Reading 2008

In the past I have seen books published by Oberon Press that have seemed under-designed, almost Porcupine’s Quill ugly, an impression reinforced by the glossy coating on the covers. Dance of the Suitors has a soft matte cover with a lovely image (somewhere between Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, though perhaps embroidered rather than illustrated) by Phoebe Anna Traquair, and it makes all the difference in the world. This volume of short fiction, with its heavy interior stock and clear, simply arranged type seems dignified rather than cheap. The thing that struck me the most about the work itself was the obvious care Villaverde took with the language, his obvious attention to crafting each sentence, choosing each word. I found myself reminded, actually, of Michael Helm’s In the Place of Last Things, which I read earlier this year and has since become one of my favourite Canadian novels. Like in… Continue Reading →

This book took me far longer to read than I expected, for two reasons: first, I was quite ill for two weeks, and did not read a word during that entire period, and second, much of this book was very, very boring. As you might expect, this book has two narrative lines that move towards a common point, sort of (gasp), like the shape of the letter “V”. One of these branches follows the comings and goings of Benny Profane and The Whole Sick Crew, a collection of AWOL sailors, thinkers, artists, gang members and various other slackers. It has many of the elements of your standard 1950s jazz (or “beat”) novel; the characters have unbelievable names, most of the dialogue is empty with long conversations that go nowhere, many of the characters feel a manic desire for change and an even more manic desire for travel, but both manias… Continue Reading →

I can’t entirely decide how I feel about this book. I enjoyed what was there, I suppose, but by the end, even though the plot had run its course, I still felt like things were just getting started. The prose was plain and very much “about the story”, in the sense that there was no formal experimentation or any real effort at elegance. It’s not that the prose is bad; I just have a hard time picturing Hanrahan slaving away over whether or not a sentence was quite right. The long and the short of it is that it was so easy to read that going slowly and chewing over what was happening was pointless; there’s very little here except the story itself, and it simply ran so fast that it exhausted itself early. I guess that’s maybe the problem. The story is alright, I suppose; I’m sure we all… Continue Reading →

I can’t get over the appropriateness of the book’s title. The men in this book—and the book is mostly about men, a thing that is more rare in my reading than you might think—are often violent, sometimes intensely so. What keeps them from becoming clichés is that their violence and brutality often shocks them more than the reader. It’s not a callous, unthinking brutality. It’s a brutality laced with guilt and fear and shame, with the knowledge of having failed, without always knowing why or how. There were times when I felt I’d read these stories before. Given how many writers cut their teeth on the form, I know, as a writer, that it’s certainly quite difficult to feel like you’re creating anything new. With a few of these stories, particularly the ones about childhood, like “The Helmet”, I get a palpable sense of Sellyn struggling to overcome the sheer… Continue Reading →

I didn’t realize when I started reading this series that, though three books had already been published, many more (as many as four more) had been planned. I wound up doing something I hate doing; I started reading a series before all the books were published. And now I’m stuck not knowing how it’s all going to turn out, with no recourse but to wait and hope the author doesn’t up and die on me or something. It is some small consolation that the books have been good enough that waiting, hoping the author doesn’t die, is in fact something that I’m perfectly willing to do. The Thousandfold Thought picks up on most of the issues that I discussed in my last two entries, particularly doubt and betrayal. I found myself liking only a single character in the entire book, a sorcerer called Drusas Achamian, and even then he’s a… Continue Reading →

Doubt remains as powerful a force in this second novel in The Prince of Nothing series as it did in the first. The Inrithi Holy War that had seemed a faraway impossibility and an excuse for political maneuvering suddenly becomes real and terrifying, not only because of how large and powerful it is, but because of the atrocities that follow along with any sufficiently large group of disorganized men, and because of the ease with which Kellhus and other powerful people subvert it until it becomes merely a tool towards the realization of their own personal agendas. Kellhus, who in The Darkness That Comes Before was little more than a kind of ninja-like traveler posing as a prince, manipulates those around him until he becomes the Warrior-Prophet, altering the face of the Inrithi religion until Achamian (a blasphemous sorcerer, and the only even remotely likeable character in the series) is… Continue Reading →

A co-worker loaned me this book (all three in the series, actually) by Canadian R. Scott Bakker, and the first thing I noticed, aside from the fact that it was so complex that I would definitely need to consult the glossary in the back of the book, was how similar it was to Frank Herbert’s Dune. The writing is dense, with the same blend of philosophy, mysticism, dream-like attention to detail, and brief flashes of internal dialogue. This is the first volume in an epic fantasy trilogy called The Prince of Nothing. Bakker’s world confounds any attempt to find analogs to our own. There are elements in many of the societies and religions that could come from ancient Rome, Sumeria, or Islam, but seen through alien eyes and combined with entirely fictional elements in such a way that it’s impossible to predict how they (the “real world” bits) will behave… Continue Reading →

Alright, I promise this is the last David Eddings book for quite some time (though there are two more series that I’m hoping to read later—much later—in the year), and after this there’s only one more post to write before I’m completely caught up. Eleven books behind is a record for me, I think. Anyway, in this final book in The Malloreon, we see the emergence of the true god of Angarak in the altered form of Erriond, a strange but minor character from The Belgariad. The Christian overtones are more than a little obvious, as UL, the father of the gods, implies that the world is beginning to make a transition from polytheism to monotheism through the emergence of a benevolent god who walks the earth gathering disciples to himself. It’s not a one-to-one analog, of course. Nothing in Eddings’ fiction ever quite is, but it’s not entirely subtle,… Continue Reading →

One of the things that marks this series as different from the first is that many of the male characters who were prominent now have their roles filled by women. The ultimate villain is a woman, the best tactical mind from the western nations has died and has been replaced (and quite ably) by his wife. Poledra, wife of Belgarath and mother of Polgara returns from the dead to take up a pivotal role in the resolution of the ultimate conflict. Belgarion’s wife Ce’Nedra, however, who was a remarkable force in The Belgariad virtually falls apart in these books. Her son has been kidnapped, so it stands to reason that she will be full of fear and anxiety, but close to a year later she’s still barely functional, even while in hot pursuit of the kidnapper. I find it odd that one of the strongest and most interesting female characters… Continue Reading →

Eddings decided to do different things with the way magic and sorcery work in this world of his. Rather than magic spells or object imbued with magic power (there are such objects, although, consistent with how magic functions for people in these books, those things are alive, possessing both a will and a measure of intellect), magic—or sorcery, I should say, because Eddings makes a distinction between the two, and what most readers would recognize as “magic” is actually what Eddings calls sorcery—is accomplished when a person directs a sufficient amount of will at a task, and then utters a word, like a word of command. Then, poof, miraculous things happen. Only a handful of people can do these things; there seems to be a distinction in both degree and kind between the will of a sorcerer and the will of a regular person. Doing things through sorcery costs the… Continue Reading →