Annals of Random Reading: The Eight Shelves, Part Two.

In December, I chose one audiobook per shelf from a column of eight shelves at my local branch library.  Last Monday, I told you how things went with the first three books.  Now, the exciting conclusion!


#4 Strata, by Terry Pratchett, 1981 (read in February)  * * *

Variations on a theme by Douglas Adams. Cute.

Terry Pratchett writes in a genre of “funny science fiction” that I tend to find rather grating. I’ve got friends who are fans, and from the choices at hand I picked this book to give him another try at winning me over. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really a win either.  And it really shares an awful lot of ideas and gags with the planet-factory episode in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Which was written first, I wonder.


#5 The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, 2009. (read in March)  * * *

Nicely written literary historical fiction, a series of vignettes really involving the staff and patients of a Victorian sanitarium. Good scenes and passages, but there's very little momentum driving the book forward. Fails to avoid landing on exactly the shocking dark secrets that you would expect from a novel treating of this time and setting.

I’ve since learned that this is a historical novel about the madness and incarceration of the famous British poet John Clare. What, you’ve never heard of John Clare? Oh good, than I feel better about not catching on.

#6 The Song Remains the Same, by Allison Winn Scotch, 2012. (begun in May) Abandoned

Adequately well-written soap opera. But life is short.

This was some sort of business about a woman who is one of only two survivors of a plane crash, and the other one is a famous but troubled movie star, and she has total amnesia, and must try to piece together her troubled relationships with her husband, mother, and sister. In retrospect, I probably should have jumped ship earlier than I did.

#7 Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell, 1998 (read in June)  * * * * *

I love this book.

This one was a real astonishment. Expecting nothing in particular, I wandered into a deeply intelligent science fiction novel that explores ecology, anthropology, history, ethics, and theology with wry wit, a full cast of well-drawn characters, plentiful violence, and a ripping story. I was stunned to discover this exciting new science fiction novel, and then more stunned to find that it’s fifteen years old; why haven’t I read this before? Why haven’t we all read it?

It turns out that it is a sequel, although it stood up just fine on its own. Mrs.5000, having noticed my stunned look, has eye-read both the first book (The Sparrow) and the second, and asked me the other night, “Why haven’t I read this before?”

A thoroughgoing win.

#8 Sea Change, by Karen White, 2012. (begun in June) Abandoned

I have no reason to think there's anything ~bad~ here, but it was emphatically not "my kind of thing," in that I was unable to pay attention to it.

Can’t win ‘em all.


Final Score

From my experiment of picking one audiobook each from eight shelves, my results were:

1 - Really Extraordinary novel
1 - Introduction into a rich seam of genre fiction.
4 - Books that did me no particular lasting good, but which all kept me company through a certain volume of road running or household chores
2 - Books that just sort of wasted my precious time, but only for as long as it took me to toss them overboard.

All in all, I’d have to say I fared pretty well. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime.

Annals of Random Reading: The Eight Shelves, Part One.

When I first moved to the City of Roses, I was for some reason a little at a loss for what to read.  I remember being downtown at the Central Library thinking that it would be interesting to pick a column of shelves, to choose one book apiece  off of each of the shelves, and to see what happened. 

I never actually did that, but one day last December I found myself in front of the “books on CD” shelves in an empirical mood, and started picking one book apiece from each of the eight shelves.  I took them home and ripped them to the little electronic gadget I use to read while I run (I call it the “stories,” often in the sentence “I can’t find my stories!”).  After six months, I have now given my best shot at all eight of the books (in and among plenty of others, of course), and am ready to report my findings.   

Initial Lessons

The initial stage of the experiment – that’s too say, the part where you pick out your books – is a bit eye-opening.  Obviously, there are bookshelves in the world where it would be painful to have to limit yourself to a single choice amongst all of the awesomeness (my brother’s personal bookshelves jump to mind).  But when you are choosing from among an essentially random selection of books washed up on the shelves of a branch library, you really start to realize that there is a lot out there that you would never, ever want to read.  There are plenty of books, for instance, in genres that just don't appeal to you, or on topics that you are simply not interested in.  There are furthermore many books that survive on past their mayfly lifespan (Running Microsoft Access for Windows 95, say), and are really just waiting to be claimed by the dustbin of history.   There is also of course a surprising volume of twaddle – diet books, political screes, conspiracy hooey, instant histories of insignificant events, and worse.  You know this stuff is out there, but when it appears on a menu that you are actively choosing from, its volume can be a little alarming.

Secondly, when you are choosing a book without prior knowledge of its contents, you must take advantage of information and cues provided on its surface by the publisher.  Fortunately, this is not hard to do: it is necessary and fairly easy to judge a book by its cover.  But everyone knows this.

The Books

Here’s what happened with my eight selections.  I’ll include the rating (out of five stars) and review (in italics) that I gave it on my Goodreads account.

#1 Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.D. Wodehouse, 1934. (read in January)  * * *

Right ho. Extremely light reading, but one a year during the winter months is not entirely without merit, sir.

Of the eight books chosen, this was the only one where I had a good sense of what I was getting into.  I had listened to Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories before, and while they can be a bit precious in bulk, they are a perfectly good lighthearted entertainment in limited doses.  I count this one as a win.

#2 League of Frightened Men, by Rex Stout, 1935. (read in January) * * * *

Good writing about a brilliant detective and the oddball shut-in blowhard he attaches himself to. Not to be read for feasibility of plot or special insights into human character, but an entertainment that has aged well.

League of Frightened Men is the second book of the Nero Wolfe series.  I’ve seen Nero Wolfe paperbacks lying about all my life without ever being especially tempted to pick one up, but apparently it was the best thing I could find on the shelf.  This was a big win.  After listening to this one, I got an audio version of the first book in the series and have since eye-read books number three, four, five, and thirty-one (books number five and thirty-one having been packaged weirdly together in a two-books-in-one-volume sort of deal).  I am hooked.  Archie Goodwin, the point-of-view character, is a terrific character, and the background teems with the flavor of New York in the 1930s and the ideas, values, and ways of life in the United States of eighty years ago.  And there are FORTY-SEVEN books in this series.  It’s like Christmas.

                                                                                                   

#3 Pictures at an Exhibition, by Sara Houghteling, 2009. (read in February)  * * *

No Goodreads review.

This was a reasonable piece of fiction about art and art dealing in Paris before and during the Nazi occupation.  I don’t remember it very well, which is not necessarily the best of signs.  You didn’t think I was going to hit strikes with all eight books, did you?

- - To Be Continued - -

Five Brisk Reviews

Book: Gilead, by Marianne Robinson.
Source: I picked it up because I read somewhere that it was good.
Findings: In the form of a long letter from an older father to his son, Gilead is an incredibly graceful and evocative look into (a) small town life, (b) the mid 20th Century in the United States, (c) American religious life, and (d) the human experience in general. It tells the story of a life of no more than the average level of drama and event, yet is quietly riveting. The spare, elegant writing style reminded me of Housekeeping, a book that I read for the Reading List project last year, yet I managed to be surprised anyway when I realized that two books are by the same writer. Where Housekeeping spoke in very spare language of momentous events in the narrator's biography, Gilead invests great emotional weight in the everyday. It is quite lovely.



Book: Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
Source: Karmasartre recommended it after I reviewed Sprawling Fantasy Epics a few months back.
Findings: The first book of the Gormanghast trilogy, Titus Groan is a coming-of-age fantasy novel as Edward Gorey might have written one. The book is populated by grotesque, parodical figures fulfilling their ceremonial roles in a vast, decadent provincial castle. Unlike the many fantasy tales where the point-of-view character is by definition good and his or her enemies evil, Titus Groan treats us to a world where no one really has much to recommend them in the way of moral fiber, and the most intelligent and dynamic member of the cast is also spectacularly self-serving. Written in the 1940s, this book can be read as a critique of both the blandness and blindness of traditional authority and of the limitations and hypocracies of anti-authoritarian movements. Or, it can just be enjoyed as a darkly funny imagined universe, beautifully realized outside of some long descriptive digressions that veer towards the purple. Either way, I'll definitely be back for the second installment.



Game: Purgatory
Source: MyDogIsChelsea told me to buy it so her friend, who designed it, could keep his patent rights or something.
Findings: An attractive, entertaining, and nicely designed trick-taking card game played by two teams of two, Purgatory is similar to Hearts in terms of its gameplay, and likely to appeal to people who like the more common game. The deck has three suits (green, purple, and blue) with numbers 1 - 13, "devil" cards that carry a penalty (a bit like hearts in Hearts), and "angel" cards that work a bit like a permanent trump suit. The most innovative twist in the game is that the three six cards are particularly significant; making a mid-value card more important than high or low cards challenges a player to come up with new trump-taking strategies. Mrs.5000 and I got our butts handed to us on our initial outting with the game, but had fun just the same.



Rock Album: The Thermals, Now We Can See
Source: I would have got to it eventually anyway, but d alerted me to its release.
Findings: The Thermals are The Rose City's other band of brainiacs, less overtly theatrical and bookish than the Decemberists and considerably rougher and more noisy. But listen through the punk-flavored guitar attack, and you'll discover songwriting that is intelligent, clever, and pointed. This new album continues their general direction towards an increasingly spare lo-fi rock minimalism, and teaches us again that just because a guitar power trio is rocking the hell out doesn't mean that they don't have anything interesting to say.



Book: Data Flow: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design
Source: I think I saw this one on bioephemera, maybe?
Findings: Graphical presentation of information is incredibly important to clear thinking. The ubiquity of Microsoft Office products, the graphical capabilities of which are bizarrely rigid and underdeveloped, has been disastrous to information visualization, so I was excited to see a text that could counterbalance the brilliant but idiosyncratic and unsystematic work of Edward Tufte in this field. Sadly, Data Flow is mostly a portfolio of truly awful graphic design that does more to obscure than convey information. With only a few exceptions -- notably, Jessica Hagy's droll hand-drawn graphical cartoons -- the work in this book abuses the capabilities of computer graphics to create images that are garish, busy, opaque, and often obnoxiously smug in their own cleverness. The ghost of the jagged, sloppy wave of early '90s graphic design infuses this work, so much so that I double-checked to make sure that this was really a new book. Depressingly, it is.

Michael5000's Guide to Awesome Science Fiction, Part III

Sprawling Fantasy Epics

"But wait," the dorkier among you are even now saying, "this series is supposed to be about Science Fiction! Why are we talking about Fantasy?" To which I say, eh, it's a blurry line, there are a lot of mutual fans, and as genres I consider them very similar in terms of their strengths, liabilities, and standards of excellence. Although really, it might just boil down to the fact that they were shelved together back in the Hometown5000 Public Library and so are indelibly fused in my mind.

Why sprawling epics? Well, that just seems to be the way that the fantasy genre works. I think that writers who have lovingly imagined a whole world and its social, political, and supernatural setting are apt to want to continue working in and exploring that context. Readers too, having invested in imagining a world-system, are likely to want to learn more about its implications. Massive bloated corporate publishing juggernauts, in their turn, are pleased as punch to be able to cultivate an established brand. Everybody wins, and there's no need to invoke the genre's roots in and enduring connections to the saga forms of the premodern peoples of Northern Europe. Although, you can if you want to.


J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings -- Well, duh. Tolkien can fairly be said to have kicked off an entire genre of fiction, not to mention having deeply informed the evolution of role-playing games, computer gaming, and heavy metal music. It is equally fair to say that most minor-league fantasy fiction written before the year 2000 was more or less directly derivative of Tolkien's world-making. And, like many people and I expect most of my gentle readers, I love these books very dearly. One of the few books I have read more than twice, I have in fact read this series something like nine times.

The action of The Lord of the Rings is set within a massive historical, geographical, and linguistic setting that one can not help but admire even as its sheer scale makes you wonder if Professor Tolkien did not perhaps have a few screws loose. While this is a strength, I think it must also be said that odd intrusions of this ponderous backstory, often in the form of tedious faux folk-poems, are the most obvious flaw of the trilogy. (The second most obvious is the sudden save-the-day manifestation of an army of the dead, which is not at all well integrated into the rest of the story.) Some critics also fault Tolkien's narrative voice as being dry and wooden, but I do not agree with this; I feel that he successfully sustains a dignified heroism that integrates beautifully with the texture of his imagined world.


George R.R. Martin, Song of Ice & Fire -- The Ice & Fire books are still being written -- indeed, I have no confidence that they will ever be finished -- and yet they are already a masterful achievement. They are to contemporary fantasy what Lord of the Rings was to late 20th Century fantasy, the touchstone that all other efforts must react to and be measured against. Heavy on the swords, light on the sorcery, the Ice & Fire books are about politics and power and the role of the individual in history. In exploring these issues on a human scale, they are magnificent. They are also vividly and richly written in a way that compells a reader forward through their hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Which brings me to this observation: the reason why Ice & Fire has supplanted Lord of the Rings as the dominant paradigm in fantasy fiction is that -- painful as this may be to those of us who have Tolkien enmeshed in our hearts and in our bones -- it is better. Martin's world is a more fully realized ecology, his characters have more recognizable psychologies, and his understanding of how history works is far more sophisticated.

Summary is futile. The plot deals with the many contests for power, great and small, within the fuedal kingdom of Westeros. There is much violence and many surprises, and a kind of harsh fantasy realism -- don't get too sentimental, as some apparently key characters aren't even going to survive the first book. On a personal scale, all of the many, many characters are fully realized, complex, believeable people. On a world scale, the history of Westeros has an immediate plausibility to anyone who has looked at medieval European history. The only real issue with Ice & Fire is its sheer bulk; Martin is certainly making a handsome living off of his creation, and good for him, but I sometimes fear that the sheer vastness of its creation will overwhelm its long-term popularity.


Ursula LeGuin, The Earthsea Trilogy -- A fantasy trilogy for adolescents, Earthsea is a tale of an orphaned boy who is discovered to be a wizard and sent to a special school to develop his talents. There, he has to deal with the politics of his school peers before -- What?!? Did you think J.K. Rowling invented the adolescent fantasy novel? LeGuin was crafting Earthsea while Rowling was still in her diapers. Literally.

Earthsea is -- how can I put this? -- I much more mature sort of fantasy for adolescents than is Harry Potter. It's in a darker register, in a more dignified tone and a sparer and more elegant language than Rowling uses or likely could use -- LeGuin is a powerful writer even in her juvenile fiction. The daughter of a leading anthropologist, LeGuin ties her work always to the mythologies, folklore, and archetypes of premodern real-world cultures. Where a key strength of the Potter books is perhaps their setting more or less in the real world, Earthsea is thoroughly Elsewhere, an archipelago land of quasi-Celtic earthiness and quasi-Norse pessimism. It is not an especially merry place, but it is beautifully evoked and an enriching place to visit.

What about Harry? Well, I've only read fragments. It's the next item up on the Reading List, though, so I'll be sharing my no-doubt crankish opinions with you soon enough.


Stephen Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever -- This series is also on the Reading List; I read it twice as a kid and once in graduate school, but not in the last fifteen years. It stands out in my reading memory, though, as an exceptionally alternative assay into the genre. Thomas Covenant isn't a sparkly-eyed child drawn into a happy wonderland, nor a quaintly virtuous hobbit drawn unwittingly but with pluck and spunk into events beyond his understanding. He is a disagreeable, disfigured grown man -- and an asshole, not to put too fine a point on it -- who is taken unwillingly into an parallel universe where he is asked to be an epic hero for a civilization under immediate threat from the forces of evil and chaos (who are led by the rather bluntly named "Lord Foul").

What I remember from my earlier readings is that the first trilogy took this unlikely concept and ran with it pretty brilliantly. Sometime in the next few years, we'll see if that still holds. My memory is also that Donaldson wrote a bunch of subsequent trilogies, and that they were decreasingly interesting. We'll see about that if the first series still works for me.

Michael5000's Guide to Awesome Science Fiction, Part II

Literary Science Fiction

"Literary Science Fiction" is generally a code for books that treat traditional scinece fiction tropes -- futurism, the impact of new technologies, space travel -- but which are written from outside of the genre. Among your classics, the dystopian future of Orwell's 1984 was a sort of Literary Science Fiction; in the 1980s, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was a blockbuster, if flawed, speciman.

Literary Science Fiction brings with it the advantage of fresh approaches and voices. Often, an LSF writer escapes some of the stylistic conventions and cliches of the genre. Traditional Science Fiction prose, if we are honest, tends to be either fairly spare and hard-boiled, or heroic with a tendency towards pomposity. LSF writers, by contrast, are generally more -- duh! -- literary, with a tendency toward a more poetic, lyrical use of language.

The disadvantage of LSF is often that, having no grounding in the issues that good science firction writers have already been thinking about over the decades, they often lovingly depict an imagined world that is not really very well thought through. This is what I remember most from The Handmaid's Tale, although in fairness it has been over 20 years since I read it: it worked, more or less, as a grim feminist parable, but it didn't contain the sense of a plausibly imagined world or future.

The difference between genre Science Fiction and Literary Science Fiction is of course largely a matter of convention and marketing. Ursula LeGuin certainly writes with a literary voice, but she is generally considered a genre writer -- indeed, one of the genre's core masters. So yeah, to an extent this is a pointless distinction. But it is a pointless distinction that gives me the priviledge of recommending the following four books.


Haruki Murikami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. -- Murakami is a sort of stand-in here for an entire spectrum of postmodern "magic realist" fiction that arguably trades in the core concepts of Science Fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, Kazuo Ishiguro -- all of these guys have written books that, with different cover art, would be right at home in the Science Fiction ghetto of the booksotre. Saramago's Blindness and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are straight up, undeniable, classic Science Fiction stories -- awesome ones -- but they are clad and marketed in carefully literary clothing.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland, although not the best of Murikami's work, is probably the one with the most Science Fiction elements. Unabashedly trippy and weird, with a strong dose of melancholy, it is certainly not for everyone. But maybe it's for you?


Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day. Mrs.5000 introduced me to this book. I tend to forget the title and call it "Quakers in Space," which is far more descriptive of the content. The novel follows the practical and societal adventures in a space habitat inhabited by pacifist religious non-conformists on a multi-generational journey to colonize a new planet. Gently paced and concerned with exploring the benefits and problems of decision by consensus, the story takes place within a richly imagined microecology.



Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife. The Time Traveler's Wife falls, consciously or not, in the great Science Fiction tradition of stories that sets up a simple counterfactual scenario -- in this case, what if there was this guy who sporadically travelled involuntarily back in time? -- and explores what the ramifications might be. In this case, we end up with a beautifully rendered story about the nature love, loss, and the passage of time. These are universal themes, of course, the same ones that are explored in much mainstream literature. But The Time Traveler's Wife also serves as a good example of, how by imagining people in unprecidented and extreme situations, the Science Fiction author can provide fresh insights, or at least a fresh viewpoint, into human nature.

In addition to being good Literary Science Fiction, incidentally, this book offers a great romance, strongly drawn characters, and an intricate puzzle of twisted and overlapping timelines. The two primary characters experience events in different orders, often knowing what lies in store in the future of the other; as readers, events are revealed to us on yet a third timeline. It is an intricate puzzle of cause and effect, and Niffenegger has structured the book masterfully to keep us thoroughly engaged in what will happen next. Or what will have happened next. It is a wonderfully crafted text.



David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. Another brilliantly constructed book, this is an intricately nested series of stories. Initially the components of the novel seem completely unrelated, and only as you approach the end does the overall pattern cohere. It can be read as a dystopian adventure story, as a meditation on the nature of individuality, as (perhaps) a study in chaos theory, or simply as a series of strange, highly evocative sotries with some quirky common threads connecting them together. Fabulous.

Michael5000's Guide to Awesome Science Fiction, Part I

OK, first things first: much science fiction is dreadful. But worse than that, much of the "classic" science fiction is dreadful, or at least dull, and many of the supposedly "great" science fiction writers are in truth downright poor writers (I mean, seriously, try reading Phillip K. Dick sometime). This lack of good signposts makes it a genre that can be really difficult to get a foothold in.

Yet science fiction can also be awesome. By placing humans into unprecidented situations and imagining the outcomes, it can be a powerful tool for casting light on human nature. By posing cultures and species against each other on a interstellar scale, it can give us analogies for our own Earthbound sociopolitics without all of the baggage that is entailed in writing about real-world events. Science fiction can warn us or give us hope about what we humans might in time become, about how events on the future path of technology might be best or worst dealt with.

But how to separate the wheat from the endless chaff? Me, I look for three elements in my science fiction.

I: Plausibility and Coherence -- Taking "Plausibility" with a grain of salt, perhaps. Most science fiction relies on futuristic technologies that may well be completely pie-in-the-sky, as far as we can tell from the here and now. What concerns me is, how are the societies for whom these technologies are available appropriated adapted to and affected by the technology? In the very worst science fiction, all you get is the author's contemporary society with a sprinkling of new gadgets.

II: Ecology -- If you are on another planet, that is pretty interesting! It's not likely to be much like Earth! So, what is it like? What of the natural processes we experience here on Sol III are also present there? What happens very, very differently? What kind of critters are there, and how do they survive in that strange alien environment? Do tell!

III: Character Development -- Fiction doesn't pull much weight without well-drawn characters. Generations of science fiction writers have been too excited about technologies and aliens to think about motivation and human (or non-human) experience, and thus there is a vast literature in which the characters are one-note cardboard cutouts. Dreadful.

Let's cut to the chase! You can now avoid the crap, and treat yourself to the official list of Science Fiction approved by michael5000! Lucky You!

The Official List of Science Fiction Approved by Michael5000, Installment #1

Iain Banks, the "Culture" Novels. Hugely popular in the U.K. and almost unheard of here, Iain Banks is probably too clever for his own good but not too clever to write extremely compelling science fiction. From 1987's Consider Phlebas, a rip-snorting episodic action-adventure, to 2008's Matter, a sort of historical romance set in a complexly nested hierarchy of civilizations at differing levels of technological achievement, the novels set in the fictive universe of "The Culture" are a diverse but hugely engaging collections. Often gruesome, always inventive, and beautifully imagined, these are probably my favorite books in all of genre fiction.

Orson Scott Card: the Ender Trilogy. Ender's Game, Xenocide, Speaker for the Dead, and Children of the Mind are a terrific four-volume trilogy (as one often finds in science fiction) that explores of what contact with alien intelligences might actually be like; the series can also be read as a metaphor for intercultural contact here on dear old Earth. The middle two books are the strongest, the fourth is strictly optional. It is vitally important that you do not read any of the more recent books that Card has accreted on to the trilogy, or for that matter anything that Card wrote after the mid-90s, when he inexplicably went dramatically from being an excellent storyteller to the worst kind of hack. Quite sad.

Sherri Tepper: Raising the Stones and Grass. Sherri Tepper can be a mixed bag, but these two, the best of her books, are dynamite. In both, characters face mysterious challenges that spring from the quirks of an inventive but plausibly rendered planetary ecology. Grass, in particular, puts a grim, grim face on the idea of symbiosis.

Things People Told Me to Read

King Dork by Frank Portman

(Recommended by Chance.) Is King Dork among the best young adult novels of recent years? Well, how the hell would I know! It's the only young adult novel of recent years I've read. But whatever. It's a damn fine book by any yardstick.

The main character, nicknamed "Chi-Mo," seems at first a fairly conventional teen-fiction protagonist. He is a smart loner on the outskirts of a brutally tribal high school society, in rebellion against the usual suspects: teachers, popular students, viscious students, parents, step-parents, and bad music. He is also more specifically in rebellion against the classic novel The Catcher in the Rye and its adoring fans among the adults in his life. Throughout the book, Chi-Mo ridicules Catcher as dated, pointless, and overrated. Whether this reflects Portman's own thoughts on Holden Caulfield, or whether the whole thing is ment as an homage to Catcher, I'm not really sure. I don't know enough about Catcher to say. (I haven't read it since high school, and I don't remember being particularly impressed. But I may have just been baffled by its East Coast prep school setting, which would have been about as recognizable to me at that point in my life as Mongolia under the Khanate.)

The plot of King Dork, which involves Chi-Mo's attempt to decypher strange messages and notations that he finds in his dead father's books, inevitably plays out against the stock conventions of teen fiction. What makes it brilliant is that way that Portman messes with these conventions. He knows what you expect from a novel about a young man coming of age, but tends to change the rules on you at the last possible moment. Chi-Mo does not discover that the well-meaning adults know best after all. He does not become the school hero after his rock band is a hit at the big pep assembly. He does not get the girl in the end. Or does he? I'm not telling.

Upping the self-referrential ante, Portman's first-person protagonist also knows the conventions of juvenile literature, and is continually commenting on how little application they have to his or anyone else's real life. Long-suffering, fiercely independant, and burdened with an abundance of ideas of his own, Chi-Mo reminds you of every painfully intelligent teenaged boy you've ever met. He's a compelling character, whose aventures in the worlds of family relationships, books, girls, epistomology, and rock and roll I found highly entertaining.

Highly recommended for bright, cynical teenagers and adults. (Contains descriptions of sex that, although not graphic, are detailed and enthusiastic.)



Fire Logic by Laurie Marks

(Recommended by Elizabeth.) Fantasy fiction has made a lot of great strides in the last couple of decades. Most writers now avoid epic struggles between the forces of "good" (pretty elves!) and "evil" (ugly goblins!). To be sure, there's usually still an epic struggle, but writers now take the trouble to think about what motivates the actors involved. This makes for a more interesting story, and makes the fantasy world more power as a metaphor for our own workaday world.

Too, most current writers think through the ecology of whatever system of magic (or whatever) that they develop. If there are people running around with supernatural powers, what is that going to mean for the society they live in? Taking questions like these seriously makes for a far richer, smarter fiction. (For the best of the crop, settle in to George R. R. Martin's sprawling Song of Ice and Fire epic with the first book, A Game of Thrones).

In Fire Logic, Marks introduces us to a continent whose peaceful agrarian society has been invaded by an aggressive warrior caste from overseas. I agree with Elizabeth that the dynamics of this scenario are among the most interesting things in the book; I did wish, however, that we had learned a little more about the invaders' point of view.

As Fire Logic goes on, we see less and less of the geopolitical contexts and more of the personal relationships among the six or seven main characters. This was a disappointment for me; I'm the kind of guy who, when the fate of civilizations hangs in the balance, is less interested in learning who is going to hook up with whom. But that's just me.

Also, this was interesting: Two of the hook-ups are same-sex relationships, and Marks introduces them without comment, treating them exactly the same as you would expect her to treat a heterosexual relationship. And this is all fine and good -- in theory. In the actual reading, however, I confess I found it surprisingly jarring. The effect was much as if she had written in big red letters in the margins, "Look! Same-sex relationships! Which I am normalizing by writing about just as I would a heterosexual relationship!" This might represent some sort of vestigial heterosexism in michael5000, but I think it also represents a special problem that still exists for writers whose characters fall in love with people of their own gender.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome, 1889.

(Recommended by a New Yorker article that offhandedly referred to it as the funniest book ever written in English. Seperately contrarecommended by both jennifer and Mrs.5000, who described it as nothin' special. An earlier version of this review appeared previously in an email to jennifer.) I think the warning of lowered expectations was helpful going into Three Men in a Boat -- and, I think it might be a better book to have read to you (I listened to an audiobook) than to sit and read -- but with those provisos, I did find it rather charming.

As essentially the Victorian era's equivalent of, say, Erma Bombeck, it is a historical document with a great deal of historical interest. I was suprised by how many elements of upper middle class life turn out to be pretty much the same over the intervening 150 years. The concept and experience of camping, in particular, seem in many ways unchanged. I wouldn't have guessed that.

There is a lot of fussing in Three Men about the modern times they live in and the fast-paced, dehumanizing nature of the 19th Century, and those are particularly arresting to the modern reader. Or at least, to me. These observations buttress my perenial pet argument that life in Britain and America went through wrenching technological and social changes in the early and mid 1800s, but has been relatively static ever since. ("Relatively" being a key word there, of course.) A long passage in which Jerome makes fun of antiques, and then riffs on the preposterous notion that everyday mass-produced goods will be regarded as "precious Victorian antiques" in 100 years time, is priceless. Sidelong references as to how people commonly drink a lot, hole up at parties to make out, and otherwise behave in unVictorian fashion are additional good correctives to our historical stereotypes.

Things People Told Me to Watch

The Animaniacs

(Recommended after I was baffled by a reference in comments.) I probably missed my window of opportunity on these 1990s-era cartoons. I can see their slapstick merit, and I appreciate the way that much adult humor, in both senses of the term, has been artfully inserted so as to not register on children's radars. Still, it's kid stuff at its core, and (because of that? despite that?) couldn't hold my interest for long.

Talk to Her

(Recommended by Austin after I talked up Volver, another film by the Spanish oddball Almodovar.) Talk to Her is another movie that you'll love if you love Almodovar, and hate if you hate him. I kind of like him. This one initially veers toward mediocrity with a long and ultimately pointless first reel about a female bullfighter, but once that bit is wrapped up we move on to a far more interesting tale about the creepy side of love. The director's trademark garish visuals and flat emotional affect create a feel that is part lowbrow soap opera, part high surrealism.


Anatomy of a Murder

(Recommended by an article in the New Yorker.) The most modern-feeling of any black and white "old movie" I've yet seen, Anatomy of a Murder stars Jimmy Stewart, usually an icon of earnest wholesomeness, in a cynical, irreverent critique of the legal process. The setting initially seems to place us in pure Perry Mason territory. Paul Biegler (Stewart) is an independant attorney with a smart, sassy secretary who faces a mediocre public prosecutor in a fabulously appointed courthouse packed with well-dressed spectators. But whereas ol' Perry only seemed to attract the innocent to his practice -- a deep flaw in his business plan, I've always thought -- in Anatomy the client is only too happy to admit having shot the local barkeep five times with his pistol, whereupon the unfortunate guy, as one character deadpans, "died very quickly of lead poisoning."

The late barkeeper may have: a) raped the client's wife, and been killed in revenge, or b) got lucky with the client's wife, and been killed in a jealous rage. The wife's bruises may have been put there by a) her rapist, or b) her enraged husband. It's left ambiguous. Biegler doesn't care anyway; his job is to defend his client, so he professes the first scenario with apparent absolute conviction. While Preminger obscures the crime itself, he dwells on the strategies, tactics, and dirty tricks used by both sides in the trial. The implicit critique comes through the portrayal of an elaborate criminal justice process in which no one is especially concerned about determining the truth about how or why the murder happened.

For "courtroom drama" you don't neccessarily think "small town Upper Penninsula Michigan," and for neither of the above would you think "steamy Duke Ellington soundtrack!" Yet these are the ingredients, and they actually sit quite well together. The movie is surprisingly frank about the adult aspects of its subject matter, albeit in a special 1950s code (a medical examiner: "Violation is sufficient for establishing rape. It does not require a... completion"). Stewart is surprisingly effective as a small-time, slightly seedy small town lawyer with more enthuiasm for jazz and fishing than the law. A sentimental male-bonding sub-plot is the only disappointment in this otherwise sharp, smart legal procedural.


The Last King of Scotland

(Recommened by Mrs. ChuckDaddy.) You have to salute any producer willing to put together the budget for a movie shot in Africa. Movies shot in Africa have a head start towards excellence, being able to draw on the magnificent natural and cultural imagery and the unhappily abundant human drama of that badly misunderstood continent. However, Africa is widely seen to be box office poison, so we only get a movie on African subjects every couple of years.

The Last King of Scotland is best understood as a biopic on Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, and in that respect it is terrific. It manages to explore how an unstable charismatic figure can sieze power when civil institutions are weak, how that person might be driven towards excess and paranoia, and the horrific brutality that can result when the guy on top has no checks on his power and his whims.

Amin is seen from the point of view of a young Scottish doctor who through random circumstance becomes his personal physician and closest confidant. This doctor is a very fully realized character in the movie, and we develop a strong sense of his family background, his significance on the fringe of Ugandan power politics, and his probable future after the events of the movie. Given this, it is a little unsettling to learn that this doctor is a purely fictional creation. He was made up simply to have a character from whose perspective Amin could be witnessed.

The Last King of Scotland is a grimly entertaining film. It is as dark as history usually is, but rooting for the young doctor through his midadventures is exciting and fun. As historical fiction, it likely exposed many people who had never even heard of Idi Amin to the strange and tragic career of the prototypical African dictator. At the same time, since the film is likely to become one of the most important historical documents about Amin for all practical purposes, it is a shame that it blends a historical falsehood into the way it tells its story at such a fundamental level. For many people, now, Idi Amin will always be that disturbing Ugandan dictator who had the Scottish doctor.

Two Popular Novels I Liked a Lot

Versions of these reviews appeared previously on the Facebooks.

The Egyptologist
Arthur Phillips, 2004

Deception and deceit in 1920s Egypt. A ripping good tale about the unreliability of documents, told through documents. The story is told largely in the writings of two men. Each, for very different reasons, is completely incapable of understanding what is really happening. Since reality takes shape in the gaps between their narratives, however, we readers are never really in the dark about what is happening. Ideas about text, in addition to providing the book's structure, also inform and propel the plot. It's an impressive feat of construction.

The primary events of the story take place in the first decade of the 1900s, 1918, and especially 1922. But, there is also a largely implied story line in the 1950s, and indeed a wholely implied story line in the undefined "present" when the book was put together. This, too, is a neat trick.

Phillips occupies his characters' heads with apparent ease, and as far as I can tell, the historical setting of the story is rendered very nicely. This leads to my only complaint -- because much of the story is written through the fictional protagonist, who is fussy and snobbish and, to say the least, pretentious, and because the style is spot-on, some of the longer passages can get a bit tiresome.

On the whole, though, The Egyptologist is a terrific story, compelling, exciting, and very sad. And it is beautifully crafted.



A Deepness in the Sky
Vernor Vinge, 1999

If you read science fiction, you probably already know that Vernor Vinge is to space opera what Mozart is to, well, opera.

If you don't read science fiction, you might consider giving Vinge a try. It is not for everyone, and that's OK. A Deepness in the Sky had me at the edge of my seat, wondering if the spider kingdom was going to pull through in the end, and I can understand if you can't or don't want to get to that level of suspension of disbelief.

It's your loss, though. You won't find many other people who are giving more thought than Vinge to the ways that technology affects our humanity, and vice versa. Nor will you find many more provocative ideas about what happens when cultures collide. If one of the cultures in this case happens to be intelligent giant spiders, well, that's analogy for ya. It's a very powerful tool.

Leap Day Books and Movies

Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo. [Melancholy American dramatic novel]. Richard Russo writes novels that, for Mrs.5000, are funny books that make her cry, and that for me are wistful books that make me laugh out loud every couple of pages. Bridge of Sighs is his newest and by all appearences (I'm 5/6 of the way in) his best. Working, as in all his novels, in the milieu of a down-at-its-heels small town in the rural Northeast, Russo manages to recreate much of the American experience in this little literary test tube. His characters are as fully rounded, as complex yet as consistent, as any in literature. They are real enough that you care for them and about them despite yourself, in that psychotic break that good fiction so wonderfully invokes. They are real enough to show you something about yourself.


Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. [Gritty Crime-Ain't-For-Amateurs flick] This movie might have been custom-made to my specifications. It has one of my favorite actors! (Phyllip Seymour Hoffman) It has one of my favorite narrative techniques! (After starting with the central event, the film skitters backward and foreward in time to explore why it happened, and what happened as a result of it.) It has one of my favorite stock movie scenarios! (The heist.) It has one of my favorite movie themes! (The destructive forces that can spin out of control when basic human relationships fail). But somehow, it didn't all add up for me. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead implies a pretty grim social critique, but doesn't offer much in the way of helpful suggestions for improvement. The title is from an Irish saying, "My you be in heaven for a half hour before the Devil know's you're dead," but I haven't figured out how that connects.

Volver. [Spanish genre-defying movie] I hadn't seen a film by the famously quirky Spanish director Almodovar in a million years, so I didn't quite know what to expect from Volver. The beginning of the movie itself doesn't offer many clues. At first, you seem to be watching a conventional drama about family relationships, and then it looks like it's going to be a ghost story, and then, suddenly, we're confronting the classic movie problem: how are we going to get rid of this body? Except, as things turn out, it's still a conventional drama and still a ghost story, more or less. It's funny, sweet, and sassy, and packed with awesome eye candy. Mrs.5000, I'd be willing to watch it again if you want to see it.

Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. [Incredibly action-packed autobiographical novel]. Ripping tale of an Australian man on the run who carves out a life for himself among the slums, expatriates, and criminal princes of Bombay. It's implausibly rich with bizarre and extreme events, and strangely free of dull moments, but apparently quite closely based on the author's own extraordinary life. The first-person hero offers a compelling model of the tough guy with a heart and a brain. Engagingly written and, in the reading I'm listening to on my Ipod, beautifully read by Humphrey Bower, who among the vast catalog of characters is required to mimic just about every possible accent that can be spun on the English language.

Weekend Edition

I: Project Updates

Subtitle That Blog!

Love! Love! Love! the great list of suggested blog subtitles/mottos that came in yesterday. There's a runoff poll of some of my favorites over to your right....


The Beard

At this point, I am basically a guy with a beard. Now we enter the boring stage, 2 to 4 weeks of unremarkable beardedness. Then comes the goatee.

Don't feel bad if you are not excited about this particular story line. Even ~I~ am bored by my beard.


The Oregon State Flag Makeover

Remember, entries are due Tuesday! Here are the rules, if you are just tuning in.


The Reading List

Michael5000 to Fingerstothebone, 1/28/08:

To the L&TM5K Vice-Dork,

The time has come for me to call on you in your capacity as blog vice-dork. I have selected the following books off the Reading List as possible "next reads": Andric, Bridge on the Drina; Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; Greene, The End of the Affair; Kafka, The Process; Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Nabakov, Lolita; Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy; Twain, Huckleberry Finn;

My request is for you to apply your patented "Random Movie" selection method to determine which of these will be the follow-up to "The Brothers Karamazov...."

Fingerstothebone to Michael5000, 1/29/08:

And the answer is: 2. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Glad to be of service.

McKenzieBooks.com to Michael5000, 1/30/08

We thought you'd like to know that we shipped your order on 01/30/2008. Your order has been shipped from Portland, Oregon, via U.S. Postal Service Standard Media Mail (4 - 14 business days). Item: The Master and Margarita [] by Bulgakov, Mikhail....

II: Less Long-Winded Reviews







Epileptic, by David B. [Autobiographical Graphic Novel]. A boy's life is shaped by his relationship with his severely epileptic brother and by his parents' eternal quest to find a cure for the disease by any medical, alternative, or even supernatural means available. An astonishly frank and fair memoir. Recommended.









District B-13. [French Action Film]. I checked out this movie having read that it explored issues of race and class in modern France in an entertaining but insightful way. Nope. Instead, it is just another movie dedicated to the proposition that a sufficiently fit and agile man has nothing to fear from an army of thugs with machine guns. Well filmed in the Hong Kong action style; staged and edited to resemble a shooter video game. Lots of running, jumping, and kicking. Not Very Interesting.









Gridlock, by Matt Gaffney. An accessible and entertaining overview of the conventions, controversies, and personalities of the world of crosswords. There's not much here that will be news to serious crossword people, but it would be a fun read for a casual solver who always wondered where the puzzles come from. Diverting.









I read Epileptic on a recommendation from Dan at Von Trapper Keeper. Gridlock was on Rex Parker's 2007 Holiday Shopping Guide for all things crosswordy.


III. Weekend Greetings

Happy Groundhog Day! It's not as dumb a holiday as it seems. It, and even the whole bit about the groundhog seeing its shadow, date back to medieval times. It's even got some calendrical significance: it marks the halfway point between the winter solstace and the spring equinox. Or, to put it another way, it marks the end of the darkest 1/4 of the year, at least up here in the beautiful Northern Hemisphere where L&TM5K is written and produced.

See you Monday for the Quiz.