A Life Spent Reading

Iain Banks is one of my favorite authors. Canal Dreams isn’t his best work, but even less-than-best Banks is better than a lot of other stuff out there.

The improbable story tells of a forty-something virtuoso female Japanese cellist who gets trapped on a ship in the Panama canal and has to deal with terrorists. They kill her friends and rape her, and then she goes postal on them and wipes them out.

Like I said, improbable.

But even with the ridiculous plot working against it, the story is well told and holds your attention. And if it doesn’t have the same sheer inventiveness of some of Banks’ other novels, it works well enough. Banks does his usual superb job of rendering the various characters’ voices, and even gets most of the Japanese stuff right. Admittedly, there are some gaffes (Japanese people don’t generally have “flatmates”), but in places his heroine’s internal monologues show that Banks has a surprisingly firm handle on Nipponese cultural priorities.

Canal Dreams is a short book, one that won’t take much time to finish. If you’re looking for something entertaining but still with some depth, you could do worse than to give it a few hours.

At 1150 pages plus, hardcover, this is a big book. It’s going to take you a while to wade through it.

Fortunately, the water’s fine. The Stand is widely regarded as King’s best fictional work, and I won’t disagree with that opinion. The cast of characters is large, the issues larger, and while he didn’t invent the whole post-apocalyptic thing, it’s done better here than anywhere else I’ve seen. There is also a good dose of both religion and mysticism injected as well, and it makes for an interesting counter-point to the usual SF “scientific” treatment of such themes.

The first third of King’s book will be very very familiar; the novel starts out with common people doing common things, and then builds smoothly as plague hits and the pressures of survival turn them into heroes and villians. It builds into a final showdown between good and evil, with an unbelievable number of twists and turns along the way.

The Stand was originally published in 1978, in a heavily abridged version that the publisher undoubtedly thought would sell better than the full manuscript; King reissued it in 1990 with not only the cut parts reinstated but new sections as well. And I’m glad he did. Despite the length, I never did get tired of either the story or the writing, and if there were a Volume II of the same size I’d gladly go out and buy it. My only recommendation would be to try to find an edition that doesn’t have the interior illustrations. The one I have has twelve ink drawings by Bernie Wrightson, and much as I like his work in comic books (he absolutely owns Swamp Thing), I felt that they detracted from the story here. King’s writing is easily vivid enough that readers can supply their own (mental) pictures; having someone else’s interpretation – especially when that interpretation is often overly muscular – just gets in the way.

This is a book that I feel comfortable recommending in hardback. I have the feeling that you can read it, put it on a shelf for a couple of decades and then come back to it and get an entirely new experience out of it. Also, like many of John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler’s books, King’s eye for detail will make The Stand something of a cultural time capsule. One of his characters has a diary in which she records things that she wants to remember about the pre-plague world; this book will help us all remember what life was like in the 1980s.

The Tipping Point has generated enough publicity and buzz that there really isn’t much I can add to what’s already been said. I found it to be a very interesting book, especially the chapter on fighting subway crime in New York City via the elimination of graffiti. Apparently there are lots of people out there now looking for tipping points of their own, for their own purposes, and hopefully this will allow Gladwell to put together a sequel, this one composed of various success stories.

I recommend the book. It’s well written and easy to get into, and – like a lot of popular sociology – will encourage you to see the world through a slightly different lens.

This will be my first Rant Review. Rant Reviews are reviews of books that are so bad I simply couldn’t put them down – but I hope to warn others about them so that no one else will waste their time. Accordingly, Rant Reviews will incorporate neither the cover nor any links to the book in question. I’m not going to make it easier for people to go out and buy this garbage.

Having read a few of Danielle Steele’s other books and been reasonably well entertained, and having a deep interest in Japan and the Japanese culture, I was looking forward to a good read when I borrowed Silent Honor from my mother. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t pay money for it. While Steele the novelist is up to her usual pacing and the few bits of historical background she throws in are accurate enough (if unsatisfyingly meager), she seems to have taken her views of Japan straight from central casting. Granted, protagonist Hiroko is supposed to be a “typical” Japanese woman, but let’s get real. Nothing, no personal detail, gives her any kind of quirk or individuality that the reader can latch onto. (Yes, Danielle, even Japanese people have a measure of individuality. Shocking, I know.) Furthermore, Steele gets the Japanese language wrong (Hiroko’s last name is Takashimaya, nice and Japanese-sounding…except that it’s the name of a department store, not a surname. Would any American reader take a Japanese author who named his lead character “Mr. Sears Roebuck” seriously?) and some of the situations and actions in the book are just idiotic. Aside from the major behavioral and cultural inconsistencies pointed out by some Amazon reviewers (“typical” Japanese woman of the 1940s sleeps with a white guy…out of wedlock, no less…riiiiiiight), one detail that particularly irritated me was the number of kimonos that tiny, delicate, flower-like Hiroko is able to pull out of the “one small trunk” that she carries to America. (I counted six before giving up – and do you know how much a full kimono weighs?)

If you look around the Net, you’ll notice that readers who gave the book a favorable review seem to fall into two camps: (1) non-native English speakers who undoubtedly liked the book because it’s simply written and easy to understand, and (2) native readers who include comments like “a wonderful introduction to Japan and its mysteries”. Well, the book’s syntax is about at a sixth-grade level, the plot is surpassingly linear, and Steele knows less about Japan than I do about Mesopotamian basket weaving, because I at least recognize that I don’t know anything about Mesopotamian basket weaving.

Any native English speaker who has any background concerning Japan will be able to finish the book only out of a sense of morbid fascination to see how awful the story will get. If you want a decent, non-scholarly story dealing with the Japanese-American internment in California, go rent Come See the Paradise. If you want to read an interesting and informative account of Japanese Americans by a western writer who actually knows something about the subject, read James Michner’s Hawaii . And if you want to learn something about Japan, please, do anything but form your opinions based on Silent Honor. As a writer of enormous popularity, frankly, Steele has an obligation to do better than this. Let’s hope that in the future she sticks to a culture she knows.

Jacqueline Carey’s debut novel is, in a word, great.

For a first-time author, she seems to be unusually confident, handling an epic scope, mythological invention and a large cast of characters with quite a bit of authority. She also pulls off a really neat trick; her fantasy world is actually old Europe, seen through a glass, redly. The device allows her to dispense with a lot of explanation that would otherwise be necessary, as the reader (if at all familiar with Europe) will immediately be able to take many things for granted. It goes beyond what, say, George R. R. Martin does in his (equally excellent) A Song of Fire and Ice series, because not only can the reader count on a certain familiarity with chivalric conventions, s/he also knows intangibles such as national character, physical features of the landscape and so on. Fantasy or not, twisted and bent to her own ends or not, Carey’s world is very familiar.

I also like what she’s done with the language. Carey uses fifth and sixth meanings of words in some places, adding to the slightly alien feel of the novel. And readers with a familiarity with French will find an extra layer of enjoyment in lots of places.

About the only quibble I have with the book is that it could have used a bit more detail in places. Carey supplies a few – sanding a parchment after writing on it, the multi-pronged tap used by a tatooist – but a novel of this size (900 pages) would have benefitted from more. As it is, the narrative sweeps you along, but you never really feel immersed in the world in the way that you do with, say, a Steven Pressfield novel.

Still, it’s a minor point. I would recommend Kushiel’s Dart to anyone with even a passing interest in Fantasy, and will definitely be reading the next few books in the Kushiel series.