And Another Thing

I meant to include this in yesterday’s roundup, but it slipped my mind.

This week I started reading Nimona, a webcomic by Noelle Stevenson about a teenager who is sidekick to a supervillain. It’s very funny and has an interesting take on both the hero/villain idea and on the villain/sidekick relationship. Go read it!

I found out about this one because I’ve been keeping my eye on a new monthly column by Hannah K Chapman on Women In Comics. Hannah’s column is also why I decided to pick up I Kill Giants, another comic I loved recently. Check out her column (March and April for more good recommendations.

Weekly Roundup

I’ll try to blog more in between these posts.

Here’s what I’ve been reading since last week.

Books

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts. Set in Cold War Russia, this is the story of science fiction writer Konstantin Skvorecky, recruited by Stalin, along with other writers, to come up with a convincing alien invasion story for the Soviet Union to use – and then told to forget all about it. Forty years later, some strange encounters begin to suggest that their story may be coming true.

With an ironic narrator and a fair share of humour, this is a pretty entertaining book. Early on I wasn’t quite drawn into it, and I was thinking that – after this and Splinter – Adam Roberts, while good, wasn’t quite for me. But then the book started going in some interesting places, and there are a couple of brilliant scenes in the second half, including one particularly fun scene with Skvorecky alone in a hospital room with an assassin. The ending is another good part, segueing easily from threat to farce to fantastically science fictional. The SF conceit behind the novel is quite a clever one.

Worth note is the rare inclusion of a positive portrayal of a heavily overweight woman, in the person of Skvorecky’s love interest, Dora Norman. This may be a humourous novel, but there are no cheap laughs about her weight to be found here – she’s treated with affection and respect. The same goes for her Scientologist faith – not a word of easy mockery. It’s something of a breath of fresh air.

Comics

1. Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon, written by Matt Fraction, art by Dave Aja and Javier Pulido. This was my first taste of Hawkeye, and in fact my first Marvel comic, picked up because of the postive word of mouth. And it deserves every bit of praise it’s been getting. Hawkeye is clever, very funny, and Aja’s art in particular is brilliant. Read this comic.

2. Dial H: Into You, written by China Miéville, art by Mateus Santolouco. How could I not pick up a comic written by China Miéville? This series is one of the weirdest you’ll read, the protagonist Nelson turning into some incredibly surreal heroes whever he dials H-E-R-O on a particular phone. I have no idea how Miéville comes up with thing like the Iron Snail, but what I do know is that whatever he comes up with, he knows how to make it work. This is a funny and well-written series, with some meta-commentary on the genre of comic superheroes on top. Read this comic too.

3. The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words, by Mike Carey, Peter Gross, and others. This sixth volume of the series almost looks like it’s building to an ending, but it seems there’s still more to tell. Alternating the ongoing story of Tom Taylor’s struggle against the Cabal with stories of that cabal’s history and origins, this volume keeps up the high quality of storytelling from the series so far. Looking back now I’m not sure why I was so ambivalent about The Unwritten after the first volume. I hope they can keep this quality going through to the end (however far off that is). And I also hope they give us some more Pauly Bruckner – he’s only had two issues so far in the whole series, but he’s easily one of the most entertaining parts.

Roundup: The First

Clearly I can’t be trusted to write a book review every week. I’m thinking of just doing a weekly roundup of what I’ve been watching/reading instead, and this here is my first try of that. I’ll still do longer reviews when I can get myself going on them.

Books

1. It took me a couple of weeks really, but this week I finished reading A Hand-Book of Volapük by Andrew Drummond. The book combines actual instruction in the “universal language” of Volapük with a comic novel set in Scotland in 1889. The narrator is Mr Justice, General Secretary of the Edinburgh Society for the Propagation of a Universal Language. Justice is a keen supporter of Volapük, and spends his narrative extolling its virtues – and entirely oblivious to its flaws, which become apparent nevertheless to the reader.

Justice travels with a cantankerous, lecherous, and sesquipedalian six-hundred-year-old dead knight, which sentence should tell you something about the tone of the book.

The lessons in Volapük were genuinely instructive, and the unreliable narrator interesting, but I wasn’t quite carried away by this novel. The humour was only mildly amusing for me. But if you want to learn about an interesting and obscure constructed language, this will be more entertaining than an ordinary textbook.

2. I was in London over the weekend, and on the train there and back I read Farthing by Jo Walton. It’s a murder mystery novel set in an alternate history – one where the US never joined the Second World War, and the UK made peace with Hitler. A man is murdered in Farthing House, home to the Eversley family, who are at the centre of the politically influential Farthing Set. Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is dispatched to investigate the crime. Lucy Kahn, daughter of Lord and Lady Eversley, provides an inside view of the family. Married to a Jewish man, she is somewhat estranged from her family, and the circumstances of the crime lead to her husband being a prime suspect.

This is equal parts crime novel and an exploration of privilege, power, racism, homosexuality, marriage as a political tool, the relationship between servants and masters, scapegoating, and all the things that go on behind closed doors among the upper classes. The world we’re shown isn’t some clean and polished version of the past but one where the scandals are close to the surface, known to all but simply not spoken about.

It was an enjoyable enough read, though not the most uplifting ending. There was one thing that bothered me, which is the use of the trope where a woman knows instantly that she is pregnant during the act of conception. It’s nonsense, but the book plays it straight, with Lucy deciding sans evidence that she’s pregnant and then spending the rest of the novel thinking and telling people about the baby.

Comics

1. Manhattan Projects vol. 1: “Science. Bad.” by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra. I’d heard some good things about this one, so decided to check it out. It’s a pretty out-there reimagining of the Manhattan Project, where instead of just developing the atomic bomb, the scientists are involved in all kinds of crazy science – interdimensional portals, alternate realities, aliens, split personalities, giant mechanical limbs. It hasn’t quite grabbed me yet, but I also felt the same way about The Unwritten when I read the first volume, and now I’m a big fan.

2. I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and J M Ken Niimura. Another picked up because I’d heard it was good but didn’t know much about it. And I can say now, it is excellent. Highly recommend. A young girl retreats into fantasy to avoid confronting difficult problems at home. The girl in question, Barbara Thorson, is smart, sarcastic, and weird, and the story is both heartbreaking and ultimately heartwarming. The clever writing and great artwork fit together perfectly.

Read this book.

Film

1. Iron Man 3 – This was a fun film. It’s ridiculous spectacle, but it works, and it’s way better than IM2 was. The film handled the Mandarin the best way it could be done these days.

2. Argo – While I was in London I went to the cinema for this one. There was more humour in this than I expected, for the subject matter. The final chase down the runway was a little hard to believe (of course, it never actually happened), but otherwise it’s a solid film, worth seeing.

Other

Also in London, I went to the theatre for a showing of Wicked. A fun night, a great show. Particularly enjoyed Gina Beck as Galinda/Glinda.

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This post went on longer than I expected.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I read this book several weeks ago, but I’ve let myself get a long way behind on these posts. I’m writing this in one go without revision, so it’s not my clearest of reviews.

You know the story by now, seeing as it’s become an Oscar-winning movie: Pi Patel, son of an Indian zookeeper, is emigrating to Canada when the ship he and his family are on sinks, leaving him floating across the pacific in a lifeboat with a Royal Bengal tiger.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Life of Pi comes in three parts, and the large middle part is the story of the boy at sea. Before that, though, you have Pi’s life story up until the voyage – the reason behind his name, Piscine Molitor Patel, his experiences at school, his upbringing at the zoo, and his unusual decision to become a practising follower of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity simultaneously. And then there are the talks about animals, about keeping them, feeding them, about why an animal is happy in a zoo, and why they do not try to escape. Much of the early part, and some of the main part, of the book is spent establishing a basis for us to believe the unlikely story of how he survived for two hundred and twenty-seven days on a boat with a Bengal tiger.

And that’s the key to this novel, really – he has to sell to us this fantastic story, this idea that a man can live in an enclosed space with a starving tiger and not be eaten, so he spends this time telling us all the reasons why he could do so.

To be perfectly honest, I found some of these early chapters a bit of a chore, and struggled to keep myself going at times. It was all very interesting, but not all that compelling.

The better part of the novel is found in the first few days at sea. He is not at first alone on a lifeboat with a tiger: to begin with, he believes the tiger to have jumped overboard, but the boat is home to a wounded zebra, a hyena, and soon an orangutan. The tension as these creatures interact on the boat, while Pi has evicted himself onto a makeshift raft, is not badly done, although it does get a little gruesome. Once these animals are dealt with, however, it is just Pi and the tiger, which bears the unlikely name of Richard Parker.

(Martel attempts to toy with us somewhat with this name. In the first section of the book he does not say that it is a tiger at all, in order to build some mystery over this person that is mentioned so often. It all feels a little gimmicky when you already know the trick.)

The book then settles in to the long story of the days at sea, interspersed with more recollections from Pi’s childhood. Martel manages to be pretty convincing in the level of detail of how the boy survives, and it can be quite compelling at times. This whole part culminates in an even more fantastic scenario than simply the existence of a tiger aboard the lifeboat, when he reaches (bear with me) a floating island of carnivorous seaweed populated by meerkats. It’s the kind of thing to stretch credulity to its limit, but is depicted in the same vivid detail as the rest of the journey at sea so that you want to accept that this could have happened.

The final section of the novel is the shortest. It takes place after Pi has returned to land, and takes the form of a transcript of an interview of Pi Patel by men representing the insurance company for the boat that sank.

If you’ve seen some of the reviews and praise for Life of Pi, you may have encountered the claim that this is a book that could “make you believe in god”. It is in this final section where Martel presents his thesis: Having given us the story of the boy and the tiger, he presents an altogether different take on the events. The suggestion, it seems, is that either of these stories could be true – and that the person hearing the tale will choose to believe “the better story”.

I have a number of issues with this ending. Firstly, most obviously, is the claim that the book could “make you believe in god”. The book makes no real attempt to do so. Pi’s spirituality is shown to us, but it never seems to be brought to a level that is significant to his survival on the boat. The (apparent) final argument of the novel does not argue that god exists, but merely suggests that one should believe in god because it is the better story, regardless of whether it is true – a detail that handily undermines the attempted argument.

The second is in the writing of the second story. I have a suspicion that Martel was aiming for a shocking twist with the rather brutal second tale, however the story comes across as even more over-the-top and unreal than the rest of the novel. It is hard to believe this is anything other than a story intended to sound cold and brutal – but which instead verges on absurd. It’s too neat, too easy, after the first tale.

In all, Life of Pi was not quite the success I had been hoping for. A slow beginning and a solid middle, falling down somewhat in the end. I can’t help but feel that the book failed where Yann Martel attempted to be clever and pull one over on the reader. He was at his best when he was simply giving us a fantastic survival tale.

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Prior to Life of Pi I had been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and I said before that I had little to share on the subject. I took a break from Earthsea to read this novel, then resumed with Tehanu – which is such a different beast, and so significant, I think I do owe it a post of its own. That will be coming next time I sit down to write a post.

Endings

A couple of days ago, I read this article by Peter Damien on the importance of endings in fiction. I agree with a lot of what he says there. In many ways, a story can be defined by its ending – a well-planned ending can shape the entire whole that precedes it, or provide context that makes the whole more than it was (the book I just finished, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, accomplishes the latter).

In a stand alone novel, an ending is something you can be well-assured of, but less so for a novel series, a television show, or, especially, comics. Keeping with some of the examples Damien used: you can have series’ where fans are eager for resolution, the creators say “we know where it all goes, trust us”, but in fact things are changed on the fly and/or never resolved (Lost). You have ones where a creator says they have the whole story planned across x installments, who then keep expanding that “x” until it seems interminable (The Wheel of Time). And then there are the stories that have no ending, the ongoing serials.

It’s that last group that I have issues with – specifically, with comic serials. I have no problem starting an unfinished book series, because usually there’s an expectation of an eventual ending. But in comics, there’s a whole big section of the market where that’s not the case.

I started out reading comics that were most like books: stand alone graphic novels, in single volumes. It made the most sense to me – and still does. I like a complete story, a rounded whole. The ongoing comics – the ones you’re most likely to have heard of: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, countless more – felt inaccessible, because they had no end, their beginnings were in the distant past, and there was this huge amount of complicated, interconnected story surrounding them.

So I stuck with graphic novels, for years, and only started to move away from that recently. I got a hold of the Sandman series – a safe choice, as it was already finished. There, again, I found that as the story approached its definite end, it began to draw together everything that had come before into something bigger than what was. The final four volumes are masterful storytelling.

The Sandman series is one made up of several smaller stories, rather than a single ongoing story split into parts. That’s what opened me up to other comics than the completed, fully self-contained ones. It’s a compromise: the collected volumes of self-contained storylines, comics that cohere into something of a whole while still being part of the bigger series. Despite the missing context of the comic’s history, there’s something that makes these volumes work: the story arc has an ending.

Finally, I have recently begun reading a few comics that are part of ongoing series. New ones, mostly, so I don’t have a lot of catching up, but ones with an undefined ending. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, yet.

I think I’ll always continue to favour the ones I know have a limited lifespan. I enjoy the comfort of knowing that something has an end in sight.

Finally, I have to say that Damien is right about one more thing: Locke & Key is a brilliant series, and I very much look forward to its own ending.

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[On another subject entirely, my Book-A-Week posts will resume soon. I've spent much of the past couple of weeks re-reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels, and haven't cared to say much on them - they're deserving classics: read them.]

Unread Statistics 2

It’s a little over a year since I did a post detailing some statistics about my to-read pile, so I figured I’d take another look.

To be honest, very little has changed.

I currently own 60 books I have not yet read. This is 12 less than last year. 48 of my currently unread books are the same as the ones on last year’s list.

Type of Book

This year sees new categories, in Comic and Graphic Novel, which I maybe should have combined. There has been a large increase in the amount of comics and such that I read in the last year, but I tend to read them much sooner after purchase than I do books, so only a couple are currently in the pile.

Once again, the pile is mostly novels.

Year of Publication

Once again all collections/anthologies were listed by publication date regardless of the age of the content.

The distribution is very much the same as last year, with some predictable shift toward the current decade. The list is still dominated by books from 2006 and 2007 – when I was in Uni and buying books much faster than I read them – but there has been some progress made on that part.

Author Nationality

Still dominated by American and British authors. Proportionally, there has been a slight increase in the ratios of non-Americans and non-Brits.

Author Gender

And finally:

Once again, my list skews heavily toward male authors. 42 books by male authors to 11 by female authors. This ratio is actually slightly worse than last year. Removing multiples once again changes little, the numbers are 36 male authors and 10 female authors.

The one Unknown is the same author from last time who keeps their identity a closely guarded secret.

Addendum: Read in 2012

After seeing the statistic above on the gender (im)balance in my to-read pile, I felt like I should take a look at what I read in 2012 and see if it follows a similar pattern – because I felt like the female representation since last year should have improved. For this, I counted everything on the Read in 2012 post. These are the results:

It’s just as bad as the to-read pile. But this had a lot of repeat names from comic series, so, reducing down to the individual writers involved:

Still pretty far skewed. One particular issue is that I’ve read very few (print) comics with female writers. In fact, to date there have been only two: Alison Bechdel, and Marjane Satrapi, and those with mainly autobiographical material.

Almost all of my comics reading to date has been from male writers. This is something I feel I need to address going forward – as well as continuing to read more great female novelists.

Black Sheep by Ben Peek

In Black Sheep, the world is segregated, with cities divided into Asian, Caucasian, and African people. In response to the “Racial Wars” some time in the story’s past, the UN has banned multiculturalism. Within the cities, everything is controlled: culture and history are tailored to suit the group you belong to, and no contact with the other cities is ever allowed.

Isao Dazai moves with his wife and young daughter from Asian-Tokyo to his wife’s home city of Asian-Sydney, but he is dissatisfied with his life there. After speaking too freely about how he feels, he finds himself falling foul of the city’s Segregators, black-masked policemen who enforce the UN’s laws, and is convicted of being Japanese. The punishment is Assimilation, a process which removes the victim’s pigmentation, leaving them completely white from head to toe, and turns them into mindless drones used for the city’s manual labour.

In this story we see the events that led up to Isao’s arrest, the process of Assimilation itself, and what happens to him afterward, in a book that at times brings to mind both George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Of course few books would come out ahead in such comparisons, and Peek’s novel is not trying to. Rather, it uses some of the same elements of familiar dystopias – the environment of constant surveillance, the inability to trust anyone you might speak to, the farce of bureaucracy and justice designed to reach a predetermined verdict – to tell its own story.

In some ways Peek’s dystopia is closer to reality than Orwell’s classic. There is more of a human element – it is easier to understand how the people who perpetuate this regime could have come to do so. There are clever moments in the world-building, too, like this one when Isao is on the plane to Asian-Sydney, and his daughter Kyoto is given a pill to calm her down for the flight:

I said quietly, “How come you don’t give them the pill in the airport?”
“Segregator Law prohibits it,” he replied. “They say that if medication is given out at the airport, then they would have to perform surveillance there, which they say is against the United Nations Freedom Laws. It is violating our rights if they are watching all of us all the time, even though airport security does that…”

Ultimately, however, Asian-Sydney and Asian-Tokyo are too perfectly dystopian to really ring true as a potential future; what they can do is serve as an extreme example, a model of a world where issues of race are handled with the ultimate form of segregation – a strange kind of equality, with the three major race groups kept equally under the heel of a faceless – and thus raceless – regime.

The story of Isao Dazai has two main strands – the first is the exploration of the cities and how they function; the second, Isao’s need to confront his wife, who was responsible for reporting him to the Segregators. While a lot of story time is devoted to the former, with much being revealed – including some tantalising hints toward what the UN’s ultimate goal with the cities might be – that side of the story doesn’t really receive a resolution. We end with an understanding of the status quo; what moments in the story that seem to suggest something bigger for Isao prove illusory. It is Isao’s wife, Kimiko, who comes to dominate the final parts of the story, as Isao sets out to find and confront her. What results is a tense exchange that reveals two people who have never and will never understand each other. It’s a moment that seems more true and right than other possible endings would have, but an ending like that is not one that can really leave you feeling satisfied.

For me, the highlight of the novel is not the world Peek creates, or the story Isao follows outside, but the depiction of Isao’s Assimilation. These are strange, sometimes surreal scenes of a manipulated virtual reality seen from inside Isao’s perspective, and what really gives it kick is the knowledge that what you are witnessing is the deliberate, calculated destruction of a man’s mind, a process deeper and more harmful than ordinary brainwashing, one designed to ruin the victim so thoroughly that he rejects his own identity. It was quite disturbing to read these scenes and begin to understand just what was being done to Isao and what purpose each element served.

Black Sheep is a book I do think people should seek out. It’s a well-crafted dystopian novel that, though it doesn’t really offer a satisfying resolution (does a dystopian novel need to?), is still overall a satisfying read. It makes me wonder why Peek is not better known.