Books, books, books
Oct. 17th, 2009 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkelf105I am dumping a whole bunch of reviews here. Nothing spectacular or particularly insightful, but I’ve read quite a few books that I’ve been quite taken with recently and thus feel obligated to share.
Pump Six And Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
Wow. What a collection. Every single story in this collection is rock solid. One of the reviewers on the back wrote that Bacigalupi writes like a demented angel, and I have to agree. His visions of the future are stark, surreal, visceral and often ugly. But he makes up for it with incredible insight into the human condition as well as being a very, very intelligent story teller. His prose is lush and inexorable and his tales will haunt you. “The People of Sand and Slag” is probably one of the best post-apocalyptic* short stories I have ever read. It’s horrifying and sad and evokes in me the same sort of emotions as watching footage of lions hunting does: they both have a terrible, awful beauty. “The Fluted Girl” completely floored me. It was sad and haunting and completely surreal. It, too, had a sort of awful loveliness about it, as well as containing a completely original idea about music. It was both perverse and beautiful and made me ache. I am completely and utterly sold on the power of Bacigalupi’s writing and have bought his novel, The Wind-Up Girl.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds and Wings to the Kingdom by Cherie Priest
Eden Moore has complicated family relations and a spooky gift. She can see dead people. Set in Chattanooga these books would be rather cliché and boring except Priest is a gifted stylist and Eden is a helluva character. I adore her, and her fierce crankiness drives both stories through their ghostly twists and turns. Priest evokes a South that is atmospheric and chilling and during both novels there were points when I seriously regretted reading them alone at night. Once I started them, I couldn’t stop. Highly, highly recommended for both ghost story lovers and people who love independent, testy heroines.
Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson
I have been jonesing for epic fantasy for quite awhile. I have a love/hate relationship with the genre and it’s hard for me to get into it. I tried several series, all of which I will eventually come back to, but these books have taken a large chunk of my time and attention.
Erikson’s prose is sparse and without much detail, so to get through these incredibly, incredibly loooooooooong books you have to be patient and willing to wait hundreds of pages to put clues together. Given the length of the novels and the fact that the first hundred and fifty are ALWAYS a painful slog to get through, I am absolutely shocked with how engrossed I am with the series. But Erikson has some very unusual things going for him. The series focuses primarily on soldiers in the Malazan Empire. Erikson’s world is very, very detailed and feel positively ancient. He treats his narrative a lot like the Annales school of history and he story tells over the longue duree, which makes the narrative interesting and unusual, despite the thousands and thousands of years it can span. His narrative is also open-ended. It actually feels quite historical, in that the it never feels like the narrative is building to an inevitable climax and the individual threads of his stories are quite naturalistic. His characterization is superb, but I noticed that many of the series’ detractors applaud his narrative aplomb but detest his characterization. I think that his ability to characterize with a few deft strokes Is quite brilliant and he is awesome at making likeable, broken characters. In fact, with a cast bordering on hundreds, there have been only three which was I thought were meh and could have cared less about. Unfortunately for me, their stories take up quite a bit of the second book in the series, Deadhouse Gates. Besides a very, very complicated and quite interesting world and really, really cool soldier characters, Erikson writes females very well. When I realized that in Erikson’s world, women really are the equals of men in most of the “civilized” parts, including the Malazan Empire and their enemies, I was thrilled. Women are soldiers, and they are just as hard bitten, cynical and awesome as the men. The empress is also painted in sympathetic tones. A lot of characters talk about her like she is Queen Bitch of the Universe, but nothing much is from her perspective, and when she does show up, she is remarkably human and understandable. She’s sympathetic and many other characters point this out.
But the series is brutal. It’s one of the bloodiest I have ever read, and that’s saying something. But Erikson makes up for the brutality by having main characters whose main drives are to seek to remain human in inhuman conditions. They also have the strong desire to act upon their decent impulses and bring some small goodness to a world embroiled in war and pain. Granted, Erikson also has a few characters that strike me as sociopathic, but he never makes the reader sympathize with them. They are exactly what he portrays them as. But, for the most part, all of his characters are just normal men and women caught in the currents of history trying to live their lives and reclaim their selves from all the violence and darkness around them. Which I dig, I dig a lot.
Plus Quick Ben and Kalam are black, which is unusual for high fantasy protags. When they first showed up, I rolled my eyes because I thought they were side-kicks, but it quickly becomes apparent that they are the heart and soul of the Bridgeburners, as much as their leader Whiskeyjack is, and they become a huge focus for much of the narrative and are simply astonishing characters. They are so splendid and badass and I just love them. Tattersail is one of my favorite sorceress characters, ever. She’s amazing. Simply stunning.
I think people who really, really like history, especially the history of empires would appreciate the breadth and depth of the series. I also think that action fans would like as once the narration starts rolling, it’s really, really hard to walk away from. Lovers of dark and blood fantasy, as well as those who like narratives dominated from the old soldier’s cranky perspective would also probably like these books, if they can get through the first one hundred and fifty pages.
Pump Six And Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
Wow. What a collection. Every single story in this collection is rock solid. One of the reviewers on the back wrote that Bacigalupi writes like a demented angel, and I have to agree. His visions of the future are stark, surreal, visceral and often ugly. But he makes up for it with incredible insight into the human condition as well as being a very, very intelligent story teller. His prose is lush and inexorable and his tales will haunt you. “The People of Sand and Slag” is probably one of the best post-apocalyptic* short stories I have ever read. It’s horrifying and sad and evokes in me the same sort of emotions as watching footage of lions hunting does: they both have a terrible, awful beauty. “The Fluted Girl” completely floored me. It was sad and haunting and completely surreal. It, too, had a sort of awful loveliness about it, as well as containing a completely original idea about music. It was both perverse and beautiful and made me ache. I am completely and utterly sold on the power of Bacigalupi’s writing and have bought his novel, The Wind-Up Girl.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds and Wings to the Kingdom by Cherie Priest
Eden Moore has complicated family relations and a spooky gift. She can see dead people. Set in Chattanooga these books would be rather cliché and boring except Priest is a gifted stylist and Eden is a helluva character. I adore her, and her fierce crankiness drives both stories through their ghostly twists and turns. Priest evokes a South that is atmospheric and chilling and during both novels there were points when I seriously regretted reading them alone at night. Once I started them, I couldn’t stop. Highly, highly recommended for both ghost story lovers and people who love independent, testy heroines.
Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson
I have been jonesing for epic fantasy for quite awhile. I have a love/hate relationship with the genre and it’s hard for me to get into it. I tried several series, all of which I will eventually come back to, but these books have taken a large chunk of my time and attention.
Erikson’s prose is sparse and without much detail, so to get through these incredibly, incredibly loooooooooong books you have to be patient and willing to wait hundreds of pages to put clues together. Given the length of the novels and the fact that the first hundred and fifty are ALWAYS a painful slog to get through, I am absolutely shocked with how engrossed I am with the series. But Erikson has some very unusual things going for him. The series focuses primarily on soldiers in the Malazan Empire. Erikson’s world is very, very detailed and feel positively ancient. He treats his narrative a lot like the Annales school of history and he story tells over the longue duree, which makes the narrative interesting and unusual, despite the thousands and thousands of years it can span. His narrative is also open-ended. It actually feels quite historical, in that the it never feels like the narrative is building to an inevitable climax and the individual threads of his stories are quite naturalistic. His characterization is superb, but I noticed that many of the series’ detractors applaud his narrative aplomb but detest his characterization. I think that his ability to characterize with a few deft strokes Is quite brilliant and he is awesome at making likeable, broken characters. In fact, with a cast bordering on hundreds, there have been only three which was I thought were meh and could have cared less about. Unfortunately for me, their stories take up quite a bit of the second book in the series, Deadhouse Gates. Besides a very, very complicated and quite interesting world and really, really cool soldier characters, Erikson writes females very well. When I realized that in Erikson’s world, women really are the equals of men in most of the “civilized” parts, including the Malazan Empire and their enemies, I was thrilled. Women are soldiers, and they are just as hard bitten, cynical and awesome as the men. The empress is also painted in sympathetic tones. A lot of characters talk about her like she is Queen Bitch of the Universe, but nothing much is from her perspective, and when she does show up, she is remarkably human and understandable. She’s sympathetic and many other characters point this out.
But the series is brutal. It’s one of the bloodiest I have ever read, and that’s saying something. But Erikson makes up for the brutality by having main characters whose main drives are to seek to remain human in inhuman conditions. They also have the strong desire to act upon their decent impulses and bring some small goodness to a world embroiled in war and pain. Granted, Erikson also has a few characters that strike me as sociopathic, but he never makes the reader sympathize with them. They are exactly what he portrays them as. But, for the most part, all of his characters are just normal men and women caught in the currents of history trying to live their lives and reclaim their selves from all the violence and darkness around them. Which I dig, I dig a lot.
Plus Quick Ben and Kalam are black, which is unusual for high fantasy protags. When they first showed up, I rolled my eyes because I thought they were side-kicks, but it quickly becomes apparent that they are the heart and soul of the Bridgeburners, as much as their leader Whiskeyjack is, and they become a huge focus for much of the narrative and are simply astonishing characters. They are so splendid and badass and I just love them. Tattersail is one of my favorite sorceress characters, ever. She’s amazing. Simply stunning.
I think people who really, really like history, especially the history of empires would appreciate the breadth and depth of the series. I also think that action fans would like as once the narration starts rolling, it’s really, really hard to walk away from. Lovers of dark and blood fantasy, as well as those who like narratives dominated from the old soldier’s cranky perspective would also probably like these books, if they can get through the first one hundred and fifty pages.