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Monday, December 28, 2015

Slade House by David Mitchell

Slade House by David Mitchell

A short collection of vignettes which reveal the mystery of the sinister Slate House. This is the least impressive book of Mitchell’s that I’ve read; it felt like a few notions from his earlier works that barely amounted to a look at a haunted house tale.
The prose is fine, but unimpressive. The revelation(s) are obvious from a long way off.

I enjoyed this book, but it is nowhere near the level of quality of some of his other works.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Mr. Mitchell’s epic Cloud Atlas spans several centuries, leaps continents and cities in a single sentence, comprises itself of at least five different variants of the English language, and flirts with as many different forms. This is not one novel, but a collection of novellas which loop and coil around one another, inform one another, flirt with greater themes and truths while still (mostly) managing to maintain a coherent shape and an approachable style. This is a masterpiece written by a truly gifted and disciplined craftsman.
Structurally, this book sprawls across five stories: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (a diary), Letters from Zedelghem (an epistolary), Half-Lives: A Luisa Rey Mystery (thriller), The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (memoir), An Orison of Somni ~451 (interview), Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After (oral history), and then back through each of them for a second visit in reverse order. Each is quite different, sometimes they stop in mid-sentence.

For this reason, the book is long and occasionally frustrating, in the way several of Mitchell’s books can be. Just about the time you’ve got a grip on the new language of a particular section, just as you’ve started to really become engrossed in the narrative or the trials of a particular character, Mitchell changes the channel on you. The metaphor of channel surfing feels appropriate somehow, because it feels that abrupt and disconnected. But unlike channel surfing, these stories are intertwined, sometimes if only at the “butterfly flaps its wings in China” level. And there is a greater whole presented with themes that seem to carry throughout other Mitchell works.

This is a great writer with something to say and a powerful drive to transcend the confines of genre fiction.

I finished this one the morning of December 19th, 2015, the day after our 11th wedding anniversary. We have just arrived here on Dragon’s Cove for two weeks. There is a rainbow over the violence of the sea just to the west and the strange old witch house creaks and groans a little as it warms up.

Time for another cup of coffee.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghost written is one of Mitchell’s early works. It consists of a collection of stories which are connected only through tenuous links. The boy who runs the music shop in the first tale happens to sit near a man from the second tale, and so on.
There is a lot of terrific writing here, and we manage to span the globe, from a lovestruck record store clerk in Tokyo to a Russian con-woman to a Chinese peasant. Almost each of these tales is compelling in one way or another.

The themes and stylistic trademarks that Mitchell will end up getting a lot of praise for in later works are almost all right here. Good stuff.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Jacob Z is a low level Dutch clerk who has just landed on the Dutch occupied spit of land just off Nagasaki from which trading enterprises with Imperial Japan are conducted. The dutch are the only country allowed to trade with Japan for decades and this is the only allowed port. Dutchmen (there are no women present) are only allowed to visit the mainland under heavy supervision. Jacob Z rises in prominence, discovers corruption, falls in love, and meets a powerful mentor. Time passes. The intrigues of the local warlords get complicated. Samauri are involved!

The prose is beautiful. It’s David Mitchell. We get a couple of dizzying perspective shifts and a few abrupt time lapses. The result is an epic, beautiful pastiche of a few lives in a strange place with a few hints of magic. Terrific work.

Perhaps my favorite of the Mitchell books. Perhaps.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
This was the first of the David Mitchell novels I read. It was a gift from my aunt, Terry. I was blown away.

First, the writing is really good. Really good, filled with observations and techniques that elevate this one from a novel to literature.

Second, the plot and structure floored me. In what (I now recognize) is David Mitchell’s style, we jump from narrative to narrative, across a span of many years. Of course, they are all interconnected, though it is hard to see how each time we jump narratives.

I don’t want to give away much more here, except to say that this one paid off for me every page along the way, and paid double at the end when I was able to look back and finally see the epic expanse of what he had done.

So I immediately put everything else on the nightstand on the back burner and went out to buy as many of his books as I could find… Since Vancouver no longer actually has, you know, bookstores, I had to go to Tokyo to find the next one, just a block off Shibuya crossing…

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Martian by Andy Weir
Finished this one on a trans-Pacific flight from Canada to China, safe in an awesome spaceship operated by Air Canada. I’ve never read a more delightful, more scientific, sci-fi novel.

Mark Watney gets stranded on Mars when the NASA mission he is a part of goes sideways. Alone, without communication, he… I will tell you no more. But suffice to say this tale is never dull, despite being peppered with hard science. Mark is one of the more likeable heroes I’ve read about in a long time. And while the “man-vs-nature” core conflict seems like something that would have gone out of fashion around the time of Stephen Crane, this one manages to be vastly more engaging than, say, Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball.

The Martian is a light, joyful celebration of human knowledge, scientific inquiry, and the human spirit. It’s also a fine adventure story, and a superb lesson in how to use language to make what could be dry subjects interesting.

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry pops the bubbles of several of the western hero clichés in this short novel. Doc Holiday, Wyatt and the Earp Brothers, Charlie Goodnight, Quanta Parker, and a few others bouce from Denver to Texas to Tombstone Arizona. None of them are portrayed as heroic figures; their deeds are pointless, their mistakes and foibles all too human, their lives short and mostly ugly and without meaning.

The writing is elegiac, sprightly, and the dialog humorous in the way that many of McMurtry’s dark/light cowboy duos are. His treatment of gender relations is pretty similar to what he has done elsewhere, in which clueless, work-obsessed men disappoint their ladies with their fumbling lack of social grace.

The only thing that perplexed me was this: McMurtry is busy setting up and knocking down legends here; taking clichés and masterfully subjecting them to the harsh spotlight of a modern sensibility on what they might have really been like. (The casual domestic abuse scene, for example.) But when it comes to the Indians, they are mostly treated like stage villians, no more nuanced than Blue Duck in Lonesome Dove. They torture whites for fun, roast genitals, “invade the privates of female captives with fireants” and so on. The savage redman cliché is treated here with all the nuance of a Michael Meyers film. And I’m not sure why, because LMM certainly is aware of what he’s doing.

The “showdown at the OK Corral” for which Tombstone is best known takes place in less than two pages; we watch see Wyatt Earp’s last days as a geriatric suffering dementia in Santa Monica, well into the age of the automobile. He was, in McMurtry’s telling, a legend who never deserved to be remembered.

A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge by Terry Shames

A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge by Terry Shames

Terry’s newest book is more sure-footed, denser, and darker than Samuel Craddock’s previous escapades have been. Samuel himself is a more nuanced character here (he makes the occasional mistake, and has moments of self-doubt.) Feels like we’re moving away from the small-town cozy and towards a more mature and complex mystery. Though there are very few surprises here, because the whodoneit part (and even the location of the body) is telegraphed quite heavily, there is enough other stuff going on here that I was engaged the whole ride. There’s still a little bit of art, a lot of cinnamon rolls and iced tea, some horses and cows, and some Texas dialect. But mostly, we’ve got a chief-of-police tracking down a couple of (long cold) murders and digging up dirt (literally!) on the moderately sordid past of an old friend.

I enjoyed this one a lot and am eager to read the next one!

Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller

Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller
Lately I’ve been casually teaching a few of the folks at the office the basics of boxing and krav maga. I’m certainly not a truly qualified instructor of either of these disciplines, but I’ve spent a lot of time trying to learn both over the last decade. Sgt. Miller’s book and his instruction in-person in Austin stuck with me. So while I’ve read this one before, I found myself going back to it to think about how I should modify my lesson plan. I reread it over a very long week here in the glorious Vancouver summer.

Miller’s experience with violence- mostly through his work as a corrections officer- seems as if it makes him an expert on the topic. I enjoyed his thinking and writing again, through I find myself raising an eyebrow at least every page or two at what seem like tall tales. (“Sarge didn’t even spill his coffee!”) Still – in my limited experience, this is a unique book, which focuses on the delta between martial arts training and real world applied violence. And it is a useful lens for thinking about how to teach folks a little self-defense.

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
Collection of short stories, which purport to be “wicked” but often fall pretty far short. The first of these is the best and the remainder gradually slide downhill. Atwood herself-- or at least an elderly female Canadian writer of fiction—appears as central to most of these tales. And there’s a fair amount here that feels like it is revisiting the Toronto writers scene from the sixties. Are these the same people we met in The Robber Bride? I’m not sure, but there are similarities.

She’s a good writer, and the language is solid, some of the imagery neat. (Particularly in the first story of the collection.) But overall, her body of work is much, much stronger elsewhere, so this is probably only really interesting to the completionist.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a modestly interesting management book on how to better structure interpersonal realtionships between company leaders. Presumably the lessons here could be applied to any working group, but they seem particularly focused on top level executives. There are a lot of feelings here and the book is pretty focused on the way people interact with one another rather than establishing core competencies, thinking about how to load balance effort, strategies for establishing dominance in a market, dealing with competitors, etc. Basically, if you’re interested in thinking about how some group of senior level people at your company might not be getting along well, this book might be interesting for you.

The most interesting element here is the way he tells the tale, by using a fictional Silicon Valley company and showing us the interactions of their leadership group throughout a few meetings. Sound dull? Well… It is. But it is still far, far more interesting than the epilogue, in which we move from the parable format to a more direct checklist. Here’s the list of the Five Dysfunctions:

Absence of Trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results

Now as a framework for thinking about your team or studio or company this is a pretty decent place to start. And that does make this book useful if you’re the kind of person who has ever stood in front of a whiteboard and tried to get others to think about how your organization could improve. If barbarians with axes, or gumshoes, or cumshots, or vampires, or futurism, or whooshing spaceships, or martial arts, or geopolicitcs are your thing instead.. Pass.

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
There are no heroes here.

And no one gets to escape. They are all bound into a senseless and brutal conflict. Most of them die, usually after being maimed, defeated physically and spiritually, and end their lives morally bankrupt and mostly unmourned. There are no heroes here.

If you like any of Abercrombie’s work, you’ll like this. The focus stays mostly on the barbarians. These are men who know the legends of Threetrees and the Bloody Nine but not much more. Perhaps a few of the older Named Men fought with (and against) them a few times, but for the most part, those days are quickly fading into legend.

Byaz and the knights of the Union are here, also not being heroic. They try. But they fail, when stupidity, arrogance, cowardice, or other human frailties end up putting them in the mud.

There are no heroes here, but Abercrombie writes a high octane tale of three to five different factions in a local protracted skirmish that ends up with a lot of people dead. It’s an anti-war novel, in fact, and none the worse for treading familiar ground in both genres. Hardcore barbarian battle fantasy and Catch-22 style anti-war are seldom found in the same body. Nice work.

But there are no heroes here.

Revival by Stephen King

Revival by Stephen King
The preacher starts messing with electricity. Fate deals him a rough blow and his fortune becomes tied with a small boy. Each travels through a few decades of America in the back half of last century. Their paths cross on occasion.

The preacher gets dangerous, becomes a demagogue and a revivalist. He cures people, but… They have unexpected side effects. Perhaps because they are ripping a tear in the warp and weave of things and starting to let in parts of the Great Old Ones? You’d have to read to find out.

This is King, so it’s a good yarn, loads of jus’ plain folks writing, and a whole lot of the author’s love of rock n’ roll and Americana.

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
In a land without honor where only money and murder have value a rough and tough merc leader and her brother are betrayed.

She crawls back from death, gathers a collection of troubled badasses and ruins all their lives in her singular pursuit of vengeance.

I like Abercrombie’s violent, dystopian take on fiction. For my money, he’s better than Jar Jar Martin.

Naomi’s Room by Denis MacEoin

Naomi’s Room by Denis MacEoin

Atmospheric and sad horror novel that ends with a skull-crushing nose-dive into clichéd resolution. It was the ancient crap in the attic from the time the house was owned by that eeeevil guy who did the eeevil stuff. Too bad he ate your daughter’s soul, dude.

It’s been a while since I read this, and I recall that the writing was acceptable. I remember thinking the scene in the London shopping center when the girl disappears was compelling; I could feel the growing terror in the main character as the terrible realty that his daughter had been kidnapped

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson’s big new epic fantasy series got a lot of love from the right corners, so I picked up a thousand page paperback brick and threw it in the bag for Vietnam. Perfect beach reading, even on too-windy a beach near an ancient city far away…

Good battles. A few interesting heroes and anti-heroes cavort around, a couple of coming-of-age plots that felt a bit tired unfold. There’s a cool system of magic, and a focus on interpersonal intrigue. My biggest beef is that the scenes between men and women in this book are almost all terrible; does anyone ever actually have sex in this universe? I don’t think so.

I’d read the second one. In fact, I’ve owned it since the day I got back but haven’t started it. Hardback.

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

On Such A Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

She travels across a ruined, crappy dystopian land in search of her brother. The writing is decent, but nothing amazing. Then she ends up in the city, where she is some kind of a weird slavegirl to an elderly couple. Luckily, her brother is one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in the land or something, and… I just can’t remember. This one didn’t make much of an impression on me.

Vietnam by National Geographic

Vietnam by National Geographic

As mentioned previously, the National Georgrapic series of travel books do a very fine job of giving the flavor of each place without being such an exhausting phone-book-catalog of temporal restaurant and hotel details. The National Geo book on Vietnam gives us lots of pictures and glossy highlights of each town and borough, along with lightweight historical context for why a place is the way it is now.

We used this book to plan our 10th wedding anniversary trip to this wonderful country… And we had a ball. I’ve written more on the subject elsewhere, but here’s a little timbit on one of the things I will most remember:

“And oh God the food. Never have I been to a place with such an obsessive interest in food, and no country I have visited has such a wealth of incredible, diverse dishes. In each of the four cities we visited there was nary a square foot in any ally or sidewalk which wasn't taken up by people cooking or eating. The calendars hawkers tried to sell on the street were not of fast cars or local girls, they were of the monthly specialty soups. From French coffees and baked goods, to the freshest of herbs, to the dozens of kinds of noodle, to high quality delicious grilled meats of every kind, Vietnam wins the gold ribbon for food. If you are a foodie, a chef, or a cook you owe it to yourself to come here…”

After Christmas, Before New Years

It's time!

From a little pub in the charming town of Yachats where we come each day to check internet...

Updates coming for a collection of novels, including most of the David Mitchell collection!

-tf