peekle book blog

I almost hate to say it, but I kept wondering if I should feel annoyed at Ready Player One because it was aimed so squarely at, well, me, and everyone else that grew up in the 80s. The answer was always “no”, and it was always no because of the writing; the story is kept deft and quick and carries you along quite well. I couldn’t even fault the ending which was, after all, exactly what you thought it would be way back at the beginning of the book.

Popcorn, yes, but good greasy popcorn, the kind you lick your fingers after.

This is one of those books I read because of a recommendation somewhere online — only thing time I remember where the recommendation came from: Jo Walton over on the Tor blog. I don’t always keep up with the Tor blog like I’d like to, but there are plenty of interesting things going on there.

I feel odd leading with this in another review, but I can certainly understand why people have problems with these books. The tone is very arch, or twee, or just plain British, or most probably some mix of all three. It’s difficult to pin down the time period in which the story is meant to be happening. The thing everyone always mentions — that it’s never said whether the narrator, Hilary, is male or female — is practically an aside as far as the book goes, for it truly doesn’t matter.

What the book is, though, is one of those clockwork mystery stories, revealed through a series of letters interwoven with live-action (as it were) interludes, which are mostly coffee-fueled recaps of events that have already happened. There are many things to be amused at, clues slowly trickle out that make you reconsider what’s happened, and the ending is pretty clever.

Jo Walton’s review came with a caveat, that these books are mostly likely not best when read back-to-back, and having fallen afoul of series exhaustion before, I’m going to take that recommendation to heart.

I can certainly understand why people would be frustrated with 1Q84. It’s overlong. The prose is elliptical, looping back and forth over details small and large. (There are good reasons for it to do so — our brains loop in the same fashion, grinding over the same thoughts, old and new, the ones that shaped us and the ones that will.) The story loops too — or maybe, more accurately, looks like a biorhythm print-out, lines crossing each other and then parabola-ing away at high speeds. The writing is maddeningly obtuse at points, and often faintly ridiculous, and the ending is sudden and resolves little.

But at the same time, it is gorgeous, full of details and asides, textured, memorable. It works, it hangs together, and it tells exactly the story it wants to tell. It’s a very long book — it took me over two months to read it — but a good one. I’m glad I read it.

(Note: Yes, I finished this on January 3d, but since the vast majority of it was read in 2011, I’m counting it for that year.)

We Meant Well is a memoir written by a Foreign Service Officer in the State Department who went to Iraq as part of the reconstruction. I had heard the author on NPR, talking about the book and telling some stories from it, so I was curious. While not masterfully written, it reaches for lyricality at times — and succeeds once or twice — and is quick-moving and never dull. It’s not really the kind of political book that can change anyone’s mind, but is more to nod along with in agreement.

I bounced off this one one-third of the way in. Certain elements of it were pretty cool, and I’ll definitely try to read it again sometime, but I think it just doesn’t fit what I want to read right now; guess I’m just not in the mood for a fussily-ornate oblique fantasy.

So now for something completely different: the first non-fiction I’ve read since The Worst Hard Time. After that, I think I’ll spend some time reading different stuf for a while. Seems like a good time for more Lord Peter Wimsey, for example, or those Reginald Perrin books I’ve had on the shelf for a while.

A minor Miles, quick and light. An investigation into business dealings spirals sideways, with Miles encouraging it at every turn. Nifty, but popcorn. Settles into an odd extended epilog, and then wham! Big surprise from nowhere which works surprisingly well. Wonder when the next one is coming…

It’s easy enough to get into the mind-set that Wolfe’s books are all excercises he’s set himself: the evasive narrator, the extremely unreliable narrator, the unredeemable narrator, the epistolary novel where the reader doesn’t have enough information to follow everything, and so on. In that case, Home Fires is something like “the detective novel where the detective’s theories are never validated”.

Of course, that’s also unfair to the books, really, but like I said, it’s hard not to do. Here, the broad strokes of the story — the continuation of a romance between someone who went on a relativistic journey and someone who did not, a high-seas hijacking — are just that, broad, and the specifics seem to get cast aside.

A good read with a little frustration, definitely in line with what Wolfe’s been doing lately.

Another John Cleaver book, which smartly decides that the series can’t go on exactly like it has and changes everything near the end, much like the last Dresden book. Overall, it’s still the same same frothy teenage-Dexter-and-literal-demons fun. A nice, quick read, not without its surprises. I somehow get the feeling that it’s the first book that holds up the best, though.