The Book Thread - January 2012

Currently reading A Path to Coldness of Heart, Glen Cook’s newest (last?) Dread Empire book. A 14-year gap between books exceeds even Martin, but Cook doesn’t disappoint. Enjoying it so far.

Finished Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, a book which at first seemed to be about a bunch of kids at an Irish prep school, but turned out to be about how there is no God, love is empty, sex is destructive, the evil are rewarded and the good perish. Dark, man, dark. To continue with the dark Irish theme, I am now reading The Book of Evidence by John Banville. Very strong Humbert Humbert vibes from the protagonist/narrator, so far (no pedo, though).

I haven’t read those books since High School but I have fond memories of several of them:

Usher’s Passing – A sequel to Poe’s Fall of The House of Usher
Swan Song – A very enjoyable ripoff of King’s The Stand set after a nuclear holocaust
Stinger – The literary equivalent of the movie Tremors, released well before the movie I believe
The Wolf’s Hour – Werewolf spy vs Nazis. Great stuff.

I finished You Are Not So Smart and loved it. Should be required reading, really. Your brain is your enemy. You must not trust it.

I moved from that to a brand new printing of Nick Blinko’s The Primal Screamer, which is Lovecraftian Horror meets Anarcho-Punk. I’m usually quite weary of Cthulhu meets Noun books, but Nick Blinko was the lead singer, guitarist of Anarco-Punk/DeathRock band Rudamentary Peni who recorded an album devoted to HP Lovecraft in 1987. So well before the internet mash up culture came along and ruined everything.

The book is told from the perspective of an analyst who is brought in to deal with the character Nat after a suicide attempt and the book takes the form of a doctor’s journal tracking progress.

It’s a very short book lasting only 120 pages so I’ll finish this either today or tomorrow. I made it a quarter of the way through just on my train ride in to work this morning.

So far, there is no weirdness, but this edition by PM Publishing, best known for punk rock related books is filled with Nick’s artwork which had been done for many previous versions.

I just re-read It. Man, King sure knew how to write a book back then. I had not read the book in many many years. I had actually forgotten much of the detail of the book. What a great time I had…if you have never read it or haven’t in many years, it will definitely keep you up at night.

Now I am just floundering a bit…reading through some old Thieve’s World stories trying to decide what to jump on next. Thanks to these threads, I have a pretty fair list of books lined up. I just need to decide what flavor the next one will be.

Thieves World? Seriously? That jumped the shark pretty early, as I recall, but for some reason I kept reading for a while. At some point they seemed to get tired of the main plot and brought in this invasion of snake people from nowhere, something like that, right? I blame Janet Morris, but maybe that was someone else’s fault. These shared-world things always seem to run off the rails at some point, maybe when some of the better contributors get tired of it, or maybe just because that’s how it goes with them.

I thought King’s new one, 11/22/63 was a pretty nice return to form. One of his better books in the past few years.

Just finished Altered Carbon for the second time. Love that book.

I’m reading James Boice’s The Good and The Ghastly and I have pretty mixed feelings about it so far. I’m about 100 pages in and I still haven’t completely bought in which is not a good sign but I’m sticking with it. I read a lot of darkly themed fiction so it’s not the subject matter that’s bothering me so much as his handling of it. The prose is a bit forced an the whole thing is trying too hard to be clever but there are nuggets of brilliance in there and I’ve heard good things so I’m trying to keep n open mind.

Briefly, it’s set in the 34th century; Following a nuclear holocaust civilization has rebuilt itself pretty much along the same lines as before. Everything is much the same as it was in the 20th century with some minor differences. Everything is owned by Visa (clever!) and there is only one of every product (Tobacco Company Cigarettes, Expensive Restaurant, etc.) The narrative voice switches all over the place, from third, to first to second person and the central character so far is a sociopath with no redeeming qualities.

Good memories of all these here. In case you don’t know, there was a final Dumarest novel printed by a small press awhile back…

I’m reading The Ruling Sea.

I’m currently reading Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor.

Thomas M Disch called this one of the best horror / sci-fi books in a back issue I have of The Twilight Zone Magazine. As I found myself without anything immediately jumping off my shelf, I grabbed this to read. Don’t quite know what to make of it just yet.

I think a guy has fled the Earth to the stars with his family in hypersleep so they can escape a poisonous political climate only to go insane.

This is another super short one (166 pages), so I may finish today or tomorrow.

Haa, I think you are correct about Janet Morris…anyway I still have fond memories. Plus since it primarily consists of short stories, as soon as I spend some time with my list, I can start a “real book”.

Working on the third of Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy (yes, that’s the guy that wrote Winter’s Bone), having finished the previous two over the last day or two. (They are less than 200 pages each.). Good stuff, if occasionally a little overdone with the poetic descriptions.

The first book’s a murder plot and introduces us to the protagonist, former boxer and childhood hellraiser Rene Shade, now a police detective, as well as other local players and the city itself. Shade’s basically morally upright but grew up with crooks and ne’erdowells, many of whom frequent the bar his older brother runs, and pried himself away from that lifestyle with a certain amount of difficulty for reasons that aren’t entirely clear even to him. The murder’s that of a local politician, and because of the profile has additional complications.

The second book deals with a violent stickup crew knocking off high stakes gambling games protected by the local godfather, who manage to murder a cop in the process and thus bring down both sides of the law on their head.

The third looks like it’s going to be about the abrupt reappearance of Shade’s pool shark father, John X., who ran out on the family years ago and has only occasionally drifted through town since. This time, though, he’s got a ten year old daughter in tow and is being pursued by a hardcase whose 47 thousand dollars have gone missing from a safe behind the bar John X. tended. (John X. didn’t steal 'em - that was his daughter’s mother, who skipped town already on her lonesome.)

I just got done re-reading J.V. Jones’ The Baker’s Boy. I remember really enjoying this when I first read it. My opinion’s changed slightly. It’s stuffed full of Snidely Whiplash villains twirling their mustaches at each other and couple of particularly inept Dudley Do-Rights. Combine that with a perplexing fascination for offal, a dogged commitment to promote the abuse of women and a puerile fascination with female sexuality and you have whatever the hell this was. I can remember eagerly awaiting the next book in the series and I have no earthly idea why. It goes on forever and then when it finally does end, it just stops. About the only thing I can say about all of the terribleness that happens in this book is that at least it happens to terrible people, so okay I guess?

Couldn’t make myself start reading the Dumarest novels, so took a detour to finally reading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

I can’t read some of these “masterworks”. Some on reading seem like they are included due to the nostalgia of whoever selected them. This however, from start to end stood out as a remarkable piece of work that I enjoyed reading all the way through.

Now I am reading Glen Cook’s Dread Empire series, even though I know I am already regretting it. I have come to believe based on my experience with this, and the Black Company series, that he does not have the ability to maintain quality of work past the first novel. I read the first two books yesterday, and started on the third. The first book was great, the second seemed somewhat forced and unimaginative (despite having some really good parts) and the third… so far feels phoned in. But I guess not everyone can be Jack Vance.

I love Cat’s Cradle, I think it’s my favorite Vonnegut work.

I finished The Ones You Do, the third Bayou Trilogy book from Daniel Woodrell today on the bus home. The first two books were solid, characterful thrillers with a noir tinge, building on the shared characters and setting well, but the third is flat out amazing, in my opinion. There’s some thriller to it, certainly - the wronged criminal setting out to recover his stolen money is a continual ominous backdrop to the main thrust of the book. But all in all, it’s much more about family, whether it be the nascent potential of Tip Shade and pregnant hippie girl Gretel, or the complicated, uncertain direction of Rene Shade and his lover Nicole, or the broken marriage of cuckolded Stew, or, ultimately, the family John X. Shade chose to leave and the family that left him. And it’s an excellent character portrait of John X., once the debonair, heartbreaking pool hustler, now an aging alcoholic, nerves and eyesight ruined by his bad habits, and with little left to him other than the children he never sought. I loved it.

I thought this would be the thread to ask, will there be a separate thread for the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge this year?

I finished the series last night, and was left liking the setting and much of the story. It would have to be one of my favourite settings, and I liked that he didn’t explain or justify everything in detail. I ended up skimming lots of the padding, but that was fine and didn’t get in the way of the better bits.

[Spoiler=]There is a whole arc related to underage girlfriends being okay, molestation being bad and so forth. It’s medieval times, whatever. But this whole arc, and most of the text related to the characters who were solely involved because of it, seemed like a combination of wish fulfilment by the author or just plain padding.

It’s also almost like the series was started as a pure fantasy novel with mythological forces behind it (norns, furies… or something), and then around the third or fourth novel, the author decided he’d rather have it backed by sci-fi technology allusions (gate tech, magic as leakage from gate tech).[/Spoiler]
Totally recommended, if you can skim lots of text that should have been edited out.

Some of the later books in the Dread Empire are better than the trilogy books, mainly because Mocker and Nepanthe are extremely annoying.

I liked the one about the Shinsan peasant general fighting the undead army.

I usually like Cook,but I bought one of the Dread Empire collections, and gave up after the first book because of Mocker.