Category Archives: Geographical Region

The Dresden Files #2: Fool Moon by Jim Butcher

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Read: 24 March, 2013

Once again, Murphy calls Dresden out to a crime scene that just doesn’t seem right. The deceased is one of Gentleman Johnny Marcone’s men, he’s been mauled and there are wolf tracks at the scene of the crime. Dresden suspects werewolves.

Unfortunately, my main complaint about Storm Front hasn’t been fixed. Dresden likes to describe himself as a believer in chivalry, wanting to protect the women around him. It would be easy enough to chalk it up to the character since Dresden plays off as a weird combination Noir Cool Guy and scraggly teen doofus (yeah, it’s awkward), but the narrative facts shatter that excuse. The strong female characters, while present, tend to act rashly, making careless mistakes that get people hurt, usually as a result of not wanting to be protected by men like Dresden.

Storm Front had some absurdities in it, but Fool Moon really takes it to the next level. There’s the standard turf war between the FBI agents and the local cops, but in this case the FBI agent opens fire on the cop. Yes, opens fire. As in she shoots her gun. It makes sense for that character to behave in such a way, but it makes absolutely no sense for the local cop not to go completely nutzo-berzerker on her. At the very least, there should a report filed and disciplinary action. The idea that Murphy would simply shrug it off as just another cop turf scuffle is absolutely absurd.

We see this again later when Murphy arrests Dresden for having once held a piece of paper with a symbol on it that was later seen drawn on the floor in a crime scene. She doesn’t even ask him for an explanation (nor allow him to give her one). She just jumps straight to arrest. It’s almost like cops don’t have to do paper work or obey the law in Dresdenland.

I’d say, as a general rule, Murphy is pretty much off the deep end in this book.

I do really enjoy the descriptions of the potions – how they’re made and how they work. The rest of the magic system I could take or leave, but the potions are quite cool.

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Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga

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Read: 22 April, 2013

I picked this up as my Basque read for the Reading Around the World challenge.

It’s a collection of short stories that seem unconnected. Though the title of the book literally means “The people/things of Obaba,” though in his prologue, Atxaga notes that another possible interpretation would be “stories from Obaba.” Even so, Obaba features only in a few of the stories.

In many ways, I found this to be a very international book. And though my purpose in choosing it was to get something of an insider’s perspective into Basque country, most of the stories deal with being an outsider there – the very first, “Esteban Werfell,” being about the child of a German caught between his father’s culture and the culture that surrounds him. And all of it is bound around with the idea of the outsider infiltrating and replacing the local.

There are some odd connecting themes to the stories, subtle enough that I had missed the ones I’ve found during my initial reading, and I’m sure that there are plenty that I haven’t spotted.

I really enjoyed most of the stories just from an entertainment perspective, but the more I think about the book, the more I feel that I have to think about. Each story is complex, and they inform each other in interesting and surprising ways. I think that I’ll be carrying Obabakoak around with me for a while.

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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

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Read: 10 April, 2013

When we read Jane Eyre in my Victorian Lit course in university, the professor mentioned Wide Sargasso Sea as an interesting further exploration of Bertha Mason and her relationship with Rochester.

For some reason – perhaps because I’d associated it with Jane Eyre – I assumed that Wide Sargasso Sea would be a large tome, something that would require a substantial investment of time, so I put off reading it for years. But when it came up in my search for books to read for my Reading Around the World project, I decided it was time to just bite the bullet and get ‘er done.

It’s a very interesting story, covering Bertha Mason (or, rather, Antoinette Cosway)’s childhood as the child of white former slave owners – rejected by the English as “Other” and half savage, yet rejected, too, by her black neighbours. She is hated by all as her mother, after a series of tragedies and mistreatments, loses her mind.

The story continues in Rochester’s voice after their marriage, as he struggles to understand this mysterious woman who is so different from the English women he is familiar with. Recovering from a fever, confused, frightened in an unfamiliar environment and with unfamiliar people, he turns against his new wife.

It’s an interesting story, and a very interesting companion to Jane Eyre. It’s a short read and interesting, though rather feverish in its stream of consciousness (it does, after all, show a descent into madness), but I found that the added perspective greatly enhanced my relationship with Charlotte Brontë’s work.

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The Hollows #1: Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison

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Read: 19 March, 2013

Rachel Morgan has been getting bored with all the small-fry runs she’s been sent on lately. She knows she’s a good runner, so why won’t they give her any good runs? So, on a whim, she decides to leave the I.S. and strike out on her own, despite the stories about the last person who tried to break his contract…

I did enjoy the book – really! – and I fully intend to read more of the series. But there were some issues that bugged me. For example:

Rachel really needs to get laid, or maybe just masturbate or something. Throughout the story, she is physically attracted to the point of distraction nearly every character she meets! Except, of course, the one she ends up dating. She notices his body on a few occasions, but not in the “gaga” way that she notices Ivy, Jenks, or Trent. In fact, while I’m on the subject, the whole Nick romance feels somewhat forced.

There are other plot critical points that just don’t seem to make much sense, or aren’t sufficiently explained. For example, why won’t the I.S. let her leave? If the problem is just the breech of contract, why not sue her or seize her assets instead of trying to kill her? If the problem is that she might have some “insider knowledge,” why doesn’t she seem to have any? And if the issue really is just that she’s taken Ivy with her so her old boss has a personal grudge, in what world is having someone killed an acceptable (let alone institutional) way of dealing with such things?

Or the point was just to add some tension to the story early on and give Rachel a reason to keep pursuing Trent once he proves himself to be rather more dangerous than she might be able to handle. Yet even this didn’t quite work. The idea that there was some suspicion surround Trent is raised early on, but there’s no reason to believe that the I.S. would suddenly stop trying to kill Rachel just because she brought in Trent – or anyone else. In fact,  if Trent is really as powerful as he’s made out to be, it seems that the I.S. might have more reason to want to avoid such a high profile and volatile case.

Same goes for the Ivy subplot. There’s some questions about Ivy’s motives, and Rachel distrusts her throughout the story, but she stays with her anyway. Again, it feels forced. Either the issue is a simple misunderstanding that an honest conversation could fix, in which case Rachel is blowing it way out of proportion, or Ivy really is a threat, in which case Rachel needs to stop trusting her so much. But it feels like Harrison wants to preserve the mystery while still having Rachel and Ivy be friends, so instead Rachel just bounces back and forth between trusting Ivy and being terrified of her.

We’re told on a few occasions that Rachel is a great runner, but the story doesn’t really seem to play that out. She scoffs at the idea of planning ahead and just kinda throws herself into situations completely unprepared. Again and again, she relies on luck and other people to save her.

And the size of the role that luck plays is rather disappointment. For example, when Rachel is in the fighting ring (no spoilers!) and just happens to be pitted against the one person who can help her. I kept waiting for it all to be part of Trent’s plan, but no. It was just unbelievable luck.

But, like I said, I really did enjoy the book. It was fast paced and there are some characters I really like. Jenks and his family are fantastic, and I loved the bits about fairies and pixies. I also found Nick intriguing, and I feel like there’s going to be a lot more to him later in the series.

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The Dresden Files #1: Storm Front by Jim Butcher

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Read: 11 March, 2013

When I finished the Harry Potter books and whining because it was over, I was told to read the Dresden Files. “It’s like Harry Potter for grown-ups,” according to multiple sources. So I decided to give it a try.

Storm Front starts out as a Noir novel, full of all the classic tropes of the genre. If you’ve seen The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon, you know what I’m talking about. The big twist on the genre is that Dresden is a wizard. Though once he finds himself wearing sweatpants and cowboy boots under his duster, it becomes rather difficult to take its genre status too seriously.

Butcher does try to play up the Noir tropes – so you get the stereotypical characters (the hard-boiled cop, the femme fatale, the surly bartender, the gorgeous reporter… That being said, there’s some amount of subtle playing with the tropes, such as the cheerleader-ish hard-boiled cop with the soft face and Shirley Temple blonde curls.

There’s a fair amount of the casual sexism that’s so endemic to the Noir genre – some of it internal to Dresden’s perspective, but some of it reinforced by the narrative (such as the hard-boiled cop crying when Dresden won’t share information with her) – and I found that rather irksome. But I grew up with Bogart movies, so I put my raging feminist aside and really enjoyed the novel, though the depictions of women are problematic and I really hope that improves further into the series.

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By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

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Read: 26 February, 2013

The set up of the novel is as a death-bed confession from Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, called Father Ibacache once he enters the priesthood. He recalls important moments of his involvement with the literati, Opus Dei, and Pinochet’s government.

Written as the ramblings of an old man, the book has no chapters or paragraph breaks, and few full stops. It made it a long and hard read, particularly since, with a toddler, I don’t always have the luxury of a sustained reading session. But, at only 130pages, a reader without a toddler could probably get through the whole book in one or two sittings, so don’t let that necessarily put you off.

I found the book disjointed, which makes sense given the narrative context, but it was still rather frustrating. Characters are introduced, plot lines brought up, and then both are dropped – never again to be taken up. There’s some pretty subtle-yet-scathing criticisms of the literati, literature’s place in a messy and political world, and the Church, but they seem more thrown to the wind than built.

I think that there was something lost in translation. The book read as though the writing should have been poetic, but instead just felt overwhelmingly bland. I’m willing to give Bolaño the benefit of doubt and assume that the narrative reads much batter in the original Spanish.

Overall, I just wasn’t very impressed by this novelette. The ending was quite interesting, and the final line is probably one of the best I’ve ever read (“And then the storm of shit begins”), but I never felt gripped. And while my background and knowledge base allowed me to appreciate the jabs at the literary/artsy scene, many of the criticisms of Opus Dei and the politics just went way over my head. It didn’t help that Urrutia is such a frustratingly passive and dense character, and thoroughly unlikable.

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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Read: 14 February, 2013

A father and son travel across an apocalyptic wasteland, struggling to find a reason for survival.

This was a hard book to read. It’s a journey of suffering with no possibility of an end. Any time the boy tries to find some hope, his father just shuts him down – even when that hope is just to die and see an end to the relentless cold and starvation.

The child, though born after the world was destroyed, never seems to adapt. I found that strange, particularly when we look at actual children who have grown up in real world combat zones (whether political  or familial), and the ways that they learn to tune out or join in. Yet the boy seems to function as more of a conscience for the man than as a character in his own right. This story is about the man, about his forgetting the past world, yet his refusal to adopt the current one. The child is a device, he’s “the fire,” and I found that somewhat disconcerting.

In this way, the child and the man seem to be polar opposites of Rick and Carl Grimes from the Walking Dead graphic novels. Rick tries so hard to keep to the values of the old world while watching in horror as Carl adapts to the brutality of the new, whereas the man finds himself adapting to the needs of survival in the new world while the child retains a sense of pure horror every time he is faced with the new realities.

I had a hard time finding the story compelling. Because there was no hope, absolutely no possibility of a happy ending in a world that is literally dead, the characters had no where to go. They just kept shuffling along, driven by purposeless instinct like zombies. All I kept thinking was “good god, just let that poor kid die already.”

I felt like even McCarthy couldn’t come up with a plausible reason for why his characters would continue fighting. We get vague references to “The Fire” and to some unformed hope that things might be different in the south (though, even then, the man is very careful about that hope and seems to understand on all levels that it’s wrong, so it doesn’t even get the status of false hope).

The world was so bleak, so depressing that I didn’t even get that “I’m so glad my life isn’t like that!” feeling. It just made me feel down. Even the “happy” scenes when they find some big cache of food just made me feel more depressed because it only meant that they’d have to start the starvation process back from zero, further extending their suffering.

There were some odd stylistic tricks, such as the lack of quotation marks, which I would imagine would make the dialogue difficult to follow. But I listened to the audiobook, so I had help from the reader. Thinking about the writing, I think it works to stylistically reflect the theme of the novel, but I could see it ticking people off.

I didn’t enjoy the book too much, but a lot of people apparently do. In fact, I only picked it up (having seen the movie and contented myself with that) because so many people were telling me that it’s a wonderful book. If you enjoyed it, could you tell me what I’m missing?

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Series: The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman

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I’ve read sixteen of these things now, so I think I’m ready to comment on the series as a whole.

This graphic novel series is about Rick Grimes – a police officer in a past life, but now simply trying to survive in a world overrun by the walking dead. Early on in the series, he is reunited with his wife and son, as well as a small group of survivors, and they travel around the Atlanta/Washington area trying to find a safe home.

There’s some good character development in the series. It’s not an easy thing to take a reader who feels reasonably safe and secure, and make them believe that someone is, if not justified, at least understandably turning into a monster. Rick’s progression is slow, and – at first – his increasingly unhinged decisions seem justified. And maybe they are in book 16 as well, but it’s sure clear enough that he’s lost that wide-eyed innocence that made him so compelling in the first few books of the series.

The plot is quite interesting. There are many twists and turns, and there’s no holding back on killing off main characters so there’s a real legitimate fear of main characters dying when things get hairy. Taking the survivors through a number of different locales keeps in interesting and allows us to see all the different ways that the people in Kirkman’s world have found to survive. There are some overly convenient bits – such as when the group is separated and then just happen to stumble on each other later on – but it’s easy enough to ignore.

The big issue with the series is the dialogue. It lacks flow, people say painfully artificial things (particularly the monologues, but this happens in conversation too), and the phrasing is very stilted. Some of the errors could be solved easily with an editor, but this seems to have been bypassed. The central theme of “humans are the real monsters” is spelled out over and over again, which is terribly unnecessary given that a) it’s an easy enough theme to convey through subtle means, and b) anyone familiar with the zombie genre is already going to be expecting it since wowzers, can anyone say “overdone”? I’m not really into graphic novels, but given that Kirkman’s only job is to write plot and dialogue, I’d expect him to do the latter much better.

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Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

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Read: 19 January, 2013

My first introduction to this story was watching the 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s a weird movie and distinctively Russian in its “let’s just give up and go home” mentality. I found it boring and silly the first time I watched it, but it stuck with me. Finally, I decided to watch it again and I fell in love. It’s an interesting movie and well worth watching if you come across it. Just be forewarned: Nothing happens. I mean that. Nothing happens. If you expect stuff to happen in movies, you’ll be disappointed.

Next, I played some of the games. Same world, same concepts, but totally different. For one thing, all those dangers that the stalker warns his guests about in the movie but that never amount to anything actually happen in the game. Between the three of them, there’s quite a bit of fun to be had. Gameplay is good (especially after the long-awaited patch for Clear Skies), storyline is interesting, environment design is amazing. Also worth it if you’re into FPS games.

All this is just to say that I’ve been familiar with the the Stalker setting for many years, so I was excited to see where it all began.

The book follows Redrick Schuhart, a stalker, over the course of about a decade. A stalker is an individual who goes into the Zone illegally to collect alien artefacts for black market sale. Through Schuhart, we get to see the threat and terror of the Zone, and of the people who seek to profit from it at all costs.

It’s a very short novel, but a slow read. The translation wasn’t particularly good, keeping idioms and word orders from the original Russian, but the story was very interesting and compelling. And, of course, the novel is sprinkled through with philosophical discussions, often about how absurd people are and how futile are their aspirations – it is a Russian novel, after all!

If you are into science fiction or Russian literature, I highly recommend giving this book a read!

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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

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Read: 30 January, 2013

Amir grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan, with his father, his servant, and his servant’s son. The two boys grew up without mothers, and they were raised nearly as close as brothers. But soon after the Russians invaded, an event changed both of their lives forever.

The descriptions were wonderful and I feel that I learned quite a bit about Afghani history and culture. In particular, I quite enjoyed the comparisons between the Afghanistan prior to the Russian invasion and the Afghanistan many years later, once it had fallen under the control of the Taliban.

The book is very obviously a fictional account – though it’s written as if it were a memoir, there are several instances of far too perfect resonance  such as the mirroring between the events of Amir’s childhood and his return to Afghanistan as an adult. This would ordinarily be fine, but it felt far too clunky in The Kite Runner, perhaps because the author felt the need to keep reminding his readers about it – “look, look! He has a split lip! Just like Hassan!”

There were quite a few issues in the novel with the treatment of women. Amir acknowledges several times that he “won the genetic lottery” as far as gender is concerned, but he never seems to actually do anything to mitigate this. In fact, again and again, he just seems to make things worse, as when he speaks to Soraya without her father present, knowing and acknowledging that she would be the one to suffer from the gossip that would result.

The descriptions of Hassan and his father, Ali, were disturbing. I realize that they are supposed to be martyrs and that their suffering is supposed to be all the more poignant because of their exaggerated innocence, but the fact that they are also members of the servant class makes this problematic. They are Perfect Servants, knowing exactly what their masters want at all times (even to the point of what appears to be mind reading), and are utterly self-sacrificial (literally, in Hassan’s case) in serving their masters. And this is presented as a mutual relationship, in which both Hassan and Amir are at their happiest when the former is serving the latter.

I also had some issues with Amir’s absolution. I don’t want to give too much away, but basically he has to perform a task in order to “make right” with Hassan. Thing is, he never really performs that task. He takes a beating, realises that he feels wonderfully sin-free, and then the task performs itself. It’s a very odd, impotent sort of cleansing.

The last issue I had with the book is possibly the greatest one. Amir essentially gets custody of a child who has been through some pretty horrific experiences, including sexual abuse that has lasted for at least a month. His first reaction to this is to keep touching the child (despite the child’s obvious reticence) until the child finally starts submitting. After some more stuff happens, he just kinda lives with the child and waits out the “issues” until, in a big redemptive moment, the kid may or may not begin to smile again. Yay, right? Except that at no point does he mention getting professional help for this child. I’m sure that there are refugee support groups or at least therapists who specialise in sexual abuse who may be able to help. But no, it’s just something that the child is expected to get over on his own. It left me with a really bad taste in my mouth for Amir and his wife, as they are this child’s sole lifeline and they seem so utterly oblivious to his needs.

Despite all the issues, I did really enjoy the book until Amir leaves the hospital after his “redemption.” At this point, his total inadequacy in caring properly for the child just made me angry.

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