I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: JUNE 2009 EDITION

[defrog]

You want to know what I’m reading. And I want to tell you. What could possibly go wrong?

JUST FINISHED

After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Not so much a novel as a sort of fictional meditation on how the nature of the city changes when the sun goes down. The basic story revolves around the events of one night that involve the beating of a Chinese hooker in a love hotel, and a young woman whose sister – who has been asleep for the past few months – has a strange encounter with the dream world, neither of which is ever explained. But as usual it’s well written, and Murakami captures that night-owl lifestyle strikingly well without delving into the usual cliches. So if you don’t mind novels where mood and imagery are more important than the plot, and if you’ve ever worked the graveyard shift, you might get something out of this.

JUST STARTED

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
On paper the idea of melding cyberpunk and noir detective fiction sounds gimmicky and not all that clever, but a number of people have recommended Richard Morgan to me, so I figured I’d start here to see what the fuss is about.

RECENT TITLES

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
This is my third outing with Steinbeck, and I remain impressed. The story is pretty basic, but  it’s how Steinbeck tells it – more like a collection of vignettes describing Monterey and its inhabitants, revolving around the idea of a group of bums trying to do something nice for a local biologist. It’s funny and sometimes sad, told with economic attention to detail without wasting yr time. Fabulous.

The Garden Of Unearthly Delights by Robert Rankin
One of Rankin’s more mind-bending works, this one concerning a guy caught up in a reality fracture that results in his favorite science-hero characters coming to life and the world transitioning to one where magic works. He is dubbed an Imagineer and charged to go out and be the hero – only for his ingenious schemes to go horribly wrong. For the entire book. Better than it sounds, but not that much better. Still funny, though.

Someday I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
What if you had this idea for a comic book but wrote it like a novel? It might be something like this, which on its face is a superhero novel with two narratives: one from supervillain and certified evil genius Dr Impossible and the other from relatively new cyborg superhero Fatale, who joins the New Champions team to look for their top hero, Corefire, who has disappeared. The characters are done really well (Dr Impossible in particular) and Grossman injects plenty of sardonic humor into it. The only really bad thing is the constant use of flashback to reveal the backstory of not just the two main characters, but the entire history of the superhero timeline. It’s way too much information that really gets in the way of the action and makes things hard to follow. Apart from that, though, it’s a lot of fun.

The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
The basic premise – a church that preaches eternal salvation by implanting yr brain into a cyborg body, and doesn’t take “no” for an answer – sounded really promising, and it is, but set against the backdrop of a world divided primarily between hyperviolent cops and hyperviolent poor people, the otherwise decent story is buried under far too much bad-ass violence. The narrator – hitman Avery Cates – overdoes it with his hard-man “You fucking have to be a fucking violent bad-ass with fucking everyone you fucking meet or you’ll get fucking killed in a fucking heartbeat” spiel, which wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t repeat it almost every chapter. I made it to the end, but overall it was way too OTT for me. Nice Jae Lee cover art, mind.

Top Of The Heap by Erle Stanley Garner
Garner is better known for his Perry Mason books, but he also wrote the Cool and Lam series under the name A.A. Fair, featuring gumshoe Donald Lam and his loud money-grubbing partner Bertha Cool. Lam is hired to confirm a rich kid’s alibi, but smells a rat and digs deeper to uncover something bigger. Frankly, I didn’t get much out of it – the actual shenanigans are insanely complicated, and as private eyes go, Lam doesn’t really stand out. Little wonder Perry Mason is more famous.

Hit the bricks flatfoot,

This is dF

Comments

[jasonfranks.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in Richard Morgan suddenly--been hearing his name a lot. I have wanted to read ALTERED CARBON for a while now. Will note that Dan Simmons overtly combined Cyberpunk and Noir in HYPERION as long ago as 1989, and it seemed an obvious match even then.

CANNERY ROW is awesome. Rankin doesn't appeal to me, and I've turned the Grossman book over a couple of times (the Bryan Hitch cover always catches my eye), but something about the nudge-and-wink tone of the blurb sets my teeth on edge. Warren Ellis did this stuff more than 10 years ago.

Murakami is on my list.