Reading 2007

(NOTE: I actually finished reading this book on April 28, but have been busy/distracted, and unable to finish this post until now.) I love mythologies. I love how they pour magic—real magic, with blood and smoke and sex and violence—into the world of they everyday. They remind us how animal and primitive and instinctual are the underpinnings of nearly everything we do. They are stories that show us our own, living, beating heart without flinching. So I’m always pleased to see a new (to me), well-crafted mythology. As I have said before, when discussing Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic, I am not a dedicated fan of fantasy literature. But I will go out of my way to find good contemporary urban fantasy, something that puts the modern city at the heart of a fantastic tale, something like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, or now China Miéville’s King Rat. King Rat is… Continue Reading →

Great cover, non? These stories, originally published in periodicals between 1959 and 1961, were not collected until the middle 1980s, and upon reading them, I can say that with good reason. With two exceptions (“Entropy” and “The Secret Integration”), they just aren’t very good. Pynchon starts the collection with a twenty-five page essay examining the flaws and foibles of these pieces, even going so far as to offer bits and bobs of his autobiography to explain why X was X rather than Y. The uncritical reader will move from the introduction to the story, and because of Pynchon’s rather hefty reputation, will see all the promise and genius blurbed about on the back cover (The New York Times, New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review all seemed to have hired non-critical readers to review this book, as they are the sources of the blurbs in question, and wow,… Continue Reading →

Aimee Bender’s’ books are impossible to find. Well, not quite impossible; I found this one, right? Next to impossible, then. I looked through every used bookstore in Toronto, and not a single copy of any of her books. Alright, I said to myself, I’ll bite the bullet and try to find her books new (I prefer to buy new books, but it’s been some time since my budget has allowed for that). I looked high and I looked low, and eventually I had to go to the The World’s Biggest Bookstore, where they had all of her works. I chose Willful Creatures, and here we are. What does it say about Bender that I had such difficulty finding her books? It’s not like I’d never heard of her. Aside from reading “The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers” in McSweeney’s I’ve actually found myself running across her name quite… Continue Reading →

Pratchett has always been very open about the fact that he writes light entertainment, although of course that doesn’t mean that his work lacks wit or intelligence. The Light Fantastic is the second Discworld novel that I’ve read (well, technically the third, but as I can’t remember anything about the first one, including its title, it doesn’t count) and it is a definite improvement on the first. The parodies are sharper, and the world more developed (it still feels a little slapdash, though, and it’s only towards the end that a setting from either novel repeats itself), but it still feels like it’s not quite living up to its potential. I did enjoy the bureaucratic satire and the change in Rincewind’s personality (it’s always good to see a miserable character gain confidence through genuine means), and I’m looking forward to the next few, if I can find them in cheap… Continue Reading →

I didn’t remember a single thing about this book. With both Deadeye Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five the plot and characters reconstructed themselves in my memory, but with this book it was as though I had never laid eyes on it before. It was not so good as the other two books, although Vonnegut was younger when he wrote it, and I’ve heard that it was his first “serious” work. The click-clack rhythm that I noted in others didn’t seem to be quite there yet, and a good deal of the satire seemed underdeveloped or tacked on as an afterthought. In some ways it reminded me of Christoper Moore’s Island of the Sequined Love Nun, but far more dire, and far less obviously funny. The Bokononist religion turned out to be more interesting (and to make more sense) than I was expecting, but ultimately it didn’t seem to have as significant an… Continue Reading →

This book is too big. Vonnegut has come to be known as a satirist, a science fiction author, an observer of American life and perhaps one of the keenest commentators on the Twentieth Century. And he is, which makes this book too big. It’s all there, in this book. Rudy Waltz and his neutered tone (still the steady clacking of a typewriter) is the vehicle for nearly every conceivable thing that can be said about American life in the decades just after WW2. The stupidity of gun violence saturates the book, although guns themselves make relatively few appearances, nuclear disarmament, the simultaneous beauty and pettiness of the art world, drug abuse, the rise of corporate culture, the immigrant story, the length and breadth of a man’s guilt (both what he should and should not be held accountable for), it’s all here and then some, in this tiny little slip of… Continue Reading →

Another re-read, sooner than I promised. And not the last; there are two more, at least, before the end of the month. I tend not to be the sort of person who adjusts his reading list to outside factors (the big exception being that when I am loaned a book, I nearly always read it right away, as it seems strange for me to hang on to property that’s not my own until I “feel like” using it), but Kurt Vonnegut’s death, though I was never a very dedicated fan, made me strangely sad, and I want to remember him by revisiting the three books of his that I read back in the late ’90s. Slaughterhouse-Five was my first foray into the trio, mostly because it was the only one whose plot I remembered. What I had forgotten was how poignant and emotionally charged the seemingly dead-simple prose was. Vonnegut’s… Continue Reading →

I’m not good with books of essays. I have to switch gears too many times, have to move from one world view to another too quickly (especially if, as in this case, the book is the work of many authors rather than just one). There is also the issue that essays are, or at least should be, works of non-fiction, and I have difficulty evaluating non-fiction that isn’t strictly academic. It’s not that I don’t understand it; I just don’t know what to do with it, where to put it. Non-fiction makes the claim of being more or less factual, but outside of the realm of the academy, where the work is mostly straightforward and boring, non-fiction pushes the same buttons as fiction, and some of the wires get crossed in my head. My brain says to me, I want to process this as factual, but it’s sending me a… Continue Reading →

Don’t let the ridiculous title (or the appalling cover) fool you; this book is more Catch 22 than The Bathroom Reader. In fact, it’s so much like Catch 22 that the protagonist may as well have been named Yossarian rather than Doyle Coldiron (it’s no coincidence that there is a plug from Heller on the front cover). Doyle is a US Secret Service agent who suffers from depression and loneliness that result, in part anyway, from the secrecy surrounding his job. Where the book differs most from Catch 22 is not in the specific characters and situations (I mean, they are different, of course, but that has little impact thematically), and not in the prose style (which is incredibly simple and straightforward and logical to the point of absurdity), but rather in the fact that the sense of insanity and futility comes, not from a ridiculous and high-stress situation, but… Continue Reading →

I actually finished this book on Monday night, but have not had the time to write about it until now. Smith is a favourite of mine, one of my very favourite living Canadian writers, in fact, and this was the last of his fiction that I had to track down. I’m not sure if it’s available from another publisher, but this particular copy was from The Porcupine’s Quill. For anyone not already familiar with TPQ, some explaining will be necessary. They are a small Canadian press, notable for two things: first, they publish well-written books by emerging or under-appreciated authors, and second, in terms of their status as objects, they publish the ugliest books known to man. This seems like an exaggeration on my part, and I assure you that it is not. I have several TPQ books, but let’s just use Noise as an exemplar, as it is fairly… Continue Reading →