Nov 06 2015

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

So you get to the one part in the book (and anyone who’s read it will know what I’m talking about) and you stop, stunned. And you go back and you read the last part over again. And if you’re me, and essentially a British schoolgirl at your core, like Maddy you burst into uncontrollable tears.

This book, about two young women working for the British during World War II, is a sensational depiction of gender and friendship in wartime. Both incredibly clever and deeply moving, it pulls no punches as our narrators describe the horror of warfare and living under Nazi rule. Code Name Verity balances out the grimness with sly humor, moments of beauty and, above all, an abiding faith in the bond between the two women. I am always partial to books about best friends, and this novel was far and away one of the best, if almost unbearably gallant, visions of such.

My only complaint about this book is that there isn’t that much difference between the women’s narrative voices, but given that the social background of “British schoolgirl” extends to them both, it’s forgivable. Regardless, it will take me quite a while to recover from this intense, amazing book.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/06/code-name-verity-by-elizabeth-wein/

Nov 03 2015

Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari

Honestly, this is just a superlative book on what it’s like to date and be in a relationship in the present day. Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg conduct studies and review data to bring a comprehensive but still accessible (in large part due to Mr Ansari’s humor and personal anecdotes) overview of modern romance. They compare present standards with historical trends, and also look at mores in Doha, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Paris, in addition to small-town and big-city America. Modern Romance: An Investigation sets out to demystify a lot of the challenges faced by those looking for love today, and succeeds with panache. I haven’t been this impressed with a popular sociology book since Andrei S Markovits’ Offside, and am even more so given that MR:AI never flags or dries out, and deals with a much larger and more universal concept than football.

Also, Mr Ansari is hilarious. Definitely looking forward to reading more of his stuff. Hopefully, a food book next? The chapter on Tokyo had me running to make ramen with chicken, spinach and egg. His enthusiasm is infectious! Which also made the last chapter, where he gives his advice on how to cope with modern romance, that much more effective, backed up as it was with reams of fascinating data. Terrific book.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/03/modern-romance-an-investigation-by-aziz-ansari/

Nov 03 2015

An Interview with Kim Alexander, author of The Sand Prince

the-sand-prince-kim-alexander

Q: Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did this book evolve?

An image. I was in bed, falling asleep, and I suddenly had a vivid image of two people sitting at a campfire. The girl had white hair and was in a party dress, and the man had red eyes. I knew she’d been kidnapped, but I also knew she wasn’t afraid of him. I had to figure out who they were and how they got there. That’s where it came from.

Q: Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

Yes, I’d like it if everyone who plunked down coin for Game of Thrones would give me a shot. (kidding/not kidding.) I wrote this for myself. I am hoping that people who liked things like The Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn, Dune, the Sookie Stackhouse series–things that I personally love–might go for it.

Q: What is your next project?

Well, I am in the finishing stages of book two (spoiler: shit gets real) which is both easier because I don’t have to do so much exposition, but also much harder in that with about 40 named characters it’s become quite complicated. It’s about to head to the rough and dangerous waters of my editor. (Whom I love. Bow down before Carly Bornstein and speak her name with reverence.) And I am plotting out the third book in the series. I think there will be four, but who knows?

Q. What is the first book you read that made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!”

I’ve read F/SF my whole life, but it was reading Dave Barry’s columns in the Miami Herald. They were funny and light and impermanent (this was before PCs, folks) but they made me realize you could leave a mark on the world with your words.

Q. Are there any new books or authors in science fiction or fantasy (or both!) have you excited? What are you reading right now?

I’ve vastly slowed down in my reading, and I’m trying to stay away from my own genre. When I was doing author interviews at my old job at Sirius XM, I would read about 3 books a week, cover to cover. The writers were always amazed I’d read their books, but I felt it was unfair to them and to the audience not to do so. Since I am out there doing my own thing and just reading for pleasure now, I’m giving my brain a break. I am getting ready to start Ancillary Justice, though, and I just finished the new Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels. His writing is so seductive. And I’ll stop drop and roll for anything by China Mieville.

Q. Are you a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) or a plotter?

Total pantser. I write the chapters completely out of order, as they occur to me, and try and jigsaw them together after. So, a LOT of rewriting!

Q. What are you reading at the moment?

Girl’s Guide to the Apocalypse by Daphne Lamb, she’s a fellow Booktrope author and a hilarious person.

Q. What made you choose science fiction/ fantasy as your means of expression?

Didn’t have a choice. I don’t know that you can force yourself to write in a genre that doesn’t call to you. At least, I can’t.

Q. How did you learn to write?

I mentioned my old gig at Sirius XM. I got to ask the most successful and talented writers in the world how to write, and they were generous with their time and advice. But it comes down to: Start. Write. Fix it later. And rewrite. Rinse, repeat. (And don’t use adverbs!)

Q. Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?

I turn off my phone, put a cat on my lap, and off I go. I’m pretty disciplined.

Q. Tell us everything about your book and why you love it!

My hero is a half-human demon prince with a drinking problem and social anxiety disorder.
(This is a somewhat difficult book to summarize!)

It’s a story about finding out where you belong- and since it’s a fantasy, my rather beleaguered hero has multiple worlds to choose from.

Here’s the blurb:

When the storm came, it was made of magic, not rain, and when it had passed, the life and the city Hellne knew were changed forever.”

In Kim Alexander’s debut novel she weaves a witty, epic fantasy brimming with diverse characters and plenty of intrigue.Two worlds On the war-ravaged demon world of Eriis, Hellne, the fierce young queen, fights to keep her people alive, and to keep her son’s parentage a secret. On the green and gentle human world of Mistra, the demons have faded into myth. Only a handful of old men and children still guard The Door between the worlds.

Bound by magic Rhuun, the Prince of Eriis, uncovers a sultry book written by a human, sparking an obsession with the other world. When he is forced to flee Eriis, he must travel through The Door or pay the price in blood. Divided by a door The humans of Mistra are not what Rhuun was expecting—and one insufferable young woman in particular is about to find out that the demons of Eriis are not mythological after all . . .

As we quickly discover, the book that Rhuun loves so much and bases his entire knowledge of the human world on, turns out to be a cheesy romance novel. (You get to read his book, The Claiming of the Duke, as you go along, and that was a blast to write.) So he has some catching up to do when he goes through The Door.

Writing fantasy really gave me the freedom to do some comedy, a little romance, some sex for the grown folks, and loads of world building. (I should mention that The Sand Prince is not a romantic comedy, although it has romance and comedy!)

I didn’t want to use a medieval-ish backdrop, so I put the humans in a city very much like Washington DC (my home) called Mistra. (They use horses and gas-light, but they have indoor plumbing and photography.) The demon kingdom of Eriis is a once-great, now half-demolished city in a really unpleasant desert. But people live there, and have children. This is their home. I got to think about children growing up, and what they think is normal, and what they take for granted. Also, a good friend challenged me to create a world without homophobia, and I think I’ve done that. There is a large cast, and I love them all (even the bad guys) and relish the chance to get inside their heads. Because no matter the setting, the world, or how bizarre or outlandish the situation, they have to be human first. (Rhuun, being only half human, might disagree, and his mother, the demon queen would send me to the Crosswinds for saying that, but I stand by it!)

kim-alexander-author-picture

Author Links:
Kim Alexander Website
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Google+

~~~

Kim’s book will be available on Amazon Tuesday, November 3rd, which is today, so go buy it! I’ll be writing a review later on, because it was a damned good book and I’m DYING for the second one to get published!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/03/an-interview-with-kim-alexander-author-of-the-sand-prince/

Nov 03 2015

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

This book wasn’t for me. I thought it might be — 10 million fans can’t be wrong — I had heard good things about it, the title stayed lodged in my brain, and I thought about buying the book several times over the course of this year. So I picked it up, not entirely on impulse, at Berlin’s main train station just before an overnight trip to points south and read it all at once, finishing somewhere between Prague and the Slovak border.

The Fault in Our Stars is a tale of dying teens in love. Sometimes books aimed at children or young adults will get to the emotional core of an idea or character or event in a way that books aimed at adults will not or cannot. As Madeleine L’Engle put it, “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” A book about death and love and growing up that is aimed at young people can afford to be very direct, and that can pay off by going straight to the heart of the matter. But the flip side of that coin is self-involvement, mawkishness, self-indulgence. A story of dying teens falling in love is an invitation to self-involvement, and I think that’s what most put me off of The Fault in Our Stars, along with the author’s indulgence.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/03/the-fault-in-our-stars-by-john-green/

Nov 02 2015

Poor Doreen by Sally Lloyd-Jones

I was walking through the kids’ section of the Silver Spring library nearly two weeks ago, somewhat haphazardly selecting books for Jms while he was at school, when I came across THIS book. Honestly, the only major character I can think of named Doreen in literature is the crazy ass friend in The Bell Jar, so I pretty much leap at anything with my name on it (call it the aftereffect of never finding touristy keychains with my name on them.)

But a weird thing happened when I started reading the book with Jms. Honest to God, Sally Lloyd-Jones must know one of the default archetypes I choose for a role-playing character (optimistic, good-hearted, not necessarily bright but a shameless manipulator; the other, should you care, is a misanthropic sociopath) because she channeled that perfectly in Miss Doreen Randolph-Potts, the Ample Roundy Fish who is the star of this charming picture book. Jms and I loved her misadventures, as well as the pictures and the way both referenced the alphabet. Tho Jms is perfectly capable of reading on his own (he’s 4 and has been doing so since age 3, brag brag,) he prefers when I read it aloud, as the construction of the sentences here lends itself perfectly to dramatics. We liked this book so much, I might get “him” a copy for Christmas!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/02/poor-doreen-by-sally-lloyd-jones/

Oct 31 2015

Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg

Stunning and sensitive, this book would have been perfect but for the ending, which I felt petered out in a way that was meant to be philosophical but which just felt oddly disconnected given all the emotions that had filled the pages till then. I mean, honestly, I’d cried three times before even getting halfway through, with tears threatening again near the end (an awkward situation, by the way, when I’m waiting by the door to hand out Halloween candy,) when Cissy sees Will’s canoe. As I finished the book, I couldn’t help but want Bill Clegg to have ended it more strongly, on a crescendo that would have swept me up in another round of emotions. He chose otherwise and I can’t help but feel it let down an otherwise terrific novel.

Did You Ever Have A Family has a gorgeously complex narrative that reads almost like a mystery novel. Aside from the shocking, even scandalous events it recounts (centering on a woman losing her entire family on the eve of her daughter’s wedding, when her house in small-town Connecticut blows up,) it beautifully examines the feelings on every side of a situation, showing how meaning well isn’t enough, and how openness and honesty can go a long way to salving wounds, and how we shouldn’t wait to give of ourselves to those we know deserve our love. It was striking how sympathetic and complex Mr Clegg made all the characters, even the rather awful Lolly (and I really liked how he showed that she was objectively bratty without judging her too harshly for it.) I’m really looking forward to his next novel, which I can only imagine will build on the quiet triumph that is this one. Then, I hope, we’ll see something truly spectacular.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/did-you-ever-have-a-family-by-bill-clegg/

Oct 31 2015

Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski

I had been thinking how terribly young the soldiers were that Ryszard Kapuściński wrote about in Another Day of Life when he brought me up short by noting that they were the same age as many of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. Alexander Hamilton raised an artillery company for the American Revolution when he was no more than 21, and possibly as young as 19. A story of war is, inevitably, a story of many young lives that come to an abrupt end. They do not have another day of life.

“In Europe,” [Commandante Farrusco] said, “they taught me that a front is trenches and barbed wire, which form a distinct and visible line. A front on a river, along a road, or from village to village. You can trace it on a map with a pencil or point to it on the terrain. But here the front is everywhere and nowhere. There is too much land and too few people for a front line to exist. This is a wild, unorganized world and it’s hard to come to terms with it. There is no water, because there is a lot of desert here. You can’t hold out for long where there are no springs, and it’s a long way between springs. Here where we’re standing, there is water, but the next water is a hundred kilometers away. Every unit holds on to its water, because otherwise it dies. If there are a hundred kilometers between water, that space is nobody’s and there’s nobody there. So the front doesn’t consist of a line here, but of points, and moving points at that. There are hundreds of fronts because there are hundreds of units. Every unit is a front, a potential front. If our unit runs into an enemy unit, those two potential fronts turn into real fronts. A battle occurs. We are a three-man potential front now, travelling northwards. If we are ambushed, we become a real front. This is a war of ambushes. On any road, at any place, there can be a front. You can travel the whole country and come back alive, or you can die a meter from where you’re standing. There are no principles, no methods. Everything comes down to luck and happenstance. This war is a real mess. Nobody knows just where they stand.” (p. 76)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/another-day-of-life-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/

Oct 30 2015

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 1: Tintin in America / Cigars of the Pharaoh / The Blue Lotus by Herge

It is so weird how bad Tintin In America is compared with the other books in this collection. It’s the kind of thing you expect from a successful series writer towards the end of his interest in the venture as anything beyond a profit generator, when he’s just churning out pablum to please the mindless hordes of die-hard fans and the editors who won’t let him try something new. Granted, Herge had a tough time getting to the point of being able to write this story, and had to satisfy his original, ultra-conservative publishers. Still, were I a child whose first exposure to Tintin was through this volume, I’d have likely given it up halfway through TIA and been absolutely mystified by why anyone else liked this stuff.

Fortunately, this was not my introduction to Tintin, and the two other stories, Cigars Of The Pharoah and The Blue Lotus, had all the charm and verve of my remembering. The hardback digest format doesn’t do as much justice to the artwork as the over-sized paperbacks of my youth, but they do have a durability that’s hard to beat, especially in the hands of children. Not that my four year-old showed a lot of interest in this, tho I doubt I would have at that age either. Perhaps when he’s several years older.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/30/the-adventures-of-tintin-vol-1-tintin-in-america-cigars-of-the-pharaoh-the-blue-lotus-by-herge/

Oct 29 2015

Remake by Connie Willis

Most of the rest of Connie Willis’ writing would lead a reader to expect that Remake, her tale of Hollywood endlessly recycling classic movies and classic actors through digital magic, would be a screwball comedy that packed an emotional wallop. But no, this is as close to dystopia as Willis gets. As the back cover says, “moviemaking’s been computerized and live-action films are a thing of the past. It’s a Hollywood where Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe are starring together in A Star is Born, and if you don’t like the ending, you can change it with the stroke of a key.”

People in their legions still want to be in the movies, are still willing to do practically anything to be seen on screen, except that no one is hiring warmbodies anymore. Remake, reuse, recycle have been taken to their logical extremes, and nothing in the new Hollywood is being made that hasn’t been made before, starring and featuring people long dead but still bankable on opening weekend. Studio mergers have been taken nearly to their extreme, with most of the novel’s action concerning people affiliated with ILMGM. It’s not yet one big studio, but constant rumors of further mergers imply that even more recognizable names will soon be mashed together like Viamount. Studio intrigue has everyone simultaneously angling for a promotion and fearful of being left on the cutting room floor. Willis also take copyright litigiousness close to its limit, with suits being filed practically instantly, ruling coming in days or hours, and some films and images being out of litigation for mere moments before disappearing again from view while lawyers wrangle not so much about the merits but about their interests.

The dystopia of Remake is not so much physical destruction as it is personal degradation. Everyone is trying to score something, addictive substances, sex, a non-existent role in a movie, a place higher up the corporate ladder. It’s all very transactional, and at first it seems that no one cares. “I’ve never understood,” says Willis’ first-person narrator Tom, “why the faces, who have nothing to sell but an original personality, an original face, all try to look like somebody else. But I guess it makes sense. Why should they be different from everybody else in Hollywood, which has always been love with sequels and imitations and remakes?” (p. 8)

The women are all trying to be Marilyn Monroe, and indeed Tom refers to most of them as Marilyns. The exceptions are Hedda, a tough-dame reporter who knows everything and who is something of a friend to Tom, and Alis, a fresh face in from the provinces who does not look like a Marilyn and who wants, more than anything else in this world, to dance in the movies. Even though she knows the movie musical died, after a long period of poor artistic and financial health, in the 1960s.

There it is. There’s that screwball comedy trying to get out again. Because against all odds, despite the drugs and the transactional sex and the skullduggery and the soulless productions, people in this story still love the movies. They can quote the great ones; they have watched hundreds, know dozens by heart; they have felt the movie magic, want to see it again, want to make it happen.

The future technology that Willis handwaves about implies that time travel might be possible. Tom, in the throes of either too much of one substance or not enough of another, believes that he has seen Alis in an old movie, dancing her heart out for the camera. And he can’t find her in the present day.

What is going on? That’s the next scene, and it’s an original. Not a remake.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/29/remake-by-connie-willis/

Oct 28 2015

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the Communist government declared martial law and fought back against its own people more effectively than the Shah’s forces had done, some two years previously and some three thousand kilometers to the southeast.

Kapuściński tells of the Iranian revolution mostly through a series of stories inspired by photographs he looks at while locked in a hotel room in Tehran, interspersed with accounts gleaned from his own daytime reporting in the city, before he again locks his hotel door against the armed bands that rule the night. The photos allow him to sketch the recent history of Iran, while the stories from his notes cover how the revolution came to pass, and what it meant to people he encountered.

The oldest photo he has acquired shows, according to its caption, the grandfather of the last Shah as a soldier holding another man — the assassin of Shah Nasr-ed-Din — prisoner at the end of a heavy chain. The two had made their way across the countryside from the site of the assassination to the Persian capital where the prisoner was to be executed. Thus began the ascent of the Pahlavis to the height of power in their country.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/shah-of-shahs-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/