I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: AUGUST 2008 EDITION

[defrog]

The book reviews continue, cos the “to read” pile isn’t getting any smaller.

JUST FINISHED

Quantico by Greg Bear
Sometimes I think I keep reading Bear because Blood Music was so good. As a writer, he’s pretty wooden, but his ideas can be interesting. Here he looks at the near future of terrorism and bioweapons, and offers an alternate take on the anthrax letters of 2001 as part of a much bigger plot which in itself is actually rather clever. Some of it is a bit far out (especially his ideas on the fate of the FBI), and the ending seems a bit rushed, but overall it’s not too bad.

JUST STARTED

Little Heroes by Norman Spinrad
This is Spinrad’s take on the cyberpunk genre, as well as a satire of the music business. It’s tough to get into because, like with a lot of Spinrad’s work, he invents hipster slang so heavy it takes awhile to get into the rhythm of it, but anything that pits rock’n’roll against the Monolithic Record Company is worth sticking around for, so we’ll see how it goes.

RECENT TITLES

Curveball by Bob Drogin
It’s amazing the things you’ll buy in airport bookshops when yr out of things to read. This is the story of Curveball, the Iraqi defector who turned out to be the chief source of info that Saddam had bioweapons labs in Iraq – and, as it turned out, a complete liar. Drogin, a Pulitzer-winning journalist for the LA Times, reconstructs how this guy went from unconfirmed source to the slam-dunk proof that Saddam had WMDs. I’d recommend it on a couple of levels – if you choose not to believe a word of it, it’s one of the better (and funnier) spy novels out there. If you believe it’s more or less true, it’s a tale of jaw-dropping incompetence that shows how even the CIA, which we depend on for national security, is subject to bullshit office politics like any other business. Only in this case, thousands of people got killed for it.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
This is Murakami’s second volume of short stories. Some are better than others, and some are stories that ended up as part of novels. The ones that don’t work are the ones that seem weird for the sake of weirdness, but the ones that do work are magical indeed. Actually, even for the stories that don’t pay off, Murakami’s writing is a dream as usual, so it’s not a total waste of time. His first short story collection, The Elephant Vanishes, is more highly recommended, though.

Thud! by Terry Pratchett
More of the usual Discworld fun, but as much as I like any Discworld book with Sam Vimes – truly one of the greatest fictional characters ever realized – this one’s not that great. The satirical focus is a dig on grudge wars and gang mentalities, and it’s good in places, but it loses coherence in others.

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins
Another one from the Hard Case Crime collection, and also the first time I’ve read Collins. It’s modern-day pulp with a hitman tasked to whack a cute librarian, and the basic stoty is okay, but I thought Collins played it too hard boiled, overdoing the whole bad-ass hitman routine and all the sexist borderline homophobic bullshit that goes with the territory. Credit for keeping in character, but making the main character a complete and utter bastard doesn’t make me want to stick around for the rest of the book.

The Game Players Of Titan by Philip K Dick
I’m a big fan of PKD, but this one is a reminder that “prolific” doesn’t mean “consistent”. The story’s to do with a post-war Earth where we fought aliens from Titan and lost, and how we play board games to determine things like land ownership and marriages that can change every week. A good start that builds up okay, but later the narrative gets messy to the point where I suspect Dick basically improvised his way to the ending. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

Read ‘em and weep,

This is dF

Comments

[jasonfranks.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit of a Sbinrad buff and I just loaned LITTLE HEROES to a mate of mine. It's long out of print, where did you find it?

Not one of his best, even if the subject matter is near and dear to my heart--he seems a bit more interested in the sex and drugs than the rock and roll. Still, I liked it enough that I referenced in the rock and roll novel I have been working on for the last eight or so years...

I've long since grown bored of Pratchett, I'm sad to say. His gags get funnier but the plots get thinner and I feel like I've long since read everything he has to say.

Unless he does a book about Brother Fingers I don't think I'll be looking for any more of them.

Agree totally on PKD--he's great when he's on, but let's all remember that he took a lot of speed in order to churn out enough work that he could survive on his 2c/word. Even in his short stories you can very often see where he's just making it up. My favourite incident is from 'Second Variety', in which the protagonist, trapped alone on a planet infested with hostiles and certain to die, wanders around dejected for 2 pages... before he suddenly remembers that he has a spaceship.

-- JF

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

Found it in a used bookshop in Monterey, California a couple of years ago. It's in rickety shape, but it's hard to find almost anything by Spinrad these days, so I got it. For $2, why not?

I've found Pratchett's later stuff to be better than his earlier stuff, so I don't feel compelled to go through the back catalog, much less read them in order. But I figure with anyone that prolific, you have to expect disappointments. And the question then becomes how many chances do you give them and invest the time and effort to read a whole novel before you finally decide it's not worth it? Because who knows, maybe the next one will be good.

I'm getting to that stage with PKD now, it seems, though there is no "next one". Still, one man's ceiling is another man's floor, so it's hard to go by common wisdom. For me, anyway.

[puffdoggydaddy.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Bear in years. I was so disappointed by some of his stuff. That I can't bring myself to pick up his books in the store and read the blurbs. :(