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New Review: Glen Cook's The Black Company
February 27, 2002 (7:20 PM) ( link ) ADDED a review of Glen Cook's The Black Company. Whew—what a depressing book. In order to make up for it, I'm going to be reading Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, a childhood classic that I remember fondly.
The next few days should see a couple of graphic novel reviews coming up, including Daniel Quinn's The Man Who Grew Young and possibly another Authority book by Warren Ellis. After that I will seriously hunker down with An Equal Music.
Borges's Ficciones continues. I really, really liked "The Babylonian Lottery" and "The Library," both of which were fascinating ideas with equally fascinating extrapolations. I almost wish, though, that Borges had fleshed out his ideas more; right now, they seem sort of slight, stated as baldly as they are. The story I'm currently on ("Funes") is completely baffling. I don't think I like it. Ultimately Ficciones is turning out to be something of a mixed bag, and my opinion of it as a whole is not particularly favorable. But maybe I just don't understand the deeper significances of everything Borges is writing? Who knows.
New Review: Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Dream Hunters
February 26, 2002 (8:23 PM) ( link ) ADDED a review of Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Dream Hunters. I am now about halfway through Borges's Ficciones, which continues to perplex me. Cook's The Black Company is just getting more and more depressing by the minute—hardly a pleasant experience, since it's just a bit too bleak for my tastes.
Today I went to the Cambridge Public Library and checked out an enormous stack of comic books and graphic novels. Sandman: The Dream Hunters is the first of the batch that I've read; also included are some more titles by Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, and others. Perhaps the most exciting book I got is Frank Miller's sequel to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It's only one-third of the sequel, since the last two-thirds haven't been published yet, but it should be fun to read.
Because I haven't had much time to read novels, I'll be posting reviews of graphic novels in my spare time instead. But then, there's always the thesis monster. Rar.
Old news updated
February 20, 2002 (3:13 PM) ( link ) Whoo! I managed to update most of the links in my older news entries so that the links should now link to the book reviews. Unfortunately, I also changed the naming conventions when I switched over to this new site design, so no doubt there'll be some errors still. I'll catch them soon.
Reading, post-Taltos, is non-existent. This weekend is thesis and Mock Trial; afterward is just pure thesis. I should be able to finish The Black Company and Ficciones soon anyway, just from casual reading, and I might even have some graphic novel reviews up. But until 29 days from now, when my thesis is due, please, please don't tempt me with fiction.
New Review: Steven Brust's Taltos
February 19, 2002 (6:23 PM) ( link ) ADDED a review of Steven Brust's Taltos. A much better book than most of the recent Vlad books, though not quite as good as Jhereg.
The rest of my reading proceeds poorly. That is because it is time to work on thesis. It is time to work on thesis. It is time to work on thesis. IT IS TIME TO WORK ON THESIS!!!!!
An Equal Music and Comic Books
February 13, 2002 (3:25 AM) ( link ) I haven't done any reading recently, at all. It's pretty sad. However, I did make it to the Cambridge Public Library today, where I checked out Vikram Seth's An Equal Music and one volume each from Warren Ellis's Stormwatch and Transmetropolitan series (both graphic novels). I think reading An Equal Music will be easier than reading A Suitable Boy, for several reasons. First, it's shorter. Second, I love music. Third, I am a sucker for this type of story—the end of James Joyce's "The Dead" teared me up, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials moved me despite its other inadequacies, and, hell, I even had to blink rapidly at the end of "My Best Friend's Wedding." (I also hunt cute animals and wrestle alligators in my spare time, which makes up for whatever girliness you think this implies.) So An Equal Music should be a good read. Perhaps it will inspire me to read A Suitable Boy afterward as well.
Warren Ellis's work is something else entirely. I really like Stormwatch, although I think Ellis is terrible at actually setting things up. (I might have reviews of two of his Stormwatch books soon, where I can explain things better.) But I'm starting to dislike Transmetropolitan. Random violence, nastiness, and expletives just don't do it for me. Is this what "edgy" is supposed to be? Hey: Frank Miller's Batman - The Dark Knight Returns was edgy, cool, and compelling long before Ellis became a big name in comics. I can only take so much of Spider Jerusalem expletive-filled rantings and various cruelties before I stop finding the excess funny.
This reminds me: another one of Ellis's series that I find really interesting, though not entirely good, is his work on Planetary. I mean, what the hell is this supposed to be about? In part I haven't posted a review because I don't feel I really understand the work yet. But at some point, after rereading the Planetary trade paperback at least one more time, I'll try putting up a brief review.
Glen Cook, Borges, Tolkien
February 10, 2002 (2:24 PM) ( link ) Reading continues slowly despite my other obligations. Recently I have been focusing on Glen Cook's The Black Company and Borges's Ficciones.
The Black Company has great atmosphere—not as good as Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, but compelling nonetheless. It's true, as I read in many reviews of this series, that the book focuses primarily (even claustrophobically) on everyday soldiers caught up in struggles too large for them to really comprehend. In The Black Company, the struggle seems to be between a group of powerful and evil wizards bent on destroying one another. Of course, each one is also subservient to a larger power—the Dominator and his Lady, whose roles I haven't yet quite figured out. And these greater powers have no qualms about using the men of the Black Company without regard for safety.
One benefit of this common-man approach to storytelling is that moments of awe are rare but inspiring. For instance, at one point the Black Company comes into contact with one of the evil wizards who are using them as pawns. Cook gives us this description. It looked as tall as a house and half as wide. It wore scarlet bleached by time, moth-eaten, and tattered. It came up the street in a sort of shamble, now fast, now slow. Wild, stringy grey hair tangled around its head. Its bramble patch of a beard was so thick and matted with filth that its face was all but invisible. One pallid, liver-spotted hand clutched a pole of a staff that was a thing of beauty defiled by its bearer's touch. It was an immensely elongated female body, perfect in every detail. Someone whispered, "They say that was a real woman back during the Domination. They say she cheated on him." Excellent. On the other hand, Cook's approach also means that, even halfway through the book, the plot feels aimless, meandering. With so little control over their own actions, the Black Company sort of moves from one mission to another without any real sense of purpose. Partly because of this, all of the characters also seem cold and slightly off—although this does contribute to the book's atmosphere.
Borges's Ficciones is still baffling as hell. So far I've read only two stories in it, each one about a fictional book. The stories are dense and confusing, written with a clearly erudite hand. I don't know if I like them.
I have a confession to make: although I should be reading new fiction (and even thesis books, every once in a while), I admit that I've taken to dipping into JRR Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring every once in a while over the past few days. It's such a comfort to read it—even if it's only a few pages at a time, I know immediately where I am, what just happened, and what is about to happen. So far I haven't even left the Shire yet, and it's astonishing to me how such an idyllic beginning can lead to the epic battles and dark forces that preoccupy the second and third books. Of course, those struggles are in part why the ending of the series—with the return to the Shire—strikes such a deep chord in me. Already I can feel myself tearing up in preparation for the last line of the book.
So that's that for reading. Hopefully I'll have a review of Cook's book up soon, and then maybe I'll have a few words to say about Borges. Will I review Fellowship? Well, what's the point? I'm giving it a 10 anyway. But we'll see.
Slow reading so far
February 4, 2002 (2:59 AM) ( link ) Not much time to read much recently. I am progressing slowly through Glen Cook's The Black Company; the dark tone of the book is unremitting, but a random plot element introduced into it has somewhat jarred me. However, Cook is doing a good job explaining how this random piece of history fits in with everything else, so by now it has only served to deepen the sense of history that surrounds the world of the Black Company.
Literally no work on Borges's Ficciones or on Seth's A Suitable Boy. I will read more Seth tomorrow, though, even if it is only a few pages a night. Its lack of portability is really hurting it, unfortunately—when I also have to carry a stack of thesis books around, it becomes difficult to justify carrying the tome that is A Suitable Boy in my bag.
It's unlikely that reading will be much easier any time soon. Thesis calls, as does the rest of my work. And my tension over law schools continues unabated. Sigh.
Five-month Anniversary
February 2, 2002 (12:05 PM) ( link ) Today marks this site's official five-month anniversary. I have updated the statistics page to reflect this. In the month of January, I read 8 novels and 4 graphic novels, adding 12 reviews for a total of 64. Since the beginning of the year, I've read 33 novels and 10 graphic novels and added 64 reviews.
Also, since the site redesign, I've seen 46 visitors on this site—most of them not from Harvard, which is a little unusual (how do they find this page anyway?).
And the reading doesn't stop. I've been reading Glen Cook's The Black Company; after the silly and light-hearted tale of Moving Pictures, The Black Company is a dark and disturbing read. In the few pages that I've read, Cook aptly conveys the claustrophobia, fear, and unpleasantness of the town of Beryl. Dread and the harsh realities of life underlie every moment of the Black Company—I think that over 200 of them die in the first few sections alone, and Cook has no qualms about killing off characters who I thought had the potential to be permanent ones. The fantasy world that Cook constructs is fascinating: there are hints of all sorts of weirdness, without anything explicit being said (except about the foklava, which hurts the effect of their introduction). Finally, Cook completely eschews the "noble hero" mentality that a lot of other fantasy follows. Even more so than George RR Martin (who has his own noble, if flawed, characters), Cook's characters are mean, vicious bastards. This could be due to the type of men that the Black Company tends to attract: I still haven't read up to the part that explains who joins the Company, although I think it has something to do with starting a new life after being convicted of some terrible crime. But the men aren't gratuitously nasty: for the most part, they're just trying to look after their own interests—and the interests of the limited few they care about—in an amoral world where dark magic, evil creatures, and an almost unfathomably oppressive sense of history serve to destroy those who attempt to act out of a benevolence.
Overall, then, I'm intrigued by Cook's book, and I'm looking forward to finishing the first one. If this series is really as good as the beginning seems to imply, and if Cook starts tying in some larger plot threads (so far the Company doesn't seem to have anything on its plate after their first, extremely tense "adventure" with the foklava), then this could be a series worth reading—all 10 books worth. It might be a good idea, though, for me to eventually alternate Cook's darker novels with Pratchett's lighter ones, just so I don't go crazy.
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