dfan says

This is one of those books I appreciated a little more after finishing it and reading other people’s takes on it.  Last year I read Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, which I thought was generally awesome; it aimed to turn the conventions of epic fantasy on their head, and actually did.  I know some people who were disappointed by it, but their disappointment seemed to lie largely in the fact that Abercrombie actually carried through on all his narrative threats rather than just teasing us with them and resolving everything in a standard epic fantasy way at the end.  I did have two political issues with it, though: 1) torture is presented as being wildly effective in producing information, 24-style, and 2) there’s an scary infidel pseudo-Arabic nation that is practically a caricature of political incorrectness.  Of course Abercrombie has the right to put stuff like this in his novels, but the fact that people can read this and comfortably see their own prejudices verified, even fictionally, makes me sad.

Anyway, Best Served Cold is a standalone novel taking place in the same world, and sharing a few characters, although to be honest my memory is so bad that I wasn’t even always sure which ones had shown up before.  It’s a revenge novel, like The Count of Monte Cristo, and there are seven distinct people who have wronged the protagonist and need to get their just deserts, so this is a long book (over 600 pages).  I think the length works against it; although the author does a pretty good job of managing some longer arcs, the episodic structure of the book forced on it by the plot does tend to induce an “okay, three down, four to go” mindset on the part of the reader.  I kept on wanting the novel to take a wild left turn and it never really did, although certainly interesting things happen.

But the writing is good and the character development, now that I look back on it in retrospect, is a little more interesting than I gave it credit for at at the time (since I was busy ticking off victims).  Still, I think this would be a better book with a couple fewer villains and a couple fewer main characters.

P.S. I don’t know if this was done specifically as a contrast with the trilogy, or in response to others’ reception of the torture thing there, but here there is a wildly ineffective torture scene.  So although I would actually prefer my novels with no torture scenes at all thanks, it was sort of nice to see this one as a counterbalance.

I discovered Edward Whittemore when his Jerusalem Quartet was republished a few years back and Jeff VanderMeer (author of the awesome City of Saints and Madmen) gushed over it.  I got around three-quarters of the way through that series, and found it simultaneously really interesting and hard to read through.  Quin’s Shanghai Circus, which was written before those books, has many of the same qualities.

It’s a crazy collection of international intrigue and larger-than-life characters who are amped up practically enough to push the book into magical realism.  The structure of the novel, like Whittemore’s other ones, is also odd, like a jigsaw puzzle; a decades-long history interweaving several characters is sketched out, then slowly filled in, almost at random, until the whole story is basically complete.  I have to admit that keeping track of all the puzzle pieces was a little too much for me to handle; I found myself figuring out later that I had missed various “flash-forwards” (early vague references to story elements that were fleshed out later), and when surprising knitting-everything-together revelations occurred, I didn’t always remember exactly what was being knitted together, which kind of lessened the impact.

Plus none of the characters were really sympathetic, which pretty much reduced the whole thing to the assembly of that jigsaw puzzle.  But Whittemore’s jigsaw puzzles are pretty neat, and there were a few really striking scenes and images.  Still, I’m left thinking that I didn’t get everything out of it that he put in, and although I read it pretty fast, that was largely because I was worried that I’d forget the information I needed to make sense of the upcoming events.  Anyway, this is one those mixed reviews you should pick and choose elements from to decide whether you think you would like it; although it didn’t end up doing a lot for me, there are people I would wholeheartedly recommend it to, knowing their likes and dislikes.

This was a weird one. Chip Kidd is a superb book designer; he might be a little overexposed by now, but there was a time when whenever I picked up a book and thought the design was awesome, half the time it was by him.

So this is his first novel, and it is, unsurprisingly, largely about graphic design.  The protagonist is a college student who starts out thinking he’ll be an artist and then discovers the world of design.  Although from page to page I enjoyed the novel a lot, when you step back and look at it from a distance it is sort of three books in succession, and the transitions were a bit jarring for me.

First comes your standard well-told comic tale of college life, stuffed to the gills with wry observations and dry wise-cracks.  It comes off as a little glib, but Kidd does know how to write and it is genuinely entertaining.

Then it turns into a manifesto of design principles.  A teacher shows up who is passionate about graphic design, and a lot of the middle of the book is devoted to him hectoring the class about various postulates and theorems.  This was actually interesting too, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was all mostly here because Kidd himself is passionate about these ideas, wanted to pass on his excitement, and thought that the best way to do so was to stick them in a novel.  It felt a little more like a novel from a hundred years ago in that respect.

Then, just when you are finally comfortable with the novel basically being a hip textbook in a thin fictional wrapper, the drama goes way up; it turns out that most of the characters are not just sort of messed up, but actually really messed up, everything sort of explodes, and you are left wondering where it all came from.

Now, clearly Kidd understood that he was making a book with an odd structure, and had his reasons, but I’m not honestly sure what those reasons were, and the book as a whole felt kind of weird to me.  Again, any individual page was quite entertaining, and I learned a lot of interesting things about graphic design, and I certainly enjoyed the book.  But somehow, once I put it down at the end, it felt like a little less than the sum of its parts. That said, I am still interested in the recent sequel, in which the protagonist apparently finds himself in the real world.  Maybe that will feel a little more grounded.

Iain Pears’s 1998 novel An Instance of the Fingerpost was one of the most addictive novels I’ve read, one of those books where you plan your life around when you’ll get to read it. It’s a long murder mystery set in 17th century England, told by a succession of unreliable narrators who keep exposing the lies and mistaken assumptions of the previous ones. I reread it a year or so ago and it was a bit disappointing — I think a lot of its impact comes from having your assumptions overturned, and when you already know what’s coming you’re largely sitting around waiting for it to happen — but it was a ton of fun the first time around.

Stone’s Fall is a similar sort of novel, this time “about” the European financial empires of the late 19th and early 20th century. As before, the story is told from the viewpoint of a succession of protagonists, each of which explains some of the mysteries left hanging earlier. The schtick this time is that each section takes place earlier in time than the preceding one, so you start out knowing how everything ends, and slowly discover the background that led to it.

As usual, I’m trying to remain spoiler-free, but I can say that I enjoyed it a great deal. Most reviewers seem to agree that the middle section is the most interesting; they tend not to like all three of them, but opinion is divided on whether the first or the last is disappointing. For me it was the last that I had the most trouble staying interested in; I wanted a headlong rush of mystery-resolving surprises, and had to reorient myself to the rather slow pace of the section. But fear not, the main questions do get resolved, and in a satisfying way. If you haven’t read any Pears, I would go for An Instance of the Fingerpost first (and I might even recommend The Dream of Scipio second, although it’s a slightly different sort of book), but if you loved that and were waiting for another similar book, this one shouldn’t disappoint you.

If you know anyone who plays the board game Go, try asking them, “Hey, I learned the rules, I’ve played a bit, and I want to improve; can you recommend a good book?” I will lay even money that they will say, “Go this minute and read Graded Go Problems for Beginners.” GGP is a series of four books containing nothing but hundreds of problems (here’s a position, find the best move) and brief answers. Volume 1 starts with problems that basically just test if you know the rules, and by the time you eventually get through Volume 4 (I can’t, yet), you’re probably a dan player, or expert. You’re led through every basic tactical technique along the way; there’s no more efficient way to improve your game.

While there are tons of chess problem books, I’ve never been able to find a good GGP equivalent. The books are usually either aimed only at beginners, or only at experts, or mix up a bunch of problems of wildly different difficulty in order to keep you on your toes.  But with Chess School I’ve finally found it: a graded problem book series that starts from square one, ends at square sixty-four, and covers every basic tactical technique.  They were originally made for teaching Soviet children, and it’s hard to argue with those results.

There are four volumes, but Chess School 4 is an endgame collection; 1–3 are the real meat of it (to further confuse things, Volume 1 has been split up into 1a and 1b in this edition, and they’re sold separately). Volume 1 starts with mate-in-one problems and ends 1300 positions later with problems that I have to think about and sometimes get wrong (I’m rated 1800, for reference). Volume 2 is really the sweet spot for me. When I was taking chess lessons my teacher would give me homework problems from Volume 3, among other sources, and I’d rack my brains over them for a week; a master could still benefit from working through it.

If you want to improve your chess game and are rated below 2000 or so, there’s no better way than by studying tactics. And if you’re studying tactics, it’s hard for me to make a higher recommendation than these books. It’s not a complete chess course — you’ll need to learn about openings and endgames and strategy elsewhere — but it’s a great foundation.

(Unfortunately, these books can be kind of hard to find in the US. I’ve had good experiences with Chess Books From Europe.)

I had never actually read a book by Philip K, Dick before, despite having seen what must be around twenty movies based on his works. I forget how this particular one — it’s not one of his more famous books — ended up on my reading list, but there it was, and I was in the mood for a shortish science fiction novel.

It was pretty good. There’s a common problem with a lot of speculative fiction, which is that it’s a lot easier to come up with an interesting premise than an interesting plot. So it is here; the premise is pretty cool, and the first half of the book as we slowly uncover it is interesting. Then it turns into a more generic adventure story, and that’s where my interest started to wane.

My attempt to keep these posts spoiler-free is a problem with books like these, since the whole point of the book is discovering the premise, so I feel like I can’t discuss it at all. So I don’t know how much more there is to say. The premise was cool (although totally implausible), the writing was fine, and the characterization was as good as it had to be. Apparently this is pretty early Dick, before he really hit his stride, and I will try to check out something from his classic period.

The other day I was in need of a comfort-food book, and what is more comfort food than Agatha Christie? Only her first couple of books are out of copyright and freely downloadable, so I grabbed the very first one. I read dozens of these as a kid, including this one, although of course I’ve forgotten all the details except for the famous ones like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express.

As a first mystery it’s totally reasonable. I don’t know enough about the history of murder mysteries to know how much Christie innovated and how much she was just good at churning out quality product, so I don’t really know how it compares to similar books from the same period.

It does suffer a little bit from an issue that also often plagues authors of interactive fiction. When writing a work of IF it’s easy to feel that the game you’re writing is too easy, that every puzzle is totally standard and will be solved within minutes by any half-intelligent player. So there’s a temptation to make every puzzle really tricky, and to make every object be used in a non-obvious way. The danger is that the resulting game will be a frustrating collection of tricky exceptions, with no standard puzzles to ground it that those exceptions to play against.

And so it is here; pretty much every clue is not what it seems, and not only is every normal hypothesis overturned, but usually the hypothesis that replaces it is replaced in turn. It is a murder mystery so Christie is careful to ensure that the eventual solution is actually logical, but by that point she’s screwed with you so much that you just throw up your hands and say, “Okay, fine, you win”, rather than “Wow, awesome!” I don’t remember whether she got better at this or whether it’s just a standard trait of her mysteries; if I read a few more I’ll report back.

Another Vance novel — I guess I’ve read over twenty by now —and it pretty much goes according to formula, but hey, I love the formula. An adventurous young man has to achieve his destiny by overcoming a smattering of obstacles on various worlds spanning the galaxy, each of which has some charmingly odd culture and people who love to haggle.

Night Lamp was published in 1996, so it’s pretty late Vance, and it feels kind of loose (not that his novels are ever particularly tight), but everything does pretty much fit together in the end. Around a quarter of the way through, I was thinking, “Hey, this is really good, I wonder if this would be a good recommendation for newcomers to Vance.” But then things slow down a little as the focus shifts to the reminiscences of a second character, and I felt that the pace never quite recovered. In addition, a new plot element (which, to be fair, had been hinted at earlier) popped up literally 90% of the way through the book, mostly just made me feel uncomfortable for the characters involved, and was then resolved in a completely unsatisfying manner. That left a weird taste, and the book was already a bit overlong (close to 400 pages) anyway. So overall I’m not going to put this up there with his best. If you’re not a Vance fan there are better places to start, and if you are you’ll probably read it anyway, and still get some enjoyment out of it. And how many books have as a major plot point a quest to become a member of the exclusive social club the Clam Muffins?^*

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^*One.

Remember when it wasn’t clear if Pynchon was ever going to write another book after Gravity’s Rainbow?  Now he’s practically churning them out.  The mammoth Against The Day was just published a couple of years ago, and now here’s Inherent Vice, which is — well, I guess you’d call it a hard-boiled detective novel, except that private eye Doc Sportello is more often baked than boiled. It’s Southern California circa 1970, and most of the scenes, as Sportello bounces back and forth from one typically paranoia-inducing coincidence to another, seem to involve either looking for weed or being offered it.

Despite the book’s brevity and fairly lighthearted tone, this is definitely Pynchon all right; it’s just that usually the goofiness is there balancing out the deep shit and rhapsodic prose-poetry that occupies the majority of his writing.  Despite all the danger that Sportello gets into, you always get the sense that Pynchon is looking out for him and is not really going to let him come to harm.  This feels like a relatively recent development; I didn’t get that sense from Pynchon’s earlier novels, and for goodness’ sake in Gravity’s Rainbow he lets the main character just kind of disappear two-thirds of the way through.  Maybe he’s mellowing in his old age.

Anyway, it has lots of the things I generally dig about Pynchon.  The sentence-to-sentence prose style is a tasty blend of informal and poetic (as compared to, say, David Foster Wallace’s tasty blend of informal and coldly analytical), and although the characterizations never seem to get that deep, they’re shallow in a pleasing way.

So I definitely did enjoy it, but then again I’m kind of a Pynchon fanatic.  People seem to be claiming that it’s the best way to ease into Pynchon, and I see their point, but I’d actually recommend The Crying of Lot 49 first as a relatively painless introduction to the themes that permeate his work.

These are the first two books of Abraham’s fantasy series The Long Price Quartet; the final one was just published last month.

They are technically fantasy, as I said, but it’s more fantasy in the style of Guy Gavriel Kay; they’re normal human character-driven stories set in a vaguely Asian-style culture that doesn’t happen to exist in reality. Although the existence of the supernatural is important for the culture (largely for economic reasons), the use of magic very rarely enters the plot itself.

These books are excellent in a fairly quiet way. There’s a lot of thinking relative to the amount of doing, but it’s quality thinking. The plot moves at a deliberate pace, but that gives everyone time to react to it instead of being carried along by it as it hurtles to a climax. The characters are well drawn, react believably to the situations they find themselves in, and change interestingly over the course of the books. Some of them have more moral fiber than others, but no one’s purely good or evil, and the “bad” ones have some redeeming qualities while the “good” ones have real and believable weaknesses.

Fifteen years pass between the first and second book, and my understanding is that there are similar gaps between the others. As I said when I reviewed The Judging Eye, I like this approach, as it keeps the plot from getting bogged down too much as the author feels the need to continue every thread left over from the previous book. The later books have just as good reviews, if not better, as the earlier ones, so I will definitely finish the series out.