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Thoughts on Reading: Confessor

Jun13

Confessor is the last of a long cycle by Terry Goodkind. Once again, I haven’t read the others; it’s just something I found on my shelf.

I enjoyed the writing. There was extensive philosophical dialogue that was nicely handled. It made me realised that my characters tend to talk in short, clipped bursts, trading swifts sentences back and forth. I think I could mix it up a bit and include some longer bits.

Goodkind also uses a lot of interior monologue. It occasionally borders on info dump, if that term can be used for emotional/intellectual exploration. Again, something that needs expanding in my own writing and this offers a good example of how to do it.

On the other hand, it is quite a violent book – one of the themes is the use of violence and where it might be appropriate, in ‘just’ wars, for example – and quite a bit of the violence is sexualised. Goodkind appears to be making the point that violence against women is bad and is labouring it somewhat. What that does mean is that there are many female characters playing a variety of roles, which is good for representation of women.

So, I liked this. The writing was good and the ideas were thought provoking. I will go back and start at the beginning of the cycle.

In non-fiction, I read Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom. It’s ok. I bought it thinking it would be quite heavyweight, but it wasn’t. It’s a good introduction to advertising techniques if that’s new to you.

Reflections on alt.fiction 2010

Jun12

Wow, what a difference two years makes. I’ve just got back from alt.fiction 2010 and it was thought-provoking and inspiring.

I went to alt.fiction 2008 and it was a fun event. I met some people and learnt some things about writing and getting published, but it wasn’t such an amazing experience that I was keen to come back again. The organisation and sessions had an amateurism that doesn’t appeal to me. I have some experience in professional event organisation, which may make me harsher than others, and the little things are important to the overall impression of the day. We all have our quirks, right?

2009 didn’t happen. I know what the reasons were; I think it had to do with funding and logistical support. Given an extra year, and the fact that I have friends in Derby, I thought it would be fun to go again. I wasn’t expecting too much.

This time round both the organisation and panels were better. The event seemed smoother and there were plenty of helpful staff on hand to keep things under control. The panellists (many of whom were the same as 2008) stepped up to the smarter venue and better organisation. The disucssions were erudite and intelligent and I was inspired by the conversations. It reminded me that there’s nothing that’s more fun than talking about books and writing, especially specultative fiction.

I couldn’t attend every session. From what I did attend, this is what I’m taking away with me:

  • Writing can be a career. You have to decide what you want from it and treat it in the same way you would any other career.
  • A web presence is essential.
  • Chasing the market doesn’t work. Write what you need to write – the market will catch up with you.
  • I have so much reading to do…

I’m definitely going next year. Maybe by then I’ll have worked up the courage to talk to a publisher about my novel.

Jarka Ruus

May24

As I’m working my way through my enormous pile of unread books, which is not getting any smaller as I keep adding to it, not that I have some sort of addiction to buying books, I’m reading books that are in a series where I haven’t read the first one. The first of these is Jarka Ruus by Terry Brooks. It’s the first in the High Druid of Shannara trilogy which is part of the larger Shannara cycle and I’ve not read any of the others.

Still, the large amounts of exposition in the book mean that doesn’t matter too much. The plot, loosely, is that a very powerful sorceress is trapped in a shadow world of extreme evil and her teenaged nephew and his sidekicks have to rescue her. Not a complex plot, but well handled it could have been very good. As it was, I found myself unhappy with the trope that small boy rescues grown woman as a coming of age rite of passage. The sorceress, Grianne, is supposed to be the most fearsome magic user in the world and yet her part in the story seems mostly to be standing around waiting.

I didn’t find the dialogue convincing; it felt too contemporary, too familiarly colloquial. The characterisation was a bit ropey and the characters didn’t really seem to have any depth to them Overall, I didn’t enjoy this and I don’t think I’ll be picking up any more.

Priestess of the White

Mar7

Priestess of the White by Trudi Canavan is not a small book. It’s the first part of a trilogy and is a massive 650 pages. The first hundred or so of these pages made me feel that finishing it would be a chore. It didn’t turn out to be, but I can’t say it turned into a real page turner either.

Priestess of the White is an epic tale of religious war between the good White and the evil Black sorcerors from the south. Problematic. I tried very hard not to draw conclusions about who was supposed to be good and evil, but in the end I was left with the idea that the author was deliberately employing stereotypical symbolism. White equals good, kind, just, true and right. Black equals evil, trickery, cruelty, lies and wrongness. These days I’m not comfortable with these racist constructions.

Compounding this are the inevitable religious parallels. Again through the use of familiar symbolism White is associated with christianity (good) and Black with paganism (evil).

I don’t know if this was deliberate on the part of the author or whether this was a case of lazy worldbuilding. Much fantasy is based on historial societies and transfers the insitutions, economics and social dynamics wholesale. Done well (e.g. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch) this can provide a solid base for a recognisable and believable world. I think that a lot of care needs to be taken that the fantasy world is more than a thin veneer.

Done badly, it becomes hard for the reader to immerse themselves in the fantasy world. I was wondering if it was meant to be allegory and thinking that if it was, it wasn’t clear what Canavan was trying to say.

Characterisation was okay, in some respects quite superficial but better than some stuff I’ve read recently. The same goes for the writing. It was unsophisticated but not the worst I’ve read lately. It did pick up as the story got going. By and large, Canavan avoided big chunks of exposition, which was nice. Overall, I felt that it lacked depth and in a book of this length that’s a real problem.

I think I will read the rest of the trilogy at some point because there were some ambiguities in the ending that suggest that Canavan is preparing to subvert and confound the assumptions she’s set up. I would really like to see that.

The non-fiction interlude was Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World by Simon Garfield. This was fascinating, full of lots of interesting things to know and less of a biography than an exploration the impact of the discovery of synthetic colour.

City of Beasts

Mar5

I haven’t read Harry Potter. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only adult in the world that hasn’t and the reason is that I’m not a child and therefore I don’t read children’s literature. Plus, I have an uncontrollable contrarian streak that prevents me from partaking in mass cultural crazes, which is why I don’t have an ipod either.

Any how, sometimes it is really hard to tell what is YA and what isn’t, especially if you’re not in a bookshop where they’ve conveniently categorised everything for you. At my office there’s a book drop where people can pick up and leave books. Handy when I unexpectedly finish a book on the way in and then have nothing left to read on my hour and a half commute home.

The first book I pulled out of the book drop was City of Beasts by Isabel Allende. On the whole, I enjoyed it very much but I found it took a while to get going. There’s a fair bit of exposition at the beginning and the language often feels a little stilted. Once into it, it’s a very engaging tale of a young boy travelling with his grandmother to the Amazon jungle and discovering a magical, strange city of beasts. It is quite fantastical and does raise the question about where the boundary between fantasy and magical realism lies. The structure is mythic and it has an old-fashioned feel about it – but in a way that is charming rather than patronising.

I googled the book because it’s been a few weeks between reading it and getting round to posting here, and I discovered that this is Allende’s first YA novel and that there are two sequels. I don’t think I’ll make an effort to read the sequels but I would certainly recommend it for teenagers.

Adventures in reading

Feb14

It’s been a while, but mainly because I’ve been writing a short story, so no apologies. Since I’ve been away I’ve cracked through lots of books and thus here comes a huge post.

Following on from the epic Martin Chuzzlewit I finished off Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, one of the many half-read books lying around my house. It had some interesting material but there are better examples of this type of book out there.

Moving on from there I felt that I wanted something light, so I chose A Wicked Liaison by Christine Merrill. It’s a Mills & Boon Historical Romance and quite far from my usual choice. I have it (and a few others) because my writing group did a workshop on writing for Mills & Boon and getting some examples was for follow up research. Anyway, I feel violated. On a content level, this offended me. On a writing level it does offer some interesting observations of what is missing from the book. What is there is well written, it’s just that there is so much that is left out. There is very little world building (as it is set in Regency London). We are offered little in the way of description, hardly any smells, sounds or kinesthetic input. The book takes place completely in the mind and we are entirely caught up in the thoughts of the two protagonists. This does make it very intense but the inner monologues are quite repetitious. Ugh. Did not like.

My non-fiction interlude was Earth Path by Starhawk, which I loved.

Then, due to an unscheduled trip to Doncaster, I read February’s book club book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It was an interesting style. The author chose a monologue for the whole book and the writing was wonderfully tight. What was there was very well done but, for me, the style made it distancing. It felt like an intellectual novel not an emotional one. Disappointing, because it could have been much more powerful.

After my unpleasant toe-dip in to romance, I felt a strong need to return to speculative fiction, in the form of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. I find that Dick’s novels are very much the fiction of ideas. I did notice lots of new words for not-so-new concepts and at one point it did feel a bit overwhelming. I loved the idea of stress being measured in units of Freuds. Having said that, the world-building was great. The book plays with the idea of reality, the nature of god and altered states of consciousness. I really liked it.

Following that I read The Introverted Leader: Building on your Quiet Strength by Jennifer B. Kahnweiler, which I found really inspiring and helpful.

Then I picked Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder (I’m noticing a lot of people using middle initials today). I think I’m going right off the use of the first person in the long form. The story had potential but the writing was unsophisticated. I couldn’t make up my mind up whether it was YA fiction or not; in the end I decided that even if it was, it could still be held to the same standards as anything else. There was too much tell and too much ‘Yelena had worried about/planned for/thought’ where we hadn’t been given that previously. The world-building and characterisation lacked depth. It also committed the cardinal sin (in my eyes, at any rate) of not being internally consistent with levels of technology, clothing, dialogue, etc. I couldn’t fix an historical period in my mind. Characters fought with swords, lived in castles and used magic but then had factories and used incredibly modern dialogue. For me, it was distracting and annoying. The dialogue as a whole was not well done; often I felt that the dialogue didn’t reflect the characters as they were described. The relationship between the protagonist and her love interest was pure Mills & Boon and was so creepy. Not good. And there are two more in the series.

Most recently, I’ve read Belching out the Devil by Mark Thomas, which is an exploration of Coca Cola’s activities in the world. I may not be able to drink pop again.

Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero

Jan7

Ah, comic fantasy. There’s plenty of it out there, even if some people insist that Terry Pratchett is the only author in the genre. Humour is a very personal thing and my sense of humour is quite idiosyncratic, so I generally don’t read too much of it.

I picked up Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero by Dan Abnett in a post-christmas impulse shop in Waterstones. On this occasion I was swayed by an hot boy on the cover and an admirable commitment to voice in the blurb. I wasn’t expecting much, just a bit of fun.

And it was indeed fun. I laughed out loud quite a lot, which was occasionally embarrassing on the train. Abnett is a good writer and his elizabethan twenty-first century is an engaging world, although it did strain my suspension of disbelief somewhat that fashion and architecture wouldn’t have changed in all that time. However, the book is so entertaining that it really doesn’t matter.

There’s quite a bit of head hopping which I normally don’t like but as the narrator is kept well away from the action for the majority of the time, it works on this occasion. I think it is an indication of Abnett’s skill that he is able to do this.

The character’s are well-drawn, the dialogue is good, the world-building is good and all the loose ends get wrapped up tidily. Highly recommended – for those with a well-developed sense of the ridiculous.

The Steel Remains

Dec1

Well, it’s been a busy time lately, what with finishing up one job and preparing for the next. One last work-related out of town trip didn’t help either.

Tomorrow I start my new job with all that entails and I’m looking forward to getting back into a routine. As I’ll be commuting, I plan to read lots, which means lots of posts on what I’ve been reading. I hesitate to call them reviews because they are more like musings. Anyway, to get in to the mood, lately I’ve finished:

The Steel Remains, by Richard Morgan. I picked this up because I’d heard it compared to Joe Abercrombie’s work (I’m such a fangirl; it’s embarrassing). This I found to be both true and not true. And I found that there were things I liked and things I didn’t.

It was a stand-alone novel in a sea of trilogies and series.

I liked that the protagonist was a marginalised minority in his world and that his experiences reflected the shocking, traumatic reality of someone in that position. I liked that the three main characters were all, in some way, outsiders and that it was done without romanticising their positions. These aren’t glorious, loner heroes nobly serving the community. They are damaged people making limited choices. Just like us.

The book is quite bleak and driven by bitterness and anger. I thought that the characters’ awareness of the consequences of their experiences was realistic. Sometimes they faced what had happened to them in the past and was happening to them now and acknowledged how it shaped them, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they saw themselves clearly and at others they were self-deluding.

I also liked the sex scenes. A couple of days ago, I was sent a news story about the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards and it reminded me that it is apparently difficult to write sex well. Richard Morgan writes sex very well. He whips up an emotional response without losing touch with the earthiness of the act. Brilliant.

As an aside, I wonder if the reason so many great literary names find themselves on the Bad Sex in Fiction Award shortlist is because they’re not that good at writing and sex scenes show up the weaknesses in convoluted, pseudo-intellectual prose. Or perhaps I’m just being snarky. What do you think?

What I didn’t enjoy so much was the rushed ending. At the start of the book we follow three characters who have a shared history and whose lives are being disrupted by similar events. The convention of fantasy fiction is that at some point these three paths will merge. Morgan draws this point out right until the very end. Then, when the three characters come together, the final scenes happen in what seems like a small number of pages. As I was nearing the end of the book and the three hadn’t met I found myself wondering if this was a trilogy after all. While I appreciate that life is often a slow build up to a brief climax leaving you vaguely disappointed, this was perhaps a touch too much realism for the novel.

I felt the exposition was handled in a slightly clumsy way and there were several points where the reader was taken out of the action into interior monologue. This was particularly true at the beginning of the book.

And all the swearing! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually mind swearing. I enjoy the full use of a wide vocabulary. It felt a little heavy handed though. Too much spice for the stew.

All in all, I enjoyed it and I’d recommend it. Unless you don’t like brutal, gritty, realistic depictions of life.

Best Served Cold – or with a nice cup of tea and a comfy sofa

Jun30

Because once picked up, it’s quite hard to put down again. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie arrived last night and threw all my (admittedly vague) plans for doing something constructive into disarray.

I very much enjoyed The First Law trilogy. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that it restored my faith in fantasy (along with Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora). But there’s always the worry that the next book won’t be as good. It’s happened before.

Happily, Best Served Cold was as good and I spent yesterday evening curled up on the sofa reading. If you don’t want to take my word for it, here’s an extract. I didn’t dare bring it to work to read at lunchtime.