I’ve decided to start updating this blog again. I really have very little excuse not to, as I’m not snowed under with work. It’s really a matter of getting around to writing something semi-regularly.
Well, I still read books on a regular basis, so I’ll start writing about them again. Recently Bookish Asia published my review of Patrick Wayland’s The Jade Lady, which encouraged me to start putting book-reactions (they seem too short to be called reviews) on Balancing Frogs again.
So here are four novels I’ve read since the beginning of 2016.
Josh Fruhlinger’s The Enthusiast is a comedic novel about two very different things: the Washington DC Metro, and a fictitious soap opera-style comic strip that (in this novel's universe) had its heyday back in the 1960s. What ties them together is our protagonist Kate Berkowitz and her work for an unusual public relations firm that specializes in covertly stoking enthusiasm for its clients’ products. Kate and her colleagues haunt Facebook and message boards and infiltrate in-person meetups to give people’s enthusiasm just a little nudge to help it organically grow, whether it’s for new subway cars or a film adaptation of a cult comic strip.
I suppose I’m making it out to seem like a biting social satire, but in fact Fruhlinger’s book is actually a highly sympathetic exploration of some of the quirkier areas of 21st-century pop culture. I read the book because I like Fruhlinger’s site The Comics Curmudgeon, where he’s cultivated a modest online community of geeky enthusiasts. Fruhlinger’s affection for cheesy daily comic strips is obviously genuine, and he must have enjoyed crafting the ficticious ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ and its heavily ironic online fan community.
Mark Rosenfelder’s Against Peace and Freedom is a far-future science fiction work about politics. In a universe where human civilization has spread across dozens of star systems, a secret agent named Morgan arrives on the planet Okura, tasked with working to bring down its tyrannical government. (The narration is 2nd-person. This facilitates the fact that Morgan’s gender stays ambiguous throughout the story. Our hero eventually gets an explicit sex scene, a narrative challenge that I bet Rosenfelder had fun writing.) The writing is lighthearted, supplying a wry commentary on the often brutal violence (formenting revolution is not a nice, innocent pastime) and the reader also gets several doses of political philosophizing in the deal. As someone who read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, found the long ‘beauty of Mars’ passages to be boring, but was fascinated by the politics, this was to my taste.
This was another book I read on the strength of the author’s reputation online; I’ve been aware of Mark ‘zompist’ Rosenfelder as an online personality for years, having read several of his web-based essays on politics and culture way back in the very early ‘00s. The universe of Against Peace and Freedom is a place he has clearly thought out thoroughly. I particularly appreciated the fact that although the culture of Okura is clearly derived from East Asia, rather than the West, I never detected a hint of cliched outsider-writing-about-the-East silliness.
Only quibble is, I was rather befuddled by the appearance midway through of a boorish 21st-century American who gets thawed out from his cryogenic suspension, makes an ass of himself over several pages, and then disappears without having added anything worthwhile to the story. I know Rosenfelder has written other works set in this same universe; maybe Mr. Stupid American is connected to one of those?
Speaking of politics, Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor is old-fashioned court intrigue. When the Elvish emperor and most of his sons are killed in an airship crash, the crown passes to the half-goblin Maia, the emperor’s least-favored son and the offspring of his least-favored wife. The earnest but naive eighteen-year-old Maia was raised out in the boonies far away from the imperial court. He faces a steep learning curve. As said above, politics matter far more than traditional fantasy heroics: we get a deep look at the inner workings of a national government in a world where cable news doesn’t exist.
Two things to say about the world of The Goblin Emperor. First, it’s remarkable how few traditional fantasy tropes make it into the main narrative. Aside from very occasional references to magic, and technology such as airships and pneumatic tubes, this could easily be a fictional royal court in a pre-modern Earth. Elves and goblins aren’t magical beings here; they’re just people. Second, the amount of world-building that the author did is impressive. Although the action mostly stays within the confines of the imperial Elvish court, it’s clear that Addison lovingly worked out the geography, politics, and languages of this world.
One quibble: I read this on a Kindle, which means it is a bit inconvenient to flip back to confirm that the character that just showed up is the same guy who was mentioned twenty pages earlier. This gets annoying given the profusion of characters, as well as the universe-specific titles they are known by. Score one for paper books!
Moving back to the 1980s, I also read Iain Banks’ Walking on Glass this year. Banks is an odd critter -- while he was alive, I kept hearing about how brilliant his science fiction novels were, but I never got around to reading them. Only after his premature death in 2013 did I try him out, and I found that I actually preferred the thrillers of Iain Banks to the SF works of Iain M. Banks (although I have his Player of Games sitting on my bookshelf unread, waiting for me to give middle-initialed Banks another try).
Despite the lack of a middle initial in the author’s name, Walking on Glass certainly does not keep the SF genre out completely. The very weird narrative follows three plots simultaneously, one of which seems to be set in an entirely different universe from the other two. In ascending order of strangeness: in one, a young Londoner is doggedly trying to pursue a relationship with a lady he is smitten with; in the second, we follow the troubled life of a man struggling with mental illness -- or perhaps he really is being persecuted by extraterrestrial oppressors. The possibility seems more than a little plausible, because the third plotline deals with two exiles from an interstellar war imprisoned in a castle in a deserted snowscape, whose only hope of release lies in their ability to work together to figure out a series of fiendishly-designed board games.
Banks’s taste for unpleasant imagery may not be for everyone, but I’ve read three of his thrillers now and I have never failed to be engrossed by them.
Well, I still read books on a regular basis, so I’ll start writing about them again. Recently Bookish Asia published my review of Patrick Wayland’s The Jade Lady, which encouraged me to start putting book-reactions (they seem too short to be called reviews) on Balancing Frogs again.
So here are four novels I’ve read since the beginning of 2016.
Josh Fruhlinger’s The Enthusiast is a comedic novel about two very different things: the Washington DC Metro, and a fictitious soap opera-style comic strip that (in this novel's universe) had its heyday back in the 1960s. What ties them together is our protagonist Kate Berkowitz and her work for an unusual public relations firm that specializes in covertly stoking enthusiasm for its clients’ products. Kate and her colleagues haunt Facebook and message boards and infiltrate in-person meetups to give people’s enthusiasm just a little nudge to help it organically grow, whether it’s for new subway cars or a film adaptation of a cult comic strip.
I suppose I’m making it out to seem like a biting social satire, but in fact Fruhlinger’s book is actually a highly sympathetic exploration of some of the quirkier areas of 21st-century pop culture. I read the book because I like Fruhlinger’s site The Comics Curmudgeon, where he’s cultivated a modest online community of geeky enthusiasts. Fruhlinger’s affection for cheesy daily comic strips is obviously genuine, and he must have enjoyed crafting the ficticious ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ and its heavily ironic online fan community.
Mark Rosenfelder’s Against Peace and Freedom is a far-future science fiction work about politics. In a universe where human civilization has spread across dozens of star systems, a secret agent named Morgan arrives on the planet Okura, tasked with working to bring down its tyrannical government. (The narration is 2nd-person. This facilitates the fact that Morgan’s gender stays ambiguous throughout the story. Our hero eventually gets an explicit sex scene, a narrative challenge that I bet Rosenfelder had fun writing.) The writing is lighthearted, supplying a wry commentary on the often brutal violence (formenting revolution is not a nice, innocent pastime) and the reader also gets several doses of political philosophizing in the deal. As someone who read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, found the long ‘beauty of Mars’ passages to be boring, but was fascinated by the politics, this was to my taste.
This was another book I read on the strength of the author’s reputation online; I’ve been aware of Mark ‘zompist’ Rosenfelder as an online personality for years, having read several of his web-based essays on politics and culture way back in the very early ‘00s. The universe of Against Peace and Freedom is a place he has clearly thought out thoroughly. I particularly appreciated the fact that although the culture of Okura is clearly derived from East Asia, rather than the West, I never detected a hint of cliched outsider-writing-about-the-East silliness.
Only quibble is, I was rather befuddled by the appearance midway through of a boorish 21st-century American who gets thawed out from his cryogenic suspension, makes an ass of himself over several pages, and then disappears without having added anything worthwhile to the story. I know Rosenfelder has written other works set in this same universe; maybe Mr. Stupid American is connected to one of those?
Speaking of politics, Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor is old-fashioned court intrigue. When the Elvish emperor and most of his sons are killed in an airship crash, the crown passes to the half-goblin Maia, the emperor’s least-favored son and the offspring of his least-favored wife. The earnest but naive eighteen-year-old Maia was raised out in the boonies far away from the imperial court. He faces a steep learning curve. As said above, politics matter far more than traditional fantasy heroics: we get a deep look at the inner workings of a national government in a world where cable news doesn’t exist.
Two things to say about the world of The Goblin Emperor. First, it’s remarkable how few traditional fantasy tropes make it into the main narrative. Aside from very occasional references to magic, and technology such as airships and pneumatic tubes, this could easily be a fictional royal court in a pre-modern Earth. Elves and goblins aren’t magical beings here; they’re just people. Second, the amount of world-building that the author did is impressive. Although the action mostly stays within the confines of the imperial Elvish court, it’s clear that Addison lovingly worked out the geography, politics, and languages of this world.
One quibble: I read this on a Kindle, which means it is a bit inconvenient to flip back to confirm that the character that just showed up is the same guy who was mentioned twenty pages earlier. This gets annoying given the profusion of characters, as well as the universe-specific titles they are known by. Score one for paper books!
Moving back to the 1980s, I also read Iain Banks’ Walking on Glass this year. Banks is an odd critter -- while he was alive, I kept hearing about how brilliant his science fiction novels were, but I never got around to reading them. Only after his premature death in 2013 did I try him out, and I found that I actually preferred the thrillers of Iain Banks to the SF works of Iain M. Banks (although I have his Player of Games sitting on my bookshelf unread, waiting for me to give middle-initialed Banks another try).
Despite the lack of a middle initial in the author’s name, Walking on Glass certainly does not keep the SF genre out completely. The very weird narrative follows three plots simultaneously, one of which seems to be set in an entirely different universe from the other two. In ascending order of strangeness: in one, a young Londoner is doggedly trying to pursue a relationship with a lady he is smitten with; in the second, we follow the troubled life of a man struggling with mental illness -- or perhaps he really is being persecuted by extraterrestrial oppressors. The possibility seems more than a little plausible, because the third plotline deals with two exiles from an interstellar war imprisoned in a castle in a deserted snowscape, whose only hope of release lies in their ability to work together to figure out a series of fiendishly-designed board games.
Banks’s taste for unpleasant imagery may not be for everyone, but I’ve read three of his thrillers now and I have never failed to be engrossed by them.
Very glad you are back to this.
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