Searching for a bright today

Finished Matter by Iain Banks, which was a good and interesting science fiction novel from someone I expect more than just a good and interesting science fiction novel. Pity, though I'm not sure if I should pity the novel or my expectations more.

Needing a break from 500+ page novels, I dived back into The Best American Short Stories of 2007, this time guest-edited by Stephen King. And once again, I wondered why. What is it about modern American literature where people feel compelled to write about rich white patricians dying and the children feeling sad and/or ambivalent about it?

The good shit deviates from this, but it's pretty spare. John Barth's "Toga Party", a look at aging and retirement that's nothing but rage and fury, blew me away. And William Gay's "Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You" is the most lyrical and moving story about meth-addicted rednecks I've ever read. Uh, not that I've read a lot of them. But it's still an awesome story.

I'm told I should skip ahead to Karen Russel's "St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves", becuase, you know, werewolves; but seriously, how many times can I want to put down a so-called best of anthology before I just give up and toss it?

But I'll probably keep it. King's introduction is fantastic and thought-provoking, if a bit gloomy on the fate of the American short story. I can see lending it to my friends. "Large book for such a short essay, huh? Yyyyeah, about that..."

Kat Sedia's "new" book, (I think it came out sometime in 2007, but my reading schedule is slow as molasses) The Secret History of Moscow, is an intriguing novel about set in both the normal world of Moscow in the 1990s and in the strange underworld beneath it where both mythical figures from Moscow's past rub shoulders with Muscovites and visitors from many eras. When Maria, the sister of the main character Galina mysteriously turns into a jackdaw and flies away, Galina is compelled to seek out the hidden world beneath and around her.

Superficially, this novel is very similar to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, as Gaiman in his usual modest way suggests in a review of his own. Sedia I think builds on Gaiman's ideas of a mythical world mirroring (and underneath) our modern one - populating her 'mythic' Moscow with historical figures - gypsies, Jews fleeing pogroms, Napoleanic soldiers and Tajik warriors; and strange and curious creatures from stories like the voidyanoi, rusalki, and Koschei the Deathless.

The three main characters Galina, a woman who works as an English translator, Yakov the cop, and Fyodor the itinerant artist, are normal people who become aware of the strangeness that's disrupted their lives: They've seen things - people turning into blackbirds before their eyes or watched family members vanish, and are the only ones compelled to get to the bottom of what's going on. It took me a few chapters of character introduction to get into the book, but once things were set up I could barely put the book down. I didn't just want to know what happened next, I was sucked into the narrative. I almost didn't want it to end and was cursing the book was only 300 pages.

Sedia cuts out nearly everything for a breezy writing style that is fast-paced and extremely easy to read, only to come to jarring stops when she pauses to flesh out a character met along the way with their own story. This, it turns out, is an extremely good thing. Sedia's strengths at least in this story is creating incredibly engaging and interesting characters in a short amount of time. And with each of those characters, one gets a sense of the inevitable change of history around them. Halfway through the book, these parts became my favorites.

As much as people in reviews I've seen have focused on the Russian-ness or Moscow-ness of the story, I don't actually see that as a strong point of the book. For all the fascinating observations of the changes of Russian style (from the crown Peter the Great refused to wear, to traffic snarls and the motives of car ownership in modern Moscow) one doesn't actually get a sense of Moscow as a character. Part, I think, is that descriptions throughout the book are notoriously spare. I never got a sense of the personality of the setting around me, only that it's a city and some of its history.

But what I did get from this book was a real sense of the struggle of otherwise normal people in events wildly beyond their control. And, in character after character, outsiders forced to view the normal events of a city from a distant, almost solitary perspective. This I think is much more universal - I'd even go so far as to say it's a primary focus of modern fantasy, and what sets apart bad fantasy which only offers an escape for those who feel outside modern culture, and good fantasy which offers empathy and understanding, and uses tools of mythology towards those ends. It's something Gaiman has always been uniquely good at and is a reason why his writing is so popular. Sedia's Secret History builds on this, and more.

I want to shout from the rooftops about this novel. It's just that great. More people need to be reading and talking about this book. I hope some of you reading this give it a chance.

Specifically, people who read books for fun, etc.

Since I'm currently revising my novel, a question:


So, this phrase: "Every sentence must be an arrow into the heart of the novel?"

How true is it? Does it really bother you if the novel you're reading is even slightly divergent? I know there are some stories that need cutting (King's Dark Tower, Jordan's Wheel of Time novels) but in general, the average novel you read, how much sprawl is okay?

Can a book be too spare, only concentrating on the plot at hand? When does that happen?

I finally finished 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and was compelled to write about it. Woah, what a book.

Of course, trying to figure out the scope of this book and its ideas has been somewhat daunting. I keep putting it off, thinking, "God, I don't even know where to begin!"

The basic gist of the book is, America was bigger and more diverse than we have been led to believe. Wikipedia, as usual, has an excellent summation here. But the basics: the Americas were a lot more populated when Europeans discovered their New World in 1492, and in the span of a hundred years, managed to die off, so, a hundred years later, when English and Dutch started migrating to North America, the place seemed like an empty wilderness with scattered migrating hunters and gatherers.

He goes into a lot, here: the Inkas in South America and the cradle of Western Civlization (hundreds of years before cities were being built in Sumeria, what is now Iraq) - he goes into great detail of the effects of disease, tracking smallpox as it moves from infected Spaniards in Mexico, moving north and south as it decimates populations who had not lived with many animals and were thus a lot less resistant to diseases (and more resistant to the native parasites)

Much is made, for example, of Pizarro conquering the Inkas with only a few men. Few talk about the smallpox epidemic that killed off 40% of the population, including many of its leaders and heirs, throwing the society into the middle of a civil war to figure out the leadership. The Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts and made contact with the Wampanoag, but no one at the time considered that they were landing in the ruins of a town that had been decimated by a disease that was likely Hepatitis A, and were desperate for allies against the Narragansett, who had forsworn contact with the Europeans and therefore hadn't been wasted away (but later would suffer great losses when smallpox, again, hit New England.)

That's huge. But that's not all that it covers. Whether it's the fall of the 'Aztecs' - the downfall of the Mayan civilization, the successive kingdoms and civilizations in South America (all of which seemed to have no concept of basic commerce - the Inkas seem practically communist to my unsophisticated eyes, and that was apparently the root of a huge ideological battle in the 60s and 70s in the historic commmunity) - or even whether or not the Amazon was an untouched jungle or a farmed land filled with communities that had made do without metal tools for thousands of years.

A big thing I got out of it was my view of technology. Europe did well for itself technologically, mainly because it was able to combine its own advances with the ability to pick and choose technologies from the Middle East and China (the big ones being gunpowder and the number zero as a mathametical concept) - the Indian civilizations had seriously advanced farming techniques, the Mayans legendarily had a more accurate calendar early in their existence than the Europeans had when they arrived, and the Inkas had all sorts of advances in building and architecture, and most importantly, textiles (only recently people have started to realize they had a writing system - using knotted thread - and have started to decipher it)

I feel like I'm not doing this book justice. That's a huge shame. It's accurate, well-written, and though it has a huge bias, it also manages to show all sides of a lot of arguments. It's worth reading - especially in the Americans, so that we can learn our history correctly, and not repeat blindly the garbage in or textbooks. It's a long book, but an easy read. I burned through it.

Highly, highly recommended.

aergern had to message me. And I had to spazz out.

George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, optioned by HBO

And...start your vanity casting...now.

So, a few years ago, Michael Cricton, of JURASSIC PARK fame, went off the rocker about Global Warming. "It's not trueee! It's a lie made up by the sciiiieeeentiiists!" and got thoroughly mocked as a result. Indeed, MIchael Crowley wrote a long piece in the New Republic about Cricton's Global Warming denials.


So what does Crichton do? What so many novelists have done over the years - he put him in his new book - as a child rapist, no less.

And not just a child rapist! A child rapist with a small penis! And one who is kind of a 'dickhead' and a 'weasel'.

This post is a public service reminder: No matter how many books you sell and how much movie money you rake in, you can still be a complete, pathetic loser. "In my imaginary world, you SUCK, your WEE IS TINY, and you RAPE LITTLE BOYS! So there! That means I WIN!"

I was just perusing messageboards and saw a thread about someone sick of books with weak endings, and thought about it a bit. I don't really read books for the endings, I think I like them, I just haven't really put a lot of thought about it. I read books mostly to get immersed in the narrative and less on having a satisfying conclusion.

But now I'm thinking of books with good endings, and I can't think of any. So I'm asking you all: What are books with good endings?

About the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds.

Hrph.

I'm happy to say the rest of yesterday went a lot better, and a lot of you are to thank for that. So...thank you. :) Last night was spent talking to my parents on the phone, which cheered me immensely, including this conversation (as best as I remember):

MOM: You know, I should really read some Phillip K. Dick. Perhaps you could recommend some?
SETH: Oh, there's lots [snip about how PKD doesn't write women very well, but is still worth reading] but I recommend Flow my...
MOM: ...Tears, the Policeman Said. I know, I read your blog.

hi mom!

And then later:

SETH: You know, it was because of you that I started reading him.
MOM: (baffled) Me? But I've never read any of his novels!
SETH: (stubbornly) Well, you did.

And she did, too. That's a longer story involving why every bookish teen should have a librarian for a mom, or at least a mom for a librarian, and will be reserved for a later time.

After that was quiet time spent with the partner in crime watching The Wire second season. And pizza. With crustacean bits on it. It was the yummy.

--

I'm reading Graham Joyce's Dark Sister, which aerinys lent me, and not particularly enjoying it. I finally hit on why the other night -- the two main characters are just...well, not completely reprehensible, but certainly irritating in their own way. And I want to relate to the husband, but he's such a prat. And then I want to relate to the estranged, witchy wife, but then I find her a prat, too. Feh. And I love his writing, too, but I don't think I'll finish it. Or maybe I'll skip to the end. I don't know.

Also reading Self Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back and it's too early to say what I think of it, but so far I'm enjoying it. If the author was a little more judgemental and less observing, or a little less judgemental, I'd enjoy it a bit less. Maybe more when I finish it.