A Game of Cages, Harry Connolly (365 Books, Day 308)

Yesterday's review.

The second of the Twenty Palace books continues to follow Ray Lilly, an ex-con who now works for a society of extremely ruthless magicians who are trying to keep the world safe from Lovecraftian ex-dimensional predatory monstrosities. Ray is too low on the totem pole to be told anything about anything, which makes the worldbuilding a fun mental jigsaw.

I was not as pleased with this book as I was with the first, Child of Fire, because this was too much like the first: small town under siege because of the actions of the wealthy and ruthless, which becomes blockaded from the greater world, and in which Ray is the person who cares the most about mitigating the damage to civilians. And the predator was creepier in the first book.

Still, this is perfectly competent fantasy of a kind I would call 'urban' except that it's kind of semi-rural, with an enjoyable Twin Peaks vibe. I will definitely give the series a third book, to see whether any of the various pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together and whether the setting and plot are sufficiently different. At the moment, things could go either way.

A Game of Cages, Harry Connolly (365 Books, Day 308)

Yesterday's review.

The second of the Twenty Palace books continues to follow Ray Lilly, an ex-con who now works for a society of extremely ruthless magicians who are trying to keep the world safe from Lovecraftian ex-dimensional predatory monstrosities. Ray is too low on the totem pole to be told anything about anything, which makes the worldbuilding a fun mental jigsaw.

I was not as pleased with this book as I was with the first, Child of Fire, because this was too much like the first: small town under siege because of the actions of the wealthy and ruthless, which becomes blockaded from the greater world, and in which Ray is the person who cares the most about mitigating the damage to civilians. And the predator was creepier in the first book.

Still, this is perfectly competent fantasy of a kind I would call 'urban' except that it's kind of semi-rural, with an enjoyable Twin Peaks vibe. I will definitely give the series a third book, to see whether any of the various pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together and whether the setting and plot are sufficiently different. At the moment, things could go either way.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Lake, Banana Yoshimoto (365 Books, Day 309)

Today's review, and caught up.

It's very difficult to portray good people well, in fiction. I don't mean people who are heroic, necessarily, or unusually courageous, or self-sacrificing, or working on plans which are good things for the world: I mean people who are simply good people, on a deep level, who do good things because they are loving and wise. It's hard to write those people, and it's hard to read them, because they are usually portrayed as overly saintly with no flaws whatsoever, or as incredibly self-righteous, or something like that. And then there is the conviction, popularized by among others Tolstoy but hovering in the air in general, that evil is always more interesting than good and that bad things make better news and better stories. Jo Walton over at torcom has talked about searching for books which do not contain violence, because they are rarities; the believable portrayal of genuine human decency is just as rare, and incredibly rare in a viewpoint character. I collect these portrayals when I find them. (The most notable to date is Tenma-sensei, in Naoki Urasawa's manga Monster, which has major flaws but is an amazing portrait of a good man faced with an unbearable moral crisis.)

Chihiro, the narrator of Banana Yoshimoto's most recently translated novel, The Lake, is one of the most unselfconsciously, matter-of-factly good and decent people I have encountered in fiction. It is very restful. Chihiro herself would deny it; her ideas of goodness have to do with energy and force and wanting to better oneself and the world and do heroic things, whereas she is a mostly ordinary person, and she drifts, and she is rather spoiled, and she makes a living painting murals but does not consider herself an immortal painter or even a professional caliber of painter. Nor does she aspire to be a greater painter than she is. Her one goal, with her murals, is to paint something that while it is not necessarily good will in ten years or twenty or fifty still fit its surroundings and not look dated; she is happy with that. And she's been very busy and confused since her mother died, after a long illness that was traumatic for everybody.

The thrust of the book is about her relationship with Nakajima, who is probably her boyfriend. She is falling in love with him slowly and almost reluctantly, because something that happened to him when he was younger, something too large to talk about, has left him irrevocably broken (and when we find out what it is, it is in fact that bad). She knows she can't save him, because she isn't a hero. She's not even sure if she can love him, because that might be too much for them both, and if she fails him it will be messy and may kill him.

But because he is never willing to lie down and give up, and because she is at the core of her relatively wise, they can try to learn every day to take it one day at a time.

Banana Yoshimoto is one of my favorite writers, almost always evanescent and subtle, sometimes peaceful, sometimes frightening, sometimes both at the same time. Her protagonists tend to be women who are aware of their own flaws. There is often a breath of the numinous across her work, something which might be the supernatural if you looked at it more closely, or might not. She has the misfortune of being best known in the U.S. for her worst novel, Kitchen, which isn't terrible but plays to very few of her real strengths. The Lake is Yoshimoto at her best, a book without a wasted sentence, one of the few books I've seen about trauma to realize that healing does not come as a single revelation but as incident after incident of things getting slightly better, and that sometimes what you are aiming for is 'as good as it can get', and that can be enough. This is a minor masterpiece, and I am very glad to find that she continues to be translated. I would like everything of hers I can have.

The Lake, Banana Yoshimoto (365 Books, Day 309)

Today's review, and caught up.

It's very difficult to portray good people well, in fiction. I don't mean people who are heroic, necessarily, or unusually courageous, or self-sacrificing, or working on plans which are good things for the world: I mean people who are simply good people, on a deep level, who do good things because they are loving and wise. It's hard to write those people, and it's hard to read them, because they are usually portrayed as overly saintly with no flaws whatsoever, or as incredibly self-righteous, or something like that. And then there is the conviction, popularized by among others Tolstoy but hovering in the air in general, that evil is always more interesting than good and that bad things make better news and better stories. Jo Walton over at torcom has talked about searching for books which do not contain violence, because they are rarities; the believable portrayal of genuine human decency is just as rare, and incredibly rare in a viewpoint character. I collect these portrayals when I find them. (The most notable to date is Tenma-sensei, in Naoki Urasawa's manga Monster, which has major flaws but is an amazing portrait of a good man faced with an unbearable moral crisis.)

Chihiro, the narrator of Banana Yoshimoto's most recently translated novel, The Lake, is one of the most unselfconsciously, matter-of-factly good and decent people I have encountered in fiction. It is very restful. Chihiro herself would deny it; her ideas of goodness have to do with energy and force and wanting to better oneself and the world and do heroic things, whereas she is a mostly ordinary person, and she drifts, and she is rather spoiled, and she makes a living painting murals but does not consider herself an immortal painter or even a professional caliber of painter. Nor does she aspire to be a greater painter than she is. Her one goal, with her murals, is to paint something that while it is not necessarily good will in ten years or twenty or fifty still fit its surroundings and not look dated; she is happy with that. And she's been very busy and confused since her mother died, after a long illness that was traumatic for everybody.

The thrust of the book is about her relationship with Nakajima, who is probably her boyfriend. She is falling in love with him slowly and almost reluctantly, because something that happened to him when he was younger, something too large to talk about, has left him irrevocably broken (and when we find out what it is, it is in fact that bad). She knows she can't save him, because she isn't a hero. She's not even sure if she can love him, because that might be too much for them both, and if she fails him it will be messy and may kill him.

But because he is never willing to lie down and give up, and because she is at the core of her relatively wise, they can try to learn every day to take it one day at a time.

Banana Yoshimoto is one of my favorite writers, almost always evanescent and subtle, sometimes peaceful, sometimes frightening, sometimes both at the same time. Her protagonists tend to be women who are aware of their own flaws. There is often a breath of the numinous across her work, something which might be the supernatural if you looked at it more closely, or might not. She has the misfortune of being best known in the U.S. for her worst novel, Kitchen, which isn't terrible but plays to very few of her real strengths. The Lake is Yoshimoto at her best, a book without a wasted sentence, one of the few books I've seen about trauma to realize that healing does not come as a single revelation but as incident after incident of things getting slightly better, and that sometimes what you are aiming for is 'as good as it can get', and that can be enough. This is a minor masterpiece, and I am very glad to find that she continues to be translated. I would like everything of hers I can have.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

365 Books: some questions answered

I thought I'd do this entry because Hylomorphist asked a question in a recent entry that other people have also been curious about, and I get other questions via email and so on.

Hylomorphist's question: N.B. It would be interesting to know by the end of your reading-reviewing year how many times you selected the book according to the expected time it would take to get through it.

My answer: I'll have to look back over the list to give an actual number or percentage, but yes, I do sometimes plan based on expected reading time, only not in a way that I think would usually be obvious.

For instance, the two Jill Paton Walshes I read because Sovay liked them so much and recommended them so highly; I read both in one day because they were short enough to make me feel guilty about how short they are. I'd have read them regardless of length.

But I save graphic novels for tired days, because they take less than half the time per page, and that is absolutely consistent, and I don't think it's noticeable.

I'm not as good at estimating reading time as I'd like to be, because it doesn't have much to do with length, really. Probably the shortest thing I've read in the past month, besides the Paton Walshes, was the Boethius of Dacia, which took forever because it is abstruse and technical. Whereas A Game of Cages, from two days ago, which is about 350 pp., was a nice relaxing hour and a half. The problem is that some of this is predictable and some not-- I mean, I took Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's essay on the dignity of man to a con because I knew it would be short, interesting, and in a rhetorical style I can read quickly, and that worked; but I read Michelle Cliff's novel No Telephone to Heaven on a tired day because it was 150 pp.. It turned out to be one of those books that demands the best of your entire brain, and it took the whole night, and it was lovely but I paid for it the rest of the week.

I also make allowances when I can for books that I know will take a while. Anything over about 600 pp. gets a day when I don't have any appointments or anything planned, and have something I expect to be easy to read for the day after. I am currently agonizing about how to handle Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear, because I desperately want to read it, but The Name of the Wind was about 700 pp. and took about six hours, which was manageable but means he is a fairly dense writer and takes me actual processing time per page. The Wise Man's Fear is 1500 pp. and requires a day in which I would basically get up early in the morning, hypercaffeinate, read for a ridiculous amount of time, and collapse-- my current estimate is ~15 hours, possibly longer. I am not sure it is really sane. But I want to know what happens, dammit! Aargh.

So far the record for denseness (length/time) is George R.R. Martin's Dying of the Light at 150 pp./8 hrs., which is because I do not think that way and might as well have been reading something written in a language I don't speak. Worth it though.

There are also a couple of writers I just haven't gone near this year because reading them takes up too much brain-space. Gene Wolfe, for instance-- this is the first year in several that I haven't reread the Book of the New Sun.

Mostly, though, I decide what to read based entirely on my mood when I get up in the morning. It works better that way, because it is difficult for me to grab myself by the scruff of the neck and make myself read something if I don't feel like it, and I would never be able to do this if I weren't religious about following my whims.

Via email from multiple people: Do you read things you don't blog about?

Oh my, yes. Right now I am a) in terrible health, b) unemployed (partly due to a)), c) living in a town where I don't know many people I don't live with, and d) gearing up for an imminent cross-country move. I'm between knitting projects due to materials access issues, and one can only watch so much anime; my fiction-writing brain decamped due to stress a couple of months ago. What else am I supposed to do with my time? I average a thousand pages a day. It's pretty evenly split between rereads, new reads I don't feel like blogging about, and multiple-volume manga. This is why I have eyestrain.

Significant rereads this year: all of Lois Lowry, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (in process), the Doctor Doolittle books, Keith Robertson's Henry Reed books, large chunks of Georgette Heyer, large chunks of Zilpha Keatley Snyder, a lot of Gordon Korman, C.J. Cherryh's atevi books, the main thread of Steven Brust's Dragaera books, most of Heinlein's juveniles, Tamora Pierce, *sigh* most of Mercedes Lackey (I have been *really stressed*, okay?), plus the things I reread as a reflex action, meaning Diana Wynne Jones, Elizabeth Enright, C.S. Lewis, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Some William Hope Hodgson.

Things I haven't felt like blogging about, mostly because of sitting down and reading them in giant chunks in like two-day stretches: the entirety of Eloisa James and Julia Quinn, the terrible yet hypnotic P.C. Cast vampire boarding school books, the surprisingly non-terrible six books Mercedes Lackey wrote with James Mallory (no, seriously, I was expecting those to be total shit and by book five they had attained reminding me of P.C. Hodgell and I'm as confused as you are), pretty much the entirety of John Ringo in an attempt to discover how the hell this gets published (conclusion: I have no goddamn idea, but it's like watching a traffic accident, including the nausea afterward and the feeling that you've been an unintentional voyeur in creepy and terrible ways).

Notable manga, including new reads, things I've been reading new volumes of as they come out, and things I've reread/caught up in: Berserk (reread/catchup), Hellsing (reread), Silver Diamond (reread/catchup), Saiunkoku Monogatari (as it comes out), Fullmetal Alchemist (as it comes out), Genkaku Picasso (as it came out), MeruPuri (reread), Little Butterfly (reread), Samurai Deeper Kyo (reread/finish), Vassalord (catchup, and has anyone relicensed this?), A Bride's Story (as it comes out, year's best manga), Ooku (as it comes out), Children of the Sea (as it comes out), Shin Petshop of Horrors (as it comes out), Maka-Maka (reread), probably the rest of Fumi Yoshinaga in English, Hourou Musuko (reread/catchup). TBR pile: Excel Saga (reread/catchup: new volume yay!), Bokurano, if I get around to it maybe reread Flame of Recca because I feel all nostalgic, Bunny Drop.

Question: Why don't you ever write about movies anymore?

I moved away from the place with the good artsy theatres and the good video stores (oh, Harvard Film Archive, I sometimes dream about you). Also I am very busy. Also you hear enough about my massive crush on Derek Jarman through the books of his I read. I will probably write more about movies next year.

Question: Why don't you ever write about anime anymore?

Have you seen the last couple of years of anime? We're at an average of .5 show/season I can tolerate.

Question: Aren't you just showing off how fast you can read/you aren't really reading all these, are you?

To the second: yes, I am, thanks. To the first: maybe a little, but that isn't the main point. If I wrote video games or painted pictures, would you consider it showing off if I released them into the wild in hopes of them finding an audience? I'm trying to entertain people through good writing, and maybe get some books I like some love and steer people away from some things I think are clunkers. Also it is amazing how much one learns about one's own opinions through trying to write about something. I don't articulate half of this until it comes out my fingers.

And that about does it for the FAQ.

365 Books: some questions answered

I thought I'd do this entry because hylomorphist asked a question in a recent entry that other people have also been curious about, and I get other questions via email and so on.

hylomorphist's question: N.B. It would be interesting to know by the end of your reading-reviewing year how many times you selected the book according to the expected time it would take to get through it.

My answer: I'll have to look back over the list to give an actual number or percentage, but yes, I do sometimes plan based on expected reading time, only not in a way that I think would usually be obvious.

For instance, the two Jill Paton Walshes I read because sovay liked them so much and recommended them so highly; I read both in one day because they were short enough to make me feel guilty about how short they are. I'd have read them regardless of length.

But I save graphic novels for tired days, because they take less than half the time per page, and that is absolutely consistent, and I don't think it's noticeable.

I'm not as good at estimating reading time as I'd like to be, because it doesn't have much to do with length, really. Probably the shortest thing I've read in the past month, besides the Paton Walshes, was the Boethius of Dacia, which took forever because it is abstruse and technical. Whereas A Game of Cages, from two days ago, which is about 350 pp., was a nice relaxing hour and a half. The problem is that some of this is predictable and some not-- I mean, I took Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's essay on the dignity of man to a con because I knew it would be short, interesting, and in a rhetorical style I can read quickly, and that worked; but I read Michelle Cliff's novel No Telephone to Heaven on a tired day because it was 150 pp.. It turned out to be one of those books that demands the best of your entire brain, and it took the whole night, and it was lovely but I paid for it the rest of the week.

I also make allowances when I can for books that I know will take a while. Anything over about 600 pp. gets a day when I don't have any appointments or anything planned, and have something I expect to be easy to read for the day after. I am currently agonizing about how to handle Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear, because I desperately want to read it, but The Name of the Wind was about 700 pp. and took about six hours, which was manageable but means he is a fairly dense writer and takes me actual processing time per page. The Wise Man's Fear is 1500 pp. and requires a day in which I would basically get up early in the morning, hypercaffeinate, read for a ridiculous amount of time, and collapse-- my current estimate is ~15 hours, possibly longer. I am not sure it is really sane. But I want to know what happens, dammit! Aargh.

So far the record for denseness (length/time) is George R.R. Martin's Dying of the Light at 150 pp./8 hrs., which is because I do not think that way and might as well have been reading something written in a language I don't speak. Worth it though.

There are also a couple of writers I just haven't gone near this year because reading them takes up too much brain-space. Gene Wolfe, for instance-- this is the first year in several that I haven't reread the Book of the New Sun.

Mostly, though, I decide what to read based entirely on my mood when I get up in the morning. It works better that way, because it is difficult for me to grab myself by the scruff of the neck and make myself read something if I don't feel like it, and I would never be able to do this if I weren't religious about following my whims.

Via email from multiple people (as are all subsequent questions): Do you read things you don't blog about?

Oh my, yes. Right now I am a) in terrible health, b) unemployed (partly due to a)), c) living in a town where I don't know many people I don't live with, and d) gearing up for an imminent cross-country move. I'm between knitting projects due to materials access issues, and one can only watch so much anime; my fiction-writing brain decamped due to stress a couple of months ago. What else am I supposed to do with my time? I average a thousand pages a day. It's pretty evenly split between rereads, new reads I don't feel like blogging about, and multiple-volume manga. This is why I have eyestrain.

Significant rereads this year: all of Lois Lowry, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (in process), the Doctor Doolittle books, Keith Robertson's Henry Reed books, large chunks of Georgette Heyer, large chunks of Zilpha Keatley Snyder, a lot of Gordon Korman, C.J. Cherryh's atevi books, the main thread of Steven Brust's Dragaera books, most of Heinlein's juveniles, Tamora Pierce, *sigh* most of Mercedes Lackey (I have been *really stressed*, okay?), plus the things I reread as a reflex action, meaning Diana Wynne Jones, Elizabeth Enright, C.S. Lewis, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Some William Hope Hodgson.

Things I haven't felt like blogging about, mostly because of sitting down and reading them in giant chunks in like two-day stretches: the entirety of Eloisa James and Julia Quinn, the terrible yet hypnotic P.C. Cast vampire boarding school books, the surprisingly non-terrible six books Mercedes Lackey wrote with James Mallory (no, seriously, I was expecting those to be total shit and by book five they had attained reminding me of P.C. Hodgell and I'm as confused as you are), pretty much the entirety of John Ringo in an attempt to discover how the hell this gets published (conclusion: I have no goddamn idea, but it's like watching a traffic accident, including the nausea afterward and the feeling that you've been an unintentional voyeur in creepy and terrible ways).

Notable manga, including new reads, things I've been reading new volumes of as they come out, and things I've reread/caught up in: Berserk (reread/catchup), Hellsing (reread), Silver Diamond (reread/catchup), Saiunkoku Monogatari (as it comes out), Fullmetal Alchemist (as it comes out), Genkaku Picasso (as it came out), MeruPuri (reread), Little Butterfly (reread), Samurai Deeper Kyo (reread/finish), Vassalord (catchup, and has anyone relicensed this?), A Bride's Story (as it comes out, year's best manga), Ooku (as it comes out), Children of the Sea (as it comes out), Shin Petshop of Horrors (as it comes out), Maka-Maka (reread), probably the rest of Fumi Yoshinaga in English, Hourou Musuko (reread/catchup). TBR pile: Excel Saga (reread/catchup: new volume yay!), Bokurano, if I get around to it maybe reread Flame of Recca because I feel all nostalgic, Bunny Drop.

Question: Why don't you ever write about movies anymore?

I moved away from the place with the good artsy theatres and the good video stores (oh, Harvard Film Archive, I sometimes dream about you). Also I am very busy. Also you hear enough about my massive crush on Derek Jarman through the books of his I read. I will probably write more about movies next year.

Question: Why don't you ever write about anime anymore?

Have you seen the last couple of years of anime? We're at an average of .5 show/season I can tolerate.

Question: Aren't you just showing off how fast you can read/you aren't really reading all these, are you?

To the second: yes, I am, thanks. To the first: maybe a little, but that isn't the main point. If I wrote video games or painted pictures, would you consider it showing off if I released them into the wild in hopes of them finding an audience? I'm trying to entertain people through good writing, and maybe get some books I like some love and steer people away from some things I think are clunkers. Also it is amazing how much one learns about one's own opinions through trying to write about something. I don't articulate half of this until it comes out my fingers.

And that about does it for the FAQ.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.