I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: FEBRUARY 2010 EDITION

[defrog]

“How’s those book reports coming, dEFROG?”

“Just filed the latest batch, chief.”

JUST FINISHED

As She Climbed Across The Table by Jonathan Letham
Letham is one of those people who writes science-fiction for people who don’t read science-fiction, and the results can be mixed. In this case, it’s an unrequited love triangle where the third person is actually an artificially created black hole with a personality. Great in theory, but Letham tries a little too hard to channel Samuel Beckett here, and focuses too much on the love story and the nature of emotional obsession that I personally find irritating. It doesn’t help that the protagonist is the sort of hopeless pathetic person that keeps me from reading Nick Hornby. But that’s admittedly my own problem, and probably a testament to Letham’s talent.

JUST STARTED

The Spider: Robot Titans Of Gotham by Norvell Page
Classic pulp action from The Spider, a Shadow ripoff who was Batman before there was Batman –  millionaire Richard Wentworth leads a double life as the vigilante The Spider, heroically fighting giant killer robots and vampire kings. This book collects three Spider stories, and so far, I can safely say I’ve never seen so many exclamation points.

RECENT TITLES

Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch
This was my first time reading Disch, with whom I wasn’t that familiar until his suicide in 2008, after which a lot of SF luminaries came out of the wood work to praise his genius. So I tried this speculative fiction piece in which America is at war with everyone and a conscientious objector is placed in a camp where prisoners are given a drug that turns them into geniuses, but comes with the side-effect of death. I couldn’t really get into it – the basic story gets too buried in the narrrator’s pretentiousness and progressively subjective madness to the point where eventually I had no idea what was going on. So unless someone wants to make a case for Disch’s other work, I think I’ll pass on the rest.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
Stross’ debut novel that – like a lot of his work – is worth reading just for the kinds of ideas he comes with – in this case, a spacefaring collection of uploaded beings armed with cornucopia machines swapping high-tech and wish fulfillment in return for information of any kind, against a background where humanity has been “raptured” and distributed around the stars by some mysterious technological force. The story is basically a metaphor for what happens when repressive neo-Luddite societies are confronted with unlimited free flow of information, and while the space battles are a little tedious in detail, overall it’s space-opera done right.

A Study In Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I have the entire Holmes canon in two omnibus books that have been sitting on my shelf forever, mocking me. And it’s fair comment to say that Robert Downey Jr convinced me to start reading the stories/novels I haven’t read and re-read the ones I have. This belongs to the former category, and it’s the first-ever Holmes mystery. It’s pretty basic, but a good intro to the character, and confirmation that RDJ and Guy Ritchie’s “reboot” of Holmes isn’t nearly as radical as it looks.

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore
In which Moore brings together a number of characters from previous books into what has to be the first Christmas story to feature holiday break-ups, middle-aged sex, a talking fruit bat and articulate zombies all in one place. My kind of Christmas story. And God, it’s funny. And not a little nasty.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
I’d never read Roth before this, and probably won’t read him again. The premise of an alternate America  in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election on an isolationist platform is interesting, but while a fascist America isn’t an implausible idea, Roth really never makes it convincing for me, and the “plot” seems like a cop-out ending. It doesn’t help that the central story of the Jewish family is mostly tedious. That said, Roth does do a good job of showing just how politics can rip families to pieces.

Thunderbolts: Caged Angels by Warren Ellis and Mike Deodato Jr
Second volume of Ellis’ run on the Thunderbolts, and like the first volume, it’s Ellis making the most of the Civil War arc and having fun with Norman Osborne as the head of the Thunderbolts dealing with an apparent and unexpected infiltration within Thunderbolt Mountain. Nicely done.

Rage in the cage,

This is dF

Comments

[jasonfranks.livejournal.com]

I've read 334 by Disch, and, while it's been a long time, I remember it being pretty good. Very bleak.

I've read Chris Moore's first novel, PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING, and while it wasn't bad I found it a bit too eager to explain itself.

-- JF