Reviews and Comments

I’m re-reading these books about the vampire Saint Germain by Yarbro that I originally read when I was in high school and enjoying them once again. Unlike other vampire books, these are more about history than horror, although Yarbro is keen on showing how bloody humans could be to each other, which I suppose also distinguishes her vampires from others, because the villains here are the humans, not the vampires.

The time period here is a time in Italy before it was a coherent country but a republic of aligned states precariously dependent on the merchant prince families for their continued existence. During the course of the novel, the Medici’s who protect the city fall from favor while a Domenican monk becomes a dangerous demagogue to the detriment of the city and its people.

What’s interesting to me reading these at this point in my own writing career is how quickly Yarbro moves her plot from time to time, sometimes skipping months or a half year between chapters. I also admire her ability to recreate the letters from particular characters to another, which, while not as opaque as A.S. Byatt’s, still challenge the reader to read between the lines.

A re-reading of this book which I first read in the early 1980s after springing for the first five Saint Germain books because of an offer in the Science Fiction Book Club. (An aside: I miss the SFBC. While I understand the volumes have no collectible value, the catalog and cheap prices enabled me to try so many books that I might have missed due to the lack of genre shelf space in my local bookstores.) On the re-read, I was surprised by depiction of the sexual abuse of two of the characters, which I surely read and yet didn’t recall being shocked by as a teen. It’s not that the events are described in graphic detail, and perhaps that’s where time has changed them for me. As a fifteen-year-old, I had no experience with sex, so I likely didn’t fully understand what was happening on the page.

The book holds up. What I admire about Yarbro is her historical accuracy, especially in her clothing details and the transport of the day. Saint Germain here is at his most urbane (the four books following this trace his live backwards, and he increasingly becomes more savage and animalistic). The romance between him and Madeleine is quite nice, and Yarbro perfectly captures Madeleine’s innocence as well as her desire to be something more than just a wife or trophy. I look forward to re-reading the next books in this series, which I remember being some of my favorites as a teen.

I first read this book as a teenager, and liked it so much that I listed it as a top ten favorite novel for decades afterward. In honor of actually having the opportunity to stand on Zanzibar myself during a recent vacation, I thought I would re-read it to see how well it held up. Thankfully, it does, although if I ranked all the books in my top ten, it would be a little further down the list these days.

When I read it long ago, I remembered it being much more disjointed. It is in parts, but I was able to connect the disparate pieces in my mind better, perhaps due to a familiarity with the prose and concept, even after these many years. I also hadn't remembered one of the lead characters being a Muslim, and likely glossed over that as a youngster, having never encountered a follower of Islam at that time.

Bruce Sterling's well-done introduction to the edition I read this time highlights some of Brunner's prescience, but what I found interesting was the near misses in Brunner extrapolation, specifically the entire concept that at some point in the future, people who have too many children will be ostracized by society for their lack of self-control and selfishness. Even at this point, after the world has doubled its population (from approximately 3.5bn when this novel was written to around 7bn today), I don't see any indication of this change in opinion--sadly, many cultures are the exact opposite, believing that they need to increase their population for fear that their culture will be overrun by others. Perhaps this is the real lesson of Stand on Zanzibar, that people (read large, as in the earth's population) will never be able to control their reproduction and the game of life will eventually collapse through disease, war, or famine.

Recommended? Yes, I would still highly recommend this book. It was a grand achievement when it was published, and it remains a solid work of art today.

I love this book. I first read it around age 9 and it cemented my love for fantasy fiction. All of the elements are here: a magical portal to another world where animals talk and kings and queens are made in the midst of a land that needs to be rescued from an evil queen who freezes everything and hands out this mysterious candy called Turkish Delight. The beauty of Lewis’s Narnia, however, is that while it contains morals within it, those morals are in service of the plot, so Edmund’s betrayal of his siblings and his later redemption comes across organically, not preachy or patronizing. The latter is the cardinal sin of so many books intended for young readers, who may not be sophisticated readers, but they can immediately sense when you are insincere. Lewis, wholeheartedly, was a sincere writer.

I understand the Christian underpinnings of these books now, and how some find that a problem, but I’ve never had an issue with it, perhaps because I was brought up in that tradition. And, without subtext, this work would be less. As it stands, it’s a classic for good reason: imaginative, clear prose, and a very exciting plot that begs you to turn the page.

Some books are simply sui generis, surprising and entertaining, emerging from nowhere. Or, at least, that’s what this book feels like, although once you delve into Dahl’s career, you can see that this had its beginnings in the shift from writing short adult fiction to short children’s novels with the same kind of absurd and grotesqueness (e.g., James and the Giant Peach had been published three years earlier, and it has some of the same exaggerations that typify the characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

But what Dahl accomplished here was a send-up of all the bad children in the world: the gluttonous, the greedy, the self-centered, the annoying. And he did it all without making his children readers hate him for it. This is a book with a moral center, where Charlie is the ultimate good child, but it doesn’t read moralistic or patronising. Charlie and his grandfather get a glimpse of the outside world, one that Willy Wonka is very aware of, and they succeed because they still have the sense of wonder that Wonka was looking for.

But what you remember about this book isn’t that so much as the Oompa Loompas, the imagery of this amazing candy factory and the squirrels looking for bad nuts, the gum that can taste like a whole meal, and all that. It’s a fun book, and one that you can revisit. Highly recommended (and avoid the movies, even the one with Gene Wilder).

I had never read anything by Brandon Sanderson before this book, although I had heard of him. It would be impossible not to have heard of him given his recent Kickstarter in which he promised fans four new books over a year and brought in $41 million. Who needs publishers when you’ve got a fan base like that? And yet, Sanderson still publishes traditionally as well. Normally this kind of success would send me running away with the screaming heebie-jeebies because I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to like the things everyone else likes, not to mention being a latecomer to anything. But in the interest of trying to understand what all the fuss is about, I thought I would give at least one Sanderson novel a try. I selected this winnebago of a book because it seemed to be his most popular and not in the middle of a series.

To cut this short, I enjoyed it. When I was fifteen, I would have loved it and instantly gone on to read the next two dozen books. It’s epic fantasy of the modern stripe, although Sanderson brings some of his own biases and ignores some of today’s trends, namely in his gender role segregation. He’s good at putting his characters through the wringer; in this book, Kaladin in particular goes from heartbreak to heartbreak until finally winning the day, but even then you know he’s still going to be losing something. I’ll give him a B- for worldbuilding, although there’s enough complications between how the “priests” tried to rule the world in the past and are now pariahs in leadership councils to the “play” of war by the competing nobles who sit around in their nice camps going out for small skirmishes rather than engaging the enemy. My biggest issue with the worldbuilding came from the magic system, always a hard sell for me as I tend to like my books logical, and the stormlight (and the armor, weapons, and fabrials) all seem to be rather deus ex machinery.

I likely won’t continue the series. There’s too many other things out there that I need to read. But I fully understand the appeal. I have a friend in my writing group, Peter Sartucci, who self-publishes an epic fantasy series, and his books have the same kind of appeal as these, although he has yet to achieve the same kind of success. I suspect it’s because he’s too nice to his characters (something I’ve told him in workshop), although he’s getting better at making his lead hero suffer. If you’ve run out of Sanderson to read, though, you might give his books a try.

Graham Joyce has an ability to write stories that defy easy description. This novel, which was also published under the title “Memoirs of a Master Forger,” has for a protagonist an extremely unreliable narrator who has a heart of gold but a troubled past, and the two are interconnected. He “sees” demons all around and refers to reference books in which these demons are supposedly ennumbered, but it doesn’t take long for you to start to question both the existence of the book and the demons themselves. And that inability to distinguish reality from fantasy continues throughout the book.

This book appeared in 2008 and by that time Joyce had made enough of a name for himself that his audience knew to expect strangeness and charm from his novels. Unlike debut novels, which are now required to start fast and explosively, this novel is a slow burn, enabling you to get into the life and psyche of the characters before the explosion happens (which it does, about halfway in). By that time, it’s almost anti-climactic, another bit of weird in a book filled to the brim with wonder.

I love this kind of thing, and Joyce remains—next to Jonathan Carroll—one of those writers whom I’ve never disliked anything they’ve ever written.

This book is a collection of essays (with some revision) that Dirda originally posted on The American Spectator’s blog, a thing he did for one year. As such, they are much less formal than his essays and reviews for his normal venue, The Washington Post Book World, but they are nevertheless just as erudite and interesting. In some ways, the blog format make these feel more like a conversation with Dirda, albeit one-sided. That said, I’d love the opportunity to have a real discussion with him, although I’m afraid my reading and knowledge of authors and writing pales in comparison. We must all have heroes, though, and in terms of book commentary, Dirda is one of mine.

As with any good book commentary, the danger herein is how it will greatly expand your To Be Read pile if you don’t beware. Early on I was amused because Dirda namedrops Paul di Filippo for gifting him a blank notebook, then I was surprised to find an essay about Readercon, a Boston SF convention that I’m planning to attend for the first time this year. I knew Dirda was favorable to genre work from having read Book by Book, but I wasn’t aware that he also embraced at least some of the fan community.

Because I liked this book so much, I thought I would check out The American Spectator and see who was now the book blogger, but was dismayed to discover it was a right-wing propaganda machine supporting the orange felon and dismissive of progressives in general. Because of what I saw on the home page, I didn’t even try to delve deeper to find the books section. Given my impression of Dirda’s politics, I find it strange that they would have given him a soapbox, but maybe something has changed there in the last decade.

I read this popular mystery novel prior to visiting Botswana with the idea of getting a little bit of insight into the people and places I would be visiting. The caveats of doing so were many: I hoped that my trip would not be filled with mystery, I was aware that the author was a white man from Scotland writing about an Africa and an African woman, and it’s fiction. Still, I found it rewarding and was happy to find out from some of the people we met in Botswana that the book and series (and TV series adapted from the books) are viewed positively by most of the local population.

Part of the criticism of the book (and perhaps the series) is that Smith’s portrayal of Botswana sugarcoats the more negative aspects of the country and the legacy of colonialism. His response, as expressed in an introduction to this volume, was that there are plenty of other books that deal with that aspect, whereas his goal with this book (which he hadn’t intended to be a series, but the audience response and the characters drove him to continue writing stories about Precious and her agency) was to focus on the more detailed lives of individuals living within that culture.

The book is somewhat disjointed. Readers of mysteries expecting a clear through-line to the narrative will be scratching their heads. But if you let the chapters dwell within your memory as you read, the book does have a clear character, if not plot, arc that resolves nicely at the end.

I’ve read a lot of flash fiction in the last three years, partly due to writing a lot of flash and thus needing to make a study of what makes a story under 750 words work. I found this anthology of 80 flash pieces in a Little Free Library and thought it would be interesting to see what short fiction outside of the SFF genre looked like.

And, to be frank, I was somewhat disappointed, although not surprised. Like their longer counterparts, these stories tended to rely too much on vibe or feeling rather than satisfy any requirement of characterization and plot. The editors talk about this somewhat in the introduction, wherein they compare a flash piece more to poetry than a short story because every word matters and the reader can’t skip any. I agree, but it’s the words selected by the author (and agreed upon by the editor) where we disagree. Every word needs to move the story forward; too many words in these stories simply pile on the vibe.

Out of the 80 stories, I liked about 15-20, including the first out of the gate, Don Shea’s “Jumper Down,” the title referencing the term paramedics use to describe if the building/bridge jumper is “Up” (and hasn’t jumped yet) or “Down” (and likely out). Peter Mehlman’s “Mandela Was Late” is a strange conceptual piece pondering what if Nelson Mandela had had a parole officer. Typically, I liked the more outre and surrealistic stories, like Ray Gonzalez’ “The Jalapeno Contest” or stories that played with form, like “Currents” by Hannah Bottomy which tells the story backwards. But all the stories are short (duh), so the nice thing is you don’t have to commit too much to any one before it’s done and you move on to the next, which meets today’s readers’ low attention spans.