the geek is not strong in this one

Against my better judgment, I went and borrowed a copy of The Knives of Your Mom or whatever the latest book is, in the never-ending, horribly endless Wheel of Time series, beloved and or hated by geeks the world over.

The whole series started out really good, got better, briefly became great, and then slid downhill with a rapidity that was breathtaking. The series is up to book a hundred and forty three, and I find I care less and less as each one comes out, and I did not understand a good three damn quarters of what the fuck was going on in the last two or three both because I did not exactly retain the increasingly intricate intricacies of the plot and I resolved that I wasn’t reading this stupid series any more, because I don’t care about stupid Rand and woolheads and Light this and Darkfriend that and yank on this, Nynaeve, or I’ll wrap your stupid braid around your stupid throat.

Sorry.

But I stumbled over a copy of the newest in a book store, and the really, really horrible cover art, in which the artist consistently produces people who look kind of like insanely disproportional retarded hunchback midget chimps, made me nostalgic, and I ordered it from interlibrary loan and it came, and I was excited to get it, and then I opened the brick and started to read it and realized I had no idea who any one was or why I cared about them or who I was, and hey! this isn’t backgammon! I tried to read a synopsis of the series so far that I found online, but I still had no idea what was going on. And it is a heavy, heavy book.

With a sinking feeling, I realize that if I want to read this stupid thing, I’m probably going to have to devote some study time beforehand. Study time! Like it is fucking Ulysses. That is clearly just wrong and bad. But I still found myself bookmarking the websites that have got chapter by chapter recountings of each of the books in the series, for slow moments at work when I just go ahead and lose my goddamn mind.

The People of Paper

Salvador Plascencia

I couldn’t do it. It is meant to be startling and original and daringly hypertextual, typographical, marvelous and weird, and I am meant to have loved it and been astounded by it, according to the reviews, but I fucking hated this, and I had to stop reading. I actually had to make myself stop reading it. I realized I was hating it and dreading picking it back up, and it took a lot of talking-to, to make myself admit that I was a grownup who didn’t have to finish anything I don’t want to finish, and which makes me so unhappy.

It made me so unhappy. I hated the typographical gimmicks, and I hated the gimmicky characters who were mechanically propelled by faux postmodern, cheap-ass attempts at magical realist “whimsy” and bullshit, instead of a true-feeling, true-sounding voice. Plascencia was far too involved with his shtick to worry about his characters, and it shows. I tried to keep reading it, and it just continued to infuriate me with its ridiculous, self-conscious posturing. Finally, I put it down and I walked away.

But I have to wonder what I am missing, and if there is anything wrong with me, when I read the glowing reviews.

The Belton Estate

Anthony Trollope

This may well be the first Trollope I have ever picked up, and I began reading it without expectations, and without any recollection of ever learning anything of him or his work, and feeling a little bit ashamed about that, in the way that you do when you stumble on what seems like a big gap in your head.

This was a strange little book – it was reaching towards instructive, and I think it was meant to be quietly revolutionary, with its independent and violently strong-minded heroine who is so clearly a better person than the man she’s supposed to be in love with, who is not interested in musty and uptight societal mores and follows her heart and all that good stuff that feels so modern.

But then it all comes screeching to a halt and the book, and the thought behind the book, feels exactly as old fashioned as you’d expect, and the exciting subversion of patriarchal notions you had been reading into the subtext turns out to have just been an illusion. This is fine if you go in expecting an artifact, but disconcerting when you find you are not exactly sure what your footing is, and what stance you’re meant to take with the text. It was jarring, the swerving forward and back, trying to decide exactly where Trollope was going.

Clara, our strong minded heroine, suddenly falls into a state of despair and lamentation and does not shut the fuck up about being the most woeful person to ever walk the earth, her strong-mindedness starts to come across as idiot pig-headedness, but her eventual submission makes you want to slap her, and the ending, which is telegraphed a million miles ahead takes a million years to arrive and is exactly as predictable as you thought it would be all along, and the ending suddenly swerves into broad and clumsy comedy for no good reason.

But you know, maybe surprisingly, I liked the book. Trollope’s writing is subtle (except for the ending), his psychological insight interesting, his characters strong and well-drawn. The book infuriated me as much as it engaged me, and vice versa, and I think that makes it successful.

Windfall

Rachel Caine

This is book 4 of the Weather Warden series, and I’m a little surprised by how much I am enjoying a series called “Weather Warden.” They are slippery-quick fantasy action things, with a heroine who’s all tough and hot, and action! adventure! shit blowing up! Wry wisecracks! More explosions! The wry asides get really old, sometimes, but you go flying through the book because Caine is good at putting together an adventure plot, with some pretty wicked slick writing.

What is also pretty awesome about this series of books is that there is no preserving of the status quo – situations shift, frequently in a radical way, and there is no counting on anything.

What is seriously not awesome about this particular book in the series is the way the author wrote herself into a corner, so that the entire novel was the heroine needing to solve a problem, but not being allowed to solve it until the end, so as to create the dramatic climax, but which resulted in an entire book of her dicking around and me going “why the fuck aren’t you doing anything? Why are you sitting around acting all dumb and weak! Jesus Christ!”

So there was a lot of action in this book, and stuff happening, but Joanne, our Hot Tough Heroine, was mostly being acted upon, instead of acting, and that was just plain irritating.

However, the ending sets up something pretty cool for the next book, and of course sent me to the Official Website to see when it comes out, which isn’t soon enough.

best of what?

Lots of people making best of and worst of lists, and I am making sad faces, because I don't remember. I don't remember what I read this year, and what was good (though I remember that Middlemarch was really, really good) and what was bad (except that I can recall how very, very bad Written on the Body was), and what I read at all.

I have a terrible, terrible memory, anyway, terrible enough that I spend a good sixty percent of my life convinced I am senile, alzheimeric, or there is something wrong with me and my head and when I am dead at 35 they will saw open my skull and find a giant throbbing tumor where a brain should have been. The other forty percent I spend on candy.

So letting the book list go for awhile, this year, was fatal, and all those books I read (which, now that I try to think about it, and get white searing pains across the backs of my eyeballs, seems to have not been so much an "all those books." I think I read a lot of Georgette Heyer, and a whole lot of nothing, otherwise. Intellectual!) are gone forever down a dark black hole, never to return. Though I can reread them with impunity!

So I'm going to try and do a better job of keeping a book list this year. I think I say that every year. But we'll see how it goes.

Charity Girl

Georgette Heyer

Back to the Heyer I know and love. Charming, though surprisingly brief, a heroine I liked a lot, an ending that wasn't immediately telegraphed, collision courses with wackiness. Not my favorite of all of them, but a pleasure to read, fast and fun.

An Infamous Army

Georgette Heyer

This is pretty unlike any Heyer novel I've ever read, except for Cousin Kate, which was just, despite an engaging hero and an heroine I liked, freaking weird. Infamous Army takes on Waterloo, and is, in consequence, remarkably dense and serious and prosy and chewy and historical, which are all the things I read Heyer to take a break from.

It is Heyer, though, so the writing is excellent, and often lovely, and the characters are brilliant, but the problem is that there are two narratives here, which conflict with each other oddly in tone and temperament. The story of the battle, before and after, is the backbone of the book, and takes up most of the last third of the book. These scenes are incredibly detailed and so not particularly fast-paced, but in Heyer's hands they stay fairly lively and interesting.

The only problem is when the scenes devolve to impersonal minutia. For the most part, she personalizes the war, setting up touchstone characters we care about, to give the reader some leverage inside the chaos. But she can't always pin the story to the characters, and in those pages (and pages and pages) there is a great and overwhelming urge to flip ahead.

The rest of the novel involves the social scene in Brussels (I wanted to write "whirl," there, but that would have been weird. Though it was pretty whirly), and the stormy relationship between two star crossed lovers (I didn't backspace "stormy" against my better judgment. Because it really was stormy! And they really were star-crossed). They are great characters, and I may be making it sound floofy and dumb, but it was as delicate and fun and light as anything Heyer has ever written, and so made for a bizarre kind of contrast to the heavy like bricks subject matter of the rest of the novel.

She almost just barely manages to pull it off – she documents the shift in tone in the town and manages to tie the story lines together in a satisfyingly parallel well, but when it was all war, war, war, I found myself impatient to get back to the two crazy kids.

Still, it's a good book, if a little strange in tone, though a bear to sludge through. Took me a surprisingly long time to finish.