Walking on the Moon

Between Redshirts and the Collapsing Empire trilogy I’ve quote enjoyed the Scalzi I’ve read. Starter Villain was a good read as well. I think it’s a lighter story than either of the others I mentioned, but it is great fun.

We’ve got a sympathetic character thrown into a crazy scenario that pushes a ton of pop culture buttons and we never really stop to take a breath. The dialog is snappy and we can pull for the good guys and hiss the villains with glee. (Villain being a relative term here, I did see the title.) There’s some earned warmth and a nice ending.

Recommended.

I was surprised by how charmed I was by Murder on the Orient Express. I know Christie’s reputation and her work is popular enough that I know some of the plots, so I know what I’m getting into. At some point, admittedly late in the game, I realized “oh, this is the one where…”. And I still was more charmed than I can defend.

I just finished writing a review of The Thin Man where I lamented that I wasn’t lit up by Hammett a writer who does so many things I generally love in writing and here I am being charmed by Christie who is doing so many things I generally don’t love.

I feel like the characters are all comparatively thin. Stereotypes are doing a lot of lifting here. And the plot is contrived to make the puzzle. It seems like this should irk me to death.

But.

In the middle of a plot that at several points seems to scream “look: a clue”, Christie snuck several genuine clues right past me. In the midst of stereotypes who were sticking to the script remarkably well, she slipped one into another and caught me off guard. And when she has Poirot lead characters by the nose as if to say “I’m better at this than you think I am” I get the feeling she’s saying that to me as a reader about her writing. And she’s right.

She turns contrivances into comfort while never letting you take anything for granted. She moves her characters along the chessboard with finesse and panache. It’s all in the service of a puzzle, but the craftsmanship is so exquisite that it can’t help but charm.

Strongly Recommended.

I wish I liked Dashiell Hammett’s work more.

I see the clever plotting and the realistic characters. I like the dialog that sounds just clever enough that a wise guy would use it. I like the moral ambiguity of his world. I like the plots that are just twisty enough to be confounding without being unbelievable.

And I recognize that he’s part of a genuine sea change in detective and crime fiction. I read Murder on the Orient Express after I read The Thin Man and there are a couple times where Nora suggests Poirot’s techniques and Nick directly says “that doesn’t work.” You could say these are works in conversation, but Hammett’s giving a lecture. I respect that. And I take his point that many earlier mysteries are just candy crush before there were screens and he’s writing stories about characters in settings.

But it doesn’t all gel for me somehow. I know this is a de gustibus thing for me. I think that if you like detective stories at all, you should check out Hammett. He’s an excellent writer and broke plenty of new ground in the genre. I really like the movies made from the books. But I don’t light up when I read him.

Strongly Recommended.

This is a Jack Reacher novel. The first one, in fact. I picked it up because my Dad has been entertaining himself with these and recommended them. He knows he’s not recommending great literature.

I did roll through it and it was fun. I had the feel of an 80’s action movie. Or maybe more like an 80’s action TV series, where a drifter moves from town to town and gets sucked into their problems. It had pretty much all the good and bad of that genre.

I think Child did a better than average job putting building Reacher as a protagonist who is believable enough to not break suspension of disbelief. Reacher does some things that run that risk, but Child moves things along and keeps twists coming in ways that kept me along for the ride.

But it is an 80’s actioner. For guys. The female characters are just prizes and items to defend.

Well built, but not my favorite.

I am a sucker for conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality art. I’m willing to die on the hill that conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality is a genre based on the number of works that fit the bill that I’ve read.

This is Chesterton’s take on it, set in the early 1900’s. I mention the time, because like so many of these, he draws the reader into the web by using plenty of contemporaneous references that slowly melt into universal tropes. Since I didn’t live in the nineteen aughts, these are historical references to me. I like the feeling that Chesterton was pulling his readers in with pop star references.

Because this kind of book is deliberately twisty to make the reader look at reality differently, I won’t try to explain much of the plot. It’s a good run at the genre and has some nice revelations. I think it’s probably sound enough that it would read and confound modern readers of this era’s fiction.

Recommended.

I was browsing around the library looking for a book and ran in to Craig DiLouie‘s name. He’s a horror author who mailed me a pre-print years ago for no reason I could possibly think of. I mean, this blog has a very select audience. Meaning that a couple people who know me and a ton of bots read it. But I liked Paranoia when he sent it to me so when I saw he was selling books, I picked one up.

Episode Thirteen is a horror story on a reality TV ghostbusting show. It’s told in an epistolary fashion, which basically means it’s a found footage telling. He plays the inter-cast drama, the is-this-real-or-not questions, and the mounting spookiness to keep the tension ratcheted up.

Overall the effect is like popping on a good horror flick on. The characters are all archetypal enough that you can get a handle on them quickly, but have enough breath of life in them that they’re believable. The epistolary method nicely mimics the feeling of a found footage horror movie. And the plot zips along well enough to cover the found footage holes.

Covering the found footage holes is a good test for me in a found footage/epistolary story. There are inherent difficulties to getting your characters to expose themselves through text or film that could reasonably turn up later and still be believable. If the story engages me enough that I don’t fixate on those limitations, the author is in business. And DiLouie is here.

Recommended.

This is a classic Czech SF novel by Karel ?apek, the fellow who coined the term robot. What strikes me most is how satirical it is on multiple scales. It does a fine job skewering individuals right up through nations and companies. It does so less in a structured way of stacking individual flaws into structural flaws – you don’t see nations acting the same way as nationals – and more as just showing the multi-scale irrationality of it all. And it’s a fun snappy read as it goes. I mean, it’s not going to wind up anywhere good, but with more whimsical resignation than call to action.

It was written in the 30’s so a lot of the satire of people and their ethnicities foibles has aged badly. The overall tone goes a long way in making it seem more misguided than nasty to me. The perceived quirks of the English middle class don’t really underlie the follies of humanity as a whole, so I rolled my eyes more than hung my head.

Overall an interesting piece of SF. Recommended.

I’ve read some great books from random recommendations on line. And I’ve read The Pussy Detective. That’s too cheap a shot to pass up but it’s unfair to The Pussy Detective.

The book is billed as a Blacksploitation Sex Magic novel, and it completely delivers on that. It creates a really fun Blacksploitation environment and uses the sex and magic ideas as mysterious elements to talk about the world. It would have been a fun 90’s Vertigo series. But it doesn’t rise beyond a pretty niche genre piece. To be fair, I don’t think that was DuVay Knox’s goal. In print, it overstayed its welcome a bit for me, though I did enjoy the Wash U pokes.

I want to be super clear. This is just a case of a work that I’m not the audience for. Knox builds a well-written unique book here. If you have an inclination to check it out, you’ll get a good ride.

I’ve been reading some Space Operas lately that I liked to varying degrees and for various reasons. These three books are a Space Opera trilogy from John Scalzi. This is what I want from a Space Opera.

This is just fun from start to finish. We open in media res of a mutiny and don’t slow down appreciably for 3 books. The world gets built up around us as an unlikely ruler ascends to the galactic throne and faces an unprecedented threat. We meet the rest of our protagonists and villains while barely catching our breath. It’s a hoot.

There’s just enough meat on the bones to make it serious, both for internal stakes and to spark ideas outside the story. The characters are archetypes animated with a breath of life. They change across the novels in interesting and believable ways. The plot twists are believable and frequent. Like I say, great fun.

In fact, I was having so much fun that I was a book and a half in before I noticed that the usual gender ratio for this kind of story was completely reversed. And, thinking about it, no character had any of their appearance described. Huh. Go figure.

Strongly recommended.

I like the idea of Paperback LA. Los Angeles is a big place and people see it different ways. Susan LaTempa wants to lay some breadcrumbs down for people who want to explore the place through media. Mostly prose though she does also include photo essays and such.

It’s an impossible task. And she knows it, but is willing to take a swing anyway. And like I say, I like the idea. I just think her tastes and mine aren’t quite in line. It was nice to revisit The Sellout again, though.