Walking on the Moon

I’m interested in how writers bringing culture of the day into stories to create verisimilitude can wind up distancing readers from the work as time goes by. When I recently read The Turn of the Screw there were several times that the characters left things unsaid that remained unknown to me because I’m not reading in late 18th Century England. I still got something out of Screw, but I wasn’t creeped out the way I was when I read The Church of Dead Girls. It’s been years since I read that and I still get chills.

I bring that up because Hank Green is very much setting An Absolutely Remarkable Thing in the world of late 2010’s internet fame. I can imagine it being steeped enough in that time to become opaque to readers in time. I hope not. For all immersion in the era, I think Green has a lot to say about fame and communities that form around arcane interests that is independent of mechanism.

He also creates a set of characters that I believe. While it’s tempting to try to make characters here stereotypes or symbols, these all feel unique. He does one of my favorite tricks a good writer can pull off: he writes a character who I think is wrong or crazy, but who I like, who I believe, and who I’m rooting for. Even knowing that it’s probably not going to end well.

I like his writing, and he brings the rhythms of the language of the time to life very well. In the same way I like to imagine that people in the 30’s and 40’s spoke like Raymond Chandler characters, I hope people believe we talked this way in the future.

Strongly Recommended.

I picked this up just poking around the library’s virtual shelves. I recognized the title and figured I’d catch up with a classic.

It’s a gothic ghost story and I’ve heard enough ghost stories to see the foundations here. And I know that James is often read more in subtext than in text. But for all the discursive text here I missed a lot of the context.

I do think it’s very hard to be eerie on the page. Especially so when you’re talking to someone across a century and ten levels of class. And even with all that gap, I did feel the slow ratchet of tension rising. But overall it felt like homework.

Yeah, I finally read The Martian.

I realized a few pages into it that I was going to enjoy it, but I wasn’t sure if it was just one of those books that was written especially for me or if it was really good. The early chapters had the tone of the things I do at work absent the threat of death if I get it wrong. A book about stressful problem solving seems to have a limited audience.

Weir is a writer with more range than stranding me in space, though. He does a really good job dropping the reader into a relatable character’s head in the middle of a terrifying situation and then expanding out to the larger worlds around him. No one’s found themselves struggling to stay alive on Mars, but many people have found themselves in a tough spot and gone into problem solving mode. I think it sucks people into the story. Once you’re in, when the main character gets a chance to breathe, bits of the worlds creep in, and the reader is oriented. And the rest of the worlds are believable and engaging, so you look up and find you’re caring about more characters than the stranded fellow.

Weir puts individual scenes into that structure that keep the reader in the story. Some of that is just writing exciting set-pieces. Some of that is dribbling out bits of context that form a universe. Some is pacing the whole story. He’s good all around.

It’s an adventure story, and super pro-space exploration. I like adventure and space exploration, so I’m an easy sell. But I recognize the bias. If any bit of adventure or space attracts you, this is top quality stuff.

Strongly recommended.

This is a dandy piece of genre fiction. Moreno-Garcia takes the basic set-up of Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and writes a better book. She sets it in late 19th century Mexico and puts real characters into the story. Once she’s put better elements into the scenario, she orchestrates a consistent, interesting, tense story with a satisfying outcome.

Moreno-Garcia builds a consistent real world full of characters with enough depth and ambiguity to make them interesting. She fits them into an adventure tale that consistently raises the stakes and grips the reader. Exciting read with plenty of interesting sidelights and ideas that drive the story without hijacking it.

Strongly recommended.

I picked this up on a lark. I was between holds at my library and this was on on one of the digital shelves of new well-regarded books. Something in the summary caught my eye, so I grabbed it. It was more than I expected.

Birnam stuck the landing in a way that few books I’ve read have. I thought I’d read one kind of book, and in the last few pages realized I’d read quite another. I admired the second one much more.

For obvious reasons, I don’t want to say more. Have a look at the blurbs and if it sounds remotely interesting to you, check it out.

You may reach the end and feel like it was a straight line. I think it’s probably a good read even if that’s the case. You may be surprised by and be put off. I just don’t know. But I know I think it’s quite a book.

Highly recommended.

Overall I liked The Three Body Problem. I think it’s a well executed SF novel with a lot of twists and turns. There’s enough hard science thrown around that part of the fun is deciding if this is just a near future thriller, or just where and how far things are going to come off the rails. There’s a nice tension to it that keeps you reading.

Liu sets the book primarily in China, primarily in the early 2000’s with big chunks in later 20th Century flashbacks. As an American reader, I found it interesting to see the differences and parallels between the same periods in the US and China. There’s a nice use of footnotes by the author and translator to both flesh out the world and keep the reader off-balance. Some are just “here’s a relevant fact from Chinese history or slang that you might not know” while others reference the history of the fictional world Liu is creating.

There are lots of interesting ideas to chew on about idealism and practicality, about how understanding the broad picture may not determine individual cases, and other lofty stuff that doesn’t get in the way of a fast moving plot in a shifting world.

If there’s anything I didn’t like, it might be that the characters didn’t suck me in as people. Some of that may be thematic. Liu may be treating them less as people to meet than as complex interacting systems. It’s nowhere as stark as that sentence makes it out to be. These folks are drawn with more depth than stereotypes. They have individual motivations and histories that help explain who they are and I recognize them as unique. But I also see how they’re the initial conditions of a complex system that expresses itself as this novel.

And I don’t think that’s just because I’m a nerd.

Highly recommended.

There are a lot of ethnic communities in Los Angeles. Much of what makes the city’s history fascinating is how they tussle in creating the place. In Plaza William David Estrada takes a slice through that history framed by the plaza at the center of the city.

That plaza has undergone changes from a traditional European central square to something flavored by Mexico’s emerging identity to a multi-ethnic gathering place. Not to mention how it was manipulated by the people selling a fictional Los Angeles into a tourist attraction. Other parts were just erased. I had no idea how big a part the LA plaza played in the Sun Yat -sen’s revolution in China.

Estrada takes the reader through these twists and turns with scholarship and heart. It’s still a largely academic work, but with plenty of treasures.

Recommended.

Folklore is Eric Avila’s exploration of how mega-roads like interstate freeways have affected the urban environment. Many authors have looked at how these developments have changed both how we get around cities and how we live in them. What I liked about Avila’s approach was that he extends his analysis from statistics and anecdotes to the art of the freeway.

He captures how freeways become both a canvas for art and a subject of art in other media. Taggers, muralists, public art, and advertisers all use the freeway in different ways. By integrating art with the process of traversing cities, the communities producing it can merge with the experience. It’s an interaction that’s easy to miss.

The freeway has also entered more traditional art in ways that illuminate how the freeway has affected the artists. Again, it can be surprising how artists with different experiences of the freeway use it in their expressions.

These are interesting ideas and well worth a look. You may have to dig a bit. Folklore has an academic basis and format which can be a little distancing.

Recommended.

The folks at Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone were talking about Dracula and made it sound so good that I wanted to revisit it.

It’s more interesting than fun to read. There’s a lot of the foundations of horror in there, but as a book there’s a lot more logistics than excitement to it. At some point Mina Harker mentions having memorized the train schedules of a city she’s just arrived in and I remember being surprised that all of that schedule wasn’t reproduced in Stoker’s dialog. Not to worry, plenty of other minutia are.

I can kick Dracula a lot from the position of a reader used to different prose conventions and as a viewer of tons of derivative works. The world building is all trees and no forest. The characters are pretty stock. The team seems to deliberately not communicate with one another just to advance the plot, and more.

But the bones are great.

The feeling of dread of a powerful supernatural force plotting its way to power remains chilling. The action set pieces are genuinely suspenseful and thrilling. The absence of specificity of the cause of the Evil lets adapters dress those bones in everything from a horror of temptation gone wrong to terror of encroaching otherness to comedic horror while keeping a ripping action adventure going. You have to trim some train schedules, but what’s left is such a great canvas that people keep coming back to it.

I did find it more of a trip to the vampire museum than a ripping yarn of its own, but there’s a lot to conjure with here. There are great reasons people keep coming back to the source.

Recommended.

grap 1.48 is released. It’s a very small output syntax change to accomodate dpic.