December's Deliciously Delirifacient Dabblings Into Fictional Diversions

[GOLLUM]

Please post here what you are reading as we officially enter what we call in the Southern Hemisphere at least the 'silly season'..

 

[Lord Soth]

Finished The Iron Jackal - another fun filled foray by Chris Wooding in that Firefly-esque universe. Still lots of scope for future adventures and it doesn't seem to be ending any time soon.

Reading War in Heaven, Gavin Smith's follow-up to Veteren. A little slow to get going, and disappointingly for me has the same nano-machine-like threat which seems to be in a lot of sci-fi at the moment (like Asher's Jain or Corey's similar bugbear in Leviathan Wakes).

In Audiobooks I am now onto the 3rd in Michael Cobley's Humanity's Fire Trilogy, The Ascendant Stars. What started of as a pretty run of the mill series has really taken off and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'm not sure if he has written anything else but I'll keep an eye on this chap from now on.

 

[elvet]

I'm on the last section of a re-read of The Golden Key (Rawn, Roberson and Elliot). I finished the Diviners (Melanie Rawn) which is a prequel and develops the base for the magic paintings used in the Golden Key. When I finished it, I just had to pick up the continuing saga of the Grijalva family.

 

[D_Davis]

All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky, by Joe R. Lansdale

3.5 Stars

This is a very solid book. But I was hoping for more.

All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky (wins my award for best book title of the year), is The Grapes of Wrath done up Lansdale Style. Being a YA novel (not his first, despite what it says on the jacket), it contains most of what makes Lansdale Lansdale, but dialed back a few notches. I don't read much YA fiction at all, but I'd bet it would be safe to say that it is better written than most - it is from Lansdale after all.

And ultimately that's what left me a tad bid disappointed - I wanted more emotion and pathos. I thought it would be more like The Bottoms, or Lansdale's crowning achievement A Fine Dark Line. While it is more adventurous and exciting than either of those novels, it doesn't contain the same emotional punch. This was especially surprising given the short novel's grim beginnings - three youngsters from Oklahoma find themselves orphaned after their parents die during the dirty thirties.

I was expecting a journey of self-discovery and loss innocence, and while those aspects are in place the tale Lansdale weaves is more genre-focused, complete with gangsters, a bank heist, and a showdown at a carnival. And although all of these elements are handled with the care and skill I've come to expect from my favorite East Texas yarn spinner, it also felt kind of dialed in.

I will give credit to Lansdale, though, for depicting what I think is his first good Christian character. It's no secret that he harps on and on about how evil and corrupt he thinks Christianity is, and usually his religious characters are evil incarnate. And so when he describes a character as being a charitable Christian, I thought she was going to end up being a she-devil in disguise poised and ready to do the most despicable things. And then I was surprised to discover that she really was a good person.

I'd like it if this book became popular in schools. I can see it being read along side something like Where the Red Fern Grows. I think boys and girls would both like it, as Lansdale does a fantastic job of creating both male and female characters. And while I might have been somewhat disappointed due to high expectations, a new young reader just discovering Lansdale will probably really like it. And boy howdy will they be surprised by what else that guy has in store for them.

 

[Adasunshine]

Still laughing at and loving Dear Fatty by Dawn French.

Am making this book last as long as possible, I'm enjoying it so much and am treating myself to one chapter per night at bedtime!

xx

 

[ragtagblues]

Currently re-reading Ringworld by Larry Niven . . . . a classic that I am sure I will come back to at various stages in my life.

A fascinating book on health psychology, although I will not bore you with the details, is taking much of my time.

 

[Extollager]

What I'm reading right now includes C. S. Lewis's little-known and very fine late fantasy Till We Have Faces (I think this is my 9th reading since around 1972) --

and (thanks to JD Worthington) Moorcock's Hawkmoon book Sorcerer's Amulet --

-- and then I'm also reading pieces from McKelway's Reporting at Wit's End, pieces from The New Yorker 1930s-60s:

 

[soulsinging]

The Galton Case- Ross MacDonald

 

[Perpetual Man]

Finished Goblin Moon by our very own Teresa Edgerton, and am now moving onto Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. (Whether I finish that by the end of the year is a massive question!)

 

[D_Davis]

Till we have Faces is fantastic.

This morning I started a re-read of The Exorcist; I'm reading the 40th Anniversary Edtion.

Blatty writes circles around any of his contemporaries. One of the all time great writers of dialog - a true master craftsman.

 

[dask]

Not sure I ever saw that Lancer Moorcock before. Looks great.

Finished THE SHAPE OF BOOKS TO COME by J. Douglas Adams, which I thought planned and written extremely well, and have now started John Erskine's THE DELIGHT OF GREAT BOOKS which could be even better in research and execution.

 

[j d worthington]

Finished Lars Walker's Blood and Judgment last night... and I'm afraid I have very mixed feelings about this one. At his best, Walker is a very good writer, capable of telling a gripping tale with a genuine sense of the time and place (both modern and ancient); he is often good at handling characters; and he has some very interesting twists and turns.

Set against that, however, is a tendency to "preach" by apparently raising questions, but these questions are phrased in such a way as to present one side as definitely more "reasonable" than the other; and, unfortunately, doing this at the expense of the credibility of characters and at times the pacing of the story and the flow of the writing. All too often, the situations he sets up to raise and knock over these arguments leave the characters (which he has previously done rather well with) coming off more as caricatures... this was especially true for me with the character of Bess, who was given a very solid presence and a nice roundedness, considering how little she actually on the page... until the final turn of the tale, when she simply strikes me as a cardboard character mouthing the sort of lines I've heard all too often attributed to opponents of the religious view. As for Eric... the less said, the better, in my view.

Don't get me wrong: Even though I am completely at odds with Christianity's worldview and what so much of it implies, I am not against an exploration of that in literature, especially if done by a believer who is sincere and has thought these issues out. This is one of the things I like about William Peter Blatty's writings; I admire it in Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Blish's A Case of Conscience; I think Tolkien introduced it quite beautifully at the end of his essay "On Fairy-Stories" and blended it quite well into his fantasy writings; and even have no problem with the scene dealing with Aslan's sacrifice in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In each of these cases, it felt it belonged, and was organic with the work in question. Here... these debates, arguments, or whatever you wish to call them, stick out like a sore thumb; and they tend to hit you over the head in the same way as do the worst of Heinlein's tendencies toward didacticism.

And that's a pity, because Walker shows great abilities. At times his writing can be quite powerful, and even melodious. But the things I speak of here did at times override the balance of the tale, and mar the book a great deal, for me. (The arguments themselves I won't get into, as that is a different matter. My concern here is for how artistically they are handled, and on that score I can't say I'm impressed.)

Nonetheless... for those who do like a little something different in their fantasy, and enjoy religious/moral/ethical debate in their work, I think they might enjoy this one. As for Walker as a writer overall: He has talent and ability, and for all I know my objections here may be to things which he handles much better in other writings. I have another of his novels on hand to read, but I will probably hold off on that for at least a couple of weeks, as I want to go into it fresh and see what impressions I get from it.*

Other than that, I am going to do my best to get Hoffmann's "The Sandman" read sunday, and I am also moving into a slightly different phase of my Lovecraftian research, putting him and his work into context by reading numerous works by his colleagues and other Weird Tales and pulp writers of the time, beginning with Clark Ashton Smith's juvenile The Sword of Zagan....

*I feel almost a bit churlish giving such a response, considering that the book was a gift from Extollager, and was inscribed for me by the author (to both of which, despite my comments above, my thanks); but I'm afraid the critic in me can't do other than be honest about my responses to what I read; hence....

 

[J-Sun]

Finished Ian Watson's The Jonah Kit.

My first encounter with Ian Watson was years ago with The Books of the Black Current which I recall liking in some strange way, but I didn't follow up for years, until I ran into four Watson books, one after the other, and bought them without reading any. (The Jonah Kit, for instance, cost 50 cents US.) My last encounter was a mostly unpleasant one with The Embedding.

In this one, the publisher of the paperback (Bantam) criminally messed me up right out of the gate. The front cover blurb says "A child and a dead cosmonaut -- joined in the brain of a giant whale!". Watson writes the whale chapters in a stream of alien consciousness and he chooses to expose what's going on in the human chapters in gradually increasing dribs and drabs, so it took me a long time to realize that the blurb was wrong and had misled me: a dead cosmonaut is in the brain of a child and a zombified blind guy is in the brain of the whale. And the blurb on the "page before the title page" (what is that called? The "recto of what would be the frontispiece"? The very first page) is taken from Chapter 27 of 29 (page 196 of 214, i.e., the climactic finale) which completely ruins things. And it didn't help that the closest thing to a protagonist was named Richard Kimble who, to me, is The Fugitive, so I suffered from constant cognitive dissonance - maybe generally appropriate in a Watson novel, but surely specifically accidental.

That aside, this has a lot in common with The Embedding, but is better, overall. I don't want to get too much into it for fear of spoiling things for anyone who hasn't read it and would be interested in it but it hinges on mathematical models of minds being "imprinted" on other brain structures, the "observer makes the world" aspects of quantum mechanics and consensus reality, and the nature of language/perception/intelligence. It has probably four main story threads: American mad scientists in Mexico, Russian mad scientists in far east Russia, Japanese not-so-mad scientists and American spooks in Japan, and the semi-human whale in the Pacific.

The following are just descriptions of my personal, subjective, somewhat facetious impressions. It has a gallery of unpleasant human characters and some 1970s-style whales. It has a lot of "tell, don't show", plenty of "as you know, Bob", a heavy wallop of generalized misanthropy, some misogyny, and lots of anti-Americanism (but not as virulent as The Embedding), and is somewhat comically overwritten or mis-written in places. Chapter 10's cosmic vulture characterization and Chapter 24's two mind-shatteringly divergent descriptions given for a couple's sexual encounter being particularly good examples, along with the pure narrative infodump about Ruth's character (which is no Thomas Hardy and no Eustacia Vye).

That said, while I was about to give up as I approached the halfway point, it got somewhat better as it went on, even attaining a kind of demented power in the Altamont-the-size-of-Woodstock scenario in Chapter 16. And the ending, while not entirely satisfying, was much better than the muddle that was the The Embedding. The book was more consistent (or gradual in its inconsistency) from beginning to end. And there's no questioning it's jam-packed with philosophico-scientific ideas and opinions.

Basically, I didn't much like it, but it certainly had interesting elements and, for people who'd like the good parts more than they'd dislike the bad (or who would see what I take as bad to be good), I could recommend it.

 

[Extollager]

JD, were there any well-known authors whose work came to mind as having affinities with the book, as you read Lars Walker's Blood and Judgment? I find myself thinking of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions.

 

[j d worthington]

Yes, that is one. And, especially with Chapter XV, the tone and manner of Anderson's The Broken Sword and parts of The Merman's Children. There's a bit, too, of the final portions of the Pratt/de Camp Land of Unreason there, too, as Fred Barber comes to realize his true identity.

 

[Extollager]

Yes, I would agree, JD.

I'm enjoying Moorcock's Sorcerer's Amulet. I'm wrapping up (I think!) a very busy time and this has been a good one to relax with!

 

[j d worthington]

Glad you're enjoying it! Yes, the Hawkmoon books (at least the original quartet) are good adventure tales with a dash of eeriness here and there, but not too much of the philosophical discussion to weigh them down (albeit there is, of course, some, as that was at the center of Moorcock's entire conception). They are not among my personal favorites, but I do enjoy them, and they have quite a following....

Smith's The Sword of Zagan (written when he was in his teens) is definitely proving to be a cut above the earlier The Black Diamonds stylistically, though lacking the complications of plot and the dash of the supernatural to be found in that novel. It is still definitely juvenilia, but interesting juvenilia, and shows a side of Smith few (seemingly) are familiar with....

 

[GOLLUM]

Embarking on Arno Schmidt's collected stories. Schmidt is certainly widely regarded as one of Germany's finest post war authors and this the best introduction possible to this author's ouevre. Prior to this publication there were very few of Schmidt's stories translated into English and whilst I can read and write German my skills at interpreting his work do not compare to this ready made English translation by John E. Woods, the respected translator. Some of you may recall this was one of the books I featured in the Untranslated Classics thread I recently posted here.

Schmidt is a writer who can be loosely termed as belonging to what I will coin as the post-Romanticism movement, which aims to retain certain elements of the roots of German Romanticism whilst distancing itself form its more Nationalistic tendencies; an experimentalist even more, according to what I have read, challenging than Joyce with allusions to Freud....an interesting segway in fact for me to mention that I will try to read Hoffman's Sandman but not unfortunately before the weekend by which time I can only hope J.D. and others here have still left me with something to add to the discussion...

Blurb for Schmidt's collected stories: Gathered here are all of the short stories that Arno Schmidt wished to preserve. They are grouped under three headings: the first two, Tales from Island Street and Sturenburg Stories, are a perfect spot to test Schmidtian waters, to hear the voice of a master storyteller. Twenty-five short tales written for a wide audience, they all share an eerie whimsy. It is as if Schmidt's beloved German Romantics were here with new stories for the modern reader. And then there is Country Matters, longer, more experimental stories written for the adventurous reader. Joyce and Freud are constant inspirations, but Schmidt's unique brand of intellectual ribaldry, shot through with the pain of our common humanity, enlivens all ten stories. Of the thirty-five stories in this volume, only two have previously appeared in English translation. Ranging from Schmidt at his most inviting and whimsical to Schmidt at his most cerebral and complex, the stories are a perfect introduction to his work.

 

[biodroid]

Going to finish off Killing Floor by Lee Child then onto Stephen King's 11/22/63

 

[Fried Egg]

Just finished Mark Lawrence's "Prince of Thorns" and was pleasantly suprised. I don't read much contemporary fantasy but this made me glad I haven't abandoned it entirely.

Now onto read Ian Whates' new SF anthology: "Solaris Rising".