fiction probably knows something about the subject. People may occasionally pick up a book on a subject they don’t know anything about, but most of the time the person who buys the book was already interested in the subject to begin with. So the tension this creates in fiction is subverted. It is also usually subverted somewhat by the “beginning at the end” device that I talked about way at the start of this post, depending on what is revealed and how strong the reader’s memory is.

Second, reading is much slower than TV watching. That means that setting up tension in chapter 4 and resolving it in chapter 10 probably means sustaining suspense across hours of reading, and maybe across multiple reading sessions. The author has no control over this timeline. If the payoff is too far from the setup, the tension may have dissipated and the literary device rendered useless.

Finally, this method creates tension in fiction because the audience wants to know what happens next. If the tension fails to materialize for the first reason listed or fails to sustain for the second, then all the author is doing here is making the reader eat his vegetables. There is absolutely no penalty to giving the reader what he wants right away.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the authors of these books aren’t really attempting to manipulate tension, but merely follow the alternating storyline format because that’s how interesting non-fiction is written. This is my greatest worry, and when I suspect it is at work, the aspect of the work I find most dissatisfying.

Multiple Afterwords

An afterword for every printed edition seems to be the norm now, and while these occasionally discuss additional research or information that has come to light in the intervening years, they also tend to be self-indulgent, talking about the way the book has affected the author’s life, thanking the audience for their outpouring of support, and so on. While this is less disgusting than the author inserting his life in the narrative, it is still pathetic.

Some Exceptions

While “Halsey’s Typhoon” follows the alternating stories method above, it is movement from ship to ship within the fleet, without disturbing the chronology, and the story is about a typhoon occurring across hundreds of square miles and affecting dozens of ships simultaneously. This is therefore the best and most natural way of telling the story.

Heavenly Intrigue is also told as two separate stories, mostly intertwined. In this case the story tells the lives of Kepler and Brahe before merging to talk about their interaction, as they were contemporaries. In that sense it is less jarring than in some books, although it does feel like the important parts of the book, the time they were working together, is subordinate to their lives as pure biography, maybe because they worked together only for a short time. This is another book that is guilty of beginning at the end, however.

Spilling the Beans, Clarissa Dickson-Wright’s autobiography, is entirely free of the criticism I leveled against the general category of “non-fiction” above. This might be because it is an autobiography, or it might be because Clarissa Dickson-Wright (of the tv cooking show Two Fat Ladies) is one of the very few people qualified to write their autobiography and simply knows how to present a true story in an interesting way, but whatever the reason, this is by far the best of the non-fiction reading I’ve done this year, and a hearty recommendation of it is the best possible place to end this tirade.

In reverse chronological order:

Super Bowl XLV (2011) made me very happy, because I am descended of Packers fans and grew up watching a bunch of terrible Packers teams stink up the league, interwoven among which were the Super Bowl XXXI winners and Super Bowl XXXII losers. This winning team also contains SJSU alum James Jones at wide-out.

True Grit (2010) was delightful. Everyone in it did yeoman work.

Heavenly Intrigue (2004), is a non-fiction book that posits that Tycho Brahe’s murderer was none other than Johannes Kepler. Every argument is circumstantial and they take a Discovery Channel like approach of speculating wildly based on very little scientific evidence, but there is at least some reason to believe that Brahe may have died of Mercury poisoning, and the excerpts from Kepler’s diaries paint him as at least an asshole, and possibly a crazy person. Still, the book was neither particularly convincing nor particularly entertaining, so I’d give it a miss.

The Chronicles of Narnia (1950′s) is very well known, and all I want to say here is that I read the books so that I would be caught up for the Dawn Treader movie, and was a little underwhelmed. There’s much more to say and I may indulge that impulse soon, but for now, I will remind young readers that it is foolish to lock yourself in a wardrobe, or I guess to shut yourself inside a fridge or the trunk of a car, if you live in present day America and don’t have a lot of heavy wooden wardrobes lying around. Maybe don’t shut yourself in one of those wardrobe boxes you get from the moving company.

Moby-Dick (1851) Starts strong and moves along pretty fast for the first 30 chapters or so, but gets into some weird digressions and becomes somewhat… overwrought towards the end. Everyone knows it as a story about a man who wants revenge against the uncaring forces of nature, and it is that, but what actually makes Ahab unlikable isn’t his mania, it’s his grandiose speech. That said, there is not a hint of whale dick in the book, which I found refreshing. I kept expecting it lurking around every corner. I’m sure that says more about me than anything, but since no one but spam-bots ever see this page, I’ll let it slide unedited.