Booklog Will Save Your Life
I swear someone is standing outside my window with a hose, because there is no way it can or should be raining this much in Los Angeles.
61. Our Hero, Tom De Haven - I loved Tom De Haven's reimagining of the Superman mythos, the utterly enchanting It's Superman! It seems he can pull off a great nonfiction look at Supes, too, with Our Hero, a fantastic exploration of the character’s real-life origin story, his ups and downs, and his lasting cultural impact. De Haven comes across like the wise fanboy on a hill-he's got both the perspective and the enthusiasm. Even if you're not a big fan of the Man of Steel-and I'm not-this book is a joy to read: a thoughtful investigation into why stories and characters are so important, into how an alien from Krypton can help us think about what makes us human.
62. Alone With You, Marisa Silver - Another forgettable short story collection! I remember that one tale had some arty types living in a loft, and someone had cancer in one of them, and there was also maybe a camel. Other than that, there were the typical unresolved endings and a lot of spoiled, unpleasant people being spoiled and unpleasant. Nine times out of ten, I should just stop with the modern short story collections, huh? But that one time...that elusive one time...! Dammit. We all already know that I never learn.
63. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson - Looking at the task of writing up this, the third book in Larsson’s tragically cut-short series, I feel obligated to sum up not just the book itself-which I found an exciting and overall solid conclusion to a storyline which was not meant to be here concluded-but what this series has meant to me as a whole. Larsson’s books have, of course, become insanely popular-The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was my store’s No. 1 bestseller two years running-and part of me always balks at being an advocate for something that is already a blockbuster. So instead here are just a few words on why these books have been important to me, from which you can extrapolate whatever larger societal meaning as you so choose.
It’s Lisbeth, obviously. Blomkvist is a totally likable character-if you like clever, determined manwhores, which I apparently do-but these books are really all about Lisbeth. And I love her. I know people have said that they find her to be a man’s fantasy of what a badass woman should be, and this may be partly the case, but if so, Larsson’s fantasy-projection synchs up nicely with my own. Moreover, for all her larger-than-life qualities, I find Lisbeth remarkably realistic-by which I mean, she felt emotionally realistic to me. For all her leather and chains, and her brilliant and calculating plans, Larsson never writes Lisbeth as a robot. She is emotionally vulnerable-as the close of book one so brilliantly and subtly demonstrates. But throughout all three books Lisbeth reacts, and in general carries herself, the way the male heroes in other series do. She, like all those male heroes, is an outsider, is outwardly tough, is someone who has been through an unspeakable trauma but survived. She’s like all those male heroes: but she is a woman, and so for once, she’s mine.
I was recently talking to my father about male and female roles in fiction, and about how much happier I was when I realized that I didn’t have to like Princess Leia best. This was a big moment for me, that I really remember: I was maybe ten or eleven, and I finally realized that I could identify with Han Solo if I wanted to. After that I liked Star Wars a lot more, because my character got all the best lines and the cool ship. In fairness, Princess Leia was given more to do than a lot of female characters, but was I really supposed to think it was so great that she got to choke Jabba with her chain after being humiliated for ages in that metal bikini? I wanted more than that, and I still do.
So for years I liked the male characters best, because male characters actually got to do things and I wanted to do things (and preferably say witty stuff in the process). Men were awesome-and doubly so, in that I could project my fantasy self onto them and enjoy a sexual attraction to them as well, which is a little masturbatory and confusing, but also clearly the reason I so like slash fiction. Ahem. The point here, though, is that since men were who I saw and read about being awesome, they’re who I started writing about being awesome, too. If you read my short stories from high school through college (please don’t), you’ll see that a dude is the main character in almost all of them. I saw guys getting all the cool shit to do, so I gave them all the cool shit to do. What a neat little circle!
It’s only recently that I had another oh! moment like I did when I was ten. Too many factors conspired for me to pick out one cause, but maybe it was simply a case of the camel’s back finally buckling under some insignificant straw: where were the women? I wanted to read and write about women! How had things gotten to the point where I wasn’t even in my own stories?
If I, and other women like me, don’t write women awesome things to do, chances are no one will. So examples of women getting to take active roles-being smart and competent and maybe even kicking ass-have become even more precious to me. And I’m not talking about the standard female sidekick in the leather bustier. Real characters-the main characters, even. Which, arguably, Lisbeth is. Larsson, in my view, never writes her as “the woman”-he writes her as a person. As the hero.
People have argued that these books’ violence toward women make them unfeminist. I don’t agree: in my view, what Larsson is doing is clearly showing both that violence of this type exists-and will continue to exist if we choose to ignore it-and that it is survivable. These are books where women rescue the men, and perhaps more importantly, where they rescue themselves. The women are the heroes. And so, yeah, in this case, I am happy to advocate for something that is already insanely popular. If characters like Lisbeth-if women in central, heroic roles-can seep into the collective subconscious the way Han Solo and hundreds of years of male heroes sunk into mine, then maybe the next girl (or boy) growing up won’t have to have some big revelation about how she can write women in her stories. She’ll already know.
64. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ed. by John Joseph Adams - Not at all what it says on the tin. I often very much enjoy Holmes pastiches that pit him and Watson against the supernatural or uncanny, but despite the purported goal of the collection, only about half of these stories fit into that category. (The other half, Adams says in the introduction, were basically included as a giant red herring, to which I say: boo.) But, supernaturally-fueled or not, nearly all of these were just really, really dull and forgettable; I had to force myself to the end-something that should never happen with my beloved Holmes! Upon review, the only two stories that I really liked were Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald,” which I have only read a billion times previously, as it has been collected everywhere; and Naomi Novik’s “Commonplaces,” which is absolutely fantastic-beautifully characterized and written-but in which the supposedly improbable element is the assertion that Holmes and Watson were lovers. Pish!
I would like to see “Commonplaces” collected in other books, because then this one would truly be completely unnecessary.
65. Hotel Iris, Yoko Ogawa - One of the things I liked about Ogawa’s short story collection The Diving Pool is how dark and twisted it is; with Hotel Iris, Ogawa raises the dark ‘n’ twisted stakes to such a degree that midway through I started whimpering and backing away and went to go hug a puppy. As in her other books, Ogawa’s use of language and her simple, elegant powers of description are gorgeously employed, but holy crap, dude: is this ever an unpleasant book! I really don’t recommend that people unfamiliar with Ogawa start here; build up a tolerance and then see if you are strong and brave enough. I am not.
66. The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner - Young adult fantasy/historical fiction/adventure thingy; the start of a series, and I’ve been told by multiple people that it improves as it goes along. I feel like I want reassurance that it gets much, much better, because while this wasn’t bad-there are some nice set pieces and good plot twists and whatnot-it was also completely uninteresting to me. I couldn’t connect with the characters at all; I’m not really sure why, I just know that it didn’t happen. I ask with genuine curiosity: is there any reason for me to continue?
67. & 200. Blackout & All Clear, Connie Willis - It is impossible to separate my thoughts on the first volume of this duology from the second-possibly because they never should have been separated in the first place. This is a single novel that got way, way out of control, and if Willis (or really, Willis’ editor, who’s supposed to be the responsible one in this case) had had any sense, this monstrosity of a manuscript would have been carefully pared down to one tighter, and much better, book. Where is Max Perkins when you need him?
So I’m not going to discuss the structural problems with these books in much greater detail: said problems are immense, and if you’re going to tackle this story, you have to accept going in that the first volume is entirely setup, and over-long setup at that. Blackout should have probably been the first hundred pages, maybe, of the overall work. All Clear, which contains-finally!-the resolution, is better, but even it took a good 300 pages to start getting anywhere. Willis has a definite style, but it can start to seem like a crutch, especially when there’s not much else going on. It got to the point where I began groaning every time I read “But she didn’t” or “But he didn’t”-just like I grit my teeth through all of Tolkien’s “And lo!” and “And behold!”s in Return of the King.
The characters’ worries and reasoning about whether or not they were screwing up the timeline were frustrating as well. There were far too many instances of them deciding that they had corrupted it-oh wait, no they hadn’t! (See, I swear, it wouldn’t have even been that hard to cut this.) And the actual solution...how was this a surprise? To ANY of them? Am I somehow wrong in thinking that “the time traveler’s actions are and always were part of the timeline” is one of the major theories of how time travel would work? They use it on Doctor Who and Supernatural all the time. Willis’ Oxford books take place in the future, and I’d think that, even if this is a future where time travel has proved possible and this particular theory of time travel has supposedly been disproved, the characters would at least be aware of it. They’ve got a good century of pop culture behind them to make use of, after all! But instead, they’re totally shocked by the possibility, like people in modern zombie films who are totally taken aback by the revelation that a bite means you’re a ticking zombie time bomb. This just makes the characters seem really alarmingly thick.
So far, I’m making it sound like these books totally aren’t worth reading at all, but this isn’t entirely true. They fail on a number of levels, but Willis succeeds on a number of others, too-just to confuse you, I guess. Her depiction of the Blitz is fantastic and brilliantly vivid: as a story of ordinary people pulling together in impossible circumstances, these books are powerful and believable. The characters, once you work through their multiple aliases (very confusing over two books) and get over the fact that they all seem to process information in a startlingly similar way (“But he didn’t”)-they are characters to root for. Both Colin and Sir Godfrey are divine romantic heroes, and Willis, as usual, knows how to tug on your heartstrings, to write sacrifices so they feel painful and fully-realized. Once I got over the 300-page hump, I zipped through the second half of All Clear in an afternoon because I needed to know what happened to everyone. There is something here, to be sure-a spark of a good novel-which in a way makes it even more of a shame that it’s buried under so much excess stuff. Oh, Max, Max: we need to invent time travel for you.
68. Trickster, Ed. by Matt Dembicki - Graphic collection of a variety of Native American trickster myths, using the words of authentic sources and a variety of artists. Clever, sly, fucked up, surprising, expected, and ever-so-human: this is a genre of storytelling that never ceases to delight and entrance me.
69. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins - The middle volume in the series, and the one that probably stands out the least to me, although it’s a neat and essential bridge. I like how the reader’s dawning awareness of the rebellious forces are paired with Katniss’ own revelations. The second trip to the arena, which I worried would feel like a retread, is instead extremely well-done: Collins is amazingly adept at writing creepy booby traps; one hopes the Saw people never try to tap that talent. The cliffhanger is, however, immensely frustrating in an almost classically hilarious way: I actually did the “Man, there aren’t a lot of pages left here; how is she going to wrap this...wait a minute!” thing.
70. Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, Steve Almond - A love song to the power of rock and roll. I loved that Almond looks at music as a writer: a frustrated writer who, like me, longs to write something, anything that can convey as much emotion as a three-minute song. I also enjoyed Almond’s soundtrack for the book, most especially for the discovery of Gil Scott-Heron’s version of “Me and the Devil.” Is Scott-Heron’s three-minute, thirty-four-second song more powerful than Almond’s whole book? Possibly, but that just proves Almond’s point.
Total Reviews: 70/210
61. Our Hero, Tom De Haven - I loved Tom De Haven's reimagining of the Superman mythos, the utterly enchanting It's Superman! It seems he can pull off a great nonfiction look at Supes, too, with Our Hero, a fantastic exploration of the character’s real-life origin story, his ups and downs, and his lasting cultural impact. De Haven comes across like the wise fanboy on a hill-he's got both the perspective and the enthusiasm. Even if you're not a big fan of the Man of Steel-and I'm not-this book is a joy to read: a thoughtful investigation into why stories and characters are so important, into how an alien from Krypton can help us think about what makes us human.
62. Alone With You, Marisa Silver - Another forgettable short story collection! I remember that one tale had some arty types living in a loft, and someone had cancer in one of them, and there was also maybe a camel. Other than that, there were the typical unresolved endings and a lot of spoiled, unpleasant people being spoiled and unpleasant. Nine times out of ten, I should just stop with the modern short story collections, huh? But that one time...that elusive one time...! Dammit. We all already know that I never learn.
63. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson - Looking at the task of writing up this, the third book in Larsson’s tragically cut-short series, I feel obligated to sum up not just the book itself-which I found an exciting and overall solid conclusion to a storyline which was not meant to be here concluded-but what this series has meant to me as a whole. Larsson’s books have, of course, become insanely popular-The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was my store’s No. 1 bestseller two years running-and part of me always balks at being an advocate for something that is already a blockbuster. So instead here are just a few words on why these books have been important to me, from which you can extrapolate whatever larger societal meaning as you so choose.
It’s Lisbeth, obviously. Blomkvist is a totally likable character-if you like clever, determined manwhores, which I apparently do-but these books are really all about Lisbeth. And I love her. I know people have said that they find her to be a man’s fantasy of what a badass woman should be, and this may be partly the case, but if so, Larsson’s fantasy-projection synchs up nicely with my own. Moreover, for all her larger-than-life qualities, I find Lisbeth remarkably realistic-by which I mean, she felt emotionally realistic to me. For all her leather and chains, and her brilliant and calculating plans, Larsson never writes Lisbeth as a robot. She is emotionally vulnerable-as the close of book one so brilliantly and subtly demonstrates. But throughout all three books Lisbeth reacts, and in general carries herself, the way the male heroes in other series do. She, like all those male heroes, is an outsider, is outwardly tough, is someone who has been through an unspeakable trauma but survived. She’s like all those male heroes: but she is a woman, and so for once, she’s mine.
I was recently talking to my father about male and female roles in fiction, and about how much happier I was when I realized that I didn’t have to like Princess Leia best. This was a big moment for me, that I really remember: I was maybe ten or eleven, and I finally realized that I could identify with Han Solo if I wanted to. After that I liked Star Wars a lot more, because my character got all the best lines and the cool ship. In fairness, Princess Leia was given more to do than a lot of female characters, but was I really supposed to think it was so great that she got to choke Jabba with her chain after being humiliated for ages in that metal bikini? I wanted more than that, and I still do.
So for years I liked the male characters best, because male characters actually got to do things and I wanted to do things (and preferably say witty stuff in the process). Men were awesome-and doubly so, in that I could project my fantasy self onto them and enjoy a sexual attraction to them as well, which is a little masturbatory and confusing, but also clearly the reason I so like slash fiction. Ahem. The point here, though, is that since men were who I saw and read about being awesome, they’re who I started writing about being awesome, too. If you read my short stories from high school through college (please don’t), you’ll see that a dude is the main character in almost all of them. I saw guys getting all the cool shit to do, so I gave them all the cool shit to do. What a neat little circle!
It’s only recently that I had another oh! moment like I did when I was ten. Too many factors conspired for me to pick out one cause, but maybe it was simply a case of the camel’s back finally buckling under some insignificant straw: where were the women? I wanted to read and write about women! How had things gotten to the point where I wasn’t even in my own stories?
If I, and other women like me, don’t write women awesome things to do, chances are no one will. So examples of women getting to take active roles-being smart and competent and maybe even kicking ass-have become even more precious to me. And I’m not talking about the standard female sidekick in the leather bustier. Real characters-the main characters, even. Which, arguably, Lisbeth is. Larsson, in my view, never writes her as “the woman”-he writes her as a person. As the hero.
People have argued that these books’ violence toward women make them unfeminist. I don’t agree: in my view, what Larsson is doing is clearly showing both that violence of this type exists-and will continue to exist if we choose to ignore it-and that it is survivable. These are books where women rescue the men, and perhaps more importantly, where they rescue themselves. The women are the heroes. And so, yeah, in this case, I am happy to advocate for something that is already insanely popular. If characters like Lisbeth-if women in central, heroic roles-can seep into the collective subconscious the way Han Solo and hundreds of years of male heroes sunk into mine, then maybe the next girl (or boy) growing up won’t have to have some big revelation about how she can write women in her stories. She’ll already know.
64. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ed. by John Joseph Adams - Not at all what it says on the tin. I often very much enjoy Holmes pastiches that pit him and Watson against the supernatural or uncanny, but despite the purported goal of the collection, only about half of these stories fit into that category. (The other half, Adams says in the introduction, were basically included as a giant red herring, to which I say: boo.) But, supernaturally-fueled or not, nearly all of these were just really, really dull and forgettable; I had to force myself to the end-something that should never happen with my beloved Holmes! Upon review, the only two stories that I really liked were Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald,” which I have only read a billion times previously, as it has been collected everywhere; and Naomi Novik’s “Commonplaces,” which is absolutely fantastic-beautifully characterized and written-but in which the supposedly improbable element is the assertion that Holmes and Watson were lovers. Pish!
I would like to see “Commonplaces” collected in other books, because then this one would truly be completely unnecessary.
65. Hotel Iris, Yoko Ogawa - One of the things I liked about Ogawa’s short story collection The Diving Pool is how dark and twisted it is; with Hotel Iris, Ogawa raises the dark ‘n’ twisted stakes to such a degree that midway through I started whimpering and backing away and went to go hug a puppy. As in her other books, Ogawa’s use of language and her simple, elegant powers of description are gorgeously employed, but holy crap, dude: is this ever an unpleasant book! I really don’t recommend that people unfamiliar with Ogawa start here; build up a tolerance and then see if you are strong and brave enough. I am not.
66. The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner - Young adult fantasy/historical fiction/adventure thingy; the start of a series, and I’ve been told by multiple people that it improves as it goes along. I feel like I want reassurance that it gets much, much better, because while this wasn’t bad-there are some nice set pieces and good plot twists and whatnot-it was also completely uninteresting to me. I couldn’t connect with the characters at all; I’m not really sure why, I just know that it didn’t happen. I ask with genuine curiosity: is there any reason for me to continue?
67. & 200. Blackout & All Clear, Connie Willis - It is impossible to separate my thoughts on the first volume of this duology from the second-possibly because they never should have been separated in the first place. This is a single novel that got way, way out of control, and if Willis (or really, Willis’ editor, who’s supposed to be the responsible one in this case) had had any sense, this monstrosity of a manuscript would have been carefully pared down to one tighter, and much better, book. Where is Max Perkins when you need him?
So I’m not going to discuss the structural problems with these books in much greater detail: said problems are immense, and if you’re going to tackle this story, you have to accept going in that the first volume is entirely setup, and over-long setup at that. Blackout should have probably been the first hundred pages, maybe, of the overall work. All Clear, which contains-finally!-the resolution, is better, but even it took a good 300 pages to start getting anywhere. Willis has a definite style, but it can start to seem like a crutch, especially when there’s not much else going on. It got to the point where I began groaning every time I read “But she didn’t” or “But he didn’t”-just like I grit my teeth through all of Tolkien’s “And lo!” and “And behold!”s in Return of the King.
The characters’ worries and reasoning about whether or not they were screwing up the timeline were frustrating as well. There were far too many instances of them deciding that they had corrupted it-oh wait, no they hadn’t! (See, I swear, it wouldn’t have even been that hard to cut this.) And the actual solution...how was this a surprise? To ANY of them? Am I somehow wrong in thinking that “the time traveler’s actions are and always were part of the timeline” is one of the major theories of how time travel would work? They use it on Doctor Who and Supernatural all the time. Willis’ Oxford books take place in the future, and I’d think that, even if this is a future where time travel has proved possible and this particular theory of time travel has supposedly been disproved, the characters would at least be aware of it. They’ve got a good century of pop culture behind them to make use of, after all! But instead, they’re totally shocked by the possibility, like people in modern zombie films who are totally taken aback by the revelation that a bite means you’re a ticking zombie time bomb. This just makes the characters seem really alarmingly thick.
So far, I’m making it sound like these books totally aren’t worth reading at all, but this isn’t entirely true. They fail on a number of levels, but Willis succeeds on a number of others, too-just to confuse you, I guess. Her depiction of the Blitz is fantastic and brilliantly vivid: as a story of ordinary people pulling together in impossible circumstances, these books are powerful and believable. The characters, once you work through their multiple aliases (very confusing over two books) and get over the fact that they all seem to process information in a startlingly similar way (“But he didn’t”)-they are characters to root for. Both Colin and Sir Godfrey are divine romantic heroes, and Willis, as usual, knows how to tug on your heartstrings, to write sacrifices so they feel painful and fully-realized. Once I got over the 300-page hump, I zipped through the second half of All Clear in an afternoon because I needed to know what happened to everyone. There is something here, to be sure-a spark of a good novel-which in a way makes it even more of a shame that it’s buried under so much excess stuff. Oh, Max, Max: we need to invent time travel for you.
68. Trickster, Ed. by Matt Dembicki - Graphic collection of a variety of Native American trickster myths, using the words of authentic sources and a variety of artists. Clever, sly, fucked up, surprising, expected, and ever-so-human: this is a genre of storytelling that never ceases to delight and entrance me.
69. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins - The middle volume in the series, and the one that probably stands out the least to me, although it’s a neat and essential bridge. I like how the reader’s dawning awareness of the rebellious forces are paired with Katniss’ own revelations. The second trip to the arena, which I worried would feel like a retread, is instead extremely well-done: Collins is amazingly adept at writing creepy booby traps; one hopes the Saw people never try to tap that talent. The cliffhanger is, however, immensely frustrating in an almost classically hilarious way: I actually did the “Man, there aren’t a lot of pages left here; how is she going to wrap this...wait a minute!” thing.
70. Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, Steve Almond - A love song to the power of rock and roll. I loved that Almond looks at music as a writer: a frustrated writer who, like me, longs to write something, anything that can convey as much emotion as a three-minute song. I also enjoyed Almond’s soundtrack for the book, most especially for the discovery of Gil Scott-Heron’s version of “Me and the Devil.” Is Scott-Heron’s three-minute, thirty-four-second song more powerful than Almond’s whole book? Possibly, but that just proves Almond’s point.
Total Reviews: 70/210