Tag Archives: book review

King Lear

I really want to see a modern dress production of this play.

Lear, an aging Briton king, wants to retire, so he gathers his three daughters and asks each of them how much they love him. Cordelia won’t play that game. Goneril and Regan kiss ass. Lear divides the kingdom between Goneril and Regan and banishes Cordelia. Goneril and Regan strip Lear of the rest of his power and cast Lear out on the moor. Cordelia, who has by this point become the Queen of France, comes roaring back with an army to put things right. Almost everybody dies.

I have a lot more sympathy for Regan and Goneril than I’m supposed to. A pair of women in the England of antinquity are suddenly given something they never expected: power in their own right. Their actions for the rest of the play are meant to cement that power. They may even believe in what they are doing, since the way Lear sliced his kingdom in half on a whim doesn’t suggest he was taking good care of it.

Lear is a political threat to the sisters as long as he remains alive. He’s nominally still king, senile, and already turned on Cordelia. They could be next. As a royal and a man, he probably did little to raise his daughters. So why should they hold tender feelings towards him? Catherine de Medici wouldn’t have blinked at the torture, poison and banishment that they resort to.

The tragedy here is that the young people prove no better at the helm than their elders. Regan and Goneril should have executed Lear swiftly, made peace with Cordelia (she is the Queen of France), and come to an agreement about their lovers. In the end they’re felled by squabbling.

This policy and reverence of our age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffered.

Was there ever a better expression of millennial rage?

King Lear is relevant in a way Shakespeare never intended because it’s about generational warfare. Lear is obsolete, pompous, and never had to suffer a day in his life. Regan and Goneril are inexperienced and petty. Sound familiar?

I want to see a production of this play where Lear watches CSI all day and his daughters have their faces in their phones, eating kale chips. I’m angry about politics; tragedy is cathartic. I want to see a play that does this to a kingdom:

Man contesting the outcome of a Go game

Sphere by Michael Crichton

A black man, a white man, and a white woman all get the power to warp reality to their will. The black man and the white woman can’t handle the power and nearly get the group killed. The white man saves the day by being more emotionally stable than them.

ಠ_ಠ

I don’t think Michael Crichton meant Sphere to come out sounding that way, but his characters are so paper-thin there’s nothing left of them but their stereotypes.

Norman Johnson, professor of psychology, gets called in by the Navy to investigate a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean. The downed plane turns out to be a spacecraft. Because of Norman’s previous work on group dynamics, the Navy has given him the job of keeping the crew from freaking out in the face of alien life. Norman and a team of scientists he hand-selected go to a deep-sea habitat to investigate the wreck.

Some of what happens next is spoileriffic. Suffice to say that whoever comes into contact with a certain sphere gets reality-warper powers. It involves time travel.

For the first few chapters, I found Crichton’s prose refreshingly sparse. After a while it gets wooden. Check this out:

Norman suddenly felt overwhelmed. He sat on his bunk, holding the notebook in his hands. Finally he looked at a couple of pages, filled with Ted’s large, enthusiastic scrawl. A photograph fell onto his lap. He turned it over. It was a photo of a red Corvette. And the feelings just overwhelmed him. Norman didn’t know if he was crying for Ted, or crying for himself, because it was clear to him that one by one, they were all dying down here. He was very sad, and very afraid.

Crichton doesn’t explore the implications of the magic sphere in nearly as much depth as he could have. Why aren’t characters inundated with pink elephants when they desperately try not to think about them? Why can’t characters imagine their way out of problems? The only thing the power seems to do is throw monsters at the habitat.

The plot runs on the characters’ terrible decisions. When the Navy learn that a typhoon is bearing down on the site of the wreck, which isn’t going anywhere, they hasten to send the characters to the underwater habitat just in time to trap them down there. When jellyfish of an unknown species swarm the habitat, one of the Navy officers decides it’s time to go for a swim. Somebody rigged the habitat with a deadman’s switch that takes away their only means of escape unless they press a button. On the outside of the habitat.

That’s not even what bugs me the most about this book – it’s the three main characters, Harry Adams, Beth Halperin, and Norman.

Harry isn’t that bad. He’s actually competent, and when his powers get the best of him, it’s because of normal human fears. And it’s gratifying to see him survive.

I like women villains. I know real women can be any one of sex-obsessed, power hungry, manipulative, hysterical (Crichton literally uses this word), incompetent, and bitter. But why is Beth all of these things? And she never misses a chance to mention she’s a woman?

Crichton’s description of her is disturbing:

Beth, with her lack of self-esteem, her deep core of self-hate, had gone inside the sphere, and now she was acting with the power of the sphere, but without stability to her thoughts. Beth saw herself as a victim who struggled against her fate, always unsuccessfully. Beth was victimized by men, victimized by the establishment, victimized by research, victimized by reality. In every case she failed to see how she had done it to herself.

I don’t know what message Crichton is trying to convey here, but I think he had a bone to pick with somebody.

Norman’s a schlub. The problems with the mission are largely his fault – it was his job to pick a team of scientists who would be unlikely to crack under stress. He picks a team of scientists with low stress tolerance who all hate each other. When consequences follow, he doesn’t feel remorse. He just rescues Harry and the hysterical Beth because he can handle the sphere-power better than them.

I think the problem here is that Crichton was trying to write a book about emotions … and he sucks at it. It’s telling that he equated emotions with space aliens in this book. He tried to get into his characters’ heads and instead knocked things over. I was rooting for the giant squid.

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

I go for Terry Pratchett therapy when terrible things are happening in the news, so I eenie-meenie-miney-moed through Pratchett’s bibliography and pulled up Soul Music.

The events of Soul Music explain what makes Susan, Death’s granddaughter, into who she is by the time of The Hogfather. Susan is a student at a girl’s school and unaware of her powers at the start of the book. When Death abandons his post, Susan is forced to step in.

Meanwhile, Imp y Celyn arrives at Ankh-Morpork determined to make his name as a musician. He gets entwined with a supernatural guitar that is slowly killing him. Susan fights to change this.

Like many reviewers on Goodreads have said, this is a good read, but it’s not Terry Pratchett’s best work. It succeeds when Pratchett crams his ostensibly medieval world with rock & roll jokes. We get to see an early version of Hex, which is fun. And Pratchett manages to make the main antagonist the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, which almost makes sense.

Soul Music doesn’t work when it runs over plot holes. What did the Music want and what was it doing to Imp? What exactly did Susan and Death do about it at the end? This book left me wondering what it all added up to. It’s best read if you don’t concern yourself with the plot and enjoy Pratchett’s funny-as-ever one-off gags.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

Legend has it that a spectral hound terrorizes an old country estate in Devonshire and the bloodline that owns it. Our heroes Holmes and Watson are called onto the scene when the latest heir to Baskerville Hall dies just outside his home without a mark on him. Next to his body, there is the mark of a giant paw.

What surprised me the most about The Hound of the Baskervilles is that it’s such a beach read. I expected a Dickens level of convolutedness, but this book is simple, clear, and short. In fact I’m a little disappointed because I wanted more depth. Doyle is good and spooky when he’s describing the moors, but the characters aren’t spooky and neither is the mystery. The book ends like an episode of Scooby Doo: (the ghost is just a cranky neighbor of theirs and a dog in glow-in-the-dark paint).

But like I said, beach read. The Hound of the Baskervilles is fun to read. It’s fun to read an entire mystery with the late Victorian attitude that science can fix everything. Doyle’s habit of describing every character in excruciating detail is also fun, and led to this knee-slapper of a line:

There were pride, valour, and strength in his thick brows, his sensitive nostrils, and his large hazel eyes.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

It was time to see what all the fuss was about. Although I accidentally started with the third book in the Millenium series, I don’t mind. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest gives a good explanation of what came before it and brings closure to the series.

Lisbeth Salander, a woman who’s wanted for three murders, shows up nearly dead of gunshot wounds in Gosseberga, Sweden. Her father, an ex spy, has an axe wound to the face. As Salander recuperates in the hospital, awaiting trial, shadowy forces try to make the whole situation disappear.

The book’s greatest strength is Salander herself. It’s fun to inhabit the mind of a genius computer hacker who’s uninhibited by the morality of mere mortals, though I wouldn’t want to meet her in person. Larsson writes with a crisp, dry style that even makes the infodumps interesting. I learned more about Sweden, the Swedish justice system, and the Swedish Intelligence Service than I ever thought I wanted to know.

The whole book was fun.

It has some problems. It’s heavy-handed: I get the point already that violence against women is bad, and breaking the Swedish constitution is bad. Computer hacking does not work the way that it is presented in the book. And it’s a pretty serious wish fulfillment fantasy for journalists. Not only does Mikael Blomquist have a full-time job at a financially solvent magazine, he gets to dash around protecting the vulnerable, exposing crooks, and earning the admiration of Swedish Intelligence agents. And for some reason everybody wants to have sex with him.

The book also has some worrying ethics. The protagonists of the book form a team effort to clear Salander’s name of the murders she didn’t commit. But Salander really is a criminal. She’s stolen billions, attempted murder twice, and in the epilogue, she’s an accessory to another murder. Her friends do a lot of breaking and entering and creepy-as-hell surveillance to help her. A doctor at the hospital intentionally misdiagnoses Salander to buy her time before she goes to prison. His actions echo those of the villain Teleborian, who misdiagnoses Salander to get her locked up in a mental institution. Why is this behavior okay when it’s done in the service of Salander?

I recommend the book. Though it’s odd, and Lisbeth Salander is terrifying, it’s a wonderful romp through Swedish society.

Mind of my Mind by Octavia Butler

Wild Seed was my introduction to Octavia Butler’s work. I loved it. My edition contained a large chunk of Mind of my Mind, the next book in the series, which left me eager to learn what becomes of Doro and Anyanwu.

Mind of my Mind takes place in the 1970s or so, about a century after the events of Wild Seed. Both immortals have settled in California. The story focuses on Mary, the latest of Doro’s breeding experiments. As Mary comes into her powers, the experiment gets out of hand.

This book is one of Butler’s early works (her second), and it shows. The book feels unfinished. The narrative skips over great gaps of time in the middle as Mary learns to control her telepathic network and the writing is so spare that it cuts into the bone.

Within that short text, though, Butler raises questions about power and control. The telepaths are a race of people who have to prey on others to survive. Should they exist? If they already exist, what kind of ethics can they hold on to? Is Mary a villain? What about Doro?

The climax of the story was rushed but brought a satisfying closure to the story of Doro and Anyanwu. It’s not a happy ending, but it is a classic one, following in the tradition of Frankenstein.

Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman

Another well-regarded book that I didn’t like. I wonder what’s going on.

Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman features an alternative West where the Devil rules the Great Plains, preventing the United States from expanding any further west than the Mississippi. Enter Isobel Lacoyo Távora, the Devil’s foster child. On the day of her majority, she walks up to him and demands a job.

It’s a Western with a Latina main character (cool) and a bildungsroman about the Devil’s new left-hand man (awesome). How do you mess this up? Somehow, Laura Anne Gilman manages to do just that.

The biggest problem with this book is that Izzy doesn’t have clear goals. The Devil throws her out onto the road to learn by doing, without explaining what she’s supposed to do. Izzy spends the first third of the book complaining that she doesn’t know what to do, instead of, well, doing anything. Which isn’t entirely Izzy’s fault. The Devil pulled a Yoda-level it-will-all-become-clear stunt on her. He’s not a Jedi, he’s a businessman. He’s the sort of boss who would be very explicit with his minions and make sure he gets results.

The narrator keeps telling us that Izzy is not a namby-pamby young woman, but tough and capable. Izzy’s actions belie this. (See the bit about the whining.) Early in the book, because of some emotional upset, Izzy loses her appetite and tosses away her breakfast. That doesn’t make sense! She knows how precious calories are out on the road. If she were tough and capable, she would stuff that into her pockets for later.

The descriptions of the land in this book are beautiful. You can tell Gilman has been to all the sites she writes about and loves them deeply. But I think I’d rather deal with The Mechanical, which got me angry and excited at the same time, than with Silver on the Road, which left me cold.

The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis

Full of cool ideas, but with a frustrating writing style.

In an alternative 1926, the Dutch have taken over the world using armies of alchemical slaves. Magical compulsions keep the Clakkers in line. What could go wrong?

Jax, a household Clakker, inevitably comes into contact with a lens that frees him from his geasa. He has to run up a steep learning curve to deal with his newfound freedom. Meanwhile, Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord, spymistress of what’s left of France, dreams of overthrowing the Dutch Empire. Her attempt to reverse-engineer a military Clakker ends in disaster. Jax and Berenice’s adventures bring them together and into an uneasy alliance.

There’s also Visser, who should never have been a viewpoint character in the first place. More on him later.

The Mechanical is full of super cool ideas. Dutch alchemical robots. Robots versus glue. A secret language for slaves. A clockwork Green Lantern. Weaponized Calvinism. I like a book that sends me to Wikipedia, and The Mechanical had me looking up Huygens, Spinoza, and what the pineal gland actually does (it makes melatonin).

Tregillis squanders that potential with an overwrought writing style. He goes in for eyeball kicks and cheap grossouts, while I am a subtext and quiet horror kind of gal. He does scare me when he mentions in passing that “Don’t harm humans” is the lowest priority of the Clakkers’ hierarchical metageasa. He lets me figure out the implications of that for myself. But most of the time I’m treated to stuff like this:

The central courtyard of the inner keep looked and smelled like a charnel house. Berenice struggled to make sense of what she saw through the pink haze of one blood-clotted eye and the mounting fog of pain. A crumpled silver funicular lay amidst the crushed rubble of the ground station, its windows shattered and empty. Bodies strewn like wreckage. Parts and whole. Blood puddles.

It’s not scary because I know exactly what’s going on. Most of the book is gratuitous; I figured out pretty early that I could skip to the end of the fight scenes and the chase scenes to see who makes it and I wouldn’t miss much.

When body fluids aren’t spattering on walls, Tregillis raises an interesting philosophical question about free will. The characters regard free will and freedom as the same thing. Even Jax himself thinks enslaved Clakkers have no free will, and it is somehow granted when the geasa are taken away. But we can see him struggle against his geasa (and fail) and say whatever he wants to his friends because it never occurred to his makers to stop him. The Clakkers aren’t missing anything, they’re willed beings with shackles added. I really hope that Tregillis is working up to a point that free will doesn’t mean getting to do what you want.

Jax is too clever for belief. He’s lived for 118 years with his every motion spelled out for him, so I expected him to feel overwhelmed by having to make so many decisions so fast. But no, he runs the entire city of New Amsterdam a merry chase, making all the right decisions, then he hijacks an airship.

While he clings to the belly of the thing in midair he decides he needs to recruit the Clakker mind inside it to his side so they can both escape. He thinks the eyes are the windows of the soul and slams his magic lens into the airship’s eye. Which works. Earlier, he got his freedom when the lens got lodged inside his chest. And he hadn’t taken the lens outside of himself yet, so he had no good reason to think he could survive doing that. And in other parts of the book, he’s not sure if enslaved Clakkers even have souls.

The Dutch people don’t make sense, either. They go out of their way to pick on Clakkers even when they’re working properly. All of the people. Jax even notes that he thinks humans are all the same. He should be wrong. I’d expect to see at least a few Dutch people take them for granted, try to take them apart and get arrested, fetishize them, demonize them, fight for the abolition of slavery, but they all seem to react to Clakkers the same way. The Dutch Empire doesn’t have to work hard at their totalitarian state at all.

Meanwhile, Luuk Visser is a blithering idiot. He’s a secret Catholic priest, working as a spy for the French from within the Hague. He learns that most of his spy cell has been executed and one woman taken prisoner. In his guise as a Protestant pastor, he asks to see the prisoner and then kills her to keep her knowledge out of Dutch hands. Reasonable enough. But then the moron tries to go home. Of course Dutch agents are waiting for him there and take him prisoner.

And then he gets enslaved under geasa and turned into a machine for the Dutch. Since he can’t make decisions, he stops being an interesting character. I would rather have Jax and Berenice hear rumors that Something Very Bad happens to Visser, then later witness the zombie-like Visser thing. That would have been scarier.

Which makes Berenice my favorite character. She’s the only main character who’s a mere mortal, she’s not too good or too evil, and above all, she makes sense. She violates medical ethics after a cold calculation that her work will benefit France. When she brings a military Clakker into a French fortress to study it, it breaks free and kills over thirty people. Does she mope? She figures out a man sabotaged her glue and hunts him down. And she has a nuanced view of Clakkers. She accepts they’re sentient, but she’s still willing to take advantage of them. Her alliance with Jax could be a lot of fun.

I’m excited to see where Tregillis is going with all the neat ideas in this series, but I think I will skip to the end to see who makes it.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

The main character is a spaceship. And she is hell bent on revenge.

It is not the plot that makes Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie shine – the above is all there is to know about it. Nor is it the setting, which is standard space opera fare. It’s the technical mastery it takes to write a first-person novel from the point of view of an AI hive mind. In some of the early chapters Leckie writes from the first person omniscient. I didn’t even know you could do that. Look:

“Is she coming or not? If she isn’t coming she should say so.”

At that moment Lieutenant Awn was in the bath, and I was attending her. I could have told the lieutenants that Lieutenant Awn would be there soon, but I said nothing, only noted the levels and temperature of the tea in the black glass bowls various lieutenants held, and continued to lay out breakfast plates.

Near my own weapons storage, I cleaned my twenty guns, so I could stow them, along with their ammunition. In each of my lieutenants’ quarters I stripped the linen from their beds. The officers of Amaat, Toren, Etrepa, and Bo were all well into breakfast, chattering, lively. The captain ate with the decade commanders, a quieter, more sober conversation. One of my shuttles approached me, four Bo lieutenants returning from leave, strapped into their seats, unconscious. They would be unhappy when they woke.

Justice of Toren/One Esk Nineteen/Breq has a bizarre sense of identity. In the first half of the book, every other chapter describes the backstory, in which the Justice of Toren is a battleship crewed by dozens of officers and running her software in the brains of hundreds of meat-puppet human bodies. In the present day, the Justice of Toren has all been destroyed save for one puppet body. She still thinks of herself as a spaceship. And she thinks of herself as having already been murdered.

What the hell is Justice of Toren/One Esk Nineteen/Breq? She’s AI software running on a human brain. To make things even weirder, another character points out that it’s probably possible to bring back her body’s original owner (some nameless political prisoner). And her remaining body earns command of a ship, so now she’s a spaceship inside a human inside a spaceship.

A lot of the philosophical parts of the book explore what happens when a mind becomes divided against itself. This doesn’t just apply to the spaceship characters.
On the other hand, there’s so much philosophy in the book that not much happens. Add to that a nonlinear plot, an unreliable narrator, and characters who like to talk around the point in a way that would make Jane Austen proud, and you have yourself a tough read. I recommend looking up all the spoilers online first so you can know what’s going on. Then you can sit back and enjoy the thought experiment.

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

They are the only two immortals in the word: Anyanwu, an Ibo woman who can repair her body at will, and Doro, a spirit who possesses bodies and devours souls. They hate each other with a passion; the loneliness of immortality makes them need each other.

I’ve kept hearing Octavia Butler’s stuff is really good. I only waited this long to read something of hers because I didn’t know where to start. Butler broke into print in 1976 with Patternmaster then wrote successive prequels to it. Wild Seed is the earliest in the sequence of events and regarded by John Pfeiffer as the best book she ever wrote.

The language of this book struck me right away. Check out this passage near the beginning:

Anyanwu looked away, spoke woodenly. ‘It is better to be a master than to be a slave.’ Her husband at the time of the migration had said that. He had seen himelf becoming a great man – master of a large household with many wives, children and slaves. Anyanwu, on the other hand, had been a slave twice in her life and had escaped only by changing her identity completely and finding a husband in a different town. She knew some people were masters and some were slaves. That was the way it had always been. But her own experience taught her to hate slavery. She had even found it difficult to be a good wife in her most recent years because of the way a woman must bow her head and be subject to her husband. It was better to be as she was – a priestess who spoke with the voice of a god and was feared and obeyed. But what was that? She had become a kind of master herself. ‘Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid being a slave,’ she said softly.

I think I count a dozen words in that entire paragraph with French or Latin origins. The rest of it is Ango-Saxon, emotional and gritty. She introduces complex ideas about slavery, gender, dominance and submission with deceptively simple language. And she keeps it up this way for an entire novel.

Wild Seed is also about game theory, since Anyanwu is trapped in a game with Doro she can’t win. And it’s about our relationship with our bodies, since Anyanwu’s super power is her body and Doro has no body at all. He’s fascinated with breeding human beings to each other because he’s impotent. The book is everything N. K. Jemisin was trying to cover with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but Octavia Butler is a master at it. The book will make you think. A lot of it you’ll wish you weren’t eating lunch while you were reading.

Wild Seed feels like an epic love story even though it’s a fairly short book. The ending was abrupt, especially for me, because my edition includes a big chunk of Mind of my Mind. I got three quarters of the way through the book, saw the end, and had to page backward looking for a climax.

Other issues include that you can tell it’s a prequel. Many aspects of the psychic humans are really only in there because of the psychics later in the series. And Doro’s breeding program has a surprising lack of Asian people considering that a) most people in the world are Asian and b) Doro’s willing to take advantage of all the genetic material he can get. But these are quibbles. This is a beautiful, thought-provoking, challenging book.

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Margaret R. Taylor's Writing Blog