Tag Archives: book review

The Russia House by John le Carré

John le Carré is the celebrated author of over a dozen spy novels (including the likes of The Constant Gardener), but there’s certain spy elements that you won’t find in his books.  You won’t find any guy in a tux whipping out a one-liner before he blasts his way out of a supervillain’s death machine.  These are not that kind of spy books.  John le Carré (not his real name) has worked for both MI5 and MI6, and his books reflect what spying is actually like.

The Russia House is not le Carré’s most famous work, but it was my introduction to him because a friend of mine recommended the book.  Barley Scott Blair is the manager of a bankrupt publishing company and borderline alcoholic.  On a publicity trip to Moscow, he says and does a chain of wrong things and winds up embroiled in an espionage scheme.  British intelligence has to figure out how to harness him to learn more about the Soviet missile program – and how to keep Barley on a leash.

What I found most interesting about this book was that it captured the zeitgeist of the late Cold War.  I’m a millennial, so the U.S.S.R. collapsed when I was a baby.  There has only ever been one Germany to me.  What was living through the Cold War like?  Le Carré does a vivid job of capturing the moribund U.S.S.R., the mutual resentment between the U.S. and Britain, and the constant, low-level paranoia that we are going to make ourselves go kablooie.

There are only gray characters in this book.  Everybody has a reason they want something out of Barley, and nobody is a knight in shining armor.

Another neat thing, which is really just an aside – you know how in English class you always learn about how The Great Gatsby is an example of a displaced protagonist?  Gatsby is the main character of that story, but the story is told by Nick Carraway.  Then the English teacher comes up dry trying to think of another example.  The Russia House is another one of these rare stories.  Barley Scott Blair is the main character, but the narrator is Palfrey, a legal advisor to the the British intelligence agency that’s trying to keep Barley in check.  Try bringing up that factoid in English class.

Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Ever since the second book of the Abarat series was published in 2004, I’d been eagerly awaiting the arrival of its sequel.  For those who aren’t familiar with the books, let me tell you that the Abarat series is a strange beast: kids’ stuff by Clive Barker.  Yup.

Barker held back a bit with the weird and creepy stuff for the first two books as he told the story of Candy Quackenbush, a girl from Minnesota who finds a portal to a magical dimension.  But in the third one, Abarat: Absolute Midnight, all Hell breaks loose.  I can’t really describe the plot to you.  In third books of five-book series, plots are hard to describe.  But in a nutshell an apocalypse has come to Candy’s Abarat.

We haven’t just got Mater Motley now.  We’ve got eldritch abominations fighting other eldritch abominations.

Highlights include the gorgeous, Barkeresque language, the full-color illustrations every few pages, and Rojo Pixler, who’s like every creepy rumor you’ve heard about Walt Disney.

Romantic spoiler alert: Who the heck is Gazza?  He shows up halfway through the book and instantly he and Candy fall in love with each other.  I was rather rooting for Candy/Malingo.  Although it would have been disturbing, Candy/Carrion or Candy/Finnegan Hob would have made for an interesting story, too.

Two Books on Science Writing

You might know that I’ve been taking a class on science writing for popular audiences this semester.  There are two required readings for the course, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, ed. Mary Roach, and A Field Guide for Science Writers, ed. Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson, and Robin Marantz Henig, and I’ve been enjoying them so much that they’ve become oatmeal reading.  Wait, didn’t you know that?  I do all my reading for fun over oatmeal in the morning.

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Source: Amazon

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011  The book is pretty much what it sounds like: a collection of the best stuff published in popular science magazines in 2011.  The articles range in subject from how you collect semen samples from chimpanzees* to shock reporting on the Gulf oil spill to a meditation on the limits of what physics might be able to discover.  The book feels like reading many issues of Discover magazine and The New Yorker, because that’s where many of these articles come from.  Except that this book is a highlights reel.

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Source: Goodreads

A Field Guide for Science Writers  This is pretty exciting stuff, because it gets into the nuts and bolts of how one goes about writing about science.  The book is divided into sections, one of which is about actually writing well, one about the peculiarities of certain fields such as medicine, and one about working in all the various print markets.  Print markets.  The biggest problem with this book is that it was published in 2006, and the written word has been through an upheaval since then.  I’d recommend this book for the section on craft alone, but the ten pages on writing for the Web left me wanting more.

I’m leaving this class with more conviction than ever that science writing is very cool stuff.  What could be better than science and writing put together?

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*  A section of PVC pipe lined with K-Y Jelly, in case you were wondering.

Cover of Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer

I’ll admit I’m a bit late to the party on this one.  The first Artemis Fowl book was published in 2001, when I was a bit older than the series’s target demographic, so it got past me until just now.  But I’m still #12 on the library waitlist for Game of Thrones, so I thought I’d give it a try.  And after reading it, I want to know why these books were marketed only to kids.  The subtext here is brilliant.

Artemis Fowl is a millionaire, a criminal mastermind, and twelve years old.  His dad has conveniently gone missing after an explosion on a Russian cargo ship and his mother has shut herself up in her room out of grief, so he can run around and do his moneymaking schemes without too much trouble.  His accomplices are Butler and his sister Juliet, the butler and maid of the Fowl estate.  And… and… the awesomeness of these characters… you simply have to read about them for yourself:

The Butlers had been serving the Fowls for centuries.  It had always been that way.  Indeed, there were several linguists of the opinion that this was how the common noun had originated.  The first record of this unusual arrangement was when Virgil Butler had been contracted as servant, bodyguard, and cook to Lord Hugo de Folé for one of the first great Norman crusades.

At the age of ten, Butler children were sent to a private training center in Israel, where they were taught the specialized skills needed to guard the latest in the Fowl line.  These skills included Cordon Bleu cooking, marksmanship, a customized blend of martial arts, emergency medicine, and information technology.  If, at the end of their training, there was not a Fowl to guard, then the Butlers were eagerly snapped up as bodyguards for various royal personages, generally in Monaco or Saudi Arabia.

The whole book reads like this.

Artemis’s latest scheme is to kidnap an officer of LEPrecon, the fairy police, and hold her ransom for quite a lot of money.  Of course, the situation devolves into a standoff in which Colfer has the chance to trot out heist movie tropes and play with them.  There’s a fairy sergeant with a cigar in his mouth, a dwarven convict who’s sent to work in a plea-bargaining deal, and the smartass techie who walks the fairies through Fowl Manor via his headset.  He’s a centaur.  He loves carrots.

There are, unfortunately, parts of the book that induce giggles for the wrong reasons.  Artemis has at his disposal the most cutting-edge of 2001 technology.  Near the beginning of the book, he steals some data from a fairy in Saigon and then e-mails it to himself.  One can only assume he was using a Hotmail account.

But seriously, just read it for the Butlers.  Go read it.

Cover of Stealing Death

Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey

Well, it’s been said that you can learn how to become a better writer both by reading great books and awful ones.  Turns out that you can learn from reading books that are just sort of okay, too.

Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey was published in 2009 and is aimed at the YA market.  It’s got a neat premise: After a fire burns down his home, the Gwali, a sort of grim reaper/boogeyman, steals the souls of Kipp’s parents and puts them in a sack.  Kipp will go to incredible lengths to get that sack back.  It’s also refreshingly different that Carey decided to set this story in an African-like society.  (Although the girl on the front cover is quite clearly a white person with darkened skin.  But I digress.  That was the illustrator’s fault.)

I was disappointed to find that Carey took such a cool idea and made a mediocre story out of it.  There’s nothing at all wrong with this book.  But I got about twenty pages into it and wondered to myself why I didn’t care what happened next.  The answer: It’s only a made-up story.  Kipp isn’t real, so it doesn’t matter what happens to him.  When you’re writing fiction, this is a very bad sign indeed.

Carey tells us, outright, that Kipp is sad that his parents and little brother are dead.  Okay.  And he has a crush on his landlord’s daughter.  Okay, but where is the evidence for this?  Does he do anything to show that he’s sad?  No, he just sort of packs up his stuff and starts on his quest.  He’s okay, but he never makes that jump from “generic YA protagonist” to “person I care about desperately.”

I suppose the writing lesson to take away from this is that crafting a compelling story is hard work.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I must be turning into a grouchy old lady.  I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – you know, that hit YA fantasy that’s scheduled to be made into a movie next year – and all I could do was cringe at the diction.

The story is nice enough, if not entirely original.  In a dystopian future, the government forces children from each of the twelve Districts to battle each other to death on live television.  When her little sister gets chosen to be this year’s contestant from District Twelve, Katniss Everdeen, warrior girl, volunteers to take her place.  There is also a subplot in which Katniss has difficulty deciding between two boyfriends.

I shouldn’t be sweating the small stuff, but what bothers me the most about this book are the adverbs.  Katniss is forever doing things “quickly” or “slowly.”  Not a semicolon in sight, dozens of places where one should have been.  Collins even goes so far as to word “actually” in a non-ironic fashion.

We are expected to believe that Katniss Everdeen likes dresses.  Katniss the pragmatic survivalist.  Katniss, who is reported to break out of the electrified fence surrounding the compound where she lives to hunt food for her family.  Okay, she’s a kid.  I liked dresses too, briefly.  When I was eight.  But you can’t move around in a dress and you can’t afford to spill rabbit guts all over it.

What is it with kids these days?

Small Favor: One of the Dresden Files

Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only professional wizard.  While he’s not solving crimes as a consultant with the Chicago PD, he’s trying to keep out of a turf war between the Summer and Winter Court of the Fae (think Queen Titania vs. Queen Mab), avoid demons who are trying to kill him, and escape the notice of Chicago’s supernatural crime bosses.  And he’d like to find a girlfriend and figure out how he’s going to make rent this month.  Yep.  It’s pretty much a hardboiled detective novel … with magic.

Jim Butcher has got a formula going here with the Dresden Files series.  But the formula works, and he’s running with it.  If you’re looking for a lightweight read with lovable characters, something you don’t have to analyze too much, Small Favor is for you.

Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China that Never Was

 

‘Take a large bowl,’ I said.  ‘Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic, and lunacy.  Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei – which means “dry cup” – and drink to the dregs.’

Procopius stared at me.  ‘And will I be wise?’ he asked.

‘Better,’ I said.  ‘You will be Chinese.’

Plucker, by Brom

Sick and twisted Toy Story.

I do have to start off with one nitpick.  The author of this book is primarily a visual artist, and it shows in the text.  But… just wait till I tell you how this goes.  A boogeyman from Africa has gotten into this little kids’ room.  It’s picking off his toys one by one and eating their eyeballs, and when it’s done, it’s going to steal the kids’ soul.  Lucky for them, the housekeeper moonlights as a voodoo priestess.  She takes Jack in the Box (our hero), sews a snake heart into him, and sets him off on a mission of bloody vengeance.  How cool is that?