Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Little Bukowski Goes a Long Way… Hot Water Music (1983) consists of thirty-six typical Bukowski short stories. They are mostly sordidly real but sometimes magically real and feature few epiphanies or transformations or triumphs but mostly endings where life in all its squalid glory goes on. The stories feature LA underbelly denizens like physically and or psychologically mutilated alcoholics, gamblers, writers, artists, editors, students, professors, prostitutes, fans, femme fatales, housewives, beggars, and bartenders. Many a first-person appearance by Henry “Hank” Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter-ego. And many of the third-person narration protagonists just happen to be alcoholic writers not unlike Chinaski. The stories may shift into fantasy, as when a jealous skeleton throws a drink in the face of a bar customer after a woman who claims to have seen Joan of Arc burn gives him a hot kiss, or as when a woman’s brother teleports into the protagonist’s home right when he’s in his bed about to climax-cheat on his wife with the woman, or as when a husband and wife spend the night shooting each other with their gun and are woken up in the morning by the police complaining about domestic quarrel situations. The suspense-pleasure in reading the stories lies in wondering what dirty sexy gross person or event or situation will manifest next in Bukowski’s deadpan, dry, drawling voice, perfectly channeled by audiobook reader Christian Baskous. The best stories are humorous, irreverent takes on poets and poetry readings and the writing profession. I really like most of the Chinaski stories, especially the two about the funeral of his father. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of unpleasant, unenriching stories. These feature graphic violence, sex, and political incorrectness, especially regarding women, as in a line like, “a local feminist poet who had grown tired of blacks and now fucked a doberman in her bedroom.” Though Bukowski loved women in his way, his male characters say things like, “A female seldom moves away from one victim without having another,” and “Of course women were all crazy. They demanded more than there was.” And some of the women are monsters preying on men, liable to do something like bite off a piece of one’s penis during oral sex or drive off with one’s wallet, clothes, and car keys while one is in the motel shower. Mind you, Bukowski’s men often deserve such treatment, and the line “What women and men did to each other was beyond comprehension” echoes through the whole collection. Bukowski writes vivid descriptions like “She tasted like old postage stamps and a dead mouse,” “It was a nice Southern California morning, smoggy, stale, and listless,” and “Her eyes were large, stricken, and stale.” And lines that ring with dry wit and raw truth, like-- “They kill people by the millions in wars and give out medals for it.” “There was nothing worse than a reformed drunk and a born again a Christian, and Meyers was both.” “Love is a form of prejudice… You love what is convenient.” “The waiting room was full of people with no real problems: gonorrhea, herpes, syphilis, cancer, and so forth.” “The only people who know what mercy is are those who need it.” References to Presidents Carter and Reagan, the Falkland’s War, and women’s lib date the stories, but on the other hand the sordid and hence vibrant human condition and cynical takes on America feel universal. As do references to the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, Pirandello, Hesse, Chopin, and Camus. (Bukowski writes a funny riff on Camus’ existentialism being compromised by his elegant writing that reads like that of a man who’s just finished a rich steak dinner accompanied by fine French wine.) I mostly enjoyed the collection, but several Bukowski stories go a long way, and about a third of the way into the collection, I started getting jaded, and by the end I was ready for the end. View all my reviews
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The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars No Eucatastrophe Here! Wow--The Broken Sword (1954) is quite a visceral experience. I liked Poul Anderson’s novel back in high school but had forgotten everything about it, so I wanted to try Bronson Pinchot reading the audiobook, and was very affected by the weird book. Raw Viking Faerie Power! Incest, fratricide, patricide, torture, rape, massacre, quests, sea and land battles and sieges, brutal violence with brains and blood and guts, heartless scheming old gods, prodigious hatreds and loves, a demon-possessed singing sword that has to kill someone every time it’s unsheathed including, ultimately, its bearer (inspiration for Elric’s Stormbringer). The story takes place in about the 9th century AD in England and environs, when the Danelaw is giving English lands to Viking invader settlers. A violent explorer called Orm comes to England, coveting the land of a local family, so he and his men surround their hall and set it afire, burning all the men inside. With Viking gallantry, they let a few women escape, one of whom, the mother of the immolated family, is a witch who goes off to brew revenge. Orm falls in love with a young local Christian lady, who’ll only marry him if he converts, which he finally agrees to do. While she’s pregnant, Orm goes off raiding (the new religion not sticking too deeply), and while he’s gone she bears the baby, but before she can get it christened an elf lord named Imric happens by-- An elf lord?! Wasn’t this a historical Vikings in England novel?! Well… wherever the new White Christ’s religion hasn’t horned in, Faerie overlays the human world, so that people never quite see it even though it’s all around them, other than, perhaps, feeling a spooky passing wind or seeing some eerie distant lights. In Faerie there are different immortal beings: elves (tall, slender, graceful, cold, supposedly incapable of deep love, technologically and magically advanced), the elves’ bitter enemies, trolls (shorter, wider, stronger, barbaric, also cold, also capable of magic), and then various other “peoples” lesser in power and culture, supporting actors in the never-ending conflict between elves and trolls: goblins, imps, Sidhe, leprechauns, half-gods (gods who used to be strong but have been partially displaced by the new god). Then behind all those and using them (and humans) as proxy chess pieces in a long Cold War lurk the Aesir gods (Odin, Thor, etc.) and their epic enemies the Jotun giants. When Imric begets a changeling by raping an insane troll princess kept for the purpose in an elf-dungeon for 900 years and substitutes the “baby” for Orm’s son, the contrasting and conflicting destinies of two identical alien “twins” are set in motion, that of the happy go lucky human Skafloc raised by elves as an elf, and that of the anti-social changeling elf-troll Valgard raised by humans as a human being. Anderson details their doomed parallel lives with relish, and when their paths finally intersect, the results are not for the faint of heart. Valgard is a worthy antagonist foil for the hero Skafloc, one moment glad about destroying his family and the next ravaged by guilt and a stunned incomprehension as to how he could do such things. Neither human nor troll/elf, neither fully himself nor only a shadow of Skafloc, lonely, pathetically believing that femme fatales love and understand him when they’re just manipulating him, evincing defiant bravery even in the face of assured doom (I’ll kill Skafloc and tread the earth under my feet: I am death!), Valgard is impressive in his giant, shield-biting emotions. Skafloc is (at first) the luckier doppelganger, having the best of both human and Faerie worlds, but also his nature is (at first) sunnier than that of Valgard. I like how Skafloc confuses his own brutal killer’s heart with that of his demonic sword, so that by turns he feels that he’s being used as the sword’s tool or acting in accord with his heart. The more Skafloc uses the sword to kill trolls, the more he starts becoming pitiless like Valgard. Anderson strips everything they love or need or want away from both men, leaving them as “heroes” for opposite sides, both fey, bleak, and bloodthirsty. There are no flat evil villains in this novel, but more or less flawed and feeling and fated people (or elves, trolls, etc.). Trolls are worse than Elves, but both sides have been performing atrocities on each other for millennia. Both sides are brutal. Humans are, too. So are the Aesir and Jotuns. Odin is a callous manipulator. The hate here is overwhelming! Valgard for Imric and Skafloc; Skafloc for Valgard and trolls; the witch for Orm and his line; elves for trolls and vice versa; Aesir for giants and vice versa; old gods and Faerie for the new White Christ and so on. Yet so is the love here, especially between Freda and Skafloc (beyond mores, religion, and fate) and even of Lea for Skafloc, giving the lie to the truism that elves cannot feel deeply. The moment when Orm’s raised ghost tells his widow to stop mourning him, because down in hell when he hears her crying it’s like vipers biting him, and she says, “Take me with you!” is weird and moving. A summary can’t do justice to the dark joys of language that Anderson revels in! His descriptions achieve an over the top, sublime beauty, as of the starry sky or stormy seas or massive clouds or terrific battles, and so on. Like this: “As if sound had frozen to death and the aurora danced above its grave.” He uses some archaic words like “ere” and “twain” and “fey” and “weird” and some old syntax, as in “bitter was the night,” and “I like not this rede.” Throughout, all sorts of alliteration and consonance. He even ascends to pseudo-Anglo-Saxon verse for intense moments as when Skafloc improvises poetry on the spur of the moment to express his love for Freda or his awe at stormy seas or his appreciation of a horrible battle. Both Tolkien and Anderson were inspired by Norse mythology and the Edda, but with different effects and aims and results. Anderson retained the grim fated hate filled feuding and god manipulating side of that source material, while Tolkien (in LOTR) wedded it to his Christian eucatastrophic consolation, removing all appearance of god or gods from LOTR, but leaving them (or God) behind the scenes. Anyway, there’s nothing in Tolkien like the troll princess Gora’s mad ramblings as she’s about to be raped to make a changeling: "The world is flesh dissolving off a dead skull. . . . Birth is but the breeding of maggots in the crumbling flesh. Already the skull's teeth leer forth, and black crows have left its eye-sockets empty. Soon a barren wind will blow through its bare white bones." Audiobook reader Bronson Pinchot relishes reading such lines, rampaging along the boundary between enhancing an appalling and exciting story and overdramatizing it. View all my reviews
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Compact, Philosophical, and Funny Fantasy Adventure I’ve read The Book of Three (1964) many times, first by myself in junior high school and later with my Japanese university students in seminars over the years, and every time I’ve liked going on the journey with Taran and company. Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper of indeterminate age, parentage, and appearance (one reason why his hair ranges from gold to red to brown to black in the various cover illustrations done over the years), is an impatient and reckless boy who chafes at chores and runs away from the safety of his home and its 379-year-old wizard Dallben to pursue the panicked oracular pig Hen Wen into the forest and then finds adventures more challenging and uncomfortable than he'd read or dreamed about. If Taran remains rather humorless and featureless, the colorful supporting characters he meets are vivid and funny, like Gurgi the homeless and hungry dog-monkey who refers to himself in third person and likes rhyming and eating (“crunchings and munchings!”), Eilonwy the lonely princess who’s learning to be an enchantress from a wicked “aunt” and who likes making similes, Fflewddur Fflam the abdicated king who likes wandering as a bard with a magical harp that plays itself and breaks its strings when he exaggerates, and Doli the crabby odd-man-out dwarf who can’t make himself invisible and can’t stand a botched job. I like the way Lloyd Alexander works into his concise and fast-paced story plenty of messages for kids (and adults) to think about, like the world of human beings being a hard place for animals to live in; the three foundations of learning being “see much, study much, suffer much”; overcoming despair is a more vital part of being a hero than big muscles or swords; noble character being more important than noble birth; our homes being smaller when we return to them after a journey; and so on. Although he does some typical things with gender, making the enchantress Achren a by-the-numbers beautiful wicked witch, he also (for 1964) makes Eilonwy strong-headed and clever (Taran’s boss) and gives her a great riff on not wanting to be called a girl. And his refusal to give us what we expect or want in the climax of the novel is remarkable. (view spoiler)[Everything has been leading up to a big battle between the army of the Horned King and the army of the Sons of Don and to a Boss Fight between the Horned King and Taran or Prince Gwydion (the legendary Son of Don whom Taran meets and loses early in the adventure). Eilonwy has been lugging around this huge enchanted (cursed?) sword, and Taran finally gets his hands on it and circumstances are forcing him to finally draw it to use it to kill the Horned King, right? Instead, the boy tugs it a few centimeters out of its sheath and is zapped unconscious by the action, which interrupts the climax because he’s the point of view protagonist. And then in the resolution chapter Taran’s companions and Gwydion tell him what happened while he was unconscious! Thus, Alexander doesn’t depict the climax in real time. And there wasn’t a big battle because Gwydion just said the Horned King’s true name to destroy him, which made the enemy army melt apart without their leader. Alexander is trying to get us to appreciate the non-physical side of being a hero, especially the psychological and moral or ethical side, as in helping or being helped by anyone or anything (after all, aren't we all lame ants?) or as in transcending disaster by overcoming despair. Taran has begun to learn both lessons by the end of the novel. He has often been a pessimistic downer: he thinks Gwydion is trying to poison him when they first meet, that Gwydion is killed in Spiral Castle's collapse, that Eilonwy is trying to trap or trick him, and even in the end that he has waken up in Annuvin. So he's still learning to overcome despair like Gwydion in Achren's torture castle. Anyway, in the context of genre expectations Alexander’s avoidance of the big boss fight and big battle is a bold move perfectly in tune with the themes of his novel. (hide spoiler)] Finally, Alexander’s writing is fine, his concise evocation of mood, place, and character through word choice, sounds, and images first rate. As with these descriptions: --“Approaching the Eagle Mountains, Taran felt his burden lighten, as he inhaled the dry, spicy scent of pine.” --“Medwyn strode ahead, as slowly and powerfully as if a tree were walking.” --“They descended to a broad, sun-swept meadow. The morning had turned bright and warm; dew still clung to the bending blades of grass.” Despite its flaws, then, (view spoiler)[like the Horned King remaining a cardboard dark lord’s minion or Eilonwy getting a pretty RING when Gwydion hands out rewards in the end instead of, say, a book of useful spells for adventures (hide spoiler)], it is a fine, compact novel that moves speedily, has a lot of good messages for kids (and adults) and colorful characters, and is refreshingly different in some key ways from usual fantasy adventures. Although my favorite novel in the five-book series is the fourth, Taran Wanderer, The Book of Three is a great start. And James Langton gives a fine reading of the audiobook—doing distinctive and suitable voices for the various characters and enhancing the various moods of the story without overly dramatically “performing” the book and drawing attention to himself.</["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]> View all my reviews
The Great Siege, Malta 1565: Clash of Cultures: Christian Knights Defend Western Civilization Against the Moslem Tide by Ernle Bradford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "This was no ordinary enemy" Even though I knew the outcome of the Great Siege, listening to Simon Vance smoothly read Ernle Bradford’s 1961 history of the months-long Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565 was absorbing and suspenseful, because Bradford tells a good (his)tory: vivid, concise, clear, compassionate, and, for the time he wrote it, balanced. That is, although his sympathies may belong more to the Christian Knights of St. John than with the Ottomans, for he highlights the “fanaticism” of the “Turks” a bit more than that of the Knights (“The knights met, many for the first time, the burning fanaticism of Islam” vs. “The Knights had such determination to die rather than surrender”), and he spends a bit more time narrating from the point of view of the defenders than from that of the attackers, he does give a fair amount of the Ottoman background, goals, strategies, and strengths (as soldiers) etc. After introducing the antagonists--Suleiman the Magnificent and the Ottoman Empire against the Knights of St. John--and how they came to be where they were in 1565 and why the Ottomans wanted to take Malta and why the Knights wanted to defend it, Bradford describes the defenses of the island and the preparations of the defenders and of the attackers and then proceeds to recount the siege, starting with the lengthy Ottoman attack on the fort of St. Elmo. Throughout, Bradford serves up choice morsels of information about things like the conditions of galley slaves, the hierarchy and composition of the Knights, the composition and training of Janissaries, the lives of the local Maltese peasants, the surprisingly aged and vital leaders of the opposing sides like the 70-year-old Grand Master Jean de Valette and Musfafa Pasha, not to mention the 80-year-old super corsair Dragut, the pluses and minuses of armor, the implementation and effects of canons and firearms and incendiaries (Greek fire and firework hoops and infernal engines and siege towers!), mining and counter-mining, spies, the precious relic of the hand of St. John the Baptist, how the Maltese women were the mainstay of the defense, and more. Throughout there are impressive moments, like when the Ottomans roll a massive round slow-fuse bomb filled with shrapnel over a defensive wall only for the defenders to roll it back over the wall so it detonates among the densely packed attackers, or like when the Grand Master organizes a surprise chain-shot canon to deal with a threatening siege tower, or like when the Grand Master rallies the defenders at the point of a massive breach, or like the fall of St. Elmo, or, like, yes, the Grand Master executing all Ottoman prisoners and firing their heads from canons into the enemy positions. Bradford highlights the brutal holy war nature of the conflict. He vividly relates how good people are at destroying things and how desperate they are at defending them, as with the “storm of marble and metal” the Ottomans unleashed for months 24-7 on the forts and towns of Malta. It reminds me of Roger Crowley’s 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West. Readers who like vivid military history about turning point moments would like Bradford’s book (though it is over sixty-years old now and may have been superseded by more current research?) View all my reviews
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Inspiring and Sad Female Native American Robinsoniad In the Newbery Medal winning novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), a Native American named Karana recounts how at the age of twelve she ended up alone on her home island and then, apart from some wild dogs and other creatures, lived there for eighteen years. Author Scott O’Dell’s Afterword reveals that he based his novel on a real historical native woman called “The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island,” that she lived off the Californian coast on one of the Channel Islands southwest of LA and Catalina, and that she was eventually found and taken to the mainland and put in the Santa Barbara Mission. Because no one spoke her language so she could only tell her story partially by using gestures, O’Dell is imagining almost everything in the story, including Karana’s native name. In that context, O’Dell writes an authentic feeling, absorbing, and moving novel relating how Karana survives for years there, like a female indigenous Robinson Crusoe. How she gets food and water and shelter, dries abalone, makes a dress from cormorant feathers, deals with hostile wild dogs, survives a hurricane and an earthquake, hunts a devil fish, hides when otter hunters show up, and generally deals with being the only human being on the island. O’Dell writes convincingly in Karana’s first-person voice, as when she describes things like the arrival of a big western ship (“At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings.”) and its use of a canon (“A puff of white smoke came from the deck of the ship. A loud noise echoed against the cliff. Five of our warriors fell and lay quiet.”). I wonder when Karana is telling her story. It’s not a present-tense first-person story (that trend not having been in vogue when O’Dell wrote the novel), so, unlike something like, say, The Hunger Games, it’s obvious that the story is being told long after the events occurred, as the first line reveals: “I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.” However, the novel ends without any indication of how Karana would have learned enough English (or Spanish) to tell her story so well. [In fact, the historical woman Karana is based on died of dysentery just seven weeks after arriving at the Santa Barbara Mission.] Anyway, it feels like a mature survivor’s story of her youth. It is a sad book, both in Karana’s isolation and more largely in the plight of her tribe and all Native Americans, partly because of the restraint with which O’Dell has Karana tell her story. She rarely expresses the strong emotions she must be feeling and never says anything like, “Another case of white people taking our resources and killing our people.” The novel packs a strong emotional punch as a result. However, I’d maybe have liked a bit more of a righteous polemic on that score! But after all Karana is ignorant of the larger world, being born and raised on her island, and is only aware that people live on the mainland. (view spoiler)[One of the saddest moments comes at the very end when, after eighteen years alone on the Island the Blue Dolphins, a ship with a Spanish missionary shows up there, and she chooses to live with people rather than to go on living alone, and she proudly dons the special, beautiful cormorant feather skirt she’s painstakingly made, and the missionary and his people make her an ankle length dress to wear instead, and she resolves to wear her own dress once they get to the mainland, but we suspect it won’t be so easy for her henceforth, and it’s clear that the white people care nothing for her culture and will impose their own on her. (hide spoiler)] O’Dell writes some potent early second-wave feminist stuff on gender roles and their limitations: “I wondered what would happen to me if I went against the law of our tribe which forbade the making of weapons by women—if I did not think of it at all and made those things which I must have to protect myself.” Despite being all alone, it takes an effort of will for Karana to do what she needs to do to survive. Another important theme running through the novel concerns the human exploitation of animals, and Karana’s change regarding that is remarkable. (view spoiler)[The tragedy of Karana’s people derives from the insatiable human greed for otter skins. The other saddest part of the novel for me—sadder even than the deaths of her stupid and fated father and of her quick and foolish little brother—is the death of the dog Rontu. In the early part of the story, Rontu probably helps kill Karana’s brother, and she resolves to kill every last wild dog on the island, but after she has shot the big dog with an arrow, she suddenly decides to save his life and then tames and befriends him. “Why I did not send the arrow I cannot say. I stood on the rock with the bow pulled back and my hand would not let it go. The big dog lay there and did not move, and this may be the reason. If he had gotten up I would've killed him. I stood there for a long time, looking down at him, and then I climbed off the rocks.” Partly as a result of her relationship with Rontu, she decides at one point to never kill any more animals (apart from abalone and fish!) for food or clothes, regardless of whether or not they are her friends. (hide spoiler)] I have no idea how accurate O’Dell’s depiction of Karana and her people is, but he did research the lives of Native Americans in the Southwest Museum of the American Indian and manages to tell an absorbing, page-turning, authentic-feeling story with mostly only one human character on stage, the last member of her lost tribe, and makes us care about her. View all my reviews
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Crash Course in Being a Lyctor OR Where’s Gideon? Harrow the Ninth (2020) starts not long after Gideon the Ninth (2019) ends: young necromancers Harrowhark Nonagesimus of the Ninth House and her rival Ianthe Tridentarius of the Third have become new Lyctors, Saints of God. Both rookie Lyctors are to get a crash course in protecting God, the Emperor Undying, from planet-eating Resurrection Beasts and their insectoid Heralds. This will involve entering and exiting the River (of death) and developing life (thalurgy) and death (thanurgy) magic abilities, as well as learning how to sword fight and how to kill planets, all while receiving snide comments from 10,000-year-old Lyctor teachers (who call them “baby” Lyctors) and too sympathetic support from the man who became God or the God who became man. The novel begins with “Prologue: The Night Before the Emperor’s Murder,” as the Heralds of the 50,000 kilometers in diameter Resurrection Beast #7 are threatening to break into the House of God, the Mithraeum, a huge space station, after which author Tamsyn Muir writes back into two past plot strands to work up to that Prologue’s climax, with chapters counting down till the seemingly inevitable murder of the Emperor. The plot strand starting “nine months before the Emperor’s murder” depicts Harrowhark’s Lyctor training aboard the space station, where she is accompanied almost everywhere by “the body,” a kind of revenant only she can see. Is she insane or haunted? “Something deep inside flickered in your nervous system that was a bit like an emotion, but it died, much to your relief.” The second-person narrator, by the way, addresses Harrowhark as “you.” “You picked your way back through the concentric rings of ground acetabula you had laid, the fine gritty layers of femur, and you stood in the centre and breathed.” Will Harrowhark and Ianthe get enough training and information to be able to prevent the impending death of God? "You spurred your exoskeleton into a trot." But what the what? Where the heck is Gideon Nav!? At the end of the first book (narrated by the irreverent, foul, and funny Gideon), Harrow’s cavalier sacrifices herself to enable Harrow to become a Lyctor, so it’s not surprising not to find her living and narrating this second novel, but no one—neither Harrow nor her frenemy Ianthe nor her Lyctor teachers nor God—ever even mention Gideon. It's as if she's been erased from history! In fact, in the list of Lyctors and cavaliers preceding the novel, the name of Harrowhark’s cavalier has been crossed into illegibility. You’d think that necromancers would retain some memory of the deceased, if not resurrect her. A moving source of suspense while reading this novel, then, is wondering what happened to Gideon. That’s not all. The second-person narration main story chapters alternate with third-person chapters that start “fourteen months before the Emperor’s murder” and rewrite the events we read in the first novel, wherein Harrowhark goes to participate in a competition to become a Lyctor in Canaan House accompanied by Gideon Nav as her cavalier. In this second novel, confoundingly, Harrowhark’s cavalier for Canaan House is the cowardly, hulking Ortus Nigenad, who in tense moments recites lines from his own epic poetry. Thus, these past chapters take place in an apparently alternate reality with different cavaliers and necromancers getting offed at different times in different ways than in the first novel. To avoid spoiling the story, I will only say that Tamsyn Muir knows what she’s doing. Like the first novel, this one is full of compelling characters (though I do miss Gideon!), interesting relationships between them (especially Ianthe and Harrowhark!), spicy banter, interesting necromantic magical systems (bone magic!), and exciting and unpredictable graphic violent action (the last third of the novel is a non-stop ride of bloody and bony revelation). This novel adds some new things--like the history and personality of God (a “man-shaped eclipse” who has an ordinary face with monstrous “white-rimmed primordial” eyes of “oil on carbon” and who seems fatherly—call him John—but also resurrected nine planets and a sun ten thousand years ago), and the two enemies of the Empire: the Blood of Eden, a rebel cult dedicated to the extirpation of necromancers, and the Resurrection Beasts who are souls of dead planets who eat living planets and are drawn to God and His Lyctors as ships at night to beacons. As in the first book, there are MANY cool things here, from the fact that Harrowhark (an emaciated necromancer) must lug around and sleep with a giant two-handed “heinous sword” (didn’t Gideon favor a two-hander?) that hates her and makes her barf whenever she touches it and can only be wielded if she magics up an exoskeleton to augment her “muscles,” to all the fun necromancy stuff, from “firing” bone missiles and using fragments of bone and permanent ash to raise monstrous skeleton constructs, to insulating wires with yellow fat and regenerating one’s damaged bones and tissues. And great lines, like “I mastered death... I wish I had done the smarter thing and mastered time,” and “Poetry is one of the most beautiful shadows a civilization can cast across time.” And original similes, like “The planet was warm like the inside of a mouth,” sometimes becoming mini-epic similes, like “Memory hit Harrowhark Nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall.” And sublime descriptions, like “For the first time you got a sense of the enormity of the flag ship, its scintillating dark and rainbow-hued steel like an oil spill, the interlocking skeletons tessellated over the whole boxy structure, so that the vessel seemed an enormous moving ossuary.” And witty snarky talk, like “We must work with what we've got as the flesh magician said to the leper,” and "I can't tell if you are a once in a lifetime genius or an insane imbecile or both." Audiobook reader Moira Quirk enhances the novel and does some great character voices (e.g., Crux and Duty), though her condescending female character voices for Harrow, Ianthe, and Mercy overlap a bit. This book entertained and moved me (view spoiler)[especially when Gideon finally appears and starts narrating and kicking ass (hide spoiler)]. And I get a kick out of perusing the many works of fan art like this one: I’m looking forward to the third volume in the series!</["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]> View all my reviews
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Would-Be Dominican Tolkien-- Oscar de Leon, AKA Oscar Wao (a mocking nickname given him when he dressed up for Halloween like Dr. Who but was said to look like Oscar Wilde) is sure no stereotypically aggressive, confident, womanizing young Dominican man! Instead, he’s a morbidly overweight uber-nerd, deeply and comprehensively into Dungeons and Dragons and sf and fantasy and anime books, tv shows, movies, and the like. His dream is to become the Dominican Tolkien, his fear to die a virgin. Junot Diaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) relates Oscar’s story, as well as those of his potent and rebellious sister Lola, his potent and hardworking mother Belicia, his impotent and refined grandfather Abelard (a doctor!), and their roots and lives in the Dominican Republic in the past and in Paterson, New Jersey in the “present” of the historical fiction, moving around in time and place from the 1940s to the 1990s. Diaz also works into his novel the background and life of the narrator of the novel, Yunior de Las Casas, a well-meaning, weightlifting, and philandering Dominican who befriends Oscar and dates his sister (and who DOES become a writer). Because of Oscar’s interests and Yunior’s attempts to understand them, the novel is full of references to LOTR and a host of other fantasy and sf works, characters, and games (Dune, Watchmen, Akira, Gary Gygax, Gormenghast, Galactus, Jack Kirby, Stephen King, Twilight Zone, etc.), like “Oscar had like a zero combat rating,” and “… when Gondolin falls you don’t wait around for the balrogs to tap on your door. You make fucking moves.” And because of the Dominican characters and narrator etc., the novel is also full of English swear words and Spanish expressions, some of which are understandable from the context, some not, all of which give it an interesting spicy-Spanish-Nerd flavor, as in “Her name was Ana Obregon, a pretty, loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller.” The book begins with the "author" Yunior introducing the Dominican concept of fuku, a curse/doom that can nail a person or an entire country. He recounts Dominican history featuring the 20th-century tyrant Trujillo, “the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated,” a leader for whom the country “was his very own private Mordor.” When you include President Johnson invading the Dominican Republic in 1965, the Vietnam debacle may be understood as a fuku coming home to roost in America. Anyway, in the novel the main target/victims of the fuku are Oscar de Leon and his family. **Note: we know from the title and other hints from the narrator that Oscar is going to die young; part of the suspense in reading the book lies in wondering when/how it will happen. I liked the book a lot, but I found the parts set in the Dominican Republic most absorbing and interesting, because I had been totally ignorant about the country and its history, starting with how the Spanish treated the indigenous people there and running up through the assassination of Trujillo (the Sauron of the DR, though his death sure didn’t lead to any kind of a utopia). The contrasts between the cultures of the Dominican Republic and of the USA are striking. The parallels between what Belicia and Oscar experience in the Dominican Republic decades apart from each other have a powerful and awful irony (Lola makes a terse and devastating condemnation of Dominicans at one point: “We’re ten million Trujillos”). By contrast, I did not care SO much for the parts featuring Oscar in Paterson or at Rutgers etc., because he can be too self-centered, self-destructive, self-pitying, and inveterate a nerd, and I could have done with maybe one or two fewer of his attempts at romantic relationships. I found myself much more interested in the plights of Abelard and Belicia in the Dominican Republic than of Oscar in Paterson. It's a funny but sad novel with a wonderfully distinctive voice. Lin Manuel-Miranda reads his parts of the audiobook splendidly (those with a male narrator), though I have a hard time picturing him as black. Karen Olivo reads her parts (those with a female narrator) well, too. And the interesting footnotes from the physical novel ARE read in the audiobook. View all my reviews
Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Woman Aboard the Surprise?!? Ah, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sailing aboard the Surprise again—what could be better!? As Clarissa Oakes (1992), the fifteenth book in Patrick O’Brian’s age of sail Aubrey-Maturin series begins, the odd couple bosom buddies should be feeling good about finally having been able to leave the hellish Australian penal colony, with Stephen recovering from his severe duckbill platypus poisoning (he is an inveterate and at times reckless naturalist), but Jack is feeling unusually tetchy (even ship-surgeon Stephen’s usual emetics and bleeding don’t seem to help), because he had some amorous hopes rudely dashed back in Australia, because Stephen has forced him to accept aging (pulling a hank of Jack’s long hair before his eyes to show him it’s grayer than blond now), and because the crew of the Surprise has been behaving oddly, leering and smirking at him in unsailorly fashion. Jack soon discovers to his righteous indignation that Midshipman Oakes has smuggled aboard the Surprise a transported female convict dressed as a boy! And Jack believes that a woman aboard only brings bad luck and dissension. To try to secure the situation, he has the couple formally married, and all seems well at first. But the crew soon dangerously divides into factions, as the newly wed wife seems to be having sex with multiple officers, such that they become bitter rivals whose men hate each other. Needless to say, this is no state for a British ship to be in during the War of 1812 with both American and French enemy ships about. And the old Surprise (a 500-ton frigate privately owned now by Jack who loves its sailing character even though its guns are too light to suit contemporary naval ships) has been given a delicate mission to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where Jack is to assess a civil war between a southern queen and a northern upstart and help whichever side seems more likely to welcome an alliance with England. As the northern upstart is being supported by the Franklin, an American privateer crewed by the French, Jack determines to help the queen. But will his ship’s crew disintegrate into civil war before they can reach the Sandwich Islands? Will Clarissa Oakes continue entertaining any officer who comes to her for “help”? Will Stephen be able to improve Jack’s health? Will he ever get to land on an island to explore its flora and fauna? Meanwhile, letters from home reveal that all is not well with Stephen’s wife Diana, who, no maternal role model, seems to have become alienated from their infant daughter and from Jack’s wife Sophie. The novel is full of all the virtues of the others in the series: appealing characters, stimulating conversation, vivid descriptions, and sudden and sparing violent action scenes. (If you like nautical warfare, you might be disappointed by how little there is, but the rare moments when it does break out are quite gripping and suspenseful.) Clarissa Oakes is a compelling new character. Intelligent and unaffected, her childhood and youth were such that she views sexual intercourse as of no more importance than a kiss on the cheek and derives no pleasure from either: “I'm not a monster incapable of affection... Only I cannot connect it with that toiling, striving, grasping... with anything of a carnal nature. They seem to me poles apart.” She also happens to have some information that Stephen in his capacity as intelligence agent finds most interesting and useful. The novel is the only one in the twenty-book series named after a female character… And yes the novel is full of great writing, descriptions, and lines, like: “… a mildly rotten sea, unvarying Prussian blue almost to the horizon under a pure, pale sky, the sun just clear of the eastern ocean, the moon sinking into it on the other hand, and on the starboard bow, a low domed island of some size, far off, but already as green as a good emerald in the slanting light.” “Ten knots… All hands loved to feel their ship running fast with this urgent heave and thrust and the water bubbling along her side, the bow wave hollowing out midships to show her copper.” “A turmoil of squids pursuing pelagic crabs... and two or three fathoms below these... some schools of fishes crossing and recrossing, all of the same mackerel shaped kind, all flashing as they turned and all feeding upon a host of fry so numerous that they made a globular haze in the clear green water. The boobies preyed on both, either making a slight skimming dive to snatch up a squid just under the surface, or plunging from a height like so many mortar bombs to reach the depth where the fishes cruised.” There is an unconvincing Captain Kirk-like one-night-stand, and the only violent action occurs ashore near the end of the novel, but the character of Clarissa Oakes and the suspense as to how the Surprise will work out her presence are absorbing. Fans of the series should read this book, but readers interested in O’Brian and Jack and Stephen should of course start with the first one, Master and Commander. Ric Jerrom continues to be the ideal reader for the audiobooks. It’s a pleasure to hear him read lines between Jack and Stephen like, “Do you suffer, brother?” “I suffer, brother, but moderately.” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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