Words: Shadows of Self

Warning: Some minor spoilery stuff below...

I liked this one, but didn't love it, and I say that as a huge fan of the first Mistborn trilogy. I did think it was a cut above its predecessor, The Alloy of Law. This book has a much deeper connection to the original trilogy, name-checking several characters, locations, and events, and even reintroducing two characters from the earlier era. Further, Sanderson also subtly hints at of the background of his grand Cosmere setting, laying some groundwork for connecting all of his series (Elantris, Stormlight, Mistborn) into one universe.

The plot is interesting, and I thought a touch more engaging than Alloy, and as always, the world-building is well-planned and immersive. There are a couple of patented Sanderson plot twists in there as the story ramps up to its climax, and though some may telegraphed a little more obviously than others, they are still interesting and well-though out for the most part. The main story comes to a satisfying conclusion, while still leaving some interesting plot threads to be picked up in the next volume.

Honestly, what really kept this book from a higher rating for me was the characterization. A lot of the characters in this era are somewhat less well-drawn than those in the earlier trilogy, and some of them tend to drift into one-note territory. Wayne, the ostensible protagonist, has a great backstory, but sometimes tends to devolve into generic "Gunslinger Lawman". I also got kind of tired of Wayne, Wax's right-hand man, who to me is best used in small doses. Despite a terrific backstory, he sometime comes across as a collection of quirks than an actual character (a couple of memorable, well-done scenes aside). Come to think of it, your tolerance for the pun of the two partners being named "Wax and Wayne" will make a pretty good litmus test for your patience with some of the dialogue, which can times get a bit quippy.

One spoilery plot/character quibble: It might be me, but I found MeLaan's actions at the end, while she was impersonating the governor, a bit much to swallow, and it took me out of the story a little. Yeah, there was a quick in-universe justification for it in a brief dialogue exchange, but it kind of came out of nowhere, and I don't recall her exhibiting similar behavior when in other guises that she had worn for much longer.

However, one thing Sanderson continues to do very, very well, is action scenes and setpieces. He has a talent for describing action in clear language while still maintaining an exciting, propulsive pace. Whether he's describing something so simple as Wax landing dramatically in the midst of a crowd, or something as complex as a tense, angry mob scene that culminates with an assassination attempt against a political figure, Sanderson conjures up indelible, almost cinematic imagery. The chase scenes are suspenseful, the fight scenes exciting, and the scenes involving the use of his unique magic system (one of the best in modern fantasy) are interesting, and rarely rely on the same contrivance more than once. I'll let the characterization slide a little as long as these aspects of the writing continue to be as good.

So overall, a couple of minor issues aside, I did enjoy the book, and am thinking of diving right into its follow-up, the recently published The Bands of Mourning.

Words: Reamde

 

 At its most basic level, Reamde is essentially Neal Stephenson's riff on the espionage/thriller/action yarn. However, being a Stephenson novel, such simplification doesn't really do it justice. While it may be less thematically dense and ambitious than much of his other work, (and was touted in advance press as his most "accessible" novel), it is by no means what you'd call airport-bookstore pulp. It still manages to clock in at a hefty thousand-plus pages.

The plot does not lend itself to a quick summarization, but suffice it to say it starts out with a computer virus, from which the book takes its name, designed to extract money from the players of an enormously popular MMORPG called T'Rain, similar to World of Warcraft. From there, through a series of extremely unlikely but entertaining coincidences and contrivances, things spiral out of control to encompass the Russian mob, Chinese hackers, American survivalists, and the involvement of the U.S. military, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the CIA, and Britain's M16, all entanged in a globe-trotting odyssey spanning continents. There are even some fascinating sequences set within the digital T'Rain gameworld.

Stephenson seems to have dialed back some of the wildly digressive tendencies that are a hallmark of his writing, but he still finds time to wander off the map plenty. As in his other work, plot points and character backstories are used as launching pads for detours and digressions that lend thematic weight to the story. Stephenson is still a fan of long, drawn-out set pieces involving multiple POV characters, alternating with quiet character work and, of course, the lengthy infodumps.

One is either a fan of his digressive style or not, but if you like his other books, you'll like this one as well. Sure, there are sequences that could use a little tightening up, and some of the narrative detours may be strictly unnecessary to further the story, but like all of his works, it's nothing if not immersive. Often with Stephenson, the journey is more important than the destination, and Reamde was an enjoyable trip. 

Words: Absolution Gap (or, How to Completely Derail a Series)

What a terrible, terrible ending to what started out as a very promising series. I really wanted to like this book, but it became an utter slog fairly early on, and I had to force myself over the finish line (more out of stubborness than anything; this is very rare that I feel this way but I hate to abandon books that I've started). If I hadn't read this on a Kindle, I would have been tempted to throw the book across the room in frustration upon finishing it. I still might.

First, some context about the series as a whole, before I get to my thoughts on this particular book.  Heads up, 'cause it's about to get all SPOILER-y up in here.

I really enjoyed Revelation Space, and thought it was an effective mixture of big ideas, with a galaxy-spanning setting and an intriguing future history built up throughout. The characterization was perhaps the weaker link, but the protagonist was at least an interesting take on the stock "Arrogant Bastard" archetype. It was extremely well-done space opera, and I was excited to read more.

The second book, Redemption Ark, picked up the conflicts established in the first book, along with some of the characters, and all seemed to go well at first. However, in retrospect some of the problems in the series started to show up about halfway through this book, and the majority of it can be blamed squarely on the writing and apparent (lack of) editing. Reynolds, for all of his great ideas, can get extremely long winded, and these books tend to disappear down rabbit-holes of lengthy exposition and really long descriptive passages. Conversations abound, but some anticipated action sequences are either glossed over or happen off-screen. For instance, there's a big build-up towards the theft of an Ultra spaceship, something that seems like it would be really fun to read about after pages and pages of dialogue, whole chapters of dialogue, and then the narrative skips forward to after the event, dismissing it with what amounts to "...and so that happened". Reynolds can spend pages describing the transformed corridors of the Nostalgia for Infinity, but breezes past a freakin' space battle? Feh.

Other problems began to be apparent. There was the ham-fisted, shoehorned in Khouri/Thorn, um, "romance". There was the sudden and not-very-convincing one-eighty in Scorpio's outlook. Why spend so much time on his backstory establishing him as this murderous, revenge-driven badass, just to have him essentially shrug and become one of the good guys? And the biggest sin was to have Volyova, a major character for two books now, die offscreen. Granted, there was not a lot of character depth there, but she had been a major protagonist, and there was a bit of build-up to her sacrifice, but then we get another "...and then this happened".

Still, the overall universe-building and Big Ideas that Reynolds was exploring gave me hope, and so I settled in to Absolution Gap, hoping for the best....

So, where to start with this mess? SPOILERS AHOY as we go down the checklist of woe; I'm not hiding 'em because if you've read this far into a one-star review, then I assume you want it with both barrels.

Among the many, many problems:
- Important characters from the earlier books are killed off fairly early on, and replaced with much less interesting ones. Clavian and Skade both die together about a third of the way in (the actual deaths happen, again, offscreen). Skade, in particular, suffered from an increasingly muddy set of motivations which basically reduced her to a caricature of moustace-twirling villiany. Scorpio essentially becomes a much less compelling Clavian-Lite. Oh, by the way, Thorn, from the last novel, dies in between books, and it happened, you guessed it, off-screen.
- There are a bunch of new characters added here. The third book in a series (not counting Chasm City in this) is a bit late to bring major players on board unless handled expertly, something which Reynolds...does not do.
- Worse, with the new characters and settings given so much emphasis, there are some major plot threads and characters that were much more interesting that are just abandoned and left unresolved. The Mother Nest/Closed Council intrigue and the character of Felka from Redemption Ark come to mind here. The Conjoiner political intrigue was a major part of the first half of the second book, and here that whole plot doesn't even get to fizzle out so much as it's just ignored.
- The story draaaaaaaaaags, on not one but two fronts. The Hela and Ararat plotlines really spin their wheels here for hundreds of pages. There are many, many pointless excursions with minor characters and setting details that pad the page count (a lot) but add nothing to a compelling, forward-moving narrative.
- The antagonists this book introduces, Quaiche and Grelier, die pointless, anticlimactic deaths. Quaiche's in particular was ridiculous.
- Plothole alert: If the Nostalgia for Infinity has been in orbit around Hela for nine years, and has sensors which can detect a mosquito fart from light years away, you're going to tell me they didn't notice Quaiche building his holdfast down there right below them? Presumably that whole endeavor took quite a bit of time and energy.

And then, the ending. Dear gods above, the ending. Where to start? Again SPOILERS AHEAD:
- Okay, I get that the idea that the temptation to bargain with the shadows was a test. If that's the case, Quaiche was going to destroy the scrimshaw suit anyway, choosing to not deal with the shadows, even if the heroes had never come to Hela. Does this then render the ENTIRE COURSE OF ACTION the heroes undertook since leaving Ararat more or less meaningless?
- Reynolds pulls one of the most blatant deus ex machina endings I've ever seen with the 11th hour revelation of the Nestbuilders, yet another ancient, all-powerful race, entering the story. Yes, there were some VERY minor hints in retrospect, but it's basically as if they came out of nowhere.
- The deus ex machina gets worse. After a couple thousand pages of series, the entire human-Inhibitor conflict, the ostensible conflict driving the last two books and forming the backdrop of the first, comes to an end....as it's basically GLOSSED OVER, occurring offscreen (sonofabitch!), described after the fact in a freakin' EPILOGUE! "And so this happened..."

My gods, why did I spend so much time reading this? It has been a long, long time since I've been so, so thoroughly annoyed and disappointed with a book, a long time since I've invested so much time in a series which crashed and burned so craptacurlary. is that a word? It is now. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated this book.

So, ratings:
- Revelation Space: 4 stars. Great ideas, matched by a compelling story. Read this, then pretend the rest never happened.
- Redepmtion Ark: 3 stars. The cracks are starting to show.
- Absolution Gap: 1 stars (really, should be zero stars, but the series started out so well), retroactively ruined the series, and causes me to swear to never, ever read anything by this author again.

Words: Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop

Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah is an ambitious work, setting to out cover no less than the entire history of pop music from just before the beginning of the rock & roll era (specifically, the publication of Britain's first weekly pop chart with the advent of the 45 rpm single as the primary medium of distribution) until the onset of the digital age with the arrival of mp3s and file-sharing.  Stanley looks at pop and all of it's many strains through the decades, including rock, soul, folk, electronica, hip-hop, disco and others, and endeavors to show how the origins, influences, and evolutions of each were threads in a wider, ever-changing tapestry of popular music as a whole.  The book forms its narrative by looking at the monthly and yearly pop charts chronologically, examining what was popular, then using the charts as a framework to zoom in on key songs, people, record labels, and events to illuminate his points. 

Stanley aims to follow two broad themes here.  The first has to do with the fact that, unlike many pop or rock history books, "Yeah Yeah Yeah" is not another appraisal of the established "canon" that has been built up by critics over the years.  Volumes have been written about what critics think is important, but Stanley is much less concerned with asking "What is the critical consensus" than with "What were people actually listening to?"  The book emphasizes the "popular" component of "pop" music.

The second overarching theme is the relationship between different genres under the broad umbrella of "pop", and their influence on each other over the decades.  Whether it's dance, rock, reggae, hip-hip, punk, or electronica, no genre exists in a vacuum.  Stanley endeavors to show not only how the different styles of pop music developed, but how they developed in relation to each other, drawing influence from what came before (or concurrently) and setting the stage for what came later.

Even with close to 900 pages to work with, fitting everything in is still a daunting task.  Stanley helps to sketch in the big picture by focusing in on little details here and there.  He excels at brief, thumbnail descriptions: Chuck Berry had the "look of a card sharp blessed with luck" whose songs "sounded like the tail fins on Cadillacs".  Johnny Cash had "a wood-carved face and a look of resolute danger; when he sang his voice could go deeper than a coal mine".  Sly Stone's early records had the "feel of a Sunday-school riot", while the harmonies of CSN sounded "like the first rays of dawn".  The book is peppered with illuminating anecdotes and observations that serve to illustrate the larger points, such as a suitably apocalyptic description of Altamont, or a charming account of a Christmas Day charity show played by the Sex Pistols.

There are a couple of things to be aware of.  The author is British, so the book takes a very British point of view in many respects.  The British charts are used as the primary reference, and there are entire chapters devoted to things that were never as big in the States as they were in England.  Thus, Elvis and the Beatles obviously get their own chapters, but there are entire chapters devoted to glam (as well as a whole separate chapter on Marc Bolan and David Bowie), chapters on the post-punk of Depeche Mode and New Order, and chapters on British pastoral folk-rock (think Fairport Convention).  Not that any of this should be a problem; readers used to an America-centric outlook will simply have to recalibrate their point of view. 

Second, rather than providing a strictly detached outlook, Stanley frequently takes the opportunity to express his personal tastes and opinions.  On the one hand, this allows his passion to shine through, giving a fervent eloquence to his writing when talking about those things that he feels strongest about, both positively and negatively.  On the other hand, some of his opinions are bound to meet some resistance with different readers.  This is especially true for those whose tastes run more towards rock (as mine tends to when push comes to shove), as Stanley can be quite disdainful of the post-sixties rock canon.  

Specifically, Stanley cites 1967 and the Monterey Pop Fest as the demarcation line when rock became self-serious, pretentious, and “heavy”, as he puts it, purposely isolating itself from the more populist, lighter fare of “pop”.  The book tends to sniff at most rock after that, especially what he decries as the insular and arbitrary “classic rock canon”.  There are exceptions, notably the watershed 70's punk revolution and it's early 80s descendant post-punk, which were by their very nature, a repudiation of rock’s perceived self-absorption.

Stanley gives his reasons (which do have a point, though he tosses around the dreaded term "rockist" on more than one occasion), but for me personally it was a bit much to swallow to hear him champion, say, Sweet over Led Zeppelin or Donovan over Bob Dylan.  Still, there is an astute chapter on early 80s FM rock and another very insightful chapter on heavy metal and it's seemingly endless appeal and ability to weather cultural shifts that have snuffed out many other genres.

For me personally, the first 2/3 of the book were the most interesting, as I am much more familiar with (and tend to be a fan of) the mainstream pop and rock from the eras Stanley writes about.  Once the chronicle reached the mid-80s/early 90s development and rise of electronica/house/techno/etc., it was difficult to maintain the same interest level (though the quality of writing seemed just as good).  I listen to a reasonably wide swath of music, but the vast bulk of those styles really do not appeal to me at all.  I was able to read and enjoy the earlier chapters on hip-hop even though I don;t really listen to that either, but for whatever reason I found myself really skimming through the last couple of chapters.

Whether or not you agree with Stanley’s personal opinions, his passion is undeniable.  When describing the music that has really moved him, be it a Beach Boys song, a Motown track, a punk anthem, a pioneering techno track, or a 70s bubblegum pop song, his eloquence and unabashed enthusiasm are infectious, drawing the reader in.  Stanley is both professional critic and professional musician,  but he is also at times simply a fan, eager to share his discovery of joy with others.  One might not agree with Stanley's personal opinions, but any music fan knows the giddy rush that only comes when getting lost in a favorite song.  No matter your musical preference, that is a universal feeling that this book ultimately seeks to celebrate,  and in that it does a remarkable job.

One more thing: It’s handy to have access to YouTube or an internet radio account while reading this, as listening to the songs he’s writing about adds a whole new dimension.

Words: The Pale King

The Pale King is the “unfinished novel” that David Foster Wallace had been working on for several years by the time of his death in 2008, and then put together by his editor according to voluminous notes that Wallace had left behind. It is certainly unfinished in the traditional narrative sense in that after 540-odd pages the plot has barely begun to coalesce. However, even his finished works were never strong on plot, and anyone who has read his previous novels (particularly Infinite Jest) will understand that with Wallace, the plot is secondary to the themes and ideas being explored, the asides and digressions, the effortless mastery of language and bold authorial voice…the experience itself of reading Wallace.

The book centers around a group of entry-level tax examiners working at an IRS center in Peoria, Illinois in 1985, and if that sounds like an unbelievably boring subject for a novel, that’s kind of the point. Boredom is presented as a symptom of a larger issue, masking much deeper, darker fears. The excruciating tedium these characters face and the ways they find to cope with it serves as a launchpad for Wallace to explore a myriad number of themes, including loneliness, self-image and the search for identity and purpose, and how what we choose to focus our attention on can shape or lives.

The story is set at the dawn of the information age, which Wallace posits as the time of a great societal and cultural paradigm change, when public institutions seem to shift from being driven by public virtue to becoming exemplars of pure capitalism. Wallace uses the impersonal bureaucratic ecosystem the characters must navigate, with its own customs, arcane language, and history, as a microcosm of society at large to explore the ideas of civic and moral responsibility, and the ramifications of how those ideas change over time.

The writing here is tighter and a bit more focused than in his previous long-form works, as Wallace has dialed back some of his more egregious post-modern tics. There are still numerous asides and digressions (some of them quite lengthy), but these sections are what carry the thematic weight of the book. Wallace’s command of his craft is amply demonstrated even in the novel’s raw form: the incisive observations, the vivid and evocative descriptions, the dark humor, the rich yet precise language. There are still moments of audaciousness; there’s a pages-long single-sentence paragraph describing one character’s commuter flight, anxious and excruciatingly mundane at the same time, while another character engages in a hundred-page monologue detailing the life path that brought him to the IRS. There are some astonishing setpieces where Wallace is in full virtuosic form, among these the tale of a high school shop class accident and its effects on those who witnessed it, the story of a seemingly doomed poverty-stricken young girl from the trailer park, and an encounter with a very unsettling infant

Even in an uncompleted state, there is a raw kind of greatness here, the potential for something amazing and epic found in the margins and asides that build the overall theme. You can see the plot threads start to take shape, although it never coalesces into anything concrete. It’s like making out the outlines of something huge in the fog – the shape is there, but indistinct and seemingly half-formed yet. There is a sadness lurking around the thematic edges, and this is underscored by the knowledge that the novel will never be truly finished, that indeed this singular voice has been silenced forever. This is the last major work we will get from David Foster Wallace, and that is a great shame.

It's Aliiiive.....

        

....Kind of.  So, I'm gonna try out this blog thing.  No guarantees.  I'm thinking that this will mostly have posts about stuff I've read, listened to, or watched, and it's basically going to be about stuff that I find interesting enough to babble on about.  Not sure if anyone is actually going to want to read this or not, so in that case I guess it's like 99% of all the other blogs out there.  If there's a dozen posts here by the end of the year, I'll be pleasantly surprised.  Anyway, make yourself at home...put your feet up, grab a beverage, maybe take your pants off...we're pretty informal around here.