The Good Wife: Season One

I’m a newcomer to the CBS legal drama The Good Wife, now in its third season. I’ve spent the last day and a half watching the first season from my sick bed. It was a combination of things that made me finally give in, despite the fact that a new network legal drama wasn’t particularly high up on my priorities. People whose opinions I respect say good things about the show, and then I saw some really great things said about it on PBS’s excellent recent documentary, America in Prime Time, so here we are. The premise is simple: Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) has to return to the law in order to support her family after her philandering husband, Peter (played by Law & Order veteran Chris Noth), an Illinois state’s attorney, is disbarred and jailed for a sex/corruption scandal. Structurally, the show is divided into two slightly overlapping major… Continue Reading

Looking Ahead to 2012

I don’t do resolutions. Not because it’s a cliché; I sometimes think those are all right. Rather it’s because I just don’t ever stick to them. Things happen, blah blah blah. I could give you excuses, but that’s how things wind up going. So, inspired by Adrienne’s post (and obviously aping her post title) I’m going to say a few words about what I hope the new year has in store. First of all, I’m going to get a new job. This really isn’t optional, since I’ve just been freelancing since August (and I’m definitely going to be doing more of that; I’ve already been doing some freelance editing this year, and I’ve been back from the holidays for less than a week), but at this point anyway, it’s not paying the bills. I’m trying to keep optimistic, but this is honestly going to be simultaneously the hardest and the… Continue Reading

Triptych, by J.M. Frey

Please note that this review may include spoilers. As a general rule I do not share the SF/F community’s aversion to that sort of thing (it quite frankly gets in the way of a critic being able to give a full and honest assessment), so I’m not going to be careful about it. This is your one and only warning. If you’re into media—any kind of media, be it books, music, film, whatever—there is a term you will eventually hear thrown around: crossover success. A crossover success is when a work or artist from one genre, say, a rapper, achieves success with the fans of another genre, like indie rockers, or even better, with mainstream audiences. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are massive examples from the book world. Before King, horror had largely been relegated to the third tier of the genre fiction ghetto (although to be fair, aside from… Continue Reading

Dear NBC: An Open Letter Regarding the Fate of Community

Dear NBC: I am a book critic by trade, but deep down, I’m also a TV person. I watch an enormous amount of television, and have since I was young. But I don’t watch uncritically. I think TV has taken over from the movies as the place to go for the best in filmed entertainment, but aside from a handful of legacy programs, I have largely migrated from the shows created by over-the-air networks to those produced by cable channels. For a time I had given up on the sitcom entirely. Community changed that. It’s the smartest, funniest, most inspiring half-hour comedy that NBC—or any network—has produced since the demise of NewsRadio, and is single-handedly responsible for restoring my faith in the sitcom as a format where good work can be done, and where innovation can still happen. The writing is stellar, the cast is the tightest ensemble on TV… Continue Reading

Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, by Adrienne Kress

Some weeks ago I was at the Toronto launch for Robert J. Wiersema’s sort-of memoir, Walk Like A Man. Because I know Rob in the let’s-grab-a-beer kind of way, I was part of the entourage that wound up shuffling with him to some late night diner/bar combo down near The Esplanade, and there I found myself seated next to author Adrienne Kress. Kress, it turns out, is more fun than eight separate monkey barrels, and so I got her to write down the titles of her books so that I could look them up at the library. And look them up I did. The obvious place for me to start was Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, as it’s her first novel, and, based on the last page of the book, introduces characters that appear in her follow-up, Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate. Now, I don’t generally write about books for… Continue Reading

Recent Events

After a spurt of activity, vestige.org may be going dark again for a few weeks, and I thought I’d tell you why. First, there are health issues, and then there are job issues. Let’s start with the health issues. For years now I’ve been sick with a disease that I thought was Ulcerative Colitis. Recently I started seeing a new doctor who believes I have something far less severe. He ran some blood tests and scheduled some other things. So far all I’ve got are the results of the blood test, but he determined that I’ve had a severe vitamin B12 deficiency, probably for the better part of a decade, and that judging from my symptoms it’s been getting worse recently. The side-effects of this deficiency include: severe fatigue, severe depression, forgetfullness, difficulty sleeping and focusing, and a bunch of similar things that have made doing anything other than my… Continue Reading

Five Days Apart, by Chris Binchy

David, the narrator of Five Days Apart, is described on the dust jacket as “bright but tongue-tied,” but I think that’s a little optimistic. For most of the first half of the book it seems more like David has some sort of disorder, like a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome. His awkwardness isn’t just outward facing; it’s internalized as depression and paranoia. David meets Camille at a party and falls for her pretty much instantly, but he doesn’t have the confidence or the social skills to engage with her, so he asks his charismatic friend Alex to help break the ice. The ice is broken, but not for David, and Alex and Camille begin what turns out to be the first serious romantic relationship of Alex’s life. A devastated David can’t cope, and breaks off the friendship, throwing himself into his work. So here’s the thing: Alex getting involved with… Continue Reading

The Ambassador, by Bragi Ólafsson

There are books that are so good you find it nearly impossible to put them down. You stay up late, take extra trips to the washroom at work, and even when you do finally manage to put them down for a while, they are easy to slide back into when you do pick them up again. And then there are books that are every bit as good, but are also dense or difficult or not very fast paced, and even though they are amazing and hard to put down, they’re also very hard to pick back up again because of that density or what have you. The Ambassador is the second kind of book; absolutely brilliant, but it makes demands on the reader, and can be difficult to get into again once you actually manage to tear yourself away so you can go to work or what have you. Which,… Continue Reading

Can’tLit, edited by Richard Rosenbaum

I’m not punk, or indie, or anything like that. There’s aspects of those cultures, or counter-cultures I guess (same thing, really), that I feel an affinity for, but they’re not really my scene. Indie culture is what Broken Pencil does, though, and therefore you’re not going to find much in the way of mainstream fiction in Can’tLit, and anthology of fiction from the magazine. That’s both awesome and frustrating. There’s two ways to think of taking risks in fiction. There’s the obvious way, which is writing against mainstream literary expectations, and I have a lot of respect for that, especially when it’s done here in Canada, because, well… yeah. CanLit can be boring and predictable as shit sometimes. Maybe even most of the time. (Rosenbaum’s foreword even starts with the words: “CanLit sucks.”) There’s a whole bunch of that in this collection; in point of fact most of the pieces… Continue Reading

The World More Full of Weeping, by Robert J. Wiersema

So here we have another gorgeous book. This is a thing that CZP does, create beautiful books that is, a logical consequence of hiring Erik Mohr to design covers, and the picture that I have posted here does not do it justice (it includes spot varnish!). Creepy in an awesome kind of way, yeah? Anyway. The World More Full of Weeping is only about eighty pages, so I don’t know whether to call it a novella or a short novel, but I don’t care, because it’s really good. There’s also a short essay on the psychogeography of his work in the back that actually stands on its own, so, you know, bit of a bonus there. I loved Bedtime Story, and really enjoyed Before I Wake, but I think The World More Full of Weeping is my favourite of his books. The central concern of Wiersema’s work is families in… Continue Reading