September Book Log
Another month gone, another interesting batch of books read!
80. Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't be Tamed by Lane Greene
A look at various ways in which people try to control or "tame" language (especially English) by imposing unnatural and artificial rules on it, attempting to stop it from changing, or reducing it to one Only Right Way of speaking, and why such attempts are generally both wrong-headed and useless. Along the way, the author takes some entertaining shots at self-appointed grammar experts who don't actually know what they're talking about, looks at how politicians use language to try to manipulate people (although often not as well as we might fear), explains the difficulties of computer translation, and samples some artificially invented languages, among other things.
There's not actually a whole lot here that was new to me, but Lane is good enough at coming up with interesting examples and vivid, useful metaphors that it still managed to feel fairly fresh. And there's a lot to be said, I think, for the clear and careful way in which he avoids a simplistic blanket condemnation of anyone who smacks of linguistic prescriptivism, but instead takes a nuanced approach, one that has little time for people who make false claims about how language works or unrealistic ones about how it should work while firmly embracing those who offer good, informed advice about formal writing.
Rating: 4/5
81. Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry's followup to his earlier Mythos. This one, as the title suggests, focuses on the mortal (or semi-mortal) heroes of Greek mythology, including Perseus, Heracles (aka Hercules), Bellerophon, Orpheus, Jason, Atalanta, Oedipus, and Theseus, retelling their stories in a casual style, with lots of informative footnotes.
I didn't find this one quite as satisfying as the delightful first volume, although whether that's due to Fry's writing here or to the fact that I don't find the heroes as inherently interesting as the gods, I'm not sure. I will say that the breezy, somewhat tongue-in-cheek dialog he gives the characters works well as a method for humanizing some of them, but does others few favors. Perseus, in particular, just ends up being kind of annoying.
Still, it was overall a fun, entertaining, and -- given that I'd forgotten the details of some of these myths and probably read sanitized versions of others -- educational read. And it definitely does remind me that there are reasons why these tales are still being told after so many thousands of years: they're just really cool and interesting stories, and it's surprisingly easy to get caught up in them even now.
Rating: 4/5
82. The Dandy Annual 2004
The third and final of a batch of British comics collections a friend lent me in order to expand my humorous horizons. I found the Beano annual from the year before an interesting mix of stuff that was genuinely funny and stuff that just seemed kind of of dumb. This one, though, really didn't have much of either. There were a couple of jokes I found mildly amusing, but nothing that came close to making me laugh out loud. But there was nothing that had me wanting to roll my eyes, either. Of course, at my age I'm hardly the target audience, and once again I'm pretty sure I'd have found more entertainment value in it all in my youth, based on my memories of reading the American funny pages (a lot of the contents of which are no longer nearly as funny to me, either).
In any case, it has been interesting, at least, to take a look at these. If nothing else, I think I now understand a few references from the other side of the Pond that might have previously flown over my head, if only by virtue of having found out who Desperate Dan is.
Rating: This one gets an apologetic 2.5/5 from me for being comparatively bland, although I can't help feeling I should maybe tack on another half star for hypothetical kid-me's presumable opinion.
83. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
A collection of short stories on the theme of love (mostly romantic, but with a bit of familial love scattered in there, too) by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who is best known as the creator and executive producer of Bojack Horseman. And if you've watched Bojack, you might, perhaps, have a hint of the flavor of these: weird and funny and painful and whimsical, with a sharp core of something unexpectedly truthful to them. Some of them are traditional short stories of varying levels of realism, from an ordinary, average failed workplace romance to the surreal experiences of a scientist who enters a dimensional portal to Opposite Land. Others are odd little snippets in the form of things like a "missed connections" ad or rules for playing the game Taboo, which sounds like it might be a bit gimmicky but works wonderfully well in Bob-Waksberg's capable hands.
As with any short story collection, I liked some of these better than others, but my least favorite ones were merely reasonably good, while the best of them were absolutely fantastic. And it leaned more towards the latter than the former, overall, too, making the collection as a whole something of a joy to read.
Rating: 4.5/5
84. Paranormality: Why We Believe the Impossible by Richard Wiseman
An exploration of supposedly supernatural phenomena from mind-reading to prophetic dreams to ghosts, by someone who is way more fascinated by the psychology of why we seemingly experience these phenomena than in postulating otherworldly explanations for them. Most of what's in here wasn't particularly new to me, but some of the examples and specific details were, and overall I found it an interesting, entertaining read, anyway. Wiseman's writing is breezy, friendly, and laced with humor. It's also a pleasantly interactive experience, as he includes some little tests and exercises and such for the reader and offers light-hearted but genuine advice for things like how to make a table move at a seance or how to induce an out of body experience. (The book is, sadly, slightly less interactive now than it was ten years ago when it was published, though, as it includes a bunch of links and QR codes intended to take you to videos containing supplemental material like interviews and demonstrations of psychic readings, which no longer work. Well, I didn't try the QR codes, but the links provided with them just take you to the front page of Wiseman's Wordpress site now, not to the relevant material. One of the hazards of tying an ephemeral medium to a more permanent one. Fortunately, none of them seem remotely essential, anyway.)
Wiseman does, along the way, talk about some rather dark things, such as the brief history of Jonestown in a section on cults, but overall it's a nice demonstration of the fact that skepticism and science can be just as fun and full of wonder and fascination as any tale of the supernatural, and it teaches readers some interesting stuff about human psychology along the way. You could do a lot worse as an introduction to to this sort of deeper thinking about the paranormal.
Rating: 4/5
85. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Man, it's kind of hard to even know how to talk about this book, especially without getting too far into spoiler territory, but I'll try. It starts out as the story of Sarah, a teenager attending a fancy performing arts high school in the 1980s, and her relationship with a classmate David, as catalyzed by their teacher, a pretentious former Broadway actor with some honestly kind of disturbing ideas about appropriate acting exercises for teens. This story is very well-written, but something about it did feel a bit off to me. A bit over-dramatic, a bit hard to fully believe in. Something like that.
Then, halfway through, the novel switches to a new POV that maybe puts a lot of things that felt not-quite-right in the first half into a new perspective and makes them seem forgivable, or even clever. Unfortunately, though, the voice accompanying that new POV was rather irritating to me, and ultimately I didn't find it a whole lot more convincing. In the end, I'm left with the feeling of an author trying to pull off something really bold and ambitious and interesting, which I admire in theory but which, for me at least, didn't entirely work.
Rating: 3/5
86. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is, I think, probably a work a lot more people have a sort of vague, second-hand familiarity with than have actually read it. Which is kind of a pity, because it's a fantastic little horror story, and one that's still very readable, two centuries and change after it was written.
This tiny volume from Penguin, published in 1995, also contains another long poem, "Christabel." This one's another story in verse, about a young woman who encounters what appears to be a lost waif in the woods, who bewitches her. It's an interesting tale, although not quite as much so as the Ancient Mariner's, but I found the ending disappointingly abrupt. I'm not sure what I was expecting from it, but it was definitely something more than that.
There are also four shorter poems: There's the unfinished "Kubla Khan," famous for the story of its creation and its rather vivid imagery. Also "Dejection: An Ode" which coveys the feelings and ideas it's going for well enough, but really wasn't to my taste, and "Frost at Midnight" and "The Nightingale," both of which were sort of warm and lovely, if not nearly as memorable as his most famous works. And, I'm afraid, if you're looking for a more in-depth analysis that that, you're looking at very much the wrong person, as I'm very much just an "I know what I like" type when it comes to poetry.
Rating: I'm giving the collection overall a 4/5, but the title poem itself gets another half-star and then some.
87. Magician: Master by Raymond E. Feist
I read Magician: Apprentice, which was the first half of the story continued in this one, a while back and found it really disappointing. But I already had this volume, so I figured I might was well get around to finishing it. I think maybe this one was a bit better, in that it had some mildly interesting worldbuilding stuff once we got away from the Discount Tolkien World we started off in for a bit. But it still didn't do much for me. The pacing is deeply weird, there's a lot of telling when there should be showing, the plot's not super interesting even if there are a couple of cool ideal buried in in somewhere, and the characters are pretty flat. Well, except for the female characters. Those don't even rise to the level of flatness. They're basically zero-dimensional.
Yeah, I think we're going to have to chalk this up as yet another series whose popularity will have to remain mystifying to me.
Rating: 2.5/5
88. Rush: The Unofficial Illustrated History by Martin Popoff
A coffeetable-sized volume looking back through the entire career of Canada's iconic rock trio. (Well, their entire career through 2013, when this updated edition was published, but, of course, that does pretty much cover it.) It goes over Rush's output album-by-album and tour-by-tour, and features photos of the band from across the years and of lots of Rush memorabilia from the author's collection. It also features a short review of every album from a variety of rock critics, which were kind of interesting to read even when their opinions were very wrong. The text includes a lot of quotes from band members and other relevant people, mostly, I think, taken from interviews made during the time periods under discussion.
As a history of the band, it's far too slight to be quite satisfying, but it is a nice, pleasant walk down memory lane for Rush fans. My one big complaint about it involves a design choice: the text is printed somewhat lightly against a background patterned with faint images, and it's genuinely a bit difficult to read in anything but ideal lighting conditions. I'm willing to forgive it a lot, though, because, in the final pages, it alerted me to the existence of a remixed version of Vapor Trails, which I'd somehow utterly missed -- I know, I know, I'm clearly a Fake Rush Fan -- and had been grumpily longing for for years when I could have already had it in my hot little ears.
Rating: I was kind of set to give this a slightly stingy 3.5/5, not for any great reason, just for being a bit physically hard to read and not as in-depth as I might have liked, but the Vapor Trails thing has put me in such a good mood, I'm giving it a 4/5 instead. Hey, nobody ever said my ratings couldn't be idiosyncratic and arbitrary!
89. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The first story in this collection -- "The Finkelstein 5," which was clearly inspired by the murder of Trayvon Martin and a hundred similar acts of violence -- absolutely devastated me. It was unbelievably powerful, and I was utterly unprepared for it. I think what made it so effective was the fact that, on the one hand, it felt deeply, darkly satirical and yet, on the other, it barely seemed exaggerated at all. It was like a giant punch in the gut, and after finishing it, I had to put the book down for a while to recover.
Part of me thinks that it's almost a shame that that was the first story in the collection, as it overshadows most of what comes after it, even though what comes after it is still very good. There's a fascinating and often disturbing combination, here, of the bizarre and the mundane, with the frequent appearance of a streak of violence that seems equally at home in both worlds. The writing is terrific, too: never showy, but always absorbing and effective.
And then we come to the final story, "Through the Flash," about a town living through the same day over and over, and the collection ends damn near as strong as it began. This one is complex, horrific, and affecting in a way that sneaks up on you from several different directions. As I turned the final page and shut the book, I found myself murmuring "wow" out loud. Astonishing stuff.
Rating: This one gets the full 5/5, which it would easily earn just from those first and last stories alone.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1013386.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
80. Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't be Tamed by Lane Greene
A look at various ways in which people try to control or "tame" language (especially English) by imposing unnatural and artificial rules on it, attempting to stop it from changing, or reducing it to one Only Right Way of speaking, and why such attempts are generally both wrong-headed and useless. Along the way, the author takes some entertaining shots at self-appointed grammar experts who don't actually know what they're talking about, looks at how politicians use language to try to manipulate people (although often not as well as we might fear), explains the difficulties of computer translation, and samples some artificially invented languages, among other things.
There's not actually a whole lot here that was new to me, but Lane is good enough at coming up with interesting examples and vivid, useful metaphors that it still managed to feel fairly fresh. And there's a lot to be said, I think, for the clear and careful way in which he avoids a simplistic blanket condemnation of anyone who smacks of linguistic prescriptivism, but instead takes a nuanced approach, one that has little time for people who make false claims about how language works or unrealistic ones about how it should work while firmly embracing those who offer good, informed advice about formal writing.
Rating: 4/5
81. Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry's followup to his earlier Mythos. This one, as the title suggests, focuses on the mortal (or semi-mortal) heroes of Greek mythology, including Perseus, Heracles (aka Hercules), Bellerophon, Orpheus, Jason, Atalanta, Oedipus, and Theseus, retelling their stories in a casual style, with lots of informative footnotes.
I didn't find this one quite as satisfying as the delightful first volume, although whether that's due to Fry's writing here or to the fact that I don't find the heroes as inherently interesting as the gods, I'm not sure. I will say that the breezy, somewhat tongue-in-cheek dialog he gives the characters works well as a method for humanizing some of them, but does others few favors. Perseus, in particular, just ends up being kind of annoying.
Still, it was overall a fun, entertaining, and -- given that I'd forgotten the details of some of these myths and probably read sanitized versions of others -- educational read. And it definitely does remind me that there are reasons why these tales are still being told after so many thousands of years: they're just really cool and interesting stories, and it's surprisingly easy to get caught up in them even now.
Rating: 4/5
82. The Dandy Annual 2004
The third and final of a batch of British comics collections a friend lent me in order to expand my humorous horizons. I found the Beano annual from the year before an interesting mix of stuff that was genuinely funny and stuff that just seemed kind of of dumb. This one, though, really didn't have much of either. There were a couple of jokes I found mildly amusing, but nothing that came close to making me laugh out loud. But there was nothing that had me wanting to roll my eyes, either. Of course, at my age I'm hardly the target audience, and once again I'm pretty sure I'd have found more entertainment value in it all in my youth, based on my memories of reading the American funny pages (a lot of the contents of which are no longer nearly as funny to me, either).
In any case, it has been interesting, at least, to take a look at these. If nothing else, I think I now understand a few references from the other side of the Pond that might have previously flown over my head, if only by virtue of having found out who Desperate Dan is.
Rating: This one gets an apologetic 2.5/5 from me for being comparatively bland, although I can't help feeling I should maybe tack on another half star for hypothetical kid-me's presumable opinion.
83. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
A collection of short stories on the theme of love (mostly romantic, but with a bit of familial love scattered in there, too) by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who is best known as the creator and executive producer of Bojack Horseman. And if you've watched Bojack, you might, perhaps, have a hint of the flavor of these: weird and funny and painful and whimsical, with a sharp core of something unexpectedly truthful to them. Some of them are traditional short stories of varying levels of realism, from an ordinary, average failed workplace romance to the surreal experiences of a scientist who enters a dimensional portal to Opposite Land. Others are odd little snippets in the form of things like a "missed connections" ad or rules for playing the game Taboo, which sounds like it might be a bit gimmicky but works wonderfully well in Bob-Waksberg's capable hands.
As with any short story collection, I liked some of these better than others, but my least favorite ones were merely reasonably good, while the best of them were absolutely fantastic. And it leaned more towards the latter than the former, overall, too, making the collection as a whole something of a joy to read.
Rating: 4.5/5
84. Paranormality: Why We Believe the Impossible by Richard Wiseman
An exploration of supposedly supernatural phenomena from mind-reading to prophetic dreams to ghosts, by someone who is way more fascinated by the psychology of why we seemingly experience these phenomena than in postulating otherworldly explanations for them. Most of what's in here wasn't particularly new to me, but some of the examples and specific details were, and overall I found it an interesting, entertaining read, anyway. Wiseman's writing is breezy, friendly, and laced with humor. It's also a pleasantly interactive experience, as he includes some little tests and exercises and such for the reader and offers light-hearted but genuine advice for things like how to make a table move at a seance or how to induce an out of body experience. (The book is, sadly, slightly less interactive now than it was ten years ago when it was published, though, as it includes a bunch of links and QR codes intended to take you to videos containing supplemental material like interviews and demonstrations of psychic readings, which no longer work. Well, I didn't try the QR codes, but the links provided with them just take you to the front page of Wiseman's Wordpress site now, not to the relevant material. One of the hazards of tying an ephemeral medium to a more permanent one. Fortunately, none of them seem remotely essential, anyway.)
Wiseman does, along the way, talk about some rather dark things, such as the brief history of Jonestown in a section on cults, but overall it's a nice demonstration of the fact that skepticism and science can be just as fun and full of wonder and fascination as any tale of the supernatural, and it teaches readers some interesting stuff about human psychology along the way. You could do a lot worse as an introduction to to this sort of deeper thinking about the paranormal.
Rating: 4/5
85. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Man, it's kind of hard to even know how to talk about this book, especially without getting too far into spoiler territory, but I'll try. It starts out as the story of Sarah, a teenager attending a fancy performing arts high school in the 1980s, and her relationship with a classmate David, as catalyzed by their teacher, a pretentious former Broadway actor with some honestly kind of disturbing ideas about appropriate acting exercises for teens. This story is very well-written, but something about it did feel a bit off to me. A bit over-dramatic, a bit hard to fully believe in. Something like that.
Then, halfway through, the novel switches to a new POV that maybe puts a lot of things that felt not-quite-right in the first half into a new perspective and makes them seem forgivable, or even clever. Unfortunately, though, the voice accompanying that new POV was rather irritating to me, and ultimately I didn't find it a whole lot more convincing. In the end, I'm left with the feeling of an author trying to pull off something really bold and ambitious and interesting, which I admire in theory but which, for me at least, didn't entirely work.
Rating: 3/5
86. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is, I think, probably a work a lot more people have a sort of vague, second-hand familiarity with than have actually read it. Which is kind of a pity, because it's a fantastic little horror story, and one that's still very readable, two centuries and change after it was written.
This tiny volume from Penguin, published in 1995, also contains another long poem, "Christabel." This one's another story in verse, about a young woman who encounters what appears to be a lost waif in the woods, who bewitches her. It's an interesting tale, although not quite as much so as the Ancient Mariner's, but I found the ending disappointingly abrupt. I'm not sure what I was expecting from it, but it was definitely something more than that.
There are also four shorter poems: There's the unfinished "Kubla Khan," famous for the story of its creation and its rather vivid imagery. Also "Dejection: An Ode" which coveys the feelings and ideas it's going for well enough, but really wasn't to my taste, and "Frost at Midnight" and "The Nightingale," both of which were sort of warm and lovely, if not nearly as memorable as his most famous works. And, I'm afraid, if you're looking for a more in-depth analysis that that, you're looking at very much the wrong person, as I'm very much just an "I know what I like" type when it comes to poetry.
Rating: I'm giving the collection overall a 4/5, but the title poem itself gets another half-star and then some.
87. Magician: Master by Raymond E. Feist
I read Magician: Apprentice, which was the first half of the story continued in this one, a while back and found it really disappointing. But I already had this volume, so I figured I might was well get around to finishing it. I think maybe this one was a bit better, in that it had some mildly interesting worldbuilding stuff once we got away from the Discount Tolkien World we started off in for a bit. But it still didn't do much for me. The pacing is deeply weird, there's a lot of telling when there should be showing, the plot's not super interesting even if there are a couple of cool ideal buried in in somewhere, and the characters are pretty flat. Well, except for the female characters. Those don't even rise to the level of flatness. They're basically zero-dimensional.
Yeah, I think we're going to have to chalk this up as yet another series whose popularity will have to remain mystifying to me.
Rating: 2.5/5
88. Rush: The Unofficial Illustrated History by Martin Popoff
A coffeetable-sized volume looking back through the entire career of Canada's iconic rock trio. (Well, their entire career through 2013, when this updated edition was published, but, of course, that does pretty much cover it.) It goes over Rush's output album-by-album and tour-by-tour, and features photos of the band from across the years and of lots of Rush memorabilia from the author's collection. It also features a short review of every album from a variety of rock critics, which were kind of interesting to read even when their opinions were very wrong. The text includes a lot of quotes from band members and other relevant people, mostly, I think, taken from interviews made during the time periods under discussion.
As a history of the band, it's far too slight to be quite satisfying, but it is a nice, pleasant walk down memory lane for Rush fans. My one big complaint about it involves a design choice: the text is printed somewhat lightly against a background patterned with faint images, and it's genuinely a bit difficult to read in anything but ideal lighting conditions. I'm willing to forgive it a lot, though, because, in the final pages, it alerted me to the existence of a remixed version of Vapor Trails, which I'd somehow utterly missed -- I know, I know, I'm clearly a Fake Rush Fan -- and had been grumpily longing for for years when I could have already had it in my hot little ears.
Rating: I was kind of set to give this a slightly stingy 3.5/5, not for any great reason, just for being a bit physically hard to read and not as in-depth as I might have liked, but the Vapor Trails thing has put me in such a good mood, I'm giving it a 4/5 instead. Hey, nobody ever said my ratings couldn't be idiosyncratic and arbitrary!
89. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The first story in this collection -- "The Finkelstein 5," which was clearly inspired by the murder of Trayvon Martin and a hundred similar acts of violence -- absolutely devastated me. It was unbelievably powerful, and I was utterly unprepared for it. I think what made it so effective was the fact that, on the one hand, it felt deeply, darkly satirical and yet, on the other, it barely seemed exaggerated at all. It was like a giant punch in the gut, and after finishing it, I had to put the book down for a while to recover.
Part of me thinks that it's almost a shame that that was the first story in the collection, as it overshadows most of what comes after it, even though what comes after it is still very good. There's a fascinating and often disturbing combination, here, of the bizarre and the mundane, with the frequent appearance of a streak of violence that seems equally at home in both worlds. The writing is terrific, too: never showy, but always absorbing and effective.
And then we come to the final story, "Through the Flash," about a town living through the same day over and over, and the collection ends damn near as strong as it began. This one is complex, horrific, and affecting in a way that sneaks up on you from several different directions. As I turned the final page and shut the book, I found myself murmuring "wow" out loud. Astonishing stuff.
Rating: This one gets the full 5/5, which it would easily earn just from those first and last stories alone.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1013386.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.