Zach

If you have read a tie-in novel, you have probably read a book by Keith DeCandido. He is the unmatched master of cheesy professional fanfiction. And that's what it reads like. This is not a complaint, though. The silly, not-entirely-in-character, but entertaining plotlines are things that draw me to both fanfiction and tie-in novels in a way that ‘original fiction' can't. Being a professionally published author, DeCandido reigns in some of the wilder impulses of the genre, while still delivering an entertaining between-episodes story.

As almost everyone knows that this point, the bible went through a fairly intense series of parings down and editings into the book that we use today (which is slightly different depending on your religion and/or denomination). Hoffman's book is a fun bit of pop history, giving a surprisingly decent overview of the history of the Judean province area during the time periods that the Bible, as we know it, was compiled and some in-depth discussion of three specific books that were left out of the Bible but were probably well-known during the time period. I wish that he'd given a broader discussion of some of the other books we know were left out, but the specific discussion about the philosophies proposed in the apocryphal texts and the questions that they raise about the transition period as Judaism turned into two different religions (Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity) isn't bad. I'd probably use this as an introduction text to more in-depth works on “lost” scriptures and the pre-Rabbinic Judaism/Christian period.

I read the first in Mead's “Age of X” series and was entertained enough by it to pick up the second book. It's one of those books where every couple of pages I have to groan and go “religion doesn't work that way”, “biology doesn't work that way”, “I'm fairly certain America doesn't work that way”. And yet I enjoy the characters and when they focus more on the thriller plots instead of the author's misunderstanding of how religion works, I find the books really fun, so I will probably read the third, despite some really ridiculous plot twists.

I won't deny that I've had a giant crush on Atwood's writing since I was in high school. I love her novels, but for me, her short stories are really where it's at. You can see her evolving concerns and her evolution as a writer. Stone Mattress doesn't disappoint– the first three short stories are interconnected, and the others are all stand alone. The subject matter is a little eclectic (a werewolf, a couple of murderers, some writers, and a lot of old people), but you can see her current preoccupations. Save one or two, all of her protagonists are older– 60s at the youngest, and the stories deal with memory and death. There's also a weird undercurrent of ambivalence about her own ability to balance the literary/genre divide. Genre fiction comes up a lot, and is often derided by characters or the narrative as “trashy” and not to be paid attention to, and the fans of genre are made out by the narrative to be strange and overwhelmingly obsessed while Atwood still utilizes conventions from those genres. In all, it's an Atwood book, it's well-written, with a deft insight into the human psyche, and also a lot of fun to read.

It's a Harry Dresden novel. I feel like it was a return to the format I enjoyed in the earlier books– Harry is a detective and vaguely smart but in over his head, and there's a caper. It had the political complexity of the more recent books combined with the detective mystery and sardonic humor of the early books, which combined to make it one of the more enjoyable Dresden books in a while. I fully expect the humor to drop back out of the series again at any moment, but I'll take the reprieve.

The last shaman of the Tlingit village of Yanut is in a retirement home in Seattle. An archaeologist digs up the mask containing the one god who must never be released into the world– and sets off a series of brutal murders as the mask makes its way to its chosen wearer. I don't know the last time a book creeped me out so thoroughly. While I tend to be a little wary of books featuring native mythology, The Faceless One treated the characters and their beliefs with sensitivity, and also used those beliefs to create a really, truly scary story. The characters were well-rounded, the plot and pacing were strong. I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed the book.

The sequel to Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots, Seanan's stories are... well, they're Seanan's stories. Full of young women who can do anything. It's entertaining, but had the same problem as the first book in the series. Because she wrote these as independent short stories on her blog whenever someone donated enough money they don't read like they've been edited well. The plot and characters are fascinating, but the pacing is off, and there are a lot of weird tangents and assumptions that make it clear she's playing to an audience rather than working on writing the story as cohesively as possible. I also had to stop for a month and facepalm repeatedly to get over the constant thread of “Santa Claus is real and every culture has an old man winter spirit who is Good and Kind and Rewards Good Children” because it got on my nerves. That said, as all Seanan Mcguire books are, it was a fun romp, with enough tearjerker angst to give it a bit of a bite.

Although not quite as strong as similar books on the topic, Silent Witnesses was a thorough, decently engaging pop history. Because it's an overview of all the forensic techniques, there isn't really enough time for any particular biography or topic to take center stage and while that was a flaw, in that it meant the story lacked an over-arching narrative, it also gave the author a chance to take a broad scope and put all the pieces together. I would have liked the book to have gone into more depth–it gave one chapter each to different forensic topics, such as ballistics, fingerprinting, blood, and DNA, with illustrative case examples, but every chapter left me wanting to know more. Still, if all you know about forensic science is from CSI, Silent Witnesses is not a bad introduction to the history of the topic, if a little overtly focused on British criminal history at times (which, I suppose can be forgiven, as the author is a British forensic scientist.)

I put five hours of my life into this book. I can probably rant to you about its flaws for at least that long. Much like Left Behind, this book is great when you enjoy shoddy theology and terrible, terrible plots. It really wants to be The Exorcist Meets Constantine– innocent young woman is possessed, virtuous priests try to save her, meanwhile Lucifer's second-in-command wants to be ~forgiven~ and is now wandering the human world. You know it's written by a Catholic because only Catholic exorcism will save her and the virtuous Protestant priest dies halfway through the book and goes to hell, and everyone is guilty ALL THE TIME. Also the author has daddy issues you can see from orbit, and all women are either victims or whores– usually literally (and they all go to hell). The theology of the book is by turns flagellatingly masochistic and blindly sadistic about the fact that so many people are going to BURN IN HEELLLLLLLL. That said, I deeply enjoyed it, but I love terrible literature.

I'm not sure how to describe this book. I am tempted to compare it to Margaret Atwood's short stories and prose fiction, in its focus on the grotesqueries, metaphors and realities of a type of female life made manifest. But Mellas breaks open even the metaphors' metaphors. Her women are boxes within boxes with cocoons within berries and fruits and bugs. She doesn't shy from making manifest emotional pain as physical pain (in the first story of the volume, ice skaters screw the blades directly to their feet). Rape, fear, anger, love, are all broken into component parts and digested in ways that are both surreal and viscerally real. I don't know if I liked the book, but I'm glad I read it.

Hurricane Fever is a sharp thriller set in the near future, where the seas have risen and extreme weather patterns batter the Caribbean all summer. It was a quick read, fast paced and enjoyable with a definitely unique sensibility. An ex-Caribbean Intelligence officer gets caught back up in biotech espionage when an old comrade sends him a posthumous message asking to be avenged. There are boats, there are hurricanes, there are many many people of color (what with it being set in the Caribbean and all). To me it was a great antidote to the “white guy beats up all the brown bad guys” airport thrillers I've read over the years. I've been hearing for a while that Tobias Buckell was an author to be reckoned with, and now I understand why.

Japanese fiction can get a little... odd for someone used to the traditional Western rising-climax-falling-conclusion plot set up. I rarely read Japanese novels for that reason. But Tanizaki is considered a master and father of modern Japanese fiction (“modern” here meaning World War I and II era), so I found a copy of his early short stories. Some of them did get a little long-winded, but Tanizaki has a real talent for narrating the strong and sometimes strange passions of his characters. His preoccupation with the control women have over his male protagonists is an absorbing thread that runs through the stories– in one a young man's obsession with his mother/stepmother brings him to ruin, in another a tattoo artist's drive to tattoo the most beautiful woman in Gion leads to his destruction by his most beautiful creation, in a third a servant blinds himself so that his mistress will not feel ashamed of a disfigurement. And yet the narration is always calm and measured, even when the emotions of the characters are roiling. This was not a set of easy reads, but they were good.

I started this book because it was billed as a GLBT book. Instead it was a mostly non-romance adventure/politics story about the God of War getting maneuvered into a bad situation and getting out of it by possessing a female soldier (who is not in a lesbian relationship with the lesbian cop character, more's the pity). There some really interesting political interplay, but it's mostly character study about War, Camilla (the soldier) and a young schizophrenic man who is possessed by Eris/Discord. The ending was fairly predictable, but the characters were engaging and I find myself looking forward to the sequel.

If you like the White Savior narrative where a white person is assigned an unruly class of underprivileged non-white kids and through the magic power of their whiteness manages to teach the kids how to behave, you might like this book.
I didn't.

You know the old “don't judge a book by its cover”? Well, with the Chris McGrath-ish cover I really was expecting going in to have a gritty urban fantasy experience. But while the book offered up a certain amount of urban fantasy grit, it's hard to be seriously hard-bodied about your protagonists when they run an antique shop in the middle of Charleston, SC. There was a lot more mucking about in history and antiques than I would have expected, albeit in a fairly enjoyable sort of way. Despite the mismatch between expectations and reality, I enjoyed the book– it reminded me a bit of the small town amateur detective genre, if those books also involved killer demons and 600 year old vampires. Pleasantly enough, although the main character is a woman, there was not a whiff of a love interest to be found (also her store manager/magic-fighting partner is gay and in a relationship with a very helpful lawyer, so there's that.) It would have been nice if the helpful Vodoun mambo had been more than a magical negro, but oh well, can't win everything.

Are you tired of retellings of classic stories yet? Yes? Me too. Alias Hook wants to be a story about shedding childish things and moving out of the fantasy of Neverland as an adult woman steps foot in Neverland and hook begins to realize there's more to life than a futile war. It was an okay book and I know people who will like it, but for me it replicated a lot of the problems that the original Peter Pan has in terms of the sexist treatment of the female characters (where even Stella, the character who was supposed to be the co-star was really just there to move Hook along in the story). And all the women were mothers or mothering archetypes (or “Wendys”, but “Wendys are always “mothers” to the boys according to this book) which gave it a really frustratingly binarist/cissexist tone. And that doesn't touch the totally unironic Magical Savage thing– Alias Hook replicated the racist treatment of the Native Americans instead of actually considering the implications of an entire aboriginal tribe out of time and space. Still, there is something to be said for a love story about Hook finally growing the fuck up, so for someone who doesn't get deeply frustrated by stagnant roles for women and people of color, it's not a BAD book. It's just not great either.

How I wanted to like this book. The concept is great– historical fiction set in the middle east around the time of the destruction of the temple, and the rise of the Rabbis as a force to be reckoned with in Judaism, focusing specifically on the magic-practicing daughter of one of the great amoraim. And if the focus had stayed on Hisdadukh's learning how to use magic, and dealing with the politics of the era (Roman, Persian, Rabbinical and magical) it would have been great– there are certainly moments of it. But the author focuses so hard on the romance between the protagonist and Rava (another prominent rabbi of the era, who historically married Rav Hisda's daughter) that all the actually interesting plot developments fall by the wayside. Like– the main villain is seen once at the beginning of the novel, or maybe it's not her, but it never really comes up again. Rava slits someone's throat in a drunken fit during Purim, and then resurrects the guy, and it's NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN. The head enchantress turns out to be a lesbian, but it's hinted at once, is revealed and all the protagonist says is “oh, that's why Asmodeus' manly manly bits don't distract you.”
So, basically, it have the potential, and never lives up to it, much to my disappointment. On the up side, i learned that during that era the smaller a guy's dick was, the more ideal it was considered. So there's that.

Dellamonica is one of those mid-list authors that I am bound and determined to get people to read. She's a queer author, who writes fascinating stories featuring great world-building and an assortment of queer people and people of color. While Child of a Hidden Sea is not quite as mind-bending as her previously duology (Indigo Springs and Blue Magic), the plot is a serviceable “modern person thrust into a fantasy world”. The fantasy world is an archipelago-based Mediterranean ocean-going set, with pirates, religious fanatics, hedonists, matriarchal societies, and a naval-based United Nations. The main character? Sophie Hansa, an adopted child looking for her parents who, upon intervening in an attack on her (possible) biological aunt ends up crash-landing on one of the smaller islands. Where, for me, the story really shines is the interactions between Sophie, and her siblings– Bramwell, her adopted brother, and Verena, her just-met biological sister. The feelings of discovery and stress rang really true. Dellamonica also put a lot of energy into developing an intricate and believable ecology and mysterious origin for her fantasy world, allowing a focus to drift from the political drama at times because Sophie is an oceanographer/videographer, which, for me, rounded out not only Sophie's character by the world in a way that's almost never explored.

I have a soft spot for Ellen Datlow– I've been reading any of her compilations I could get my hands on since I found a copy of “Snow White, Blood Red” in the early 90s. On the other hand, while I want to like the Cthulu and other attendant mythos in theory, I generally dislike Lovecraft and the people who write homages to him. I tend to find it overly verbose, aggressively unscary, with a shiny patina of racism. But if anyone could put together a book of stories that would bring out the horrifying elements of Lovecraft that I want to like, it would be Datlow.

In the end, the book was a profoundly mixed bag. Some decent stories, including ones by well-known writers like Neil Gaiman and Elizabeth Bear, and a few clear stand out stars that featured characters and settings profoundly different from the standard Northeast/Wild West/Victoriana that makes up much of the Lovecraft genre:
“Red Goat Black Goat” by Nadia Bulkin is set in Indonesia, with a young nanny caught up by a family watched over by The Goat With A Thousand Young. Brian Hodge's “Same Deep Waters As You” involves an animal whisperer pulled into something strange when she's asked by the US government to communicate with the Deep Ones. “The Bleeding Shadow”, by Joe R. Landsdale, is a Lovecraft twist on the blues musician making a deal with the devil.

On the other hand, there were also stories that came close to making me throw my Kindle against the wall. “Bulldozer”, about a Pinkerton detective and “The Dappled Thing” by William Brown Spencer about steampunk victorian colonialist bullshit both did very well at replicating both Lovecraft's wordiness and his semi-explicit racism. Fred Chappell's “Remnants” involved an autistic girl who was so low functioning as to have thought processes akin to a dog. Also autistics are usually telepathic. Also all telepaths are skinny and pale and blond. Also I hated this story and if I could rip it out of every copy of this book I would.

So, there were some great stories, and some really hideously awful ones. If you like Lovecraft and/or Datlow, you could do worse than giving it a try since there were more decent stories than not, but be warned– there are definitely a couple of stinkers.

I've said before that I really enjoy McGuire's writing– even moreso when the stories aren't written for anything besides the enjoyment of herself. The Velveteen Vs series started off as a one-shot in thanks to a couple of fans, and expanded into an online series of short stories about the former child superhero, Velma Martinez (codename: Velveteen), her rejection and subsequent reacceptance of the superhero life. The stories were collected into two published books (“Velveteen Vs The Junior Super Patriots” and “Velveteen Vs The Multiverse”), which I finally bought. If you've read any of the superheros-as-marketing comics (or watched Tiger and Bunny), you'll recognize some of the tropes. In a lot of ways because the series was a spontaneous series of creations, it feels less over-worked than some of her commercial writing.

An incisive, entertainingly written book on history of the concept of “heterosexuality”, which, as it turns out, was a term invented in the late 1800s and only picked up for reals in the early part of the 20th century. The author tends to go on tangents a bit and the introduction is a little self-absorbed, but it provides a nice overview of how male-female couplings evolved as they went from being “just the relationships everyone has” to “heterosexuality”. A fairly short book, as it says, it clocks in at slightly over 200 pages, a good third of that is endnotes and bibliography. It's well-researched, and thoughtful– she unpacks the common sense notions that “everyone knows” about the way orientation is talked and thought about, firmly grounding everything she in history and science.

A book of retold fairy tales by well-known young adult authors (including Jackson Pierce, Malinda Lo, Julie Kagawa, and Tessa Gratton). Honestly, there are only s many ways you can retell fairytales, but enough of them were engaging and fun to make it a worthwhile read: “Figment”, a retelling of Puss in Boots, fore-fronted the necessity for humans to make their own way, sometimes to the detriment of their fairytale helpers. Malinda Lo's “The Twelfth Girl”, a retelling of the Twleve Dancing Princesses casts one princess in the role of the hero/soldier and tasks her with breaking the spell. “Beauty and The Chad” is about as ridiculous as it sounds, but was a fun story, starry the Beast as a frat boy pulled into a fairytale world without permission.

Most short story collections have a tendency to be a bit uneven, and this one is no different (“Before The Rose Bloomed” by Ellen Hopkins and “The Pink” by Amanda Hocking both stood out as less than stellar submissions), but on the whole it's was a solid offering and most of the authors did well by the book.

I've been meaning to get around to reading this thing for at least a year. It's not bad, but I'm not sure it deserved the acclaim that it got. It felt pretty derivative to me (which, I mean, it's a book for kids– derivative is okay since most kids haven't read quite as much as a thirty year old librarian), but despite the fact that everything I saw said that the plot and characters where amazing, the only really interesting twist was the use of “vintage” photos. It felt like an X-Men story with a couple elements from the Supernatural tv show. Which is not to say it was all bad– the characters are pretty believable, minus the romance plot where the main character falls in love with his grandfather's eternally 15 childhood sweetheart, and the subplot about the fact the grandfather living through WWII as a young Jewish kid with powers was fascinating. But a lot of the loose ends are never tied up, and the end seemed really rushed.

I might be more satisfied with it if I read the sequel that came out in January, but it didn't hook me anywhere near enough to make me go out of my way like that.

In the near future, drug-printing chemjet machines are fairly common and boutique drugs are easy to download. Neuroscientist Lyda Rose, is dealing with hallucinations after an incident with a promising anti-schizophrenia drug she was developing with her wife and a group of friends, and when she realizes that a young girl who has been admitted to the same detention facility is exhibiting the signs of addiction to that drug, she embarks on a violent quest to track down the remaining members of that group and find out who is producing the drug. The book deals with themes of drug use, religion and the ways our brains handle reality or lack thereof.

I picked it up at the library while pulling down a bunch of other, more general, books on the subcontinent. For some reason religious fundamentalists fascinate me, and I will read books on them, not matter what flavor of fundamental they are. This was an interesting read, since it seems like a lot of history books gloss over the impact of religion in the area aside from Pakistan = Muslim, India = Hindu and/or Secular-ish. It seemed at times like a bit too much of a travelogue and Fernandes gets up her own ass occasionally with the flowery descrptions of things, but the basic information about the way the British partition plan fucked up Indian conceptions of religion and self, and therefore the subcontinent's history from the 1950s on is solid. There's some really interesting stuff about Catholics and Baptists mixed in with the meatier information about the political and social structures and interactions between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.