A Life Spent Reading

I got two very different impressions about this book. On one hand, Elizabeth Vaughan has written a light and entertaining romance. On the other, TOR did an absolutely execrable job editing and copysetting the book.

So, about Vaughan’s novel. It’s well paced and fun. The author moves her story along without any noticeable lags, and in places exhibits a very nice turn of phrase. Some of her images are really striking; for example, a sentence from page 136: “But other thoughts whirled about, skittering around like colts on ice.” She also injects a bit of humor into the narrative, as when one of the nomads asks the princess to give them a tour of her castle by saying, “Show us this stone tent of yours.”

Vaughan also manages to construct a good reason for why the “savage” hero doesn’t just immediately deflower the heroine once he has her in his charge. This is no mean feat; speaking as a man, the single most frustrating thing about the romance genre is slogging through endless plot contrivances that artificially keep the hero and heroine from falling into bed together. (And don’t give me any of that delayed gratification being better stuff; I want the sex scene!) But Vaughan makes it work. I’ll read her next one.

So, about TOR’s book. As you can see from the link, the publishers gave Warprize a fantastic cover. Unfortunately, once you open the book things immediately get worse. Actually that’s not quite true; they start getting worse around page 70, when all of a sudden whoever edited the book seems to have forgotten the difference between “lie” and “lay”. Along the way “than” and “then” get a sex-change operation. There are multiple periods on a single sentence, and on page 138 the coup de grace — “Atira’s needs rest.” — which in context makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I would normally lay — I mean lie…no wait, lay…god, this is so confusing! — the blame with the author, but considering that Vaughan is a lawyer, she probably got it right.

I know things are bad within the publishing industry, but really. Is it too much to expect literate copy? Thirty years ago you almost never saw a spelling error in a mass market paperback. It’s getting to the point now where I feel like borrowing a copy of a friend’s book, reading it, and — if I like it — sending the author a few dollars directly to show my appreciation. This, of course, would leave the publisher absolutely nothing — which is about what they deserve for a slipshod, piece-of-shit job like this. There are so many typos that it is honestly somewhat painful to read. TOR really should, if they’re going to publish books in America, employ at least one person in the editing process who actually knows English.

Okay, costs are up and the publishing houses have to make money. Well you know what? I’ll pay the extra dime or whatever it would cost to get a decent human proofreader to go over the manuscript after it’s been spellchecked.

The record companies are facing a massive paradigm shift right now because their years of putting out inferior products and charging the consumer too much are coming back to haunt them. Seems to me the publishing industry is heading the same way. My advice: change for the better before you’re forced to change. Consumers care about this sort of thing, and we remember who the consciencious publishing houses are.

A friend of mine recommended this highly so I decided to give it a try. I’m very sorry that I wasted my $7.99 on this drivel (and about a week of reading time because I couldn’t bring myself to read it in one day).

Rachel Morgan is a paranormal bounty hunter who quits her job. The reason for that is very childish — she thinks her talent isn’t being appreciated by her boss. Too bad she screwed up so many jobs before. I couldn’t believe her boss didn’t fire her first.

Then the plot becomes even more ludicrous. Rachel’s relationship with Ivy is contrived, filled with psuedo-lesbian love-hate undertone. It’s so heavy-handed it’s insulting. Rachel does a lot of stupid things and uses the same unsuccessful plan over and over again, yet somehow manages to escape death due to pure luck. Her instant acceptance of Nick didn’t sit well with me because for a witch with a contract on her head, she’s awfully trusting.

It’s quite sad when I start rooting for the bad guys. I tried hard to like Rachel, but I couldn’t think of a single reason why I should. Harrison keeps telling us how wonderful, smart and resourceful Rachel is, but Rachel demonstrates the exact opposite time and time again. I’m still trying to understand why this series is so popular.

Also, is it me, or do authors who write Mary-Sues make their heroines look just like themselves? Laurell K Hamilton and her black-haired heroines whom everyone wants to boink and now Kim Harrison with a redhead witch everyone thinks is so cool. It’s becoming a tad distasteful, especially when Mary-Sueness seems to take priority over good story-telling.

This prequel to the more heavily publicized (but not as good) Chronicles of Riddick was the first movie that really showcased Vin Diesel to good advantage. He plays a captured murderer, one who escapes when his transport spacecraft has to make an emergency landing on an unknown planet. A few of the passengers survive, then must battle both the planet’s heat and the indigenous life-forms that seem to have a taste for human blood. One-line summary? Alien meets Nightfall.

This basic run-from-the-monsters plot is embellished and fortified with better than average acting and a storyline that incorporates more character depth and arc than most sci-fi horror flicks. Along the way, Diesel’s muscular physicality is used to good effect and he definitely holds his own in a cast composed of some really excellent character actors; Keith David and Radha Mitchell are particularly good.

This movie wasn’t given a lot of publicity, but if you want something fun and somewhat scary this one won’t disappoint. Also, I personally happen to love the throwaway one-liners that tough-guy flicks all seem to have inherited from Clint Eastwood, and this one has one of the best.

I tried to get into this book, because someone close to me really really wanted me to read it. But I confess to failure.

It’s not that there’s really anything strikingly wrong with the book. The plotting is okay. The writing could be tightened up some, but it’s okay. The author’s descriptions are okay. It’s just that there’s also nothing really right with it either. No particular beauty of language, no particularly horrifying killer, no mesmerizingly engaging characters. I read, but I didn’t feel the need to read. And when that happens, anything that goes wrong with a book will cause you to put it down. (It’s not like there aren’t other books out there clamoring for attention.)

For me, that happened in chapters four and five, when the characters started behaving in not-so-true-to-life fashion. In chapter four there is a mini-crisis when an actress screams at the sight of a pool of blood. This happens on a movie set, mind you, and I just have trouble swallowing the idea that a grown woman, one who’s been exposed to make-up and make-believe for a living, would be that taken in and freaked out by some stage blood. Or that her scream would throw everyone into such a security frenzy if she did.

Then in chapter five a brother grabs his sister as a sort of prank as she walks in the door to her home, startling her and causing her to drop her laptop. Once she realizes it’s him and not some stalker, she playfully tries to slap him, then gives him a hug…then starts cooking him dinner. The computer is never mentioned again. The people I know would be a bit more worried about their technology than that. In fact, they’d be furious.

That was it for me. Stopped reading after about 60 pages, and wondered how in hell this book made it to the NYT bestseller list. Then again, as somebody once said, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

It’s a mystery to me why Stephen King is known primarily as a horror writer and not as a humorist. On Writing is freaking hilarious in places. Anyone who can talk about being farted on by a two hundred pound baby-sitter in a book that’s ostensibly about prose production — and make it work — has got my vote. No wonder he’s the most widely published author on the planet.

The book is basically divided into two parts: a sort of autobiographical sketch of King’s childhood and early adulthood up to selling Carrie, and then a large chunk of very practical writing advice. Both are laced with the aforementioned humor, which King uses to make his points. Having worked as both writer and editor in my time, I found the advice to be eminently sensible. Anyone who is planning to write professionally should have this book. And people who are simply interested in the life of, and the writing process as it goes on in, one of our current masters will find the book rewarding as well.

I have to admit that I’ve found King’s fiction to be hit-or-miss. Probably unlike most people, I actually haven’t read that much of his work. I liked The Green Mile and several of his short stories, but found Gerald’s Game to be terminally boring. If On Writing is any indication, though, his non-fiction, like the movies made from his novels, may prove to be more consistently rewarding.

Unlike a lot of the fiction I’ve read lately, this is a book that I think one could profitably come back to every few years or so. We have two copies in our household, one hardback and one paperback, and I plan on hanging on to them both.

Quite enjoyable, if not quite as good as the previous installment in the series. I don’t think that this was due to any particular lack in the story per se, but more because of the much larger cast that had to be slotted into the movie and a certain lack of attention to detail. For die-hard fans of the comic book, little things like Colossus not throwing Logan the right way stand out. The other installments got all such minutia right; let’s hope that in X-Men IV they go back to the same sort of rigor.

Also — I have to say this — Halle Berry is so mis-cast it’s painful. She looks only slightly more African than David Bowie, and has a southern US accent that occasionally slips through as well. Iman would have been the perfect choice to play Storm; given that she’s a bit too old now, the producers really should have searched for a newcomer who had talent and the right look. The rest of the casting, though, is spot-on. (I have to admit that I was unhappy with Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine at first, but he’s turned out to be perfect.)

Overall, a very fun movie. The whole mutant vs human thing can be used for endless commentary on any number of social issues (racism and terrorism being only the most obvious two), and the X-Men have a huge canvas on which to paint; they’ve been around for a long time in comic form, and there are so many storylines and mutants to choose from the series could go on forever. So long as the producers get the details right, I’ll keep watching.

Naomi Novik has written an entertaining and easily read novel her first time out. The book’s main merits lie in the author’s obviously thorough grounding in the period she’s dealing with (the early 1800s) and the writing. Novik has good control of her prose, the style of which reflects the time period quite well. Sentences are ornate; semicolons abound; some paragraphs are composed of nothing but such sentences, curling back upon themselves as though turned out on some literary lathe. There are also lots of small touches that speak of her easy familiarity with military customs and ways of thinking.

In a nutshell, Novik has taken the early 19th century and injected dragons into it. In her world, flight has come several centuries early to humanity, and she weaves a military story of what likely might have happened against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars.

The plot follows the adventures of a man, Laurence, who raises a dragon, Temeraire. I found their relationship to be a bit unsettling. Temeraire is a male dragon, and Laurence’s constant cuddling up to him, stroking him and referring to him as “my dear” gave the book a sort of odd, almost homoerotic flavor in places. Others might not be bothered by this, but it made me cock my head and squint a few times.

Other than that there’s little to complain about. The story for the first two-thirds of the book doesn’t really fit what one might think of as “a dragon book” — there are no fights to the death, no fire-breathing antics — but the characters are sympathetic and the reader wants to see what happens to them. Then in the last third things heat up.

I doubt I’ll find myself coming back to read this book again and again, but it’s certainly well worth the cover price. Novik even injects a bit of Oriental flavor into the appendix, deftly managing to explain a bit of Chinese and Japanese myth by way of her dragons. Given that the sequel is titled Throne of Jade, I’ll probably want to check it out as well.

A recent article concerning childhood obesity says, in part:

Americans are beginning to realise that childhood obesity is a real problem [gee, ya think?] and are even starting to do something about it, but there is no way to tell what actually works, a panel of experts said on Wednesday.

Statements like this — and the attitude behind them — piss me off no end. Don’t know what works? Please. How about not eating a bunch of junky crap and getting out from in front of the TV once in while? That seemed to work for pretty much every generation of Americans up to now, and it’s a good bet that it’ll work for this one as well. Energy in versus energy out. It’s really not that complicated.

Then there was this part:

The need for better programmes is clear. The obesity rate for US children and youth rose from 16 percent in 2002 to 17.1 percent in 2004. It is projected to hit 20 percent by 2010.

Sorry, but the need is not for “better programmes”. The need is for parents to start taking a little responsibility onto themselves by not giving in to demands for candy, sweets and trips to McDonald’s instead of expecting the schools and programs to do their job for them. They need to set and enforce limits as to how much TV their kids watch and how much time per day they sit twiddling their Playstations. Don’t want to deal with it? Then don’t have kids.

It makes me ill to think of all the children who — largely through no fault of their own — are going to be saddled with an adolescence filled with unnecessary anxiety and a lifetime of health problems because their mothers and fathers are too lazy and preoccupied to parent effectively.

This is another urban fantasy centering on a werewolf. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as good as Bitten. (See review immediately below.)

Several things about the book bothered me right from the start. For one, the use of smells quickly became overwhelming. Fear smells tangy, lies smell like black pepper, etc. etc. It’s an interesting idea, and certainly smell would play a larger part of a werewolf’s life than a normal human’s, but there’s a limit. One Amazon reviewer commented that the smells took over the book. I felt the same way.

Another was the sentence structure. Short, choppy, nary a dependent clause to be found. I guess the writers thought that this was a good way to convey a masculine POV, but it too got old very quickly. Men can and do actually use commas…even tough men.

And speaking of masculine, it was immediately obvious that this book was written by two women. On page two, as the hero meets the female lead, he thinks, “She was probably a size ten — Maybe a twelve.” Maybe I just don’t get out much, but no man I know looks at a woman and tries to guess her dress size. No straight man, anyway, which the hero presumably is.

This pretty much sank the book for me. The final nail in the coffin was reading that the heroine has won the lottery but, due to a horrible family, feels so hopeless that she asks the hero to kill her. I don’t know about you, but anyone who wins millions of dollars and still can’t figure out a way to (a) get away from her family and (b) be happy isn’t someone I want to read about. Plus, if you’re going to commit suicide, it just seems a whole lot easier and less painful to take a bottle of sleeping pills than have a werewolf rip you apart.

I put this one down after the first chapter.

For a first novel, Bitten is pretty good. Kelley Armstrong tells a nicely paced tale of a female werewolf — the only one in existence — who finds herself torn between two men and two worlds.

Armstrong’s writing is good, if a bit clunky here and there. There were far too many times that she would go on about something, then finish the paragraph by saying “Okay, [admit something completely contradictory here], but that’s not the point.” Aside from that overused literary device, Bitten reads smoothly and — after the first fifty pages or so — will draw you into the narrative without much problem.

While the story and plot are competent, the real fun of the book is how well Armstrong depicts things from non-human points of view, both as-yet-unchanged werewolf and post-change wolf. With chapter headings like Hunt, Trail, and Stalking, the reader gets a full dose of life from a lupine perspective. Armstrong obviously spent a lot of time thinking about things from the other side, and she doesn’t miss a trick.

Bitten is the first of a series, and it kept me hooked enough that I’ll read the next one if I have a chance. Urban fantasy is a relatively new genre, one that, with its blend of magic and reality, would seem to offer a lot of very fertile ground for new writers. It’s also hot at the moment, with books about werewolves and vampires coming out of the publishing houses almost too quickly to count. Most of them, frankly, haven’t kept me interested long enough to get much past the first chapter. But this one is good.

Dae Jang Geum is a phenomenally popular television series from Korea. It ran over fifty episodes, two per week, and is loosely based on a real woman who lived in the 15th century. This woman rose to become the personal physician to the king of Korea, an unprecedented feat.

The series starts before the main character was born, as Korean stories often do. Jang Geum’s mother is a palace woman framed by a friend and forced to leave the palace. She marries and has a child, Jang Geum, but is still pursued by the palace faction that is arrayed against her. Eventually, the mother is killed and Jang Geum is adopted into the palace’s kitchen section where she becomes a kitchen girl. The rest of the series follows her trials and tribulations as she fights to become the top kitchen lady, then a nurse, then a physician.

This might not sound all that interesting on the face of it, but the show has a good budget, excellent writers and some very good actors. The result is a surprisingly watchable saga, replete with plots, counter-plots and enough twists to satisfy even the most jaded soap fan. Along the way you’ll get to see something of what it was like in the imperial palace of Korea in the 1400s. While this makes the series more interesting, it also renders it less approachable for those who might be watching to help themselves learn Korean. The language used is highly formal, somewhat archaic Korean, and will present problems for even very fluent non-native speakers if they aren’t familiar with the time period.

Along these lines, even the best translation leaves something to be desired. If you want to watch it and don’t speak Korean, spend the money to get a good translation. I tried a cheap one out of Indonesia and had to send it back it was so bad. Then I saw one from the States that was much better. Even this one, though, had some that made the story difficult to follow in places. If you can, watch this with a Korean friend, preferably one who knows enough about the time period to be able to explain some of the finer points of what’s going on. Without knowing the political background, especially as it relates to the queen and her son, a lot of what goes on simply doesn’t make much sense.

Language and cultural issues aside, this is an enjoyable and somewhat addicting series, especially if you have an interest in Korean, political intrigue or – most of all! – cooking. (Since the story centers around the palace kitchen for the majority of the episodes, there are innumerable scenes showing how food was made at that time.) Women in particular seem to identify with the Jang Geum character, and the show has gained some unexpected popularity in the US as a sort of early feminist parable. Buying the full set is fairly expensive, but it will reward you with hours and hours of entertainment.

This is an older book; it was published in 1989, and it won the Hugo award for Best Novel the next year.

I would say that the award was well deserved. Dan Simmons uses a Canterbury Tales format, having each of the main characters tell his or her story to move the main narrative along. What results is several novellas contained within the larger framework. And it succeeds brilliantly, mostly because of the author’s fantastically fertile imagination. Religious themes, space combat, family drama — all of these are handled with consummate aplomb, making me wonder if there are any limits to Simmons’ gifts. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to stick Raymond Chandler into a science fiction milieu, look no further. That’s in here, too.

The story of Sol and Rachel is particularly well done. The range and depth of emotion that Simmons is able to mine with this section alone is breathtaking, and I challenge anyone to read it and come away unmoved.

The only weakness in this book is that it’s very easy to put down. For all its brilliance of conception, there is a certain lack of tension in Hyperion. I had tried reading it once before, back when it was first published, and I couldn’t get into it at all. This time, I managed to get far enough into the book to want to finish it (and I’m glad I did), but it was a bit of an effort. The book never really “hooked” me the way that something like In Conquest Born did. I could have (and did) put it down at most any point and not worried about finishing it.

Final verdict: Despite not being the most riveting read, Hyperion is definitely worth the effort. Stay through the first fifty pages or so and you’ll be rewarded with beautiful language, effortless writing, and most of all the incredible ideas that Simmons comes up with.. This is a book that should be read; one of that select subset of science fiction that makes the transition to true classic literature.