[Book Reviews] 50% unlikable protagonists
Entertainingly, both sections here have two fictional books and one nonfiction. Getting the three that I just didn't like out of the way first:
ilcylic sent me Sarah Hoyt's "Darkship Thieves" as part of our latest book exchange. Unfortunately, I hated the protagonist. Until she falls in love, she doesn't care about anyone but herself. I know she's characterized as spoiled rich space adventure-aristocrat rebel, kinda like if Tank Girl was a Rockefeller, but the book fails my "have at least one major character that I root for and want to see do well" check. She's kind of a jerk, her boyfriend is pretty one-dimensional, and no one else really features. Fundamentally selfish characters like that are always a turn-off for me... I can deal with "cynical world-weary adventurer turns out to actually have compassion", but when it's "self-centered mercenary turns out to be a self-centered mercenary", well, that character stays truer to themself but I don't want to read about jerks being jerks in space. If that kind of thing doesn't bother you, it's a perfectly fine airplane book. Two space brooms out of five.
I picked up "Jack Glass" at Elliott Bay in a total fit of judge-a-book-by-its-cover... the cover art was gorgeous, I liked the structure of interlinked stories, and as someone who never minds spoilers, I was pleased by "we're telling you the ending right from the beginning and you'll still find the journey worthwhile". Unfortunately, again, the protagonist is a jerk and the stories are centered mostly around him. I totally award points for technical artistry to the author; he's a wizard with structure and I want him to write similarly clever works about someone that I actually like or sympathize with. [rueful grin] Diana wasn't bad as a character, but overdramatic teenager having a coming-of-age experience is also not really a story that I would have wanted to pick up. So I have to give this one a split rating; five spaceships out of five for technical merit, two support bubbles out of five for plot.
The third book I am annoyed to have read was the usually-likable Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild". Again, it was just sheer dislike of the protagonist... which is worse because this is nonfiction. I must just not have the wiring to understand or relate to the protagonist, but... he made a plan to deceive his family, disappear on everyone he knew, and walk out into the wilderness with astonishingly inadequate preparation, rejecting all offers of help. He left behind a bunch of mean writing about how his parents were sellout capitalist pigs and he was secretly plotting to reject them, ha ha won't everyone be surprised. Um. So for Krakauer to devote a whole book to his marching off to die in the Alaskan wilderness because he vehemently rejected all offers of help... this guy is not a hero. It was really strange for me to read all the interlocutors comparing him to Emerson or Thoreau or other people who sought solitude and refuge in the wilderness. I just didn't see the greatness in the protagonist. Apparently he was a very charming guy, lifelong religious people became atheists when they heard he'd died because if God would let that dude die then there is no God. But if you're fundamentally selfish and kinda self-destructive, having a charisma of 20 is not really a good thing for everybody else. So I'm sorry that he starved to death, that's horrible and I wouldn't wish that death on anyone, but I'm also sorry that he hurt tons of people who cared about him. Two abandoned wilderness buses out of five. Sorry, Krakaeur.
Three that were at least okay:
Another Elliott Bay pick, "The Lives of Tao" is an alien-symbiote spy novel. It's not the shot at Serious Literature that Jack Glass was, but I liked it more. Wesley Chu does a pretty fair job of knowing his audience; our hero Roen is a schlocky IT geek of no particular fitness or spy skills. He whines a lot at the beginning, but he still does what he needs to do, so I'm forgiving. (Whining but still delivering == annoying but okay. Whining while failing to deliver == abrupt loss of sympathy. If you're a spy, that is.) It sadly shares some of the flaws of the James Bond genre it's rooted in -- women are more love interests than independent characters with agency, and both major female characters find our schlub spy charming and bafflingly hard to resist. Sigh. But on the plus side, there's a lot of sneaking around and saving humanity, and the alien symbiote is pretty funny when it's being mercilessly encouraging. There's a sequel, I'll probably read it. Three "I'm a WHAT now?"s out of five.
I became interested in local author Ramez Naam's "Nexus" after hearing about his talk on beating the surveillance state. (I'm heartened that it was apparently the most widely attended book event Ada's has ever had.) So I thought I'd check out his sci-fi. "Nexus" has an interesting conceit of shared neural networking... I don't think it's very well rooted in neurology as best I understand it, it sounds a lot more like peoples' ecstatic drug experiences of being one with everything. But giving him that suspension of disbelief, it was still fun to try to figure out possible use cases for that and how it would be perceived worldwide. Some of the things he came up with are absolutely things I think people would try to do, and it was nice to see him explore the interaction between things humans attain on their own to control brain states and what would happen with an external inducer of something similar. I was entertained at how much I wanted to network-security that whole thing... the concepts carry over but the infrastructure only slightly does. (But if they can build their own OS and program it in standard CS ways, surely....) So it didn't feel very plausible, but most futurist books are speculation and guessing anyway, so eh. It was fun, and all the places where I went "but but but!" were thought-provoking. That's a lot of what I read sci-fi for. Three and a half "I didn't want THAT MUCH networked!" out of five.
My serious-business book for this batch was "The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army's Elite Intelligence School". I'd read a bunch about US and British military intelligence during World War II, and some if rather less about French and German intelligence. I knew very little about the Japanese side of things, though, so this book was invaluable about filling in my understanding of what was going on in the Pacific. Author Stephen Mercado does an excellent and well-attested job at explaining the roots of the push towards improving Japanese intelligence, the First Class of the intelligence school at Nakano, and then follows several operatives from that class through their later careers in intelligence. The book is unabashedly Japan-centric (that is: it's about what Japan did and how, not about what Japan did to America or how America feels about what Japan did) in a way that really highlights the otherwise unseen biases in the history of the era I had heretofore read. Particularly interesting to me was the coverage of Japan's role in helping Indian partisans throw off the British empire, the relationship between imperial Japan and small insurgent groups that it funded and supplied (obvious parallels to US and Russian policy Cold War and on), and how trust was built and broken between Nakano-school Japanese operatives and their allies in India, the Philippines, and Russia. Fascinating, if dry at times, and the pick of this batch. Four secret plots out of five.
ilcylic sent me Sarah Hoyt's "Darkship Thieves" as part of our latest book exchange. Unfortunately, I hated the protagonist. Until she falls in love, she doesn't care about anyone but herself. I know she's characterized as spoiled rich space adventure-aristocrat rebel, kinda like if Tank Girl was a Rockefeller, but the book fails my "have at least one major character that I root for and want to see do well" check. She's kind of a jerk, her boyfriend is pretty one-dimensional, and no one else really features. Fundamentally selfish characters like that are always a turn-off for me... I can deal with "cynical world-weary adventurer turns out to actually have compassion", but when it's "self-centered mercenary turns out to be a self-centered mercenary", well, that character stays truer to themself but I don't want to read about jerks being jerks in space. If that kind of thing doesn't bother you, it's a perfectly fine airplane book. Two space brooms out of five.
I picked up "Jack Glass" at Elliott Bay in a total fit of judge-a-book-by-its-cover... the cover art was gorgeous, I liked the structure of interlinked stories, and as someone who never minds spoilers, I was pleased by "we're telling you the ending right from the beginning and you'll still find the journey worthwhile". Unfortunately, again, the protagonist is a jerk and the stories are centered mostly around him. I totally award points for technical artistry to the author; he's a wizard with structure and I want him to write similarly clever works about someone that I actually like or sympathize with. [rueful grin] Diana wasn't bad as a character, but overdramatic teenager having a coming-of-age experience is also not really a story that I would have wanted to pick up. So I have to give this one a split rating; five spaceships out of five for technical merit, two support bubbles out of five for plot.
The third book I am annoyed to have read was the usually-likable Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild". Again, it was just sheer dislike of the protagonist... which is worse because this is nonfiction. I must just not have the wiring to understand or relate to the protagonist, but... he made a plan to deceive his family, disappear on everyone he knew, and walk out into the wilderness with astonishingly inadequate preparation, rejecting all offers of help. He left behind a bunch of mean writing about how his parents were sellout capitalist pigs and he was secretly plotting to reject them, ha ha won't everyone be surprised. Um. So for Krakauer to devote a whole book to his marching off to die in the Alaskan wilderness because he vehemently rejected all offers of help... this guy is not a hero. It was really strange for me to read all the interlocutors comparing him to Emerson or Thoreau or other people who sought solitude and refuge in the wilderness. I just didn't see the greatness in the protagonist. Apparently he was a very charming guy, lifelong religious people became atheists when they heard he'd died because if God would let that dude die then there is no God. But if you're fundamentally selfish and kinda self-destructive, having a charisma of 20 is not really a good thing for everybody else. So I'm sorry that he starved to death, that's horrible and I wouldn't wish that death on anyone, but I'm also sorry that he hurt tons of people who cared about him. Two abandoned wilderness buses out of five. Sorry, Krakaeur.
Three that were at least okay:
Another Elliott Bay pick, "The Lives of Tao" is an alien-symbiote spy novel. It's not the shot at Serious Literature that Jack Glass was, but I liked it more. Wesley Chu does a pretty fair job of knowing his audience; our hero Roen is a schlocky IT geek of no particular fitness or spy skills. He whines a lot at the beginning, but he still does what he needs to do, so I'm forgiving. (Whining but still delivering == annoying but okay. Whining while failing to deliver == abrupt loss of sympathy. If you're a spy, that is.) It sadly shares some of the flaws of the James Bond genre it's rooted in -- women are more love interests than independent characters with agency, and both major female characters find our schlub spy charming and bafflingly hard to resist. Sigh. But on the plus side, there's a lot of sneaking around and saving humanity, and the alien symbiote is pretty funny when it's being mercilessly encouraging. There's a sequel, I'll probably read it. Three "I'm a WHAT now?"s out of five.
I became interested in local author Ramez Naam's "Nexus" after hearing about his talk on beating the surveillance state. (I'm heartened that it was apparently the most widely attended book event Ada's has ever had.) So I thought I'd check out his sci-fi. "Nexus" has an interesting conceit of shared neural networking... I don't think it's very well rooted in neurology as best I understand it, it sounds a lot more like peoples' ecstatic drug experiences of being one with everything. But giving him that suspension of disbelief, it was still fun to try to figure out possible use cases for that and how it would be perceived worldwide. Some of the things he came up with are absolutely things I think people would try to do, and it was nice to see him explore the interaction between things humans attain on their own to control brain states and what would happen with an external inducer of something similar. I was entertained at how much I wanted to network-security that whole thing... the concepts carry over but the infrastructure only slightly does. (But if they can build their own OS and program it in standard CS ways, surely....) So it didn't feel very plausible, but most futurist books are speculation and guessing anyway, so eh. It was fun, and all the places where I went "but but but!" were thought-provoking. That's a lot of what I read sci-fi for. Three and a half "I didn't want THAT MUCH networked!" out of five.
My serious-business book for this batch was "The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army's Elite Intelligence School". I'd read a bunch about US and British military intelligence during World War II, and some if rather less about French and German intelligence. I knew very little about the Japanese side of things, though, so this book was invaluable about filling in my understanding of what was going on in the Pacific. Author Stephen Mercado does an excellent and well-attested job at explaining the roots of the push towards improving Japanese intelligence, the First Class of the intelligence school at Nakano, and then follows several operatives from that class through their later careers in intelligence. The book is unabashedly Japan-centric (that is: it's about what Japan did and how, not about what Japan did to America or how America feels about what Japan did) in a way that really highlights the otherwise unseen biases in the history of the era I had heretofore read. Particularly interesting to me was the coverage of Japan's role in helping Indian partisans throw off the British empire, the relationship between imperial Japan and small insurgent groups that it funded and supplied (obvious parallels to US and Russian policy Cold War and on), and how trust was built and broken between Nakano-school Japanese operatives and their allies in India, the Philippines, and Russia. Fascinating, if dry at times, and the pick of this batch. Four secret plots out of five.