I find it impossible not to like John Scalzi’s public persona. He’s clever, thoughtful, straightforward, and sometimes delightfully wacky. I read Whatever, his blog, regularly, and have for years. I also liked the first collection of writings from it, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded.
Nevertheless, even though I breezed happily through the new collection, The Mallet of Loving Correction, I liked it less. I can think of four reasons, and only one and a half of them have to do with the book itself. I’m a little surprised at my less-than-glowing recommendation because I had been considering buying the book since it came out, and indeed I finally did get it via a Humble Bundle that I found out about from an entry on Whatever.
Here’s why I liked my experience of reading this collection less than the previous one: Continue reading
Imagine a helpless, pregnant 16-year-old who’s just been yanked from the serenity of her home and shoved into a dirty van. Kidnapped…Alone…Terrified.
Now forget her…
Picture instead a pregnant, 16-year-old, manipulative prodigy. She is shoved into a dirty van and, from the first moment of her kidnapping, feels a calm desire for two things: to save her unborn son and to exact merciless revenge.
She is methodical—calculating— scientific in her plotting. A clinical sociopath? Leaving nothing to chance, secure in her timing and practice, she waits—for the perfect moment to strike. Method 15/33 is what happens when the victim is just as cold as the captors.
The agents trying to find a kidnapped girl have their own frustrations and desires wrapped into this chilling drama. In the twists of intersecting stories, one is left to ponder. Who is the victim? Who is the aggressor?
I received a free copy of Method 15/33 from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This is author Shannon Kirk’s debut novel, so one of the factors in my decision to request the ARC were the glowing reviews already available on Goodreads. I began this novel with high expectations. Unfortunately, Method 15/33 did not deliver.
Lisa Yyland is a neurological anomaly – her frontal lobe, the area of the brain that controls reason and planning, is enlarged. As a result, Lisa is not only a genius, she’s also able to turn her emotional responses on and off like a light switch. Even in times of extreme crisis, she is able to remain as calm and rational as a battle-hardened veteran.
Ms. Kirk illustrates this character trait by briefly recounting an incident when Lisa saves her first grade class from a gun-toting drug addict by yelling “air raid” and pulling the fire alarm, which causes the shooter to drop his weapon and dive for cover. If you can suspend your disbelief long enough to buy the idea of a six-year-old, even one who is a prodigy, possessing enough wisdom to recognize a junkie experiencing a psychotic break, you might enjoy Method 15/33. I couldn’t and the book went downhill from there.
Despite Ms. Kirk’s writing honors from the Faulkner Society and the praise heaped on her novel from several award-winning authors, I found multiple rookie mistakes, including “as you know, Bob” info dumps, allowing the author’s voice to intrude by having the narrators directly address the audience, and using twenty-five cent words when nickel words would do, as early as the first chapter. Part of the problem appears to stem from the stylistic choices Ms. Kirk makes for her story.
Method 15/33 is told from the alternating viewpoints of Lisa and FBI Special Agent Roger Lui. However, both Lisa and Agent Lui are recounting the incident in flashback from seventeen years after the abduction, which leads to a lot of passive voice in the narration on top of all the other issues. One of the least necessary of Ms. Kirk’s blunders is her decision to withhold the name of one of the main characters until halfway through the book. For the first 11 chapters I thought Lisa’s name was Dorothy because Agent Lui kept referring to the pregnant, kidnapped girl he was searching for by that name. I might have been able to accept one unreliable narrator as a plot device. Two is overkill.
Six chapters into Method 15/33, I’d failed to find a reason to care about any of the characters. By the end of the book, indifference turned to active dislike. Lisa, in particular, struck me as overly arrogant and condescending even for an adolescent. At one point, she waxes poetic about her “homicidal intent” toward the incompetent captors who are obviously beneath her. Really? Really?! I have a teenager of my own who isn’t nearly as obnoxious as this character.
In one of Ms. Kirk’s bungled attempts to create a more likable protagonist, Lisa tells her reader she has turned on her emotional switch where her unborn child is concerned. It is her love for her baby (as opposed to her own sociopathic tendencies) that fuels Lisa’s rage and impels her to plot the death of her captors in excruciating detail and with obvious relish. Unfortunately, Ms. Kirk fails to show maternal love or any other emotion through her writing. Rather, I felt I was being told when Lisa experienced emotion rather than genuinely connecting with her.
The other major character, Roger Lui – a drama club geek turned special agent, struck me as vapid and whiny. If only he hadn’t been gifted with vision better than a fighter pilot or with hyperthymesia – AKA a really good memory that allows him to recall every day of his life in perfect detail. Maybe then he could have been happy as an actor instead of getting snapped up after applying to the FBI. Cry me a river. Oh, wait…psych! He actually has a compelling reason for choosing a career law enforcement, but that pesky little detail is also withheld until near the end of the book. Have I mentioned Ms. Kirk is fond of the unreliable narrator trope? His partner, Lola, is a stereotypical butch, complete with chewing tobacco and Old Spice cologne, desperately overcompensating for the crime of having breasts in a male-dominated career field. This walking cliche doesn’t just have a chip on her shoulder, she’s carrying the whole potato. Both characters are as flat as their descriptions suggest.
Although Method 15/33 is billed as a gripping thriller, I was hard pressed to find anything thrilling about it. In fact, the unbelievable fish yarn that is Method 15/33 grows less realistic with each chapter until it finally jumps the shark when Lisa stages her escape. This novel could have been remarkable, but it fell far short of that promise. A concept this ambitious requires a master storyteller to pull it off. Sadly, Shannon Kirk does not yet have the experience to do it justice. If your tastes run to revenge fantasy, Method 15/33 might be your cup of tea. To me, the bottom of the Boston Harbor seemed like a more fitting place for this novel.
I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world
My surname is Lu and my personal name is Yu, but I am not to be confused with the eminent author of The Classic of Tea. My family is quite undistinguished, and since I am the tenth of my father’s sons and rather strong I am usually referred to as Number Ten Ox.
Nearly finished with a couple of other things and very much looking forward to re-reading this delightful classic. (I picked it up as a part of the Humble Bundle referred to here.)
Where to start when writing about a city as vast and storied as Istanbul? In Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, Charles King takes an inflection point in the history of a city that is itself a key inflection between East and West. Or rather, he takes a period of hinges to illustrate how many aspects of modern Istanbul came about, and to show both what is new and how it is linked to what came before. He uses a series of portraits of people coming to, living in, or passing through the city to demonstrate how individual choices both take part in and add up to larger currents of history. Continue reading
Jo Walton answers the question posed by the title for a bit more than 100 books in this collection of brief reviews devoted to re-reading. As I read through, I enjoyed thinking of how the emphasis could fall on each of the words in the title, although the cover design clearly places it on the third: What Makes This Book So Great. But it’s fun to hear Walton put it elsewhere in various essays. What Makes This Book So Great. What Makes This Book So Great. What Makes This Book So Great.
All but two of the short essays are collected from columns that ran on Tor.com between 2008 and 2011. They are pithy, to the point, and occasionally refer to comments made in answer to previous columns.
Walton reads as a prodigious rate. At one point, she notes that a day seldom goes by that she does not finish a book, and if she devotes the day to reading, she is perfectly capable of getting through six or seven novels. In one of the columns, she mentions readers who have commented and noted that they seldom re-read books. They feel there are so many books to read, and a limited lifetime to do it in. Walton, by contrast, says that she grew up with a finite number of books and still has the feeling that she might run out. I think her speed, about five times as fast as even a devoted reader, explains the difference.
In her discussion of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Walton regrets that Eliot couldn’t singlehandedly invent science fiction. It’s not as far-fetched as it seems. Jules Verne was being translated into English at that time. H.G. Wells would be writing just 25 years later. Eliot appreciated how science and technology were changing the world. Many of the things she does in Middlemarch have science-fictional aspects. But what could have been! Walton writes, “… Dorothea’s story at least ends happily, if unconventionally. That is, unconventionally for a Victorian novel. She doesn’t get to be the ambassador to Jupiter, more’s the pity.”
Many of the books that she writes about in the book are out of print, or otherwise obscure. She likes books that expand the possibilities of what can be done within the genre. She mentions authors she finds brilliant and their lack of commercial success difficult to fathom, such as Terry Bisson. She also likes books that aren’t, as she says, like anything else. She says that, for example, about The Interior Life by Katherine Blake, Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack, or Red Shift by Alan Garner.
Walton takes extended looks at C.J. Cherrryh’s Union-Alliance books, at Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, and at Steven Brust’s Taltos series. I skipped the 50 pages or so devoted to Brust because I am planning to read several of them later this year. She also looks at several books in a row in which time travel is a major element, but ultimately self-defeating. I’m curious what she thinks of John Crowley’s “The Great Work of Time.” She has interesting takes on Heinlein’s earths as dystopias, and her essays on Samuel R. Delany give good entry points to a famously challenging author.
Walton writes her reviews in direct, declarative sentences. The one thing that would really improve the book is an index, preferably a long one compiled with a dry, perhaps even Borgesian, sense of humor. That’s the only complaint I have with this collection. Spending time with someone so knowledgeable and so enthusiastic is a great pleasure. And that’s what makes this book so great.
In the second Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic, Rincewind saves the Disc, not quite by accident but certainly not through great forethought and cunning action, either. The Disc appears to be hurtling toward a great red star in such a way that collision is imminent, and the only way to prevent the Disc’s annihilation is for the eight Great Spells to be cast simultaneously. The problem, such as it is, is that one of the Spells has lodged itself in Rincewind’s brain, and he is (a) far away from the other seven, and (b) not being seen.
As a through-line to hang a novel on, this is a bit thin. There may have been more suspense about the outcome when the book was new, but now there are 38 more Discworld books, so obvsly it doesn’t go crashing into a looming star, casting the remainder of the series into flashback. But the main line isn’t what interests Pratchett anyway, or at least, that’s not what he devotes most of his attention to. He seems most interested in the set pieces, sketches, and ancillary characters that he introduces throughout the book. Sometimes they’re parodies of established fantasy pieces (Cohen the Barbarian, who is now in his late 80s but fierce as ever), while sometimes they are just extended bits of drollery, put there for their own sakes.
Of course, like druids everywhere they believes in the essential unity of all life, the healing power of plants, the natural rhythm of the seasons and the burning alive of anyone who didn’t approach all this in the right frame of mind, but they had also thought long and hard about the very basis of creation and had formulated the following theory:
The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.
Thus it was that the sun and moon orbited the Disc because they were persuaded not to fall down, but didn’t actually fly away because of uncertainty. Charm allowed trees to grow and bloody-mindedness kept them up, and so on.
This is all good fun, and the book bounces along happily, skewering cliches left and right. There’s not a lot of heft here (which is fine! how many other books don’t even reach this level of fun?), but for the longer project of the series I’m interested in finding out how many of the minor characters turn up again. Also in the longer context, it’s probably important that the Great Spell is no longer with Rincewind at the end of the book, freeing him up considerably as a character. Twoflower, a tourist who has often driven events in the first two books, decides at the end of the book that his vacation is over and returns to his place of origin. I guess we’ll see about that, too.
The main reason I enjoyed this book is the impressive way in which Peter Swanson sucked me into Lily Kintner’s psyche. I was originally repulsed by her philosophy of ending lives (and still am, tbh) but as the book progressed, I desperately wanted her to get away with all the marbles. Conversely, her murderous spree went from most to least justified, I felt, over the course of the novel, which only served to highlight how masterful the writing was in getting me to empathize more with her as it went on.
I also find it intriguing that I found the women in the book to be, overall, far more sympathetic than the men, who were all at least some degree of repulsive. Swanson pulls no punches in displaying the tawdry underbelly of the human psyche, in all its cheap, short-sighted selfishness, and I wonder if it says something about me in that I understood exactly where most of the women were coming from (with the exception of Lily’s mother, but that could be because she was viewed solely through the prism of Lily’s fears.)
A solid psychological thriller, with a lot of twists and turns, and an impressive ability to make a monster (or several of them, to be fair) sympathetic.
People whowereannoyed by the cliffhanger ending of Wolfhound Century should definitely wait the six weeks or so until Radiant State is published before reading Truth and Fear. Peter Higgins hasn’t solved the middle-book problem, but it’s clear that he conceived and wrote the three books of the Wolfhound Century tale as a single, coherent story. In the middle of March of this year, it will all be there for readers to enjoy. That is, if the desperate story of a now-renegade policeman caught amidst a revolution and an invasion and maybe a limited nuclear war, with the possibility of a superhuman intelligence imposing permanent totalitarianism, is the sort of thing you enjoy. I know I do.
It’s possible that a merely human Stalinism might be the preferable outcome of the trilogy, given some of the other choices on offer.
As the back cover says, “the Reduced Shakespeare Company‘s classic farce” presents, after a fashion, all 37 plays and does something to with the sonnets in just over 90 minutes of stage time. They do the comedies all at once, in a bit Continue reading
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I suppose it would be smart to wait until I got to the part where Italy can properly be said to be Mussolini’s before writing about a book called Mussolini’s Italy, but my progress through this volume has been so slow — “deliberate” would be a kinder word, if less accurate — that I might lose the thread entirely before then.
Bosworth’s book does a lot of what I like histories to do: it locates Mussolini and Fascism within larger currents of Italian and European history; it reaches back to trace continuities, so as to make the differences of the new era clearer; it’s careful with explanations; and it shows the contingency of how events looked at the time. In the particular case of Italian Fascism, it shows clearly how the desire to make things anew rose from the experience of soldiers on the fronts of World War I. While the war didn’t blow up the Italian state, as it did the Russian, German, Austrian and Ottoman Empires, it revealed the old order as inadequate to the demands of the returning soldiers. Bosworth is very good at showing how various threads that became Fascism arose from a largely inchoate desire for something new in national life that would give meaning to the sacrifices of the front.
October 1922, the month the Fascists seized power with their March on Rome, is closer to World War I than it’s common to see in histories that concentrate on western Europe. Only a month earlier, Turkish forces under Atatürk regained control of Smyrna, effectively ending the war in the former Ottoman Empire and deciding it in favor of Turkish nationalist forces. October 1922 was also the month when the Bolsheviks captured Vladivostok, ending the Russian Civil War in the far east and cementing Communist control of the Tsar’s former empire. The Soviet-Polish War was only a year in the past. In Germany, there had been armed uprisings in 1920 and 1921. So while I’ve often read of the Fascist seizure of power as a harbinger of the politics of the 1930s, it might be just as illuminating to see it as another 19th century regime swept away by the First World War.
I’m a little past a third of the way through, and Bosworth is just starting to describe actual Fascist rule. I’ll see if he’s as thorough with the execution as he has been with the setup. But probably not speedily.
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire