Fool Moon

Jim Butcher

So this was bad. Not fun bad, or entertaining bad, or trashy bad, but just bad. Boy howdy, do I hate the main character, who I continually wanted to punch in the face. I think he is supposed to be macho and tough and outrageously cool and isn't awesome how principled and awesome he is? Except it isn't, because he is irritating and preachy and snotty and full of himself, and I hate him and the story went on forever and he kept being an asshole, and when he dresses so badly and acts so poorly and is so irritating, how does he get insanely beautiful women to love him? I think the answer, my friends, is Mary fucking Sue.

I'm going to give one more of these a try, before I throw up my hands in disgust, but I do not have high hopes.

The Stolen Child

Keith Donohue

The interconnected stories of a changeling who steals the life of a boy, and the boy who becomes a faery in his place. It was a strangely subdued and quiet book, well-written and often moving, but there is a surface gloss to the story that kept me from really understanding the undercurrents, what Donohue was trying to say about a child's place in a family, growing up, feeling alienated, especially parents dealing with damaged children. In the last third of the book, you start to get a little bit of that, and then it is over, and you've got a story that was somehow deflating.

The book's gotten a lot of attention and good reviews, however, so maybe I am missing something.

Storm Front

Jim Butcher

I used to read romance novels, until I could no longer stand the formulas. I got cynical! Or maybe just bored. I kept reading them for a few years, but with hate in my heart, because I have a need for junk food kind of reading, sometimes. And I like to punish myself, apparently.

Then, I found the paranormal genre – ever so slightly different from sci-fi or fantasy, usually mystery stories with a kickass protagonist, using magic or being magical or paranormal to beat the bad guys and Have! Exciting! Adventures! They are silly books, but they are fun, and usually a lot smarter than the romances I used to read (with the exception of Crazy Laurell K).

So I keep looking for new authors and series to read, while the authors I’ve already found get their asses in gear and write a new damn book, already. I ran into the Harry Dresden series about a year ago, but didn’t pick them up because I was into the girls kicking ass genre of paranormal books. Then the SciFi channel series showed up, and I started hearing about how the books-are-so-much-better, and I finally broke down and picked up the first book in the series.

It’s got the mystery, the magic, the ass-kicking protagonist, the absorbing, quick-reading thing I want in a junkfood book. It’s also incredibly masculine-feeling. Mr. Harry Dresden is an old-fashioned chauvinist, all the women are described, fashion-and-beauty-wise from head to toe, and it was just masculine, in its attitudes and outlook. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something that surprised me. Though I guess it shouldn’t have, seeing as the book was written by a man named “Jim Butcher.” That is a very manly name.

I liked this, and it was fun and fast and Butcher did a remarkable job of setting up an incredibly rich backstory for Harry that was never entirely explicated, which sets up a lot of material for the upcoming books. Which I think I’ll be picking up. It is exciting to have a new series to plow through.

Moscow to the End of the Line

Venedikt Erofeev

I’ve studied Latin American authors in school, back when I was young and innocent, and then later when I was old and less innocent, and somewhere in there was triggered a love for the magical realism that is so often a hallmark of those writers. And I went around thinking that they had the market cornered on the peculiarly imaginative, flight of fancy style of writing that makes me so happy. Why didn’t any one tell me about modern Russian literature?

It could be that modern Russian literature is not, in fact, characterized by surrealism and the beautiful profane, and that I have simply lucked into two Russian authors who are similar in their approach to the novel (i.e., exploding it in one way or the other). So I will test my theory, in the future.

In the meantime, I loved Moscow to the End of the Line. It is the story of a man, drunk and heartsick, traveling to see his lover and his child. It’s a monologue about culture and history, music, art, literature, politics and the Russian soul. It gets stranger and more surreal as the narrator gets drunker and drunker, and abruptly plummets back to earth at the end. It is hilarious and weird and sad, a tiny little book that feels much bigger than it actually is.

Hart & Boot & Other Stories

Tim Pratt

Oh, this was so good. A collection of stories that is imaginative, weird and fun in the way that something extra-imaginative and inventive can be. Tim is creating his own mythologies, and in that way I can see why he is compared to Neil Gaiman, but the writing styles are so different – Tim’s is much more straightforward and frank, I think, and I was thinking about how he generally likes a happy ending, which I am so down with, until I got to Tyrant in Love because whoa.

Rarely, I like every story in a collection – this time I liked every story, and loved some in particular. Living with the Harpy is Tim believing in happy endings; Hart and Boot has one of my favorite endings ever and showcases his strong female leads; Dream Engine was weird and marvelous, and Cup and Table just blew me away – spectacularly epic, such a good last line. And his author photo cracked me up.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Lewis Buzbee

A tiny book about the history of books and booksellers, and also about the history of the author and his love for books. Though sometimes he falls into a didactic, sweeping narrative when he is over on the history side of things, in the memoir sections the voice is lovely and eloquent, and if you love books and you are down with bookstores, you'll nod your head as you read along.

The Sweetheart Season

Karen Joy Fowler

It's taken me a couple of days to write anything about this book, because I'm not sure exactly what to say about it. I liked it very much as I read it – it seems to be a slow-paced meditation on small town life, and what it is like to be a woman after World War II, and it was written in a lovely way and was interesting and seemed to go on forever, but that was okay, because it was nice. And I loved the idea of a narrator telling the story of another person's life, the imaginative I voice, which is something I did in my own book but not entirely successfully so it is exciting to see it work

But then I got to the ending, very last paragraph, the whiplash, the lightning rod, the beautiful black and vicious humor of it, the supernatural strangeness and brilliance of it, and I became sorely, deeply disappointed. The book should have been half as long; the book should have had twice as much of that feeling and emotion behind it as the ending. I had the feeling it was meant to be, behind the surface, delivering as powerful a message as the final paragraph does, but if it did – I missed it somewhere in the slow and steady pace of the plot.

Maybe I would have hated a book with a message. But I think Fowler could have done it without making it a clonking mess. I would have liked a book with more passion and fire, for sure – half the time, the main character, Irini, she did not seem accessible at all. She was distant and hard to know, which is ironic, given that she was the viewpoint character the narrator, her daughter, chooses to use.

I still think I am become a fan of Fowler and her sharpness and imagination and her ability to evoke an era and the loveliness of her language.