Walking on the Moon

Nick Dybek’s When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man is a solid literary work.  He takes a claustrophobic hide-bound town and the strained relationships inside it and makes it something both mythic and small.  It’s a story of place and time more than character, but the place and time are worth a look.

His characters are solid, but not stunningly original.  They are creatures of his small fishing town and more personify parts of it than exist on their own.  He has passages where the narrator looks back from where he gets to later, but one sees clearly that he’s a different person than the one experiencing the events in the novel. The time and place are the stars.

The time is the time when a young person decides who he’s going to be – to the extent that he has a say in that decision.  His protagonist is reactive, as most are then, but introspective enough to make the transformation interesting.  Similarly the setting is condensed enough to make nearly every action symbolic.

Fortunately, Dybek has an even hand and an ear for dialog, so that the symbolism stays clear but not hackneyed.  The larger meanings are never hidden, but never overwhelm the story’s rhythm.  The story is a good yarn with some grand gestures.

Recommended.

Even if Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts is aptly named I’m curious to see what the rest of his writing is like.  What’s here is wonderfully character-driven mayhem that is great fun to read.  Because this is not happening to you.

Lipsyte walks a fun line creating characters that are both chaotic and small.  They’ll screw up the lives of those around them and themselves with grand emotion and petty scale (as an internet acquaintance once quipped). None of these folks are villains, but all of them are screwed up in some semi-comical way.

There are real tragedies in here as well, but even the foregone conclusions and dire destinies are the stuff of comic opera.  Each of these characters is an embodiment of a non-obvious but twisted aspect of our culture.  Things could be dire in some cases, but Lipsyte provokes a wry smile and a “what are you going to do” shrug more often than despair.

These are a lot of demented fun.

Recommended.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove is a collection of wonderfully off-kilter short stories from Karen Russell that manage to be symbolic without being portentous.  All of them have some aspect of the magical in them, but no two are alike.  The variety of setting and character keeps the ideas fresh and the stories engaging.

The stories are also refreshingly non-cinematic.  More to the point, they’re literary without making too much of that fact.  They are a pleasure to read as much for their language and their structure as they are for their incident.  They hold the reader’s attention without spectacle or excessive flash.  I wanted to see what happened as much for what it means as for how a story turns out.

Vampires contains stories that reward  contemplation and capture attention.

Recommended.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore isn’t described as a Young Adults title, but it has that tone.  Considering the quality of today’s YA works, that shouldn’t be taken as a slight, nor is it intended as one.  It does mean that Robin Sloan spins a fast-paced enjoyable yarn, more memorable for the sense of adventure and wonder than for its carefully realized characters and poetic passages.

That sense of thrill and enjoyment is really difficult to sustain, especially when the thrill comes from a sequence of puzzles that really aren’t as clever looking in from the real world.  Robin’s savvy about the feel of tech people and the joy of a good puzzle, but he’s not Neal Stephenson. Those impressions and that excitement carried the story, even for a nit-picker like me.

The plot involves a centuries-old conspiracy, the latest big thing, and the people and societies (secret and public) that make things happen in the world.  There are some nice observations about the cults and sects we all are parts of in this world and why Sloan values the ones he does. Overall a fun read.

Recommended.

This is a Kindle single, really a short insider’s memoir, about the early days of the James Bond franchise.  It’s primarily about the translation from novels to movies in the 1960’s and 70’s.

There’s lots of insider goodness – telling anecdotes and personal remembrances – that I’m sure will delight detailed fans.  I’m not a deep fan, so I actually felt a little adrift in the thing.  I felt like I was expected to recognize some of the names as they came on stage, but other that Ian Fleming and Sean Connery, I didn’t.

Even coming in cold like that, this was a diverting enough read, but I think a bigger fan would get more out of it.

John Irving writes a John Irving novel better than anyone else does.  That’s more of a trick than it sounds like.  More than many writers, Irving pays explicit homage to his influences and has become closely attached to a set of symbols and touchstones.  Having such a strong and imitable voice will attract parodists and rip-off artists at a surprising rate. It’s easy for a rip-off to become more noticed than the original; ask Bill Hicks.

It’s amusing that Irving has chosen to practically parody himself in In One Person. Reading it isn’t so much a game of “spot the trope” as looking for ground that hasn’t been covered by Irving before. It’s a misleading game, though.  Even as I was checking the boxes (there’s a cross dresser, there’s a wrestler, it’s a New England Prep School, Dickens story, oh, look Austria) it never felt old. It’s a nice way to make the point that individual characters and people are individuals, even if they share experiences.

And really, what Irving does better than anyone is build his characters lives that bring them into sharp focus.  There’s usually an issue of the day to address as well, of course.  The man is a Dickens disciple, after all.  While his well-wrought characters generally illuminate that issue, I always enjoy them just for their clockwork completeness and emotional verisimilitude.

In One Person has a lot to say about the lives of non-heterosexuals (that sounds PC, but Irving covers a fair amount of this ground) that is certainly worth hearing.  Irving says it all by walking a real person through that world and inviting us along. Writers have been doing that since Dickens (at least), but few as well.

Recommended.

E. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who did her field work studying hackers – in the “free software geeks” sense of the word.  And that’s “field work” in the sense of “serious social science investigation of a culture by immersion” sense of the word.  She applied the same techniques and rigor to studying Debian maintainers as others have applied to Maori tribes.  If I’m not a member of that hacker tribe, I’ve certainly lived around them for many years, and it’s both enlightening and disconcerting to see that analysis progress.

I’m not an anthropologist, but I find the analysis insightful and largely accurate. It’s strange to see the values, mores, and rituals of my community described with the clinical compassion of the anthropologist.  In addition to describing these features, her dissection of how they relate to and are motivated by larger societal issues is compelling.  I think someone reading this could explain hacker culture more effectively both to non-hackers and to hackers themselves.

In addition, I learned some specific things about the Debian project.  I understand their positions and why I didn’t know more about them now.

Coding Freedom is a scholarly treatise and an anthropological one at that, so it is thick both with anthropological jargon and with references and citations.  That can make for dense reading, but for me, it remained compelling.

Recommended.

I picked up Greg Rucka’s Alpha because Warren Ellis had nice things to say about it and because I’ve enjoyed his comics writing.  In Alpha I found a well executed thriller that didn’t have much ambition beyond that.  Now, I like a potboiler more than the next guy, so a well-executed thriller is nothing to apologize for.  It did throw Gun Machine into sharp relief, though.

Rucka’s action is tautly written and clear to follow.  Even though we’re pretty sure how things will go in the long run, there is plenty of suspense in the individual engagements. It’s always clear who’s doing what to whom and what the stakes are.  Tension builds and the action proceeds at a snappy clip.  The tactics and strategy of heroes and villains are believable and original in an action movie kind of world. The pot boils nicely.

I do wish that I cared about the characters some more.  Everyone is a little too much a variation on a theme from central casting.  I gave up trying to tell members of his anti-terrorist team apart, though they all do have cool code names.  The most interesting variations are a well realized sleeper agent and the protagonist’s deaf teenage daughter. Probably the worst thing about the undercharacterization is that when the protagonist is feeling put upon by his alienated family it’s hard not to see their point.  He is a duty-driven action hero who doesn’t do enough to help people he ostensibly cares about to see his side and that’s what they tell him.

Back at the plot, things are moving quickly and cleanly toward an exciting conclusion.  As long as you keep your eye on that, Alpha is a lot of fun.

Ted Saves The World is a novella for young adults that intentionally has the feel of a smart TV action drama.  Bryan Cohen, the author, is very up front about his goals and inspirations.  He’s writing in the vein of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Ted was originally intended as a TV pilot.

In terms of those goals, I found Ted to be very well done.  The writing is clear and engaging.  The characters are sharply drawn, and the story moves along well structurally.  Everything in the story serves the narrative and it all meshes well. This is all very promising.

It will be interesting to see if Cohen can go beyond these technical achievements and infuse his work with something unique.  Right now he’s sticking very close to his inspirations in theme, tone, and character, but Buffy already exists. There are good reasons to hope that he can begin mixing in new elements and make something completely original.  This is worth a look and keeping an eye on.

Recommended.

James Daily and Ryan Davidson have a fun idea in The Law Of Superheroes.  They take situations that arise in the comics and show how current and future US law  would apply.  Extreme hypothetical cases are a good way to understand the ramifications of any set of rules, especially the law, and it’s tough to come up with more extreme hypotheticals that comics.

The execution was a little dry for me.  I felt like too many of the problems had cut-and-dried solutions that would be helpful in getting law students to remember the principles, but that were less thrilling to the layman.  That’s not to say that the book reads like a police blotter.  There are several places where interesting aspects of the law pop out, but I think the book would benefit from a deeper look at the more interesting cases, rather than trying to survey too much of the legal landscape.

Worth a look through, especially if you are a law student or have a strong interest.