Tag Archives: fiction

The Truth about Triangles

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Obviously, I read to my kids all the time. Just as obviously, I do not review the hundreds of picture books and board books, nor still the dozens of chapter books that I have read. But once, almost exactly a year ago, I read Malcolm a real book, and that time has come around once more.

This time, he chose The Truth about Triangles. I wasn’t at the library when he picked it, so I don’t know if it was on one of the monthly themed displays or how he found it, but I assume he liked the picture of the pizza slice on the cover. The last one was probably 50ish pages shorter but aged identically, 12 going on 13. That said, it was a noticeably younger book than the one I’ve read this past month. And I have to say, I don’t know if Malcolm was entirely ready for this one?

In part I say this because he took quite a while to get into the groove, consistently wanting me to read something else.[1] But mostly I say it because this 12 year old is dealing with much older situations than the last batch were. Luca Salvatore has to contend with a junior high crush on the new kid in school, and with his parents’ eroding marriage, and with their eroding family pizza business, and with his overblown sense of responsibility to resolve these issues by himself and without affecting his best friendship.

Luckily, he’s a really good pizza maker, and he has an idea about getting on a reality show and winning over his celebrity crush who hosts the show, as a method of solving nearly all of these problems. But will he be able to keep everyone together and solve all of their many problems, even with such a great plan up his sleeve?

Kid book that nobody who sees this will read so: mostly, yeah. If you accept the premise that he was always going to get on the show, the book shines for dealing with the other problems in mostly thoughtful and realistic ways. Luca has to learn how to not solve everyone’s problems and just be a kid, but since pizza is his passion, he’s allowed to nevertheless solve the biggest one that way. Everything in his personal life is solved through a judicious helping of telling the truth instead of lying about how he’s fine in order to keep other people from feeling more stressed out. And the divorce…. isn’t fixed. He learns that, no, that’s not how life works. Kids cannot fix adult relationship problems, nor be responsible for them.

And so on the one hand, that was a lot of stress for Malcolm to wade through, and I get why he was so unwilling to listen to the earlier parts of the book where it’s all a quagmire of tween angst. But I’m glad to have him be matter of factly exposed to gay kids, and the idea that some parents don’t make it and the kids are not and cannot be responsible for that, and hell, even the idea that sometimes with enough passion and perseverance, problems can be magically solved. It doesn’t happen much, but it doesn’t happen never, y’know? But mostly the prior things more than that last one.

Oh, and also: the triangle as slice of pizza but also as visual metaphor for many, many three-sided relationships? It comes up a lot. Which makes it the most literary book I’ve ever read to a child. Hooray!

[1] I’m not a monster, after the first few chapters I offered for him to not finish reading it and take it back to the library. But he always vociferously refused, and he did basically devour the second half.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

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Some years back, there was a real time release version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by which I mean the person who ran it looked at all the dates of the diary entries and and letters and whatnot, and emails followed with the information from those dates, on those dates. I missed that, but it sounded pretty cool, and later when our group of friends did a similar re-read of Freedom and Necessity, I liked that enough that I took the plunge on yet another guy’s read of Moby Dick. That one is less explicitly dated in most places, so I think he more or less made up the schedule as he went along, but still, Ishmael’s journey does cover a goodly span of time; if two years sounds right to you, then hooray!

A thing I forgot to mention but which is perhaps obvious from context clues is, I’ve never read this book. I was scared off of it at a young age by people telling me there’s hardly any interactions with the eponymous whale, and that instead most of the book is Melville explaining the whaling industry. More on that later, but I can say that this book is oddly paced, and not because it took me nearly two years to read it.

In the first act (let’s say), Ishmael[1] was bored and listless in Nantucket and looking for a job on a whaling ship. This part is surprisingly heartfelt, and snarkily hilarious, in part because… here I will just admit I’m not going to worry about spoilers for a 175 year old book, so consider yourself warned. In large part, I was saying, because he’s clearly unqualified for the job. But he meets and instantly forms a bond (see heartfelt above) with Queequeg, who is a Pacific Islander of some extraction or other[2], and Queequeg is a harpooner of substantial skill, with the results being that Ishmael rides his coattails onto the Pequod, a boat captained by one Ahab, about whom we spend the rest of act one hearing various dark portents and omens and foreshadowings.

In the second act, Ishmael introduces us to the three captain’s mates and the two or three other harpooners (all alike noble savages, because the thing about sports existed even then I guess) and life on the boat, I suppose because he’s experiencing it as we are. Here we also learn that Ahab’s missing leg is due to a fight with an albino sperm whale who is famous enough to have acquired a name among the whaling brotherhood, and that Ahab is less interested in bringing home as much sperm oil as possible[3] and more interested in finding that particular whale, and, you know, winning round two. If you’re thinking that Rocky II should never have been made and this has the same energy, well, you’re half right.

In the third act, which is the meat of the book (no pun), the ship sails into the Pacific to hunt some whales. Here, Melville gives up all pretense that Ishmael is not actually him, and sets to describing the American sperm whaling industry in exhaustive and gory detail, including the differences from other nations and other whale types. He describes a hunt and a cleaning and a disposal from beginning to end, including an almost but not quite slapstick scene in which someone falls into a whale whilst it is hung to be processed. He waxes rhapsodic about his plans to categorize all whales amongst the other fish of the sea, and bemoans his inability to truly explain the fearsome, awesome scope of what a whale truly is, up close and personal, neither alive nor dead.

All this is interspersed with various stories of the sea, both his own experiences and what he hears from others along the way, I suppose to show passage of time and remind people that this is in fact a narrative. The odd thing is, yes, I said it was an exhaustive survey of the whaling industry, but what it never is, is exhausting. I would not have expected to find anything of interest in a historical oddity that is abhorrent to anyone who has seen Star Trek IV or who cares in any other way about other highly intelligent species. Nevertheless, it was engrossing. I think this may be a sign that I’m old?

In the fourth and final act, the action picks up for nearly the first time since Ishmael set foot on the boat. The odd part is, after having talked to the reader about all his grandiose plans to correctly taxonomize the various whales and of his struggles to convey the truth of them, he all but disappears into the woodwork as the story nears its climax. Now everything is about the crew slowly being stretched tauter and tauter by Ahab’s monomania, plus more signs and portents about the inevitable conclusion. His return to the narrative in the denouement is written as an offhanded afterthought.

So, going back to my point above: seriously weird pacing, not just from a narrative perspective, but from the perspective of Melville’s intentionality about what the book should actually be. I  still liked it, so I suppose I cannot say he failed despite my bewilderment on this point; and having actually read the book definitely does elevate Star Trek II above even what that scene meant without the full context, which I would not have expected, honestly.

In the scope of 19th century American literature, you could do a lot worse! I’m still surprised by just how funny the book was.

[1] Rebecca Black’s inspiration
[2] It is clear throughout the book that Melville is enlightened on the subject of race, as compared with his 1851 American peers in general, but he is nevertheless a white dude from 1851, and concerns himself little with such niceties as whether people from different places are in fact much different from one another.
[3] I wonder as to Ayn Rand’s opinion on Ahab’s anti-capitalist sensibilities.

Billy Summers

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It really should not take me four months to read a book, too-busy job and toddler-rearing or not. And I mean, don’t mistake me, I read really a lot of comics in this period as well, but… something isn’t right, and I need to address it[1]. All that said, despite a four month duration, I was pretty happy with Billy Summers, even though after the early act two surprise shift in direction, I expected not to be.

The way things start is, Billy is a hitman who is a) smarter than he acts, b) only takes jobs on bad people who deserve it, and c) has just been offered one hell of a payout on his next job, even though he had kind of already convinced himself it was time to retire. I, uh, think we all know what that means. Hell, even Billy knows, but the money shines a little more brightly than the flashing genre signpost in his mind does.

Later… well, that would be telling. I will say that by the end of the book, my misgivings about the second act shift in direction had largely been settled, the long delay mainly because it was impossible to be sure whether it would turn out okay until the end of the book. I can imagine wanting to stay away, though, and I’m aware of just how vague I’m being: this is for spoiler purposes. But if you personally want to know what I would be waving you off from as a hazard, just let me know and I will divulge.

Lastly, it’s a little weird how political King has become. I mean, not on Twitter, he should do whatever he wants there. And I also understand that one writes what one knows. It’s just jarring after reading everything he’s written, a catalog that by a small margin predates my own birth, to see how much politics has seeped into his overall viewpoint in just these last recent years. The good news is, boomer blind spots or not, at least he’s on the right side of history. (The other good news is that just because it’s there to notice and be surprised by, it’s not like he has, this time or previously, written a book about politics. (Even if act three is sort of a political revenge fantasy.))

[1] Possible way to address it: accept that I’m primarily a comics reader and have 35 years still to catch up on. For various reasons, I’m not perfectly happy with this option.

If It Bleeds

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I don’t know if you know this about very small children, but they take up a lot of your time. That’s not the only reason the number of books I’ve read in the past month totals one, but it’s definitely high up on the list. But: when Stephen King arrives on my doorstep, I persevere and do the thing.

If It Bleeds is a novella collection whose stories are each largely concerned with mortality. Which is certainly timely, although I’m not sure it’s what I would have asked for as my leisure reading during the [first?] summer of Covid-19. But it also makes sense that an aging prolific author is thinking about death. Like, natural causes death, not horror fiction death, which to be fair he has always been thinking about.

The title story has the least to do with this theme; it is instead another Holly Gibney mystery story, and I liked it, but it’s hard to feel like it belonged. But weighing in at half the length of the book, it was good to not overstuff it into a full-sized book, and it had to go somewhere? As for the other stories: The Life of Chuck was the most ambitious, and while I don’t think it quite hit the mark, I have a lot of respect for the story it was trying to tell. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone continues King’s fascination with the dark cracks in modern technology through which supernatural horror can slip. And Rat is yet another in a long line of stories about authors in dire straits. But, well, write what you know, I’m told? And he is pretty good at that particular topic!

Anyway: if you ever thought he had it, he’s still got it.

Dodge and Twist

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To be honest, I’m not even sure Dodge and Twist qualifies as a thing I review. It’s in a weird netherzone heretofore unexplored. Because it’s a book without a book. In a dim forgotten age, it would have been a radio drama played out in half hour segments over a series of weekly appointments with the local PBS affiliate. But here in modernity, I got it with one of my Audible credits because I had so much new stuff to read between Malazan installments. So, does that even count as a book? I still can’t decide, but a full paragraph in, I may as well finish as scrap the whole thing, right?

This is a sequel of sorts to Oliver Twist, a book with which I am somewhat familiar without having really ever read it. Like, I know the first half pretty well from summary kidbooks, where the boy who wants more food at the workhouse eventually falls in with a master criminal who is more of a petty thief through our eyes, and also a murderous guy and his tragic girlfriend, and most importantly the Artful Dodger, best of the pickpockets in Fagin’s child criminal army. How or why the book ends, though, I could not tell you. Did I never finish the kidbook version? Was the story boring once all the pickpocketing interludes were over, and so I’ve forgotten? Who knows!

Anyway, now it’s twelve years later, and our characters (those still alive) are brought back together by circumstance, with stand-ins aplenty for the characters who are not (still alive, that is). Will Oliver be corrupted this time? Will Dodger have a brilliant plan for the biggest heist of all time? Will everyone sound terribly British? The answers may surprise you! …I mean, probably not though.

The biggest upside, of course, is that this sequel was in fact not written by Charles Dickens. But that’s because it’s a really big upside. At 5 hours, this was not a huge investment, and I liked the return. Plus also, now I have a slightly better idea of how the original book ended. Only slightly, but still.

Elevation

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Elevation is an unusual Stephen King book, by multiple measures. First, it’s tiny. Barely over a hundred pages, and it’s a small factor book on top of that. I’m not saying he only writes doorstops, but this is just barely north of novella-sized, almost certainly shorter than, say, The Mist.

Second, it’s… I started to say it’s overtly political, but that’s not true. To be overtly political in this climate, you have to go a lot farther, and I’m not sure you can do it in written fiction, period. His politics have been pretty clear to me for a number of years anyway (and thank goodness I don’t hate them, because man, that would be a blow), but as far as I can remember this is the first time I’ve seen them bleed into his work, and in such an obvious manner.

Third, it’s definitely not horror (which okay is not super unusual for King, and especially lately, but it’s still what he’s known for). There is a central mystery which is well outside normal experience, but it is the least interesting part of the story. The meaty parts are about what it means to be a good neighbor[1], and about the rot at the heart of Smalltown, USA (both conscious and unconscious) and whether it can change, and about the things we leave behind.

Anyway, I liked it. Not a bad way to spend a lunch break.

[1] I’ve never tried to be a good neighbor. Don’t misunderstand me, I want to not be a bad neighbor, and have definitely tried to do that. But I never really cared about who lived near me, much past junior high. Maybe if I were less suburban and more rural, I would feel differently.

The Handmaid’s Tale

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51qGjF8UHJL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Another month, another book club book. This time out, a horribly dystopian near-future examination of some religious dudes stealing everything from women. You know, to save them from how cruel the world can be. I must say, despite taking a while to get to a point where it was believable, The Handmaid’s Tale seemed utterly plausible from then on. Due to plummeting birthrates and the aforementioned (aforeimplied?) enslavement of functionally all females in the nation, our mostly-nameless heroine viewpoint character heroine has been enrolled as a Handmaid; which is to say that, Genesis-style, she acts as a stand-in for the wife of one of the high muckety-mucks of the fictional future nation of Gilead, so they may be fruitful and multiply. Keeping in mind the disdain these people have for fertility clinics (or, indeed, science), well, my point is to say, yes. That is every bit as horrible as you’re imagining it to be.

The rest of the story, with its leisurely revelations of the world Atwood has built[1] and its insistence on hitting the reader with one terrible event after another, is a surprisingly difficult slog. Well, if you’re looking at the size of the book it is, anyway. If you’re considering the emotional toll of the things I’ve mentioned and taking me at my word that I’ve left out five or ten reveals for every one that I’ve spoiled so far, well, it’s easy to see why the emotional density of the book makes for a slow, miserable read.

The worst part is, it was extremely good and I wanted to know what would happen. If only it had read as badly as it made me feel and I could have quit a few chapters in!

[1] She revealed things far more leisurely than I just have! In my defense, I’ve still only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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41E4+fttDjLIn case you are wondering why I should read such a very Snow Falling on Cedars type of book, and nevermind that I haven’t read comics in ages or that there’s a new Stephen King book in the world? Book club.

So, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There’s this Japanese guy, living in a house with a wife and a secret alley that wanders through the neighborhood and a missing cat and some fortune tellers and a Lolita neighbor, all of which are also Japanese[1]. And…. okay, I have no idea where to start or end this review, spoilers-wise, because very little of what actually happens is the point, and I’m going to spoil the hell out of the themes of the story, because that’s what I usually do, except this time if you take away the themes there’s actually nearly nothing to discover, so I may be doing it wrong. If you’re worried about that kind of thing or this particular book, you should skip the rest of this, only then you’d have no review at all. So here’s what I’ll do.

Before all the despoiling of the fecund thematic territory I am about to perpetrate, I will say that I did not particularly like the book, and mainly it was because of a probably cultural difference between myself and the author that leads me to strongly disagree with the points his book is making. (I am not so sure he himself is making them, but it’s hard to explain why. Hopefully I succeeded below, in the spoiler part you aren’t reading? Still, it seemed like I ought to say so, in case.) However, and this may strongly tie into the recent parenthetical distinction, the way it wrapped up was pretty satisfying, so at least I don’t resent the whole endeavor.

Anyway, though, themes. Well, theme. Toru Okada (the Japanese man I mentioned earlier), as he wanders through his world, growing more and more confused by the ever stranger events and people he comes into contact with, is presented with one unifying message from every single character, except possibly the cat: “there is no way to control fate, not yours, not mine, not anyone’s.” And I mean, the name of the book itself: there’s this bird that nobody can see, up in a tree somewhere, winding up the world every morning, and then the world goes off on its preordained path until it winds down again. And while that’s an interesting thought exercise, it makes for a pretty horrible world. Nobody can fight for happiness. Nobody can feel good about any accomplishment, nor feel regret about any shortcoming. It all just is, and that’s the end. My ability to maintain interest in characters for whom I don’t feel the slightest shred of empathy? Turns out to be vanishingly small.

The one good thing about all that is that I’m pretty sure the pivot on which the story swings is Toru’s decision whether to accept that message or not. If you are saying to yourself, “He can’t decide that or it undermines the entire premise!”, well, a) that’s what makes me feel a little better about things but also b) that’s why I’m not sure if I read the book correctly. Because, seriously, if I’m right, it’s 95% “everything is outside your control” and 1% “I disagree”, and that’s a weird proportion when you are arguing the converse. So I may really just be inserting what I wanted to happen instead.

(The remaining four percent is Japanese history lessons, ca. World War II.)

[1] I point this out repetitively because it will be important later. I pointed it out with one repetition instead of one per noun because that would have been as horrible to type as it was going to be to read.

Swan Song

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You guys. You guys. Do you know how long it’s been since I finished a book? Thanks to the magical powers of the Internet, I can reasonably speculate. Two and a half months. I… I am literally convinced that the last time I went two and a half months without finishing a book, it was because I had never finished a book. Like, ever. Because I was still three or something.

If you have any questions about my job (which, to be clear, I had only just accepted when I started reading), I think all of the meaningful answers lie in the previous paragraph, and anything else I could say is just window dressing. But anyway, yes, I have read a book. It is Swan Song, by Robert McCammon. It is one of those apocalyptic nuclear war books from the ’80s, only it shares a lot more in common with The Stand than with the Deathlands books I’ve been reading lately (and may skip ahead to, since they go so well with camping and also I am about to be camping).

See, there’s a nuclear war, and then different people, like a bag lady and a quasi-pro wrestler and a Vietnam vet turned survivalist slumlord and the embodiment of evil and a girl named Swan who has an affinity with plants and may or may not be extremely relevant to the title of the book slowly start to shuffle their way across post-nuclear America toward one another for a dramatic showdown between good and evil. I liked it pretty okay, but if I had it to do over again, I would have been reading much shorter and faster books, so that I might have had a chance to enjoy this more when I eventually did read it. (Or, possibly if it was spread over two weeks instead of ten, vast flaws would have been revealed? There is no way to know!)

I of course liked the apocalypse sections, as always. The eventual post-apocalypse was saved from being too simplistically preachy by likable characters. The downside was that the majority of evil characters were too caricatured. If you tell me that a fourteen-year old boy is going to point an unloaded .357 at his dad’s head and pull the trigger several times as a joke, you can’t justify that by calling it foreshadowing. Not unless you plan to do something to make him nuanced and redeemable later. Otherwise, he was just a budding psychopath from the start, and that’s not a very interesting entrant into the armies of evil. But the good characters, yeah, pretty likable and maybe even two-dimensional in many cases. And of course there’s always that apocalypse.

The Road

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I got on a plane to Portland on Thursday night, and, as one does, I brought a book along. It had been recommended by a librarian and by a used bookstore’s regional manager, both friends of mine. Pretty rarefied praise, right? I read about three chapters of it around the discomfort of my late arrival to the front seat, you know the one, it has no tray and no space for your stuff. Then, when the plane landed, I set it down to get my backpack out of the overhead luggage, and then walked off the plane, fiddled with the internet for an hour thanks to free wifi, and realized as I was at the end of the line for the next plane that I had never picked it back up. A quick check in my backpack confirmed the sad tale, but by then not only was the first plane almost certainly gone, I was also on the jetway, three people back from the actual plane entrance. So I sat on that flight, sad about the lost book and the inability to read until I finally fell asleep, and then I found a Powell’s at the bookstore in the Portland airport and bought the first book that really caught my eye, the long-recommended The Road. (There was a movie starring Aragorn as the man who is on said road, which I never saw, if that helps to identify which particular road I have in mind.)

In a strictly plot-derived sense, this could be a book of the first years of the apocalypse that resulted a century and change later in my ongoing Deathlands series[1]. Something horrible happened, and the world (presumptively but never explicitly America) is a broken, terrible place where you can only rely on yourself or, in the case of pretty close to 50% of the book’s characters by presence, your father. Food is gone, shelter is gone, animals are gone, even the sun is gone. The prose reminds me a lot of Hemingway, only with a richer vocabulary of colors to paint from; I could almost understand, reading it, why people can appreciate a spare canvas over a rich, vibrant, and above all completely full one. It will stay with me, I know, but I’m not sure I can say that I liked it.

How is this, you may ask, knowing my love of the apocalyptic? It occurs to me that, aside from the dire events themselves, my apocalypse porn addiction shares another consistent thread throughout the collection. All of those books, however high- or low-minded, have a generous amount of hope buried within them. The Road was as bereft of hope as it was of sunlight, and no amount of spare beauty could ever make up the lack. And now that is a thing I know about myself!

[1] In the character and prose senses, of course, they could not be further apart.