What’s Wrong With Iron Council

August Leave a Comment

This is not a post about the Bechdel test, nor The Frank Miller test (dramatised here), aka the How To Tell If A Male Science Fiction Writer Is Obsessed With Whores Test. This post is not actually about gender representations at all. It does, weirdly, come from my having just read a post that is kind of, sort of, about those things. You see, a while back I wrote about China Miéville’s novel, Iron Council, and I had some trouble explaining exactly what was wrong with it, stylistically speaking. What I wrote was: Events that would later be referenced with specificity were described with a dream-like vagueness that often made it difficult to figure out just what the hell was going on. It felt like he was in such a hurry to move the plot forward that he ignored the mechanics of his prose. In addition, he once again made… Continue Reading →

Goings On

August Leave a Comment

My eyelids are heavy and my hands are cold for no apparent reason because I left the window open and this is a basement apartment wherein the heating is controlled by someone in an apartment the heat rises to rather than from, so what we have here is just a “hey, I’m alive” post for those of you that don’t follow my ramblings on Twitter. There will be no e-books post this weekend, because apparently there’s some holiday called “Easter” coming up, and I’m going to be out of town visiting family, which is the sort of thing I do on holidays. Not having a laptop or other portable computing solution makes posting while out of town a touch difficult. On a related note, there won’t be any post on the Jeff Rubin book for a while either; I’m taking extra care reading it because I think it will help… Continue Reading →

It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law

August 4 Comments

If there’s anything folks love to do on the Internet, it’s talk and argue, argue and talk. Anyone who spends enough time online will, whether they know it or not, eventually run into Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. There are numerous variations and corollaries, and after eleven years of talking about books and with Book People, both in person and online (including an absolutely epic party last night, thrown by the one and only Julie Wilson), I’ve come up with a corollary of my own*. I hereby present you with August’s Corollary to Godwin’s Law: As an English-language literary discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving William Shakespeare, James Joyce, or Ulysses approaches 1. *What finally tipped the scales for formulating the Corollary was Perdita Felicien’s appearance on Canada Reads.

God Bless You, Charlie Stross

August Leave a Comment

Last June I followed all of the BookCampToronto posts on Twitter, and read as many of the follow-ups and round-ups and blog posts dissecting it afterward as I could. Most of them focused on e-books and social media and various technologies (though I’m sure there were other things discussed at the “uncoference”—is it okay that I don’t like terms like “unconference?” ’cause I really don’t), which are still the hot topics in the publishing industry. Ever since then I’ve wanted to collect all my thoughts and opinions about e-books into a single coherent post. The problem is that even after almost ten months of turning them over in my head, I’m still not sure I really know what all my thoughts and opinions are. Clearly it’s time to start writing. I’m going to try to have something for you by the end of next week, but there’s been so much… Continue Reading →

It’s Just A Blog

August Leave a Comment

You can ignore the rest of this post, because the bits that I’m about to quote are the only bits that are relevant to what I want to talk about. Adam Greenfield writes: The reason people keep blogs – let me be more straightforward: the reason I keep a blog – is to express opinions. Precisely to not, always, have to be consistent or sensible or bound by a duty to the truth. To not, always, have to be responsible. To not, always, answer to the same standards I’d expect of (say) a writer for the New York Times or the Guardian. To be full of shit, if I feel like it. And, what’s more (and this goes to the bozo who whined about my ostensible tone of “world-weary superiority”), to be full of shit in whatever style I feel like adopting. This is nearly identical to something I wrote… Continue Reading →

#13 – Fear of Fighting, by Stacey May Fowles

August 1 Comment

I bought Fear of Fighting in early 2009 after reading Be Good, a pretty good debut novel that wasn’t perfect, but took some risks and showed that Fowles is an author with a lot of promise. I want to say that I put off reading it until now because I was really busy, or because it was lost on my ridiculous fucking coffee table (which is partly true), but what actually happened is that I got stuck living Marnie’s life. I never bothered to read the synopsis on the back cover when I bought it—I generally don’t when buying a book by an author whose other work I’ve enjoyed—but when Zoe Whittall described it for The Post as “a good non-cliché-ridden mental illness narrative,” I almost wanted to put it off forever. I do not enjoy mental illness narratives largely because I have yet to encounter one that isn’t chock-a-block… Continue Reading →

The Well-Wrought Urn

August 1 Comment

There’s not a great many things about which Dan Green and I agree, but recently he posted about concepts of beauty in art that challenge norms, and I think he’s spot on. He writes: It is true that in invoking the “well-wrought urn” Brooks was trying to call attention to poetry as a verbal equivalent, a poem as an art object sufficient unto itself. But the trope can be dismissed as a “trivial goal”–indeed, as a “goal” at all–only if you assume that the urn is well-wrought because it successfully attains a level of “beauty” that conforms to pre-established formal requirements. Literary history as a series of such skillfully-fashioned verbal objects reinforcing aesthetic norms would indeed be a tedious procession, and the goal of adding yet one more “fine” work would indeed be trivial. But I don’t see why “well-wrought urn” has to be taken in this way. A poem,… Continue Reading →

A Winner Declared

August Leave a Comment

I know I’m late to the party on this, but I wanted to wait until I’d posted my final review. Without further delay, let me congratulate Ray Smith and Dan Wells for Century‘s Canada Reads: Independently victory, and Kerry Clare for organizing the contest. Century was my favourite of the bunch, but it was a fine group of books, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting a chance to read along with others for the first time since I left university almost five years ago (actually, four years and eleven months to the day). I hope to get the chance to do something like this again sometime.

#12 – Wild Geese, by Martha Ostenso

August Leave a Comment

I chose Wild Geese as my final Canada Reads: Independently selection because it was the only one I’d already read, and therefore if I was late finishing it—and I was—I’d be able to vote on a winner knowing that I had read all the books. Summarizing Ostenso’s novel is difficult without making it sound like a CanLit stereotype. It is, after all, a family drama set against the backdrop of a poor, isolated farming community on the windswept Manitoba plains. To say that it’s about a young girl wanting to escape a domineering father, and a school teacher who falls in love with a young man with a shame hanging over his head so secret that even he doesn’t know of it… well, we’re into the realm of melodramatic stereotypes, into the realm of being force-fed books like Who Has Seen the Wind back in high school. Wild Geese has… Continue Reading →

Canada Reads 2010: Day Five

August Leave a Comment

Congratulations to Nicolas Dickner, Lazer Lederhendler, and Michel Vézina for Nikolski‘s victory. I was rooting for Nikolski all along, but never did I actually believe that it would win. I almost don’t know what to say, except that I think it was the most deserving title. It was beautifully translated, complex and inventive without being inaccessible, and full of life and fun even in its darker moments. Its truly a remarkable book, and I hope to read more of Dickner’s work—and more French Canadian work, if this is in any way indicative of what’s going on in that particular solitude—in the future. I took the time to drop by the CBC chat again today, and found it smoother going. Perhaps yesterday was simply an off day. The discussion was not a bad one, in some ways better than what was going on in the official panel. If that’s the sort… Continue Reading →