nicanical
You could alternatively call this Diary of an NPC because that's what the main character is: butler Stevens (I don't recall a first name) takes a week-long vacation during which he reminisces about his previous service to the late Lord Darlington. Stevens served loyally and unquestioningly through tough times and objectionable demands. He believes this exemplifies a form of dignity but, by the end of the story, realizes that it exemplifies more his lack of a backbone.
I think the pacing is good, the scenes are balanced in weight and Kazuo Ishiguro doesn't linger too long in any given one—a sometimes-issue when stories rely heavily on deeply introspective characters. However, it's frustrating to follow along with Stevens: he is stiff, awkward, and naive in his blind loyalty to his employer. I don't like his highfalutin manner of speech and his habit of justifying himself ex post facto with sophistry. I admire The Remains of the Day as a composition but this doesn't make up for its uninspiring protagonist.
Starts with short stories set during World War II, drawing on Roald Dahl's experiences; these stories are a little boring in their simplicity but are notable as the initial efforts upon which Dahl developed his skills.
Following are polished, understated pieces with good characterization that you might read in The New Yorker (in fact, some were published there). I liked The Mildenhall Treasure best. The Great Automatic Grammatizator is also notable today, being about a machine replacing human authors.
Dahl's prose is pleasant to read: clearly polished, well-edited, and readable in its diction and structure.
There are a few straight info dumps in the first half here. I don't recall this being a problem in Old Man's War.
It's nice to see Jane Sagan although The Ghost Brigades doesn't develop her relationship with John Perry from the first novel. Sagan isn't very interesting here though—her role being to babysit the main character, Jared Dirac.
The plot is serviceable.
The Forever War is like Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers with fewer classes, more combat, and a protagonist—William Mandella—who is jaded with the war rather than bought into it.
Joe Haldeman's treatment of time dilation here is the best I've seen after Alastair Reynolds's. Time dilation means decades pass between engagements, with successive expeditions equipped with drastically improved weapons and tactics. Like winning a line battle with muskets and cannons only for the enemy's reinforcement to show up with jets and tanks.
Naturally, time dilation means that Earth changes drastically as well from Mandella's point of view. The first time he returns home, two years have passed for Mandella but over twenty years have passed back on Earth. Mandella is so alienated by the unfamiliar world that he re-enlists shortly after. (In this way, The Forever War is also an allegory for the Vietnam War).
The story is paced well with chapters kept to digestible lengths. Haldeman's style is straightforward and relatively unadorned making this an easy read.
Awesome revenge story: sailor Edmond Dantès, on the verge of marriage and captaincy, is framed and imprisoned. He eventually escapes, transforms himself into the titular Count, and moves to reap the pounds of flesh owed to him.
I read the unabridged Robin Buss translation. It's very good, very readable. Buss modernized the manuscript so his version reads like a contemporary work, though he did leave in some obnoxiously long complex sentences.
Good pacing, good flow. The book is hard to put down. Despite its length (approaching 400,000 words) it's all killer no filler. Well . . . except Luigi Vampa's backstory—Dumas shares all these details about Cucumetto and Carlini as background to Vampa, but Vampa ultimately plays small roles in the middle and end of the story.
The story slows down where Dumas introduces new settings or important characters because he front-loads a lot of his descriptive work. The Count invariably appears soon after to tie it all to the main arc so these moments don't slow the pace too badly. The last few chapters are slow too, but only because the revenge plot is mostly complete three-quarters through. The last few chapters serve to wind down some outstanding items and address the Count's eleventh hour crisis with his actions.
More of the behind the scenes would have been nice, showing the Count laying down the foundations for his many identities and maybe more of their movements (like Lord Wilmore's); details are so sparse that the Count's machinations and contrivances are sometimes dubious—like how is there such a convenient secret passage leading to Valentine's room? I get that the lack of details adds to the mystery and almost supernatural appearance of the Count's movements which goes hand in hand with his self-image as an agent of providence. I would have preferred to have seen more of the toil and planning and human achievement though.
Pyramids starts out interesting with Teppic's assassin training but that's not what the story ends up being about at all.
Pyramids suffers from the same issue in Sourcery of introducing interesting characters only to shelve them before climactic moments.
The story rambles after the first "book" (unlike previous Discworld entries, Terry Pratchett organizes Pyramids into four parts called books). There's a message in the story about breaking cycles and expectations, but it's difficult to extricate from the unruly path the story takes.
The titular Gateway is an alien space station discovered with hundreds of ready-to-go ships; people figure out how to plot destinations but the Heechee's (the name given to the aliens) coordinate system remains opaque—travelers scarcely know whether they're headed for a valuable discovery or certain death. Despite this risk, a gold rush commences.
Frederik Pohl's writing style is simple and straightforward. Protagonist Robinette's survivor's guilt and suppressed memories make him an unreliable narrator, but otherwise, Pohl clearly lets readers know what's going on.
Structurally, Gateway alternates between two narrative streams: one in the past on Gateway and one in the present back on Earth, with the present stream exploring Robinette's psychological trauma. Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons employs a similar structure to good effect, using flashbacks to hone into events relevant to Cheradenine's psychological profile. Gateway, on the other hand, simply has Robinette harassing his machine therapist over and over until revealing his suppressed memories. These therapy sessions do not bless Robinette's character with mitigating nuance. They also fail to rehabilitate Robinette of whupping the tar out of his girlfriend Klara—if Pohl's intention was for Robinette to be more sympathetic, the therapy sessions would have been good for that.
Carry On, Jeeves is a collection of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves shorts. It includes the four from My Man, Jeeves, so it can stand-in as a starting point to the series if following publication order. I started with The Code of the Woosters, so my expectations were set by that that book. The shorts lack the room for situations to snowball as they did in Code, but they are still funny and charming.
My favorite stories are the last three:
- Fixing it for Freddie has a sweetness to it in addition to Wodehouse's humor;
- Clustering Round Young Bingo reminds me of Code: Bertie is called upon for his burglary skills and even Aunt Dahlia makes an appearance. There's also backstory on how Anatole comes to cook for her in Code;
- Bertie Changes His Mind is the only Jeeves story narrated from his perspective. There's mischievous fun in seeing Jeeves move behind the scenes.
Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a collection of simple yet thought-provoking stories all set in one retrofuturistic timeline where Earth colonizes Mars. The stories are light on the sci-fi; obstacles like travel to Mars and habitation and availability of resources once there are waved away by setting Mars up like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom, with a breathable atmosphere and potable water.
Instead of wrangling technical hurdles The Martian Chronicles is similar to Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle in its exploration of themes like oppression, the role of technology, and man's tendency to destroy itself.
Bradbury seems to take a dim view:
Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth.
On Bradbury's writing style: it is clear and clean, with the occasional sense of whimsy with how serious events are written about deadpan and matter of factly. The near extinction of indigenous Martians, astronauts killing each other, Earth's destruction? So it goes.
A sourceror is born (an eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son) disrupting the balance of magical power on Discworld. Rincewind answers the call, supported by barbarian-hairdresser-thief Conina, aspiring barbarian Nijel, Klatchian Seriph Creosote, and the Luggage of course.
The story rambles a bit three-quarters in. Also around this point, circumstance splits the gang three ways. The loss of the fun group dynamic is huge, and why I think the story ends not with a bang but with a whimper.
Wyrd Sisters is the second book in Discworld's Witches sub-series. Granny Weatherwax responds to a crisis following the accession of a new king. She is joined by Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, the three witches together forming the Lancre coven.
Some parts are convoluted because plot points are explained through the witches' banter, which is often ambiguous although very entertaining. This is a story that will benefit from a reread, allowing the plot to be offloaded to memory.
This is first Discworld story where I laughed out loud. Probably because there's more witty dialogue here, whereas previous entries relied mainly on satire and absurdity.
Sophomoric prose: too much hedging and qualifying, e.g., "sort ofs" and "kind ofs"; similes made awkward by wrenched comparisons and excessive length; sloppy continuity and logic, e.g., the protagonist, Dresden, returns home after being out all day to pick up "fresh-baked bread" for a spell—if you've been away all day, how fresh could it be?
Jim Butcher overexplains Dresden's thoughts even where obvious: if a character clenches their fists and grits their teeth, you don't need to then say they are frustrated. Also, while some sexual objectification is to be expected given Storm Front's noir and hardboiled influences, Butcher writes these parts like a lecherous teenager. Dresden comes off like a leering pervert, less Bogey to Bacall.
The magic system suffers from its own inconsistencies. It is less a system and more an ass-pull. For example, magic users disrupt nearby machinery:
"It has something to do with being a wizard, with working with magical forces. The more delicate and modern the machine is, the more likely it is that something will go wrong if I get close enough to it."
Stereos, telephones, and elevators are affected yet Dresden can use cars without issue? His personal Volkswagen Beetle does break down in one scene. But that's due to the Beetle's age more than anything else because he rides cabs and drives a TransAm elsewhere without issue. (It's not a matter of chemical combustion versus electronics either because guns are also disrupted).
Another example: magic circles used for summoning or protection are easily broken by penetrating them. Near the end, a plastic canister pierces a field cast by such a circle, disabling it. However, earlier in the book, a plastic bottle thrown and caught from inside a similar circle does not disable it. Why?!
The pacing—to the extent I can discern it separately from prose—is good, with balanced beats of action and reaction.
What an intriguing writing style. Elmore Leonard does most of his work with dialogue and free indirect speech. I scarcely recall any regular descriptive passages but I visualized the story easily.
Freaky Deaky's story is a bit of a crime comedy. The comedy coming from the unexpected and roundabout ways the characters interact with each other. Pacing is good throughout, there's just a feebleness to the ending because of how swift it is.
Guards! Guards! is another fun entry in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.
Pratchett pulls from more areas of Discworld lore here compared with, e.g., Equal Rites and Mort. Equal Rites for instance is a straight coming of age story with wizards and witches, set half in Ankh-Morpork, half in the Ramtops. Guards! meanwhile is a buddy cop story at its core that ties in dwarves, dragons, wizards, and political intrigue, with Captain Vimes's redemption and Carrot's coming of age arcs running parallel with the main buddy cop-mystery story.
This broad scope can make the story feel jumbled. Pratchett also rambles more in this one, unraveling tangents that might otherwise have been tucked into footnotes.
Pacing is good.
Granny Weatherwax is fun, with a depth and spin to her portrayal—not the usual evil witch.
Esk's precociousness is a bit insufferable. Her journey to become the first female wizard is a pedestrian plot. Not bad. Just something pulled whole cloth from a children's or YA book.
I like that the world is revealed through the characters experiences. The humor doesn't land with me, which is fine because the story is more than its humor.
James Ellroy's style is lots of fun initially. "Machine gun prose," I've seen it called. It is highly declarative, chopped up by colons, semi-colons, and fragments, to trim as many words as possible. It gives the story a frenetic, manic pace, which works wonders for action scenes. The problem is Ellroy uses it everywhere. The nervous energy in every scene is exhausting.
In the middle of the book, the sprawling plot becomes a formless haze that is slow to work through. With three main characters and many more supporting, it is also hard to track who's who.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge reminds me of Matter by Iain M. Banks. Both share the theme of advanced and medieval civilizations colliding, and the presence of hyper-advanced transcendent beings.
The quality of the worldbuilding ranges: the medieval Tines' world is vivid and captivating, whereas with the more advanced societies worldbuilding is handwaved or incoherent jargon. I like the variety in lifeforms. Vinge goes beyond recycling bipedal analogues, featuring telepathic dog packs, sentient fronds, and warmongering butterfly people. I also like the "Zones of Thought." It's a creative and refreshing explanation of universal limitations.
Vinge's writing style is straightforward in the sense that he tells readers what's happening and why. It's mostly without ornament, but as mentioned, Vinge sometimes resorts to dumping jargon to build out the universe.
Pacing is languid, dragged out with ultimately minor subplots. Like the Out of Band II's chase and battle in the latter half, and the Pham-Ravna romance—actually, a lot of what happens in the Beyond and higher feels like filler that takes you away from the meaty story on Tines' world.
Mort is cozy and charming. I like the dry levity of Death's personification, and the lighthearted worldbuilding. Mort's pluckiness in spite of his naivete endears him. While I don't find the style of satire here to be particularly funny, this didn't distract from the story.
Terry Pratchett's prose is largely straightforward with a warm, playful narrator. However, I had to backtrack some because he is occasionally explains too much—this might be what neutered a lot of the humor for me.
I actually started Discworld in publication order with The Colour of Magic. Its weakness as an entry to the series is apparently well-known—that book put me off Discworld for a few years. Fortunately Mort rehabilitated the series for me.
The Dispossessed is recommended, together with The Left Hand of Darkness, as a good first read for those new to Ursula K. Le Guin. It's an irresponsible recommendation without disclaiming the book's slow start. The story is captivating but it takes its sweet time getting there.
The Dispossessed follows Anarresti physicist Shevek as he journeys from Anarres to Urras, which Anarres orbits. The journey is a matter of principle for Shevek, and for Le Guin, a medium for contrasting between diametrically-opposed values: Anarchism and Capitalism, Individualism and Collectivism, as represented by the Anarresti and the state of A-Io on Urras.
The chapters alternate between Shevek's present and past like Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. Here though, both of Shevek's narrative streams proceed forward in time. The even-numbered chapters eventually lead to the events of the odd-numbered chapters. I only noticed this structure after a few chapters. Until then, I wondered why the story felt so disjointed.
Dry exposition is front loaded into the first third of the book and you just have to power through it. The book reads better after that as Le Guin shifts more to "showing" with her characters and also focusing on Shevek's relationship with his wife Takver. The latter adds more depth to the world than any of the exposition ever did.
A fun, funny read with wonderfully playful prose. Savor it like poetry. The prose is very rich, so this is a series that might need to be read in intervals. Narrative structure is simple: dialogue and characters interacting, and few descriptions of settings. P.G. Wodehouse's style reminds me of Raymond Chandler's, down to the brain-tickling similes.
Peep these, fellow literati:
- I met them going around London like a couple of sailors on shore leave.
- . . . I had only to inform Spode that I knew all about Eulalie to cause him to curl up like a burnt feather.
- She had been as tough as a restaurant steak, and she continued as tough as a restaurant steak.
- The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road . . . .
- He writhed like an electric fan.
Coincidentally, Wodehouse and Chandler both attended Dulwich College. Not at the same time though. I wonder if there was a class or a teacher in common that was pivotal to their literary gifts. I'll have to read some C.S. Forester too now. He's another Dulwich alum.
The Deep Blue Good-by moves swiftly and hits hard. John D. MacDonald's writing reminds me of Raymond Chandler's—much more than that other oft-recommended Macdonald, Ross Macdonald.
Writing for the pulps, John D. MacDonald understood, like Chandler, to let scenes outrank plot. Also like Chandler, MacDonald's metaphors and similes have an effortlessness to them:
The worst crimes of man against woman do not appear on the statues.
Nevertheless, Good-by doesn't rise up to a definite reread for me. It suffers from issues of composition like dialogue occasionally going on and on, and the climax is messy and hard to follow. It is also a bit too brutal to its female characters for me. Not gratuitous, but close.
I'd like to check out more of the series though.
I feel like I got tricked into reading this. A recommendation elsewhere described Outline's prose as lyrical, descriptive, but not purple, with clear sentences that are easy to follow. It starts out like that then quickly takes on the qualities of a tar pit.
The dialogue is all indirect speech. All inline, no paragraphs, quotation marks, or any such visual delineation. Little distinguishes narrative from dialogue, and there's so little white space that it reads like a textbook.
Each chapter is a conversation. The protagonist's engagement in these conversations is minimal, effectively turning them into monologues. Long, meandering, and very boring. The subject matter is often failed relationships and lamenting thereof. Big deal.