This week's book:
Medicus: a Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie
Grade: A
In college one of my concentrations was Classics, Latin and Greek. Later I taught Latin, which included a healthy helping of Roman culture and customs. I always told my students that even though we modern Americans get many of our legal traditions and symbols from Romans - not to mention Christianity - the Romans of classical times were very, very different people from you and I. Their culture was a slave culture through and through, and that's not something modern people really get. Sure, we understand it intellectually, but we don't feel it, we haven't ever participated in the cultural evil of holding another person in bondage so our understanding of slavery lies on the shallow end of the enlightenment pool. It was always tough, maybe impossible, to get the truth across to my students.
I wish this book had been available back then.
Medicus is a murder mystery, set in Roman-occupied Britain back in the Second Century AD. The hero is the physician - a 'medicus' - Gaius Petreius Ruso, late of Rome itself. He used to be in the Emperor's favor, but Roman politics and intrigue conspired against him, his wife divorced him, and his family farm in Gaul is in trouble and his brother might have to sell. Overwhelmed by circumstance, he flees to military medical service in the Empire's hinterlands, among the barbarians. He's slowly coming undone, becoming less than who he thought he was without finding who he really is. Then, someone finds a body in the river, and Ruso can't stop asking questions. His already complicated life becomes much more messy.
So far it sounds like a fairly straightforward mystery. Sure, the trappings are Roman - and suitably authentic, I can vouch for that - but the situation could be a regular modern mystery. Then we find out that the dead woman fished out of the river was a slave. And then we find out there are more dead slaves, all women, and no one seems to know anything. Slowly the author pulls back the veil and lets the readers see that slavery corrupts. Everyone touched by the slave trade, even the hero Ruso, becomes soiled by it. They're all dirty, it's just that some are dirtier than others.
Balancing that tension is what led me to like this book. More than once characters say 'anyone can buy a girl,' with a casual voice that made me shiver. It's true, that's the way things work in a slave economy, people aren't people, they're property, and treated only as well as their owner treats his things. The characters are in a terrible society, but it's the only one they have; they don't know any other way. They try to do good, but it never works out right.
The story is suitably convoluted for a murder mystery, complicated by the hero's own personal shortcomings, and it comes to a satisfactory conclusion, with all the loose ends tied off. But even the final pages, where the hero comes to a triumph of sorts, involve slavery and the inherent power imbalance between master and slave.
You can read this book just for the mystery part, which is very good, or just for the Roman culture and history part, which is also very good and incredibly real, or you can read it for the deeper shades of meaning that apply to our own time and place. I recommend the third one.
Next week:
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
The dude who wrote 'Fight Club.' I read 'Fight Club' years ago and didn't really like it. Too... I don't know... angry white guy? This is about a dead teenaged girl. I'm trying to go into it with no expectations, we'll see how well that works out.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Sunday, October 20, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 42: The Lies of Locke Lamora
This week's book:
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Grade: B+
I liked this book. It was mechanically sound, had a decent plot with twists and turns and what-have-yous, and was an entertaining read. The hero is a con man whose only real talent is lying, a thief who preys exclusively on the wealthy of his city. But he's not nearly as clever or untouchable as he thinks he is. Good premise.
So why the B+? Well, sit down a spell and I'll tell you why...
This is a fantasy novel, and by that I mean adult fantasy. No, not that kind of 'adult' fantasy, I mean it's more like Game of Thrones than Harry Potter. For grown-ups instead of kids. The main character, Locke Lamora, lives in a world where magic is real - but not ubiquitous - and alchemy is real and poverty is real and slavery is very real, and people live by intrigue and trickery or they don't live very long at all.
When you get a brand-new fantasy world, you have to allow the author the page count to do a decent job of world building. Some things need explanation, after all, especially if they're germane to the plot. But it's a fine line between explaining the way your fantasy world works and losing your narration in the details. Sometimes the author stepped over that line. Many times, actually. We don't get to even the hints of the plot of the book until about 50 pages in. There is actually a Prologue, which in publishing nowadays just isn't done. Honestly, I'm surprised the term 'Prologue' survived the editing process, if I were in charge that would have been my first edit.
The author never gets past this tendency to navel-gaze the details of his world. Time after time after time the narration is interrupted with an explanation of some point of the world that's going to be important in ten pages or so. I get it, you thought this through, but this over-reliance on exposition of the details of the world is just like when other authors over-share their research. Dan Brown, I'm looking your direction here. It gets in the way and only calls attention to itself.
There is too much dialogue. Luckily, the author avoids - mostly - the kind of too-clever 'author's voice' dialogue I loathe; the characters speak in their own voice. They just do too much of it. There is banter between characters, which is the author's self-indulgence leaking through, and it persists long after establishing mood and defining relationships. Towards the end the dialogue veered into exposition from time to time.
Because of the first two points, too much world-building and too much dialogue, the book is too long. Much too long. The plot, even with its twists and setbacks, could have been accomplished in 450 pages instead of 650. When I actually have to turn off the page count on my e-book reader because the countdown to the end is interminable, you know the book is too long.
Also, even though this is a fantasy world, the author clearly based it on the Italian Renaissance, probably Venice or Florence or a combination of both. There are many Italianate words and names and terms, which keeps them from sounding like Fake Fantasy names, but doesn't allow them to fade into the background either. I got the feeling that the heroes would take a gondola to St. Mark's Basilica any moment.
Even though I have my complaints and I graded it a B+, I really did like the book. It's clever, and the fantasy elements hang together. The hero is likable even though he's a rogue and a con man, and the bad guys' motivations seemed reasonable enough. As far as first novels go, it was much, much better than Twilight or Ready Player One, but not quite as good as The Golem and the Jinni or The Panopticon.
Next week:
????
I have absolutely no idea. I need to go to the bookstore and find something tomorrow.
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Grade: B+
I liked this book. It was mechanically sound, had a decent plot with twists and turns and what-have-yous, and was an entertaining read. The hero is a con man whose only real talent is lying, a thief who preys exclusively on the wealthy of his city. But he's not nearly as clever or untouchable as he thinks he is. Good premise.
So why the B+? Well, sit down a spell and I'll tell you why...
This is a fantasy novel, and by that I mean adult fantasy. No, not that kind of 'adult' fantasy, I mean it's more like Game of Thrones than Harry Potter. For grown-ups instead of kids. The main character, Locke Lamora, lives in a world where magic is real - but not ubiquitous - and alchemy is real and poverty is real and slavery is very real, and people live by intrigue and trickery or they don't live very long at all.
When you get a brand-new fantasy world, you have to allow the author the page count to do a decent job of world building. Some things need explanation, after all, especially if they're germane to the plot. But it's a fine line between explaining the way your fantasy world works and losing your narration in the details. Sometimes the author stepped over that line. Many times, actually. We don't get to even the hints of the plot of the book until about 50 pages in. There is actually a Prologue, which in publishing nowadays just isn't done. Honestly, I'm surprised the term 'Prologue' survived the editing process, if I were in charge that would have been my first edit.
The author never gets past this tendency to navel-gaze the details of his world. Time after time after time the narration is interrupted with an explanation of some point of the world that's going to be important in ten pages or so. I get it, you thought this through, but this over-reliance on exposition of the details of the world is just like when other authors over-share their research. Dan Brown, I'm looking your direction here. It gets in the way and only calls attention to itself.
There is too much dialogue. Luckily, the author avoids - mostly - the kind of too-clever 'author's voice' dialogue I loathe; the characters speak in their own voice. They just do too much of it. There is banter between characters, which is the author's self-indulgence leaking through, and it persists long after establishing mood and defining relationships. Towards the end the dialogue veered into exposition from time to time.
Because of the first two points, too much world-building and too much dialogue, the book is too long. Much too long. The plot, even with its twists and setbacks, could have been accomplished in 450 pages instead of 650. When I actually have to turn off the page count on my e-book reader because the countdown to the end is interminable, you know the book is too long.
Also, even though this is a fantasy world, the author clearly based it on the Italian Renaissance, probably Venice or Florence or a combination of both. There are many Italianate words and names and terms, which keeps them from sounding like Fake Fantasy names, but doesn't allow them to fade into the background either. I got the feeling that the heroes would take a gondola to St. Mark's Basilica any moment.
Even though I have my complaints and I graded it a B+, I really did like the book. It's clever, and the fantasy elements hang together. The hero is likable even though he's a rogue and a con man, and the bad guys' motivations seemed reasonable enough. As far as first novels go, it was much, much better than Twilight or Ready Player One, but not quite as good as The Golem and the Jinni or The Panopticon.
Next week:
????
I have absolutely no idea. I need to go to the bookstore and find something tomorrow.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 41: Why I Jump
** Fair warning, I get very, very, very cussy below. If you don't
like a lot of bad words spread around like spiteful mayonnaise on an
anger sandwich, skip this one and wait until next week. **
This week's book:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida -- really by his mother
Grade: F-- this is a bullshit scam using 'facilitated communication.' Do not buy this book, it's charlatanism of the highest order.
Fuck this guy, fuck his mother, and fuck his transcriber. Fuck his Japanese publisher, fuck his American publisher, fuck his English translator and fuck Apple and iTunes for making it available.
And a very special two-middle-fingers-waaaaaaay-up for Jon Stewart. Fuck him sideways with a watermelon for giving this awful, despicable, entirely-discredited and thoroughly exposed fraud a fresh start on national cable TV (more on that below).
This book is a fraud. From start to finish. Do not buy this or even read it if someone gives it to you, it's pure fakery.
I suspected as much, when I heard about Mr. Higashida. He's severely autistic, essentially non-verbal, and the means he used to 'write' this book is facilitated communication. You may have heard about this in the 90's, it's where an assistant - in this case his mother - holds a disabled person's hand or arm, allowing them the smooth control to point to letters or words (or ideograms in Japanese) and make themselves understood.
The problem is, the disabled person isn't the one doing the pointing.
Study after study after study has proved that facilitated communication is nothing more than the 'facilitator' doing the typing. With very simple methods it's been demonstrated time and again. For instance, when the disabled person is shown a picture of a cat, but the facilitator sees a dog, the disabled person types 'dog.' Or when the facilitator can't see the word, oddly enough the disabled person types something random.
Even better, the facilitator usually has to be the same person all the time. If the disabled person really just needed a steady hand it wouldn't matter whose hand it was, or even whether they could see what the disabled person could. And yet, when the disabled person's special facilitator is taken away, the disabled person stops being able to communicate. Like when 'psychics' are asked to reproduce their methods in lab settings, the ability just flees them for some reason. Because they're faking.
Naoki Higashida did not write this book. His mother did, using long-disproved methods. For a week I have looked for proof of Mr. Higashida's independence in this matter. I just need one video, or one reliable first-hand account of him writing on his own, where his mother isn't looking at his alphabet board or a disinterested third party does the facilitating. I found nothing. Not a single independently verified instance of Mr. Higashida doing anything like writing.
** If someone can provide me this proof, I will gladly retract everything in this review. I'll start holding my breath now. **
I understand why Mr. Higashida's mother does this. It was hard enough for me to try to know the mind of the autistic kids at camp and fail, and I only had them for a week, five nights. The parent of a person locked away into autism craves understanding, they want to know - or feel they know - what's going on with their child. So they buy into this kind of crap, hoping their child can reveal themselves.
Facilitated communication tells parents they can know their child, that it's simple and easy, all the child has to do is point. But it's just a late-20th Century version of spiritualism, nothing but fakery and self-deception. And so very cruel. I wouldn't wish the false hope 'facilitated communication' offers on my worst enemy.
Which is where Jon Stewart comes in. He of 'The Daily Show,' a man who is adept at parsing political speech and asking tough questions, never questioned this book at all. He took at face value the proposition that a severely autistic man, who can't even be demonstrated to read let alone write, dictated a book word by word. Jon Stewart researches his comedy assiduously, and picks apart situations to shovel away the bullshit and expose the lies. But he just sat in awe of this garbage, and whole-heartedly recommended this miserable excuse for book to all his viewers. Then he crowed about it shooting up the charts, never suspecting that it was complete and utter bullshit.
So fuck you, Jon Stewart. Fuck you to Hell and back for all the damage you're going to do to families with autistic kids because you couldn't be bothered to do your homework. People are going to read 'Why I Jump' and expect their autistic children to be able to make their wishes known using 'facilitated communication.' At best they'll be heartbroken when it doesn't work, and at worst they'll be victims of their own hope and believe, even for a short time, that their child can actually communicate, before the veil is ripped away and they learn the awful truth. Fuck you.
Next week:
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
A first novel. I'm kind of hit or miss with first novels, but I've found I like rolling the dice. Maybe because with the last few I've hit my point. Some day I'm going to crap out again, though.
This week's book:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida -- really by his mother
Grade: F-- this is a bullshit scam using 'facilitated communication.' Do not buy this book, it's charlatanism of the highest order.
Fuck this guy, fuck his mother, and fuck his transcriber. Fuck his Japanese publisher, fuck his American publisher, fuck his English translator and fuck Apple and iTunes for making it available.
And a very special two-middle-fingers-waaaaaaay-up for Jon Stewart. Fuck him sideways with a watermelon for giving this awful, despicable, entirely-discredited and thoroughly exposed fraud a fresh start on national cable TV (more on that below).
This book is a fraud. From start to finish. Do not buy this or even read it if someone gives it to you, it's pure fakery.
I suspected as much, when I heard about Mr. Higashida. He's severely autistic, essentially non-verbal, and the means he used to 'write' this book is facilitated communication. You may have heard about this in the 90's, it's where an assistant - in this case his mother - holds a disabled person's hand or arm, allowing them the smooth control to point to letters or words (or ideograms in Japanese) and make themselves understood.
The problem is, the disabled person isn't the one doing the pointing.
Study after study after study has proved that facilitated communication is nothing more than the 'facilitator' doing the typing. With very simple methods it's been demonstrated time and again. For instance, when the disabled person is shown a picture of a cat, but the facilitator sees a dog, the disabled person types 'dog.' Or when the facilitator can't see the word, oddly enough the disabled person types something random.
Even better, the facilitator usually has to be the same person all the time. If the disabled person really just needed a steady hand it wouldn't matter whose hand it was, or even whether they could see what the disabled person could. And yet, when the disabled person's special facilitator is taken away, the disabled person stops being able to communicate. Like when 'psychics' are asked to reproduce their methods in lab settings, the ability just flees them for some reason. Because they're faking.
Naoki Higashida did not write this book. His mother did, using long-disproved methods. For a week I have looked for proof of Mr. Higashida's independence in this matter. I just need one video, or one reliable first-hand account of him writing on his own, where his mother isn't looking at his alphabet board or a disinterested third party does the facilitating. I found nothing. Not a single independently verified instance of Mr. Higashida doing anything like writing.
** If someone can provide me this proof, I will gladly retract everything in this review. I'll start holding my breath now. **
I understand why Mr. Higashida's mother does this. It was hard enough for me to try to know the mind of the autistic kids at camp and fail, and I only had them for a week, five nights. The parent of a person locked away into autism craves understanding, they want to know - or feel they know - what's going on with their child. So they buy into this kind of crap, hoping their child can reveal themselves.
Facilitated communication tells parents they can know their child, that it's simple and easy, all the child has to do is point. But it's just a late-20th Century version of spiritualism, nothing but fakery and self-deception. And so very cruel. I wouldn't wish the false hope 'facilitated communication' offers on my worst enemy.
Which is where Jon Stewart comes in. He of 'The Daily Show,' a man who is adept at parsing political speech and asking tough questions, never questioned this book at all. He took at face value the proposition that a severely autistic man, who can't even be demonstrated to read let alone write, dictated a book word by word. Jon Stewart researches his comedy assiduously, and picks apart situations to shovel away the bullshit and expose the lies. But he just sat in awe of this garbage, and whole-heartedly recommended this miserable excuse for book to all his viewers. Then he crowed about it shooting up the charts, never suspecting that it was complete and utter bullshit.
So fuck you, Jon Stewart. Fuck you to Hell and back for all the damage you're going to do to families with autistic kids because you couldn't be bothered to do your homework. People are going to read 'Why I Jump' and expect their autistic children to be able to make their wishes known using 'facilitated communication.' At best they'll be heartbroken when it doesn't work, and at worst they'll be victims of their own hope and believe, even for a short time, that their child can actually communicate, before the veil is ripped away and they learn the awful truth. Fuck you.
Next week:
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
A first novel. I'm kind of hit or miss with first novels, but I've found I like rolling the dice. Maybe because with the last few I've hit my point. Some day I'm going to crap out again, though.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 40: Doctor Sleep
This week's book:
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Grade: A for the novel itself
B- for the horror
This is my very first Stephen King novel. I kind-of read a short story decades ago and that was as far as I got. I've seen more Stephen King movies than I have read Stephen King books. I have to say, I liked it. But then again, Mr. King has been a professional novelist for almost as long as I've been alive, so he'd better have learned a thing or two about telling a story.
Here it is in a nutshell: the kid from The Shining, Danny, has grown up. He's reliving all his father's mistakes, becoming an alcoholic and drug addict. He tells himself it's a way to numb the 'shine' that shows him when people will die, but he knows that's not the real reason. He hits rock bottom and starts to climb his way out with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then he meets a little girl named Abra (no, really, that's her name) who has more of the shine than he does. Trouble is, there are others after her as well, and they're not nice at all.
I liked this story more for its first part, where Danny - now Dan - is on his slow slide to the lowest point in his life. Mr. King is himself a decades-sober alcoholic, and the description of Dan's worst moment rings completely true. In the story it's complicated by his shining (psychic powers), but those chapters felt to me like the author ripping the scabs off his own addiction and ascribing the pain and remorse to a character. Really good. Beyond good.
The rest of the story... meh. It wasn't bad. but it didn't feel so much like a horror novel to me as a comic book in novel form. There's astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, all sorts of mental powers. And then there are bad guys who feed off the shine of non-bad guys. Yup... vampires. Not blood-sucking vampires, soul-sucking vampires. Same diff. At least they weren't glowing and angsty teens, they were old. And drove RVs. Like vampire Travelers.
In the first half of the novel, when the narrative got to the horror parts where the bad guys were preying on their victims, who have to be children because the shining is strongest in them, I felt uncomfortable. Like I didn't want to read it. Then I realized that was pretty much the aim, the author intends those passages to be uncomfortable (scary?) as part of the genre convention. Thing is, after a couple of these I got numb to it. It stopped making me uncomfortable. And with all the psychic comic-book-y stuff going on, it kind of got lost in the whirl. This is why I graded the novel down for its horror elements. Sure, there are ghosts and vampires and revenants and what-have-yous, but they're opposed by two of the most powerful psychics around. Tight and suspenseful, but not terribly scary.
Maybe one of my favorite parts of the story is what Danny does with his gifts. Since he can read minds, and move stuff, and see ghosts, you could imagine what sort of charlatanism he might engage in. But after he finds sobriety, he settles into a hospice, where he provides comfort for the residents in their last minutes alive. It's a kind, gentle sort of application of an amazing talent, one that makes the character more human despite the incredible things he can do. It's also why the staff call him 'Doctor Sleep.' Good choice, Mr. King.
Next week:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Years ago I worked several summers at a camp for handicapped kids, including severely autistic ones. I know many autistic people, and a hallmark of for-real, no-shit autism is the inability to communicate, it's almost the defining characteristic. This is a book purportedly written by an autistic boy. Or maybe 'written,' you can make your own finger quotes. I'm not buying it until someone proves it to me. Stay tuned.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Grade: A for the novel itself
B- for the horror
This is my very first Stephen King novel. I kind-of read a short story decades ago and that was as far as I got. I've seen more Stephen King movies than I have read Stephen King books. I have to say, I liked it. But then again, Mr. King has been a professional novelist for almost as long as I've been alive, so he'd better have learned a thing or two about telling a story.
Here it is in a nutshell: the kid from The Shining, Danny, has grown up. He's reliving all his father's mistakes, becoming an alcoholic and drug addict. He tells himself it's a way to numb the 'shine' that shows him when people will die, but he knows that's not the real reason. He hits rock bottom and starts to climb his way out with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then he meets a little girl named Abra (no, really, that's her name) who has more of the shine than he does. Trouble is, there are others after her as well, and they're not nice at all.
I liked this story more for its first part, where Danny - now Dan - is on his slow slide to the lowest point in his life. Mr. King is himself a decades-sober alcoholic, and the description of Dan's worst moment rings completely true. In the story it's complicated by his shining (psychic powers), but those chapters felt to me like the author ripping the scabs off his own addiction and ascribing the pain and remorse to a character. Really good. Beyond good.
The rest of the story... meh. It wasn't bad. but it didn't feel so much like a horror novel to me as a comic book in novel form. There's astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, all sorts of mental powers. And then there are bad guys who feed off the shine of non-bad guys. Yup... vampires. Not blood-sucking vampires, soul-sucking vampires. Same diff. At least they weren't glowing and angsty teens, they were old. And drove RVs. Like vampire Travelers.
In the first half of the novel, when the narrative got to the horror parts where the bad guys were preying on their victims, who have to be children because the shining is strongest in them, I felt uncomfortable. Like I didn't want to read it. Then I realized that was pretty much the aim, the author intends those passages to be uncomfortable (scary?) as part of the genre convention. Thing is, after a couple of these I got numb to it. It stopped making me uncomfortable. And with all the psychic comic-book-y stuff going on, it kind of got lost in the whirl. This is why I graded the novel down for its horror elements. Sure, there are ghosts and vampires and revenants and what-have-yous, but they're opposed by two of the most powerful psychics around. Tight and suspenseful, but not terribly scary.
Maybe one of my favorite parts of the story is what Danny does with his gifts. Since he can read minds, and move stuff, and see ghosts, you could imagine what sort of charlatanism he might engage in. But after he finds sobriety, he settles into a hospice, where he provides comfort for the residents in their last minutes alive. It's a kind, gentle sort of application of an amazing talent, one that makes the character more human despite the incredible things he can do. It's also why the staff call him 'Doctor Sleep.' Good choice, Mr. King.
Next week:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Years ago I worked several summers at a camp for handicapped kids, including severely autistic ones. I know many autistic people, and a hallmark of for-real, no-shit autism is the inability to communicate, it's almost the defining characteristic. This is a book purportedly written by an autistic boy. Or maybe 'written,' you can make your own finger quotes. I'm not buying it until someone proves it to me. Stay tuned.
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