Souls and Bodies, The Sons of Heaven
Just two this time, but they're on the long side. I have otherwise been busy reading unidentified research materials and writing IF comp reviews (it's conceivable some of them will be amusing even without familiarity with the games/IF community, but I dunno).
Souls and Bodies (David Lodge): If you had asked me a year ago what kind of book I would be least likely to read as a result of the book club, "a fictionalized analysis of the evolving views of Catholics on human sexuality from the 50s to the 70s" would not have made the list, but only because it would not have even occurred to me that I needed to add it.
Like you might guess from the summary, this book is pretty slow going at first. The whole point is to show how different people evolve over time and react to the church's position (which is itself evolving, of course), so you have to start out by introducing nine or ten characters. The author has a section where he explains how each character has one distinguishing characteristic and it's cued by their name, but, really, this didn't actually help me follow the narrative better. On the other hand, by the time I Was halfway through I had everybody sorted out, and you really are able to do some interesting things as an author with that many characters to play around with -- this one's a nun, this one's gay, this one's crazy, this one's dating a divorced guy, and you still have space to show multiple variations of more conventional relationships.
The other thing that made it slow going at the start is that it turns out Catholics have a lot of weird rules. Obviously as a Jew I can't help but be sympathetic to religions with a lot of weird rules, but it turns out I am way more sympathetic when they're weird customs and not weird ethical systems. So the bit about when and what you can eat before communion is totally interesting, but when it gets into the snakes-and-ladders system of mortal versus venial sins and accumulating penance to get yourself out of purgatory my eyes kind of glaze over.
Luckily for me this too clears up as the book goes along, or at least becomes engagingly fuzzy. The whole point of the book, after all, is how the characters' beliefs change and how the church changes and how each influences the other, and so the strictly laid out rules of the game from earlier are replaced by people genuinely grappling with questions of faith and sin and right.
There isn't really any conclusion to the book. It comes to a stopping point (with the election of John Paul II, appropriately enough) but it's clearly not so much a halting point as a pause along the way in a process that started long before I was born and will continue long after I die.
P.S. Incidentally, this is one of those books that's published under a different title in America -- the UK title is How Far Can You Go? (this is the sort of philosophical question probably answered "second base"). This is an interesting distinction, because while both touch on sex and religion, the original title is clearly much more about the sex while the American title is clearly much more about the religion.
P.P.S. This is another ghira recommendation, and while you would think it does not fit the math/Go/Italian culture categories, I can still get it in on a technicality, because apparently the reason he read it was due to recommendations from a bunch of Italians.
The Sons of Heaven (Kage Baker): Well, so here it is, the crashing conclusion to the Company series. Endings are always hard to write for a big-concept epic-type sf novel, and when it's a series the problem is exponentially larger. The last book has to sweep up all the hints and loose ends that have been lying around in the previous books and carry out all the themes of earlier, but at the same time it has to create something new and impressive. It has to go beyond the rules set out earlier, without making any previous books look stupid for following those same rules. It has to include everyone's favorite characters but also spend enough time on the important characters to let them accomplish everything they need to accomplish. And most importantly of all, if all the previous books have been dropping hints about a Big Event, that event has to take place, and it has to be awesome enough that the readers don't feel let down.
In other words, the concluding book has to take things to the next level, but when the current level is centuries-long clash between different factions of supercompetent immortal time-traveling cyborgs, it wasn't even clear at the start of the book in what direction the next level was, let alone how to get there.
So I wasn't just pleased, but actually relieved, that this book totally delivers. Big events happen and they're really big and really satisfying, both symbolically and concretely; all the carefully-prepped guns on the mantelpiece go off in a hail of explosions; we get unexpected but believable character development from some of the characters; and, possibly most important of all, the central concepts of the series are extended in a way that makes this book feel like a true climax to the series.
It's not, I must admit, a totally smooth ride. Not everyone comes back, not everything is explained, not all loose ends are tied off -- but in a narrative this big and sweeping, I'm ok with that. There is plenty of room inside for more stories in the future, whether or not Baker chooses to write them.
So, yeah, even though I didn't have any idea how it could be done, this is what I wanted. Brilliant.
P.S. In case it isn't obvious, this would be a terrible book to start reading the series with. Go read In the Garden of Iden instead.
Next up: I don't actually have anything scheduled to read next, but for those few of you not from ifmud, I should point out Rob has a web comic.
Souls and Bodies (David Lodge): If you had asked me a year ago what kind of book I would be least likely to read as a result of the book club, "a fictionalized analysis of the evolving views of Catholics on human sexuality from the 50s to the 70s" would not have made the list, but only because it would not have even occurred to me that I needed to add it.
Like you might guess from the summary, this book is pretty slow going at first. The whole point is to show how different people evolve over time and react to the church's position (which is itself evolving, of course), so you have to start out by introducing nine or ten characters. The author has a section where he explains how each character has one distinguishing characteristic and it's cued by their name, but, really, this didn't actually help me follow the narrative better. On the other hand, by the time I Was halfway through I had everybody sorted out, and you really are able to do some interesting things as an author with that many characters to play around with -- this one's a nun, this one's gay, this one's crazy, this one's dating a divorced guy, and you still have space to show multiple variations of more conventional relationships.
The other thing that made it slow going at the start is that it turns out Catholics have a lot of weird rules. Obviously as a Jew I can't help but be sympathetic to religions with a lot of weird rules, but it turns out I am way more sympathetic when they're weird customs and not weird ethical systems. So the bit about when and what you can eat before communion is totally interesting, but when it gets into the snakes-and-ladders system of mortal versus venial sins and accumulating penance to get yourself out of purgatory my eyes kind of glaze over.
Luckily for me this too clears up as the book goes along, or at least becomes engagingly fuzzy. The whole point of the book, after all, is how the characters' beliefs change and how the church changes and how each influences the other, and so the strictly laid out rules of the game from earlier are replaced by people genuinely grappling with questions of faith and sin and right.
There isn't really any conclusion to the book. It comes to a stopping point (with the election of John Paul II, appropriately enough) but it's clearly not so much a halting point as a pause along the way in a process that started long before I was born and will continue long after I die.
P.S. Incidentally, this is one of those books that's published under a different title in America -- the UK title is How Far Can You Go? (this is the sort of philosophical question probably answered "second base"). This is an interesting distinction, because while both touch on sex and religion, the original title is clearly much more about the sex while the American title is clearly much more about the religion.
P.P.S. This is another ghira recommendation, and while you would think it does not fit the math/Go/Italian culture categories, I can still get it in on a technicality, because apparently the reason he read it was due to recommendations from a bunch of Italians.
The Sons of Heaven (Kage Baker): Well, so here it is, the crashing conclusion to the Company series. Endings are always hard to write for a big-concept epic-type sf novel, and when it's a series the problem is exponentially larger. The last book has to sweep up all the hints and loose ends that have been lying around in the previous books and carry out all the themes of earlier, but at the same time it has to create something new and impressive. It has to go beyond the rules set out earlier, without making any previous books look stupid for following those same rules. It has to include everyone's favorite characters but also spend enough time on the important characters to let them accomplish everything they need to accomplish. And most importantly of all, if all the previous books have been dropping hints about a Big Event, that event has to take place, and it has to be awesome enough that the readers don't feel let down.
In other words, the concluding book has to take things to the next level, but when the current level is centuries-long clash between different factions of supercompetent immortal time-traveling cyborgs, it wasn't even clear at the start of the book in what direction the next level was, let alone how to get there.
So I wasn't just pleased, but actually relieved, that this book totally delivers. Big events happen and they're really big and really satisfying, both symbolically and concretely; all the carefully-prepped guns on the mantelpiece go off in a hail of explosions; we get unexpected but believable character development from some of the characters; and, possibly most important of all, the central concepts of the series are extended in a way that makes this book feel like a true climax to the series.
It's not, I must admit, a totally smooth ride. Not everyone comes back, not everything is explained, not all loose ends are tied off -- but in a narrative this big and sweeping, I'm ok with that. There is plenty of room inside for more stories in the future, whether or not Baker chooses to write them.
So, yeah, even though I didn't have any idea how it could be done, this is what I wanted. Brilliant.
P.S. In case it isn't obvious, this would be a terrible book to start reading the series with. Go read In the Garden of Iden instead.
Next up: I don't actually have anything scheduled to read next, but for those few of you not from ifmud, I should point out Rob has a web comic.