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.

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.

Some Lists Apropos of Nothing

Related to book discovery and social media.

Authors Whose Work I Read Because I’d Followed Their Blogs

Elizabeth Bear
Jeffrey Ford
Jay Lake
Nick Mamatas
Ben Peek
John Scalzi

Most of these are blogs I have kept up with regularly for the best part of a decade. A couple I followed for a year or two then stopped when I tried to cut down on time spent reading blogs.

Authors Whose Blogs or Twitter Accounts I Follow Whose Work I Will Definately Read in Future Because Of It

Lauren Beukes
The Bloggess
Warren Ellis
Jim C Hines
Maureen Johnson
Mary Robinette Kowal
Seanan Maguire
Chuck Wendig

Every one of these I have only started following in the past year, most since joining Twitter. Two I have bought books by – one before I followed the author online. All but two I had heard of before encountering their online presence.

What Does This All Mean?

Social media including blogs has been an important part of how I discover authors for a long time. There are much longer lists I could make of authors and books I have read or intend to read because they were mentioned by a writer I follow.

If an author is interesting/entertaining in their online presence, I will almost certainly check out their books at some point. And I’ll also check out the books by other authors they mention (Jeff VanderMeer has been responsible for a large portion of what I’ve read).

I almost never buy a book just because I came across it in a bookstore.

Read in 2012

In roughly the order of reading.

• The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
• Splinter – Adam Roberts
• Old Man’s War – John Scalzi
• Big Questions – Anders Nilsen
• Chronicles of the Black Company – Glen Cook
• The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman – Angela Carter
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – Alison Bechdel
• The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K LeGuin
• The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For – Alison Bechdel
• Choker – Ben McCool & Ben Templesmith
• Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant – Tony Cliff
• Are You My Mother? – Alison Bechdel
• Black Juice – Margo Lanagan
• Boneshaker – Cherie Priest
• Delilah Dirk and the Seeds of Good Fortune – Tony Cliff
• Dust – Elizabeth Bear
• Trial of Flowers – Jay Lake
• Kraken – China Miéville
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon
• The Time Machine – H G Wells
• Above/Below – Stephanie Campisi & Ben Peek
• Bad Monkeys – Matt Ruff
• Heart-Shaped Box – Joe Hill
• Preludes & Nocturnes (The Sandman vol 1) – Neil Gaiman et al
• The Doll’s House (The Sandman vol 2) – Neil Gaiman et al
• Accelerando – Charles Stross
• Escape From Hell! – Hal Duncan
• Dream Country (The Sandman vol 3) – Neil Gaiman et al
• The Third Bear – Jeff VanderMeer
• Season of Mists (The Sandman vol 4) – Neil Gaiman et al
• A Game of You (The Sandman vol 5) – Neil Gaiman et al
• Blood-Stained Sword – Ben Templesmith, Dan Wickline, Amber Benson
• Batman: Year One – Frank Miller, David Mazzuchelli
• The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity – Mike Carey & Peter Gross
• Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• Fables & Reflections (The Sandman vol. 6) – Neil Gaiman
• Batman: Arkham Asylum – Grant Morrison & Dave McKean
• Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft – Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
• The Unwritten: Inside Man – Mike Carey & Peter Gross
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Graphic Novel) – I. Culbard & H.P. Lovecraft
• Brief Lives (The Sandman vol. 7) – Neil Gaiman et al
• Worlds’ End (The Sandman vol. 8) – Neil Gaiman et al
• The Kindly Ones (The Sandman vol. 9) – Neil Gaiman et al
• The Wake (The Sandman vol. 10) – Neil Gaiman et al
• Locke & Key: Head Games – Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
• Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows – Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
• Fury – Salman Rushdie
• Use of Weapons – Iain M Banks

Additionally, a lot of good short fiction, interviews, and essays on Weird Fiction Review, which at the minute is the only short fiction venue I manage to find the time for.

My picks for “best”: Big Questions; Fun Home; The Left Hand of Darkness; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; the last four volumes of the Sandman saga. I’m also very much enjoying Locke & Key – I have two more volumes to read, and the final volume will be completed in 2013.

This year I also watched six seasons of Criminal Minds (excellent; I have the 7th on DVD to watch soon), rewatched the entire run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (good, with moments of brilliance), all three seasons of Veronica Mars (loved it), and four seasons of Breaking Bad (one of the best TV shows I’ve ever watched).

Looking forward to more more more in 2013. Book-A-Week resumes next Monday.

Book-A-Week: Catch-Up

I’m a long way behind, so here’s quick thoughts on the books in the last month and a half. At the start of this I said I wouldn’t include comics and graphic novels, but I’ve changed my mind on that, as they make up most of the stuff I’ve read lately.

13-17: The Sandman vols 1-5 – Neil Gaiman et al

Gaiman’s classic series tells the story of Dream, aka Morpheus, one of the Eternals, ruler of the dreamworld. This is a series that moves easily between lighter fantasy and horror, such a wide variety of tales, and full of originality.

I really shouldn’t try to condense half the series into a few short sentences. I’ll say this: It starts strong and gets stronger, moves easily from longer graphic novel length tales to self-contained short stories, contains a rich mythology of dream and other related worlds. Top moments: “24 Hours”, a strange chapter showing how a madman plays increasingly depraved games with the patrons of a small diner; the serial killer convention in volume 2, The Doll’s House; short story “Calliope” from the third volume (Dream Country), wherein a writer imprisons a muse.

18: The Third Bear – Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer’s collection The Third Bear covers all sorts of territory – the fairytale-like titular story, quasi-Steampunk in “Fixing Hanover”, surreal office politics in “The Situation”, and wild metafictional weirdness in “Errata”, among other things. VanderMeer shows a great range of style and voice between the various stories. Images recur of animals that are not quite animals, people who search for places that may or may not exist, and people who are haunted by their pasts. It is often dark, and occasionally (“The Third Bear” being a particular case) seems to delight in denying the reader the comfort of a fairy tale happy ending.

Favourites in the collection would be “The Third Bear”, “The Surgeon’s Tale” (co-written by Cat Rambo), and “The Goat Variations”, wherein an alternate reality incarnation of the President of the United States experiences all the possible events that occur on September 11th, 2001.

19: Batman: Year One – Frank Miller & David Mazzuchelli

A rare superhero comic read for me, Batman: Year One is one of the caped crusader’s better known and highly praised stories. As the title suggests, it covers the first year of Batman’s career fighting crime. But presumably because the origins of Batman had been done many times before, Year One doesn’t actually show all that much of how Bruce Wayne became Batman, instead showing him learning his methods and establishing his relationship with the Gotham Police. The result, to my mind, is that Batman’s scenes are the least interesting in this graphic novel. And to be honest, for some reason I found Bruce Wayne and Batman’s dialogue and narration difficult to read, coming across very stilted and unnatural.

Where Year One shines, though, is in the story of James Gordon, newly arrived in a Gotham City steeped in corruption, and his struggle to work within an environment where everyone – including his superiors – expects him to be crooked. This feels like much more Gordon’s story than it does Batman’s, and Miller does an excellent job with it.

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Next up: Because it was Banned Books Week recently, I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I will write up my thoughts on that during the week.

Words WordPress “proofread” doesn’t know: Metafictional (it knows metafiction), career.

12: Escape From Hell! by Hal Duncan

A hitman, a hooker, a hobo and a homo die and go to hell: a dark imitation of New York City, where their punishments reflect their sins – prison; an endless succession of johns; a life on the streets, invisible and Forgotten; a “gay cure” clinic. In other words, they each receive what some people in the real world would say they deserved, for what they did (or who they were). After tasting what Hell has in store for them, these four find themselves attempting the impossible: Escape From Hell!

This started out as a screenplay concept on Hal Duncan’s blog, later expanded into a novella. It’s a homage to blockbuster action films and a send-up of religion, with Hell as the ultimate dystopia and the group of outcasts fighting to beat the system. Hell is governed by the Archangel Gabriel, breaking men’s spirits by order from up high; Lucifer is not a ruler but Hell’s most important prisoner. There’s probably not a single page of this book that wouldn’t offend any number of fundamentalist Christians (and probably a lot of more ordinary Christians, too). Hal Duncan’s in his element, with God and Gabriel as his villains, and deranged, flamboyant Lucifer the voice of reason in a Hell not that far removed from reality.

For his heroes, Duncan chooses not to give us the easy image of the unfairly condemned escaping – though little seems fair about this vision of damnation – but alongside the innocent, closeted, virgin Matthew gives us a whole range of “sin” right up to the hardened career killer Seven, an undeniably bad man. Seven might be evil, by most definitions, yet still it’s hard to agree with any person being submitted to the eternity of extreme confinement and torture that was to be his fate.

The story is full of little satirical touches, too – the entry to Hell a customs and immigration checkpoint, where the souls are treated more like luggage than people; the inhabitants of the city are treated to 24 hour TV news that glorifies the carnage and suffering; in the anti-gay clinic the “cured” go on to become staff, victims of indoctrination and institutionalisation.

But most of all Escape From Hell! is a fast-paced, action-packed, insert-more-movie-trailer-cliches-here. I highly recommend it, so long as you’re not easily offended.

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Next week: The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer