100 Books 69 - Maurice Broaddus' KING MAKER

Man, I was as ready to like this as I've ever been to like anything. I even put myself into full delayed gratification mode -- I was originally going to save this book as my prize for finishing NaNoWriMo (see prior post). But in that I failed; I made it maybe a week into this month before I just couldn't resist anymore -- such allure, a cross between The Wire and Arthurian Legend! -- and gave in.

But -- you feel that "but" coming, don't you? -- I'm sad to say this novel didn't quite live up to its initial promise.

This is half of a fan-damn-tastic piece of balls-out amazing fiction writing, and half a messed-up, cliche-ridden mess, more or less. The first half is the former, vivid and strange and gripping, tripping with lines of the kind of weird and heart-breakingly poetic imagery and observation that this Wyoming girl only gets to hear at 5am on Saturday mornings when her local public radio station gives it over for Snap Judgment. The legend of Arthur and the formation of his Knights of the Round Table feels like it really could be re-enacted in the sad ghettos of Indianapolis, though perhaps the rib-digging character names (King, Lott, Lady G, Wayne, Green, Dred) aren't strictly necessary. My jaw dropped. Often.

What Broaddus did with Merlin, here cast as a crazy homeless man shambling through the projects in a tinfoil hat to which he keeps adding layers, struck me as especially fine, for instance.

But once the characters are established and the world (about 90% drug-slum realism, 5% TV cop show fantasy version of that realism, 5% epic fantasy, except the magical sword is a pair of guns, etc.) is built, the book kind of collapses in on itself a bit, so that by the time the zombies (oh man, really? Zombies?) show up I was bored and disappointed and scrolling back to earlier chapters, wondering how these two halves got sewn together.

Origin stories always suffer a bit from the formula thereof, though, so I'ma give Mr. Broaddus another chance. I already have the sequel, King's Justice, loaded on my various e-reading devices. I really hope it's more like the first half of this one than the second.

We Did It!

Despite a busy writing docket full of seekrit projects (to which I've just, sigh, added another one, it seems) and scorching lateral epicondylitis in both elbows, I am a NaNoWriMo winner again in 2011.

I co-wrote a rather demented bit of redneck pulp sci-fi with my good friend and fellow Cheyennian, Colin Stricklin. We traded days of adding to the word count, with me providing the very first and last 1666 words (or so). We started the month with a vague set of ideas, many of which we kicked forward to future books (for of course this thing has crazy series potential), and only cooked up a plot to follow about halfway in to the enterprise -- though, I'm delighted to say, that plot was already taking shape within our daily contributions.

The really fun part was, since this was more or less word count driven, we each felt perfectly free to stop in mid-scene and see how the other would finish it, which meant we had a lot of fun leaving each other with tension-laden cliffhanger situations to resolve. This is the best part about collaborating, and why I recommend it to anyone, as long as it's two or more people who have similar goals, commitment and discipline, and senses of humor.

Though we're well over the 50,000 word mark, the novel is nowhere near done. I'm guessing there's roughly another 20-30,000 words to go on this first draft before the real fun of editing begins.

But for tonight, well, cheers, mates!

And special thanks to My Own Dear Personal Mom, Carol Sherrod (@Casherr on Twitter), who spent the last week with me helping me cope with my semi-handicapped state, combing my hair, helping me with some housework that I was behind on, keeping me company through a lot of crap and, most importantly, typing in my entries (which I'd written longhand, in very soft pencil, on graph paper, because I am a big dork and like doing it that way) so Colin could read them.

Woot!

100 Books 68 - J. Daniel Sawyer's PREDESTINATION (AND OTHER GAMES OF CHANCE)

Well! There is genre-bending, and there is genre-bending, and the bending author J. Daniel Sawyer has done in this political thriller/crime noir/space opera/tale of revolution/double-cross extravaganza would require a whole new, possibly Lovecraftian, geometry to trace out.

Which is to say this is one of the most downright complicated novels I've read since... hmm... Game of Thrones? Yeah. It's like that. Except for no dragons. Or swords. Or horses. Or kings (at least not in name).

But yeah, Game of Thrones in space? A little bit. Except there are a whole bunch of people on the Moon, Mars and various space stations who are sick of being treated like chattel-colonists and aren't going to take it anymore (one of my favorite scenes is near the end, when a Lunar city erupts in exactly the kind of colorful and seemingly purposeless disorder that characterizes the Occupy Wall Street movement, proving that the movement has been incohate in the air for quite a while now), the one element that I think is most sorely missing in GoT.

So much duplicity. And orbital mathematics. And cool space colonization history. And duplicity. And scotch. And poker. And did I mention duplicity?

So much J. Daniel Sawyer, all that is missing is someone singing to an acoustic guitar in a heart-melting clear tenor. But it appears there are three more novels in this Antithesis Progression, so I may yet get some of that.

If you like any (or all) of the above genres Sawyer has bent here, you really pretty much owe yourselves to pony up the five bucks for this here ebook. If you want a dead tree edition, I think one's in the works, but why wait.

And if you're really feeling poor, well, Sawyer is one of those generous Podiobooks authors who offers his books as free audiobooks before they even hit the Kindle/Epub world.

Eyeholes or earholes, you can't lose here.

100 Books 67 - Jose Saramago's BLINDNESS

So it's now a toss-up between this and Cormac McCarthy's The Road in the contest for Bleakest Book I've Read This Year. Were it not for the ending, I'd say Blindness wins, and even thereby, it still kind of does. Which is saying something.

Interestingly enough, Blindness shares another quality in common with The Road: it's rather difficult to read, just in terms of the prose and, especially, the dialogue. Neither novel uses conventional punctuation or presentation for dialogue, but Saramago's work, at least as here translated by Giovanni Portiero, comes at us in great torrents, without tags or any warnings at all of a change of speaker. Hello, how are you, I'm fine, how are you, fine, thank you, where is the dog buried, over behind the cat's grave, ok, that must be what I smell, hey, I overheard you guys talking about a dog, I could sure go for one with catsup and mustard, no not that kind of dog you idiot, oh, ok, but I sure am hungry, why isn't there a food named for cats?

As you can maybe see from that made-up example, it's more or less possible to tell that more than one person is talking (I intended it to be three individuals - is that what you experienced?), and maybe even to tell, if you've outside or prior knowledge of characters' modes of speech or motivations, which character is saying what, but it's a whole lot of interpretive work that most of us American readers are unaccustomed to having to do, finding that the basic interpretive work of looking at skinny and repetitive designs in ink on paper, understanding them as words, and following the sequence of words as a story is quite enough, thank you.

But some books are worth the extra effort, and this account of a world in which first one man, then a few people, and then a whole bunch are suddenly struck with "white blindness" (in which the visual field becomes a field of complete white, rather than the blackness that we usually believe blindness to be), which turns out to be virulently contagious, and the horrors that ensue when first the afflicted are confined to a run-down mental hospital, and later when it turns out the whole city, perhaps the whole world, has gone blind, is absolutely worth that effort.

It is not, however, for the weak of stomach; if you are easily grossed-out by descriptions of serious squalor (as in what happens when a hundred of people or more are kept in a small space and can't find the toilets squalor), maybe give this one a pass. But if you're not that wimpy and want a seriously amazing read, don't pass this one by. Saramogo is a Nobel laureate for a reason.

100 Books 66 - Erin Morgenstern's THE NIGHT CIRCUS

I want Tarsem Singh to direct a film adaptation of this movie, STAT. And I need a red scarf, also STAT.

Singh because I think he would bring The Night Circus's vividly imagined sights and sounds (alas, no way to bring the smells as yet, in any way that isn't hokey and cost-intensive, I suspect) to eye-popping life, and I want to see them: unlike some readers, my mind's eye isn't all that clever. I'm a verbal girl. I mostly yawn through detailed descriptions of fabrics and color schemes and intricate designs, and can't be arsed to do the work of making them into pictures in my head. So, since said detailed descriptions make up the bulk of The Night Circus's pages, one might expect that I yawned through this book.

But I didn't.

I think what makes the difference is the writing itself, which is poetic and gorgeous in its own right, so I never yawned, and instead was filled with longing to actually see what was being described. I suppose that's my background in comics coming out (and indeed, if for some reason I don't get my film of this, I'd settle for a graphic novel, with, say, Christian "Infinite Vacation" Ward on art detail. Or Fiona Staples. With Dave Stewart on colors... Ahem).

Anyway, while this book is a little thin on plot (and what plot there is owes a lot to Christopher Priest's fantastic novel that was spoiled by its film adaptation, The Prestige, and maybe a bit to Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, too, and of course Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes if you drained out most of the wicked and just left the wonder), it's a treat to read, dreamy and evocative as hell and just the sort of bedtime story you'd want to read to your kids, if you want them to grow up to be art snobs.

I loved it.

100 Books 65 - John Mierau's ASUNDER: WAR BETWEEN WORLDS

Short version: a fun answer to the question of what happened to all of the bad-ass alien technology after the microbes took care of the aliens in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds with a nice, adventurous flair. Victorian reverse-engineering, pirates, sea battles, and tension within the ranks of Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Alas, like a few other self-published treats, the sweet comes with a little bitter: this could have used at least one more careful edit/proofread before it was released into the world. Lots of sentences are weirdly missing the verb, more than a few homophone errors have reared their ugly heads, and a few malapropisms, too. They're all the kind of errors a professional editor would never let slip by, but that a spell-check doesn't catch. If you're the kind of reader who gets too distracted by these, wait for another edition. But if you don't mind them, this is a fun and delightful read.

100 Books 64 - Trent Jamison's ROIL

Short version: God damn, Angry Robot is putting out some good, genre-muddling stuff. This one is part straight-up sci-fi (this world seems to be a settled, terraformed exoplanet on which something native and terrifying is fighting back against the terraforming), a dash steampunk (lots of clockwork technology, airships -- oh, but get this, the airships are ALIVE) and possibly a little bit fantasy, too (lots of malformed monsters, some of which kind of defy physics a bit and rejoice in baroque and bizarre names like "Hideous Garment Flukes", and also a quest that hangs heavily on an ordinary boy who turns out to be a very special boy and who is everybody's Only Hope). I found it wonderfully reminiscent of Alastair Reynold's last proper novel, Terminal World in lots of ways, which made me very happy. I tore through this thing in a matter of days and can't wait for the sequels. Hurry up, Trent!

Long version: again, will try to do an Audioboo. Cuz, even this much typing is ouch.