dfan says

Steven Erikson’s epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen is about the most ambitious writing project I can think of short of Henry Darger. It’s not just the number of words in the thing, which is immense enough already (each of the ten books is a doorstop), but also the scale of the conception. There’s a giant amount of detail in there, with a backstory going back thousands of years, the uncovering of which is often just as much of a gasp-inducing plot element as any action sequence. Hints are often dropped which don’t pay off until literally thousands of pages later, and clearly Erikson had the entire thing largely planned out from the start.

Just a peek at the locations of the books is impressive. The second book drops almost all the characters and plot threads from the first and starts up a giant new collection of characters and threads on a different continent. The third book does jump back to the first book’s location, but then the entire first quarter of the fourth book is the backstory of what had originally appeared to be a minor character from the second book, and the fifth book starts all over again on a completely new continent. After that the threads start getting woven together a little more, which is almost a disappointment when you’re used to giant new vistas opening up every book.

As you might guess, this sort of thing is right up my alley. The sheer size of the worldbuilding, both in space and in time, is amazing, and the revelations that occur regularly are often jawdropping. Plus the guy can actually write, and the themes are largely about real human experience and emotions, and the characterization is pretty good; you can see why I’ve devoted an embarrassing number of hours to reading and rereading these books as they’ve been published. The tenth and final volume is coming out in early 2011, and I’ve started one more reread so I’ll be in place to read it at that time.

All that said, the books aren’t perfect. For one thing, although Erikson is a good writer, he’s not quite as good as he thinks he is, and sometimes passages can be overwritten or unclear. (And the excerpts of fictional poems that open the chapters are often just horrible.) Although there are occasional romantic relationships, he’s not that good at them—it’s generally hard to understand just why characters are falling in love (or, more usually, in lust). And although it’s hard for me to complain about the size when that is one of the things I love about the series, there’s just so much to keep track of, and so much to physically read, that it can be hard to remember it all and sustain my motivation all the way through.

The first book, Gardens of the Moon, also suffers somewhat from being written long before the other ones, before Erikson had really matured, and the violently in medias res nature of it is even harder to deal with as a reader than with the other books, since you’re starting from a blank slate. If you do read these books for the first time, I have one caution: don’t roll your eyes too much at the occasional seemingly completely random plot event or deus ex machina, especially in the first few books. In the context of a single book, they do appear to come from nowhere and have no good function except to tie up plot threads, but in the context of the entire series, they are usually used to introduce key elements that will become very important later in the series.

These books are not for everyone; they’re one of those things, like the band Cardiacs, that I love but am reluctant to actually recommend to anyone. But if this is the sort of thing you like, you may love it. And this is just about the best time to give it a try; it’s wrapping up soon so you can read the whole thing without waiting a year between each book, and tor.com is doing a pretty insightful reread through the whole series, which they just started a few weeks ago.

Number two in my package of books from amazon.co.uk. As I mentioned before, I love some but not all of Miéville’s books, and this one looked enough like it was right up my alley that I was sufficiently excited to order it from England before the US release date. And… it was pretty good.

My opinion of it sort of went through a U shape. It starts out as kind of a romp. A preserved giant squid has disappeared from a London museum and all sorts of crazy supernatural cults are getting involved. But somewhere around the 25% mark I stopped looking forward so much to picking it up again. For one thing, it just felt kind of overstuffed. There are like six major players, and I kept wishing there were more like four. Although I usually like big messes of books, and I’ve enjoyed Miéville’s unfettered creativity in his other works, here I felt more suffocated by the number of groups involved, not to mention the n-squared issue of keeping track of how they were all interacting with each other.

My other issue is that all of the secret underground supernatural stuff, despite a lot of it being pretty original (e..g, one major villain is a sentient face tatooed on someone else’s back), wore on me after a while. Maybe I’ve just read too much of it, but I spent a lot of the novel feeling like I was reading Miéville’s Neil Gaiman impression that he was tossing off between real books.

But with about a quarter of the book to go, the pace really picks up, there are some awesome set pieces, and most importantly, all of these pieces of the plot actually fit together in a satisfying way. So overall I’d say I enjoyed it — in particular some of that overstuffedness makes more sense in retrospect after seeing where it all leads to — but it wasn’t quite the awesome experience that I know it’s possible to get when I pick up a China Miéville book. I’d put it below Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The City & the City, but above Iron Council, which I didn’t even finish.

I first encountered David Mitchell through his debut “novel” Ghostwritten, an intricately linked collection of short stories that really tickled my structural fancy. Of course, he is now mostly known for Cloud Atlas, another linked set of stories that span from centuries in the past to millennia in the future with impressive facility. In between he’s written another couple of more conventional novels, which I have not read.

This is his latest, and I was actually excited enough about it to place an order from the UK, since it was released a month earlier than the US and so was China Miéville’s Kraken, about which more in a subsequent post. It’s a historical novel, and much has been made of the fact that it’s supposedly Mitchell’s first, but honestly his previous work already has many historical elements. It takes place around 1800, largely on a small artificial island outside of Nagasaki where the Dutch trade with Japan.

The historical stuff works well. It’s a very interesting time and place, and the writing is the sort of historical fiction that I like, demonstrating the setting with a nice amount of detail without hitting you over the head with it. The plot and structure are pretty odd, though. I don’t like to spoil much in these reviews, but I will say that the entire focus of the novel changes fairly radically multiple times, each of which caught me by surprise, and one of which made me pretty uncomfortable for a while. I guess Mitchell’s tendency to divide a novel into contrasting parts dies hard, even when writing a book that is more unified on the surface.

But it really does end up being one story, and once you get through the slower scene-setting chapters, it’s a pretty gripping one. I would still recommend Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten before this one, and they will probably stick with me longer, but it was still an excellent book and I’m very happy to see that it’s already been a bestseller in England.

This novel takes the all-too-familiar career of Thomas Cromwell and turns it inside out, revealing an unexpectedly thoughtful and empathetic character. What’s that, you’re not familiar at all with the career of Thomas Cromwell? Well, neither was I, and I suspect that that made my reading of it much different from the intended one, as I ended up reading it purely as a historical novel and not as some great reimagining. But it was a really good historical novel.

Thomas Cromwell was born a commoner and rose to become one of the must trusted advisors to Henry VIII (the one with the six wives — we just get the first two of them here). He seems to be regarded by history mostly as a villain, largely based on his standing as the chief nemesis of Thomas More, who opposed the king’s declaring himself the head of the church. Mantel turns Cromwell into a real person, who is not perfect but is generally always trying to do the right thing.

Her writing style here is intriguing; it’s very restrained, avoiding much emotion or florid description, and you get the feeling that it is meant to reflect Cromwell’s own character. Cromwell himself, although present in every scene (as far as I can remember), is hardly ever mentioned explicitly by name, but is just called “he” unless it is really necessary to distinguish him from another man in the scene. There is pretty much no “As you know, Bob” exposition; the characters talk to each other as if they already know the subject they’re discussing, which can make it a little hard for the reader to catch up, but is rewarding once you do, making it feel a bit like you’re in on a secret.

The plot moves fairly slowly, and I think I might have been happier with it at 400 pages instead of 550, but it remained very interesting all the way through. I imagine that part of the slowness for me was that Mantel wanted to visit and reinterpret a number of important historical incidents, none of which meant much to me.

So I feel like I didn’t get everything out of it that the author put in; it’s sort of like hearing a cover of a song without knowing the original and thus not being able to hear what original aspects of the song the new performer kept or discarded or reworked. If you are already familiar with 16th century English history this book is probably revelatory (and in fact it has won all sorts of prizes); if you’re not, it’s still an excellent read.

A couple of months ago I got a random email saying (paraphrased) “Love your Infinite Jest notes, love your blog, can I send you a free copy of this novel that appeals to a lot of the people who like Infinite Jest?” I looked it up and saw that it was self-published, which is not a great sign, but a few pages on the net did praise it effusively, and I figured that there was no downside, so I said sure. I wasn’t planning to read it any time soon, but a few weeks ago I picked it up and read a few pages, and then read a few more, and then I read the whole book, and damned if it wasn’t really good.

The novel is A Naked Singularity, and it is a big mess, but luckily for de la Pava, I love big messes. Infinite Jest itself, Gravity’s Rainbow, Sandinista!, Zen Arcade — if it’s some gigantic work that overflows its banks and doesn’t know when to stop, chances are good that I’ll love it.  It’s a 700 page book, but we’re at about page 300 before the plot even really gets started; most of the beginning of the book is filled with a depiction of what it’s like to be a public defender, as the narrator is, in between a bunch of entertainingly digressive dialogues dealing with subjects ranging from abstruse philosophy to pop culture.

Actually, once the plot really gets started and the book gets more focused, it gets a little less interesting and more conventional, but it never stops being entertaining. Most readers would likely disagree, but I almost wish that the novel was even more of a big mess. It’s already 700 pages; why not add a couple hundred more and keep the second half of the book as crazy as the first?

Back to the good points about the book. As I said, the writing style itself is super entertaining. For example, even though about 5% of the the book is taken up by the narrator going on about the professional boxing scene of the 1980s, I didn’t mind. And learning about the life of a public defender was very educational, and naturally enraging as well. There were a bunch of interesting stylistic experiments (there’s one great chapter in particular that keeps jump-cutting back and forth between different scenes during one day) which I would have been happy to see de la Pava take even farther.

A Naked Singularity is self-published but it’s not that easy to tell; the physical book and its layout are very professional, and the only thing giving it away to me was a larger-than-usual incidence of typos. I’ve seen other reviewers wish that it had been edited down some, but as I said earlier, I kind of wish it had been edited even less. I don’t know how hard de la Pava looked for a publisher — it seems hard to believe that no one would have taken a chance on this being the breakout hit of the year. Hopefully his next book will find a wider audience. I’ll certainly read it.

P.S. I am required by the FTC to disclose (as I already did, but here it is again, explicitly) that I received this book for free.

One of my 2010 projects is to read this 4000 page, 5 volume history of Western classical music. It got outstanding reviews when it was published in 2005, and last year it was released as a reasonably-priced set of paperbacks, and when I finally got to browse them in the bookstore I was impressed enough to make the investment in time and money.

I’ve just finished volume 1, which takes us up to 1600, so I’m pretty much on track to finish this year (I figure my pace will go up once I get to the music I’m much more familiar with, about halfway through volume 2). It was very interesting, especially since I didn’t know a lot about the early evolution of classical music already.

Despite the fact that the work as a whole is thousands of pages long, Taruskin clearly intends this to be read front to back as a narrative; it’s not a reference, or even really a textbook. This has many advantages and a few disadvantages. One nice thing (to me) is that it is clearly written with some subjectivity; although of course he is writing a history, the author isn’t afraid to inject his own opinions on occasion, which makes it a much more interesting read than it could be. The biggest disadvantage to me is that it’s not as easy to use as a reference as a textbook would be. If he introduces some new term, it’s not going to be in boldface or set off in a sidebar; if you run into it again later and forget its meaning, you’ll have to flip around looking for its definition (and it’s not always in the index). This was a real issue for me in this volume because I’m unfamiliar with most pre-1700 musical jargon. On the other hand, I’m reading it for pleasure, not so I can pass an exam, so it wasn’t a huge deal.

He makes a big point about this actually being a history of written music, which is very different from being a history of music; we really don’t know a lot about pre-literate performance, or even a ton about the performance of the works we have scores of. And of course a lot of written music has been lost, or even intentionally destroyed (grr). So it was neat to read about the ways in which we have to piece together knowledge about what music was really like during this period.

The material itself I found really interesting. I wish I got a slightly better sense of the evolution of certain musical vocabulary from a more theoretical point of view. For example, somewhere during the hundreds of years covered by this book, harmony gradually changed from being mostly just a succession of consonances into having semantic meaning on a more “sentence-sized” level. Taruskin points to some individual examples of this, but I found myself wishing for a higher-level overview of how the shift occurred. Of course, the individual composers who made this shift happen probably didn’t think about it that way at all, so any attempt to impose some sort of teleological post-facto history on it is going to be pretty artificial anyway.

In any case, so far the series has been very entertaining and informative, and I’m not regretting my time spent with it at all. On to Monteverdi!

This is a short Czech novel from 1993 that just got translated into English last year and showed up on lots of SF/weird readers’ 2009 best-of lists. The genre is magic realism, which is to say highly-literate fantasy that takes place in the real world. The narrator (I don’t think he ever gets a name) starts discovering clues to an alternate fantastic city that exists in parallel to Prague (shades of China Miéville’s The City & the City). And this other city really is fantastic, full of arresting poetic images that don’t make much rational sense.

Those images, at their best, are really gripping and memorable — two scenes that come to mind are a fight to the death with a shark on top of a tower and a bushwhacking expedition through a library-jungle — but just as often seem more random, as if the author was picking words from a dictionary and then trying to connect them in some sort of Oulipian manner:

“Of course it was all in vain, you fool,” she said disdainfully. You purged geometry of polar animals… You’ve forgotten that the first axiom of Euclid states that there will always be one or two penguins in geometrical space? Wasn’t it you who tattooed that sentence on my thigh in your automobile of ice? […] You turned us against you when we discovered you on the lavatory squeezing oranges onto a pocket calculator. We don’t like you and find you ridiculous.”

Which rather than making me savor each crazy image makes me just skim until I can find something that makes a little sense again.

So although there are some reoccurring images and themes that do give the book some structure, I sometimes had the same experience I have with David Lynch movies, where, after a bit of seeming to have some strange internal logic that is tantalizingly just beyond the reach of my rational mind, the work just goes off the rails entirely. It was short enough and cool enough that I am perfectly happy with the time I spent with it, but overall for me it didn’t fulfill that top-ten promise it started out with.

I haven’t had much to write about books lately, for a couple of main reasons: I’m trying to get all the way through Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music in 2010, which is close to 4000 pages long, and I got sucked back into the game of Go (I’m using the Korean word, baduk, for the tag since that seems to be the standard search term – “Go” is pretty terrible for obvious reasons).

I got to my current level (AGA 4 kyu) largely by reading lots of instructional books, which is pretty much the main way I like to learn (which is also true of chess or math or science), as opposed to playing a lot or doing lots of exercises. But I’ve become convinced that the way to really improve is to actually do a lot of problems, and in both chess and Go that’s what I’ve been concentrating on lately.  So here are some of the Go problem books I’ve used in the past and present and what I think of them.

Graded Go Problems for Beginners (4 volumes). When I am forced to give only one recommendation for problem books, this is it. It’s a super collection of all sorts of problems, although by the later books it concentrates a bit overmuch on life and death, which gets a little tedious. Volume 1 starts at the very beginning (e.g., capturing stones in atari), so if you have any experience at all you probably want to start with Volume 2, which is still pretty basic but even I still spend an hour reviewing it every once in a while (like when I’m returning to the game after a break). Volume 4 is probably useful all the way to 1 dan level.

One Thousand and One Life-and-Death Problems. Exactly what it says. Starts out around 10k level, probably close to 1d level by the end (I’m only on problem 534 so far so who knows!). They can get a bit samey after a while but doing life and death problems is the single best way to improve your reading skill.

Get Strong at Tesuji. A good collection of tactical problems from ranging from very easy to 1d level. One nice thing is that a lot of them are mainly about making good shape rather than more obviously concrete goals like living or killing or separating or connecting. So you’ll learn how to place your stones effectively and flexibly in the first place, which will put you ahead of the game when the actual living and killing problems come up.

Lee Chang Ho’s Selected Life and Death Go Problems (李昌镐精讲围棋死活). Tons of people raved about this series of six Chinese books so I had to pick them up. The nice thing about problem books is that it doesn’t matter a lot if you don’t know the language (which I don’t); the diagrams have most of the information. Anyway, these problems are indeed great; they feel interesting in a way that some other collections don’t, and they build on each other nicely. Volume 1 is probably tractable at 10k, I pretty much hit a wall in Volume 4, and Volume 6 is probably suitable for dan players.

Lee Chang Ho’s Selected Tesuji Go Problems (李昌镐精讲围棋手筋). Naturally I had to pick up his tesuji series as well. This had gotten less stellar reviews, but I like it just as much. The problems are simpler, but that’s good; this is basically a giant practical compendium of all the standard techniques you should have in your fingers during the middle game, so it’s more for, say, reminding you that if you’re trying to connect two groups you should think about clamping the opponent stone sitting between them than it is for practicing intense reading. I’m only in Volume 3 so I don’t know how hard it gets, but I’d say you could get a lot out of this at 10k.

Cho Hun-Hyeon’s Lectures on Go Techniques and Lectures on the Opening. So far two out of three books have been translated in the former series and just one of the latter. These are really super. At least in Volume 1 of each series, the problems are very simple, but 1) even I only get them 90% right and it should really be 100%, and 2) he goes into detailed explanations about why alternative moves are bad, in a way that is incredibly useful when you’re learning and don’t have good shape intuition yet. Lectures on Go Techniques Volume 1 is about simple joseki (although it doesn’t really feel that way; it’s more about “applied fundamental principles”) while Volume 2 takes that knowledge a little further into the middlegame. Lectures on the Opening is more about opening principles, which you likely have picked up somewhere else but are always useful to review.

But again, if you want to start with just one book, I still would go for the relevant volume of Graded Go Problems for Beginners and take it from there.

After finishing Shriek: An Afterword, I dove right into VanderMeer’s third Ambergris book, Finch. This is in yet another style — it’s a hard-boiled detective novel set in a dystopian future a hundred years after the events of the last book. It’s pretty cool how willing he is to play around with many different styles in the same world.

Despite my appreciation for it, it wasn’t totally successful for me, for reasons that are not really the author’s fault. For one thing, it’s a very grim book, and it turns out I wasn’t really in the mood for grim at the time I read it. Also, it resolves a bunch of mysteries from the first two books, but as you can guess from the word “dystopian” above, not in a very happy way. It made me sad that some of the open questions about Ambergris and the underground gray caps from City of Saints and Madmen that at the time were a neat mixture of charming and menacing turned out to be just menacing in retrospect. I’d almost rather imagine this book as one possible future history of Ambergris than as the one true author-approved one.

Anyway, as a book it was quite good despite my negative reactions above. The plot took a little while to get started and had just one or two too many components for my taste but was interesting and held together, and there were a few great “whoa” moments, as you would hope for in a fantastic (in genre) book. I’m not sure how much sense it would make if you hadn’t read the earlier books, but the first one (City of Saints and Madmen) is the one I would recommend for newcomers to Ambergris and VanderMeer anyway.

Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen is one of my favorite books, a collection of stories and other strange forms (one item is a fictional bibliography, another is a medical report, another is written entirely in code) all set in the fantastic fictional city of Ambergris, built over the caverns of mysterious underground-dwelling mushroom people known as the Gray Caps, and home to the dangerously bacchanalian Festival of the Freshwater Squid, world-famous composer Voss Bender, and a zillion other captivating creative inventions. “The Transformation of Martin Lake” in particular is one of the most arresting stories I’ve ever read.

So I was thrilled to hear, a few years ago, that VanderMeer was returning to Ambergris with the novel Shriek: An Afterword. I bought it as soon as it was released, tore into it… and stopped 2/3 of the way through and didn’t pick it up again. It just didn’t resonate with me the way his earlier work did, and I found myself dutifully chewing my way through it without really enjoying it.

Then VanderMeer recently released a third Ambergris book, Finch, and it got me thinking that I should really give Shriek another shot. So I did, and I enjoyed it a lot more this time. This is a similar relationship to the one I had with Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon; in each case I had anxiously awaited a book, which then turned out to be not quite what I expected, reducing my enjoyment to the extent that I put the book down without finishing it, but then enjoyed it quite a bit on a reread when I understood more what I was in for.

Shriek is quite different from City of Saints and Madmen. Most of the metafictional tricks are gone, replaced by a single one; the story, Janice Shriek’s biography of her brother Duncan, is regularly interspersed with comments from Duncan himself, supplementing and/or contradicting her assertions. This could be pretty cool but it was mostly irritating; rather than adding surprising or world-overturning information to Janice’s observations, Duncan resorts mostly to “Well, it’s more complicated than you give it credit for” excuses. And where I was hoping for more revelations about the nature of the Gray Caps (especially after some teasers early on), the book mostly is concerned with the much less interesting social rise and fall of the two siblings.

But taken on its own terms, as I did on my second read, the book is still pretty interesting, and it did turn out that some exciting stuff happened just after the point where I gave up the first time. So I did enjoy it the second time, and knowing what sort of book it was did help a lot. It still didn’t live up to City of Saints and Madmen, but at least this time I didn’t expect it to.