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New Review: The Big Over Easy
March 28, 2009 (4:14 AM) ( link ) Added a review of Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy (mildly recommended).
I'm currently reading the next volume in Fforde's Nursery Crime series, The Fourth Bear. After that, I'll probably turn to Benjamin Black's Christine Falls (a highbrow mystery) or Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire. (Note to self: never use the word "final" for the first volume of a trilogy.) I'll freely admit that I'm reading Sanderson only because he's now working on the final volume in Robert Jordan's long-running Wheel of Time series.
Updated Review: City of Saints and Madmen
March 25, 2009 (12:11 AM) ( link ) Updated the review of Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen (still recommended).
I recently finished Henry Chiang's Chinatown Beat during a plane ride from Orlando. I have mixed feelings about reading books on planes. On the one hand, it passes the time. On the other hand, almost every book I've read on a plane has suffered from it -- unsurprisingly, the unpleasantness of travel (the stress, the dehydration, the lack of sleep) detracts from the reading experience.
Chiang's book is the latest victim. (Earlier ones included Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, which I didn't finish and never felt the urge to pick up again.) Maybe I should stick to old favorites or lurid pulp fiction next time.
New Review: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
March 20, 2009 (12:33 AM) ( link ) Added a review of Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
Next up: I've managed to dig up an updated version of Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen, which is about twice as long as the 2001 edition that I read, primarily due to a lengthy "appendix" of additional materials. My local public library branch also has all of the Owly comics, which are adorable and delightful.
Top 10 List (2006-2008)
March 19, 2009 (12:23 AM) ( link ) In part because I was working at a law firm, I didn't have as much time to read or update this site over the past two or three years. So this top 10 list will cover the entire time I was delinquent.
My Favorite Books of 2006-2008
10. Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Very bleak. A little pointless. But hard to shake.
9. Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice
Extremely satisfying sense of wonder. It makes you realize that Earth is a very, very small place in an unfathomably vast universe.
8. Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections
Yet another yuppie novel about suburban middle-class angst -- but surprisingly readable.
7. Ian McEwan's Atonement
A beautifully written sucker punch of a novel.
6. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres
King Lear in rural Iowa. As good as the original.
5. John Scalzi's Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, and Zoe's Tale
Jazzily written military sci-fi that is, above all things, fun.
4. C.J. Sansom's Dissolution, Dark Fire, and Sovereign
In 16th-century England, a humane, hunchbacked detective investigates dastardly crimes and navigates the treacherous shoals of politics. Sansom tells a good story, but he's even better at conveying the moral bleakness of ambition.
3. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
A virtuoso display of Mitchell's talent: nested stories, each completely different, yet equally gripping.
2. Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger
Volcanic drama never feels out of place in this slender but intense volume about Victorian prostitutes and the terrors they faced.
1. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
A languorously written and beautifully backgrounded novel that charms, then moves. One of my favorite books of all time.
Movie Review: Watchmen
March 17, 2009 (11:57 PM) ( link ) I saw the Watchmen movie the other night. It was pretty entertaining. As others have noted, the movie essentially treats the original book as a storyboard and so slavishly reproduces many of Moore and Gibbons's original frames. Since the graphic novel had plenty of cinematic flair, this fidelity is mostly a good idea, although the film accordingly has very little power that isn't derivative of the original work's (with the exception of Jackie Earle Haley's excellent performance as Rorschach). In addition, some scenes suffer from the translation to the screen: Dreiberg's "What happened to the American dream?" sounds plaintive on the page but kind of lame in the movie; Dr. Manhattan's excursion to Mars seems really random (in the silence following his first appearance there, somebody in the theater audibly muttered: "What the f---?!"); and don't even get me started on the campy and awkwardly explicit sex scene.
The director, Zack Snyder, departs in only two significant ways from the graphic novel. The first is the ending, which I thought worked better than the book's. The second is a rather significant upgrade in violence. Dan and Laurie don't just fight off the knotheads, they break bones and push the jagged edges through skin; instead of letting a kidnapper burn offstage, Rorschach drives a cleaver into his skull; and Big Figure saws off his henchman's arms rather than simply breaking his neck. Snyder films these events (and more) in all of their blood-spattering glory, often in slow motion. It's disgusting -- and unnecessary.
Definite and indefinite articles
March 17, 2009 (2:39 AM) ( link ) The book reviews on this site are generated by an incredibly kludgy set of Gawk scripts that process a set of coded text files. It's not pretty. The backstory: Years ago, when I started this site, I discovered and admired Danny Yee's Book Reviews. Danny's site obviously served as a template for mine. So I figured I might as well go all the way and ask him how he generated his reviews and indices.
Danny very kindly sent me the code that he used for his site. I didn't understand any of it. (If I remember correctly, it was Python or Perl or something similar.) And so I instead started from scratch, settling on Gawk because my college roommate at the time was using it for his own projects.
Anyway, the inelegant programs I wrote dealt poorly with definite and indefinite articles: a book title like The Year of Our War would end up looking like Year of Our War, The; and, while a title like A Deepness in the Sky would display correctly, it would be indexed with the A's (e.g., About a Boy), when it should be with the D's (e.g., Darwinia).
Today, I finally dug through my code and managed to fix these article problems. Hooray for small victories.
New Review: 9Tail Fox
March 14, 2009 (8:11 PM) ( link ) ADDED a review of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 9Tail Fox (not recommended).
I've recently begun reading Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The lady standing behind me in the library queue became very excited when she saw that I was checking the book out and made a point of saying that it was one of her favorite series ever -- always a good sign.
I have a number of other books that I've requested from the library. Although New York's public library system is impressive in its breadth, the sheer number of patrons makes reserving popular books a huge pain. For example, I am dying to read C.J. Sansom's Revelation, the latest in his superb Shardlake series, but I doubt that I'll get it any time in the next few months.
New Review: Agent to the Stars
March 11, 2009 (11:53 PM) ( link ) Added a review of John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars (recommended).
As I say in the review, consider me a Scalzi fan. Fortunately, the man publishes profusely. Thanks to James for recommending Scalzi to me in the first place.
Also noteworthy is that I read Agent to the Stars online -- Scalzi has posted the full text of the book on his website. I think this is only the second full novel that I've read on a computer screen. The first was, oddly enough, The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson, which I read during a particularly dull period of a college summer internship.
New Review: The Android's Dream
March 11, 2009 (1:43 AM) ( link ) Added a review of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream. Recommended.
I frequently say to my friends that I don't find books funny. Scalzi's book, which is hilarious, made me reexamine this statement, which turns out to be not entirely true. In addition to The Android's Dream, here are a few of my favorite funny books: Tooth and Claw, Bridge of Birds, anything by Jasper Fforde, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (also sad), City of Saints and Madmen (also creepy).
In hindsight, Towing Jehovah was also pretty funny, but obtaining that hindsight was extremely painful.
New Review: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
March 5, 2009 (11:35 PM) ( link ) Added a review of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
An interesting aside on Caro. Last week, I met a lawyer who saw that I was carrying Caro's latest book, Master of the Senate. We got into a conversation about Caro's works (including The Power Broker, his equally enthralling biography of Robert Moses). The lawyer mentioned that he had actually met Caro several times -- not just at book signings and lectures, but also just around the neighborhood (apparently Caro keeps his office in Manhattan).
"But I also have a sadder connection to him," the lawyer continued. "I was actually involved with disbarring his son." It seems that Caro's son, Chase, was a lawyer who embezzled over a million dollars from several elderly clients, including his own grandparents, and was subsequently both disbarred and incarcerated.
How very, very sad.
New Review: KJ Parker's The Engineer Trilogy
March 5, 2009 (4:07 AM) ( link ) Added a review of KJ Parker's The Engineer Trilogy.
I've begun reading another John Scalzi novel -- I won't ever get around to reviewing his Old Man's War series (although it was excellent), but I will have something to say about the book I'm currently reading.
I also recently finished Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. It's a masterpiece.
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