Posts tagged books

I am not an enormous fan of fantasy* but I have been known to make exceptions for urban fantasy. Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” popped up on a book list recommend by the lit snobs over at Slate. As I cannot resist lit snobbery, and it comes in convenient e-book form, it appeared on my Kindle.

Quentin, our super brilliant emo protagonist who normally would be in line for the new Arcade Fire CD, is whisked off mysteriously to take a bunch of entrance exams for some mysterious Wizard College. He gets in after some brutal and bizarre exams, because he’s the main character, and he gives up all the vestiges of his old life to become a wizard. The first half of the Magician’s is a bit of Harry Potter meets College Angst meets the X-Men. Quentin meets a whole bunch of other proto-wizards, makes a bunch of friends, and learns to become content with his weird wizarding self. This part of the book is more “New X-Men” than “Harry Potter” frankly — it feels more than a little like Professor Xavier and his secretive school for Mutants in Upstate New York than Hogwarts, especially once the students start to differentiate into different magical power specialities.

The second half is post-college early-20s angst with magic. The book picks up here. It feels like the characters are in a holding pen until they are let loose to go wreak havoc on the magical world. The book becomes funnier and it moves faster once it acquires something that resembles the vague outline of a plot; before then it was just a coming of age story set in a fantasy background. This book does have a lack-of-plot problem. The big evil is not well formed. The fantasy on a fantasy world is pretty vague although, to be fair, it is supposed to be. The fights are written well and the plot ends satisfyingly enough.

The book is highly readable. It doesn’t feel bogged down with turgid prose and it moves at a brisk pace. It mixes modern sensibilities and pop culture references (D&D references; fight club; drinks and drugs of all kinds) with urban fantasy into a nice little whole. The writing gets better as the book goes on, leading me to believe this is a sophomoric effort and leading me to hope for a possible sequel — something with a firmer plot with the same characters would make for a better story.

Originally I gave this book 3 stars out of 5 because I read it immediately following Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” If you have read Umberto Eco, you know it’s hard for a fantasy novel, let alone any novel, to follow up that act. I docked it a star merely because it came after a better written book. It’s unfair and I give it back half a star and upgrade it to 3 1/2 stars out of 5. It is good. Not great. Not fantastic. It is solidly a good and entertaining read.

* Exception made for Game of Thrones.

Kim lent me a copy of the hardbound first collection of the graphic novel Castle Waiting by Linda Medley and produced by Fantagraphics Books. The story is a sort of feminist Chaucer set in the never never land of fairy tales. It opens with the story of Castle Waiting, a castle set over a land once lush and prosperous until it became the bramble-covered castle of the story of Sleeping Beauty. Once the Prince woke the Princess and everyone else from their century-long sleep the town was gone and the castle destroyed. With the castle abandoned by all but a few, it became Castle Waiting.

The stories in Castle Waiting are charming and entertaining but lack emotional punch. It’s difficult not to be charmed by the book as the stories are light, funny and entertaining. A pregnant woman flees from her abusive husband and falls into peril before she manages to reach Castle Waiting and give birth to her strange green son. A horse-headed knight and the stork-shaped keeper of the castle go into town for supplies and meet up with bandits. A full second half of the book involves the story of the local nun and how a bearded girl joined a circus, left a circus, and found herself among a feminist order in the service of God. The story of the nun goes on too long — it spins into backstories about backstories that have backstories — but is otherwise fun to read. It’s sort of the fantasy lives of the women of various fantasy series while their men go off and fight wars and the great battles between Good and Evil.

It’s a fun read. It’s well and clearly written. The art is top-notch for being b&w. It’s very light. I’m not certain it’s a “read more than once” but it is handsomely bound and looks good sitting on a shelf among other books. It makes a nice introduction to comics for people who aren’t enormous comic-book people and aren’t interested in requiring an encyclopedic knowledge of this universe or that one going back 40 years. Although it has fairy tale references it is a self-contained volume.

I’ll happily read volume #2 when it comes out. This one comes recommended for those looking to get into comics and not knowing where to start, or those who enjoy comics from time to time but don’t want to invest in some huge story. It’s a great intro-story. It may not be a good recommendation for people who are hard core comics nerds who are looking for more meat out of their stories.

(Also, it needs to go back to its owner!)

David Foster Wallace is an acquired taste, a bit like hot sauce or sushi. I started with the essay Consider the Lobster in the now sadly defunct Gourmet magazine. Actually, this isn’t true. I found some other essay online that I read and greatly enjoyed but now I cannot find it again so I will start with Consider the Lobster.

After Consider the Lobster, I worked through his collected essays to get to Infinite Jest, a 1000 page tome of a book with 200 pages of absolutely essential footnotes. The closest work to Infinite Jest, the Internet tells me, is Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and if you like Pynchon you will like DFW. This is undoubtedly true; both specialize in dense and complex works of weird non-linear fiction. The difference is DFW is on the Kindle and Pynchon is not to spite me and me personally so the one on the Kindle got read and the other one did not.

The best way to describe the book is a dense post-modern surrealist novel that is often not surrealist at all. It focuses on strong themes of depression, drug addiction and recovery, fall and redemption, tennis, Quebecqois separatism, terrorism, adolescence, suicide, LARPing, film theory, philosophy, and other fun topics all set to a tone that is best envisioned, bizarrely enough, fully animated. The world is science fiction the same way Vonnegut’s worlds are science fiction: it is a vague near future where even the years have a corporate sponsor, everyone is wired into their ‘entertainments’ and New England has been turned into an enormous toxic waste dump for electoral reasons. The future is full of American’s inalienable rights to consume and consume until they cannot consume any more, pleasure and fulfillment, and the Infinite Jest being the ultimate pleasure, a movie so pleasurable after watching it once, a victim will kill to watch it again and again and again.  Now if only someone could weaponize infinite pleasure in the form of a DVD…

The story follows two separate storylines — one at an Elite Tennis Academy high school and one at a drug and alcohol addiction recovery halfway house down the hill.  The cast of characters feels vast at first and impossible to track with their special ticks and personalities but this turns out to not be an insurmountable task. Both the Ennet Recovery House and the Enfield Tennis Academy are populated with dozens of characters, each with their own special personalities that manage to come through on the page. Some characters show up and hang around for a scene and wander out again. Some are given full and rich backgrounds until they, too, drift away. But through it the two main threads of story never quite touch except in one paragraph possibly in a flash-forward early in the book — although several characters from the two threads often cross.

Like Catch-22, Infinite Jest is not in chronological order. The story jumps around showing a future scene and then flashes back to show the full runup to that scene. (Arguably, the entire book is a run-up to the first, opening scene.)  Sometimes a chunk of essential narrative is told in a long footnote.  This is where the ‘challenge’ comes in — sometimes it is difficult to tell where in the cut-up machine of Infinite Jest a certain scene fits. The narrative jumps around point of view from character to character. One long stretch is told entirely in script-form with puppets. Another is the story of a particularly strange LARP played with tennis rackets and giant maps. The book is not difficult to read, not in the way a dense text from Victorian England can be difficult to physically read. The text itself is quite easy and quick to read. The book itself is structurally challenging.  This is not a band thing.

Infinite Jest is highly referential in places — Dostoevsky, Melville, Shakespeare, Joyce.  The Enfield Tennis Acadamy is full of Hamlet references in the last half of the book. Even the Ghost of the Father! The skull! Gravediggers! The Queen and Polonius! The final scene as Hamlet goes off and Horatio is left behind. Read or refresh Hamlet before picking up Infinite Jest.  Most of the play is embedded in the book.

My favorite part of the book was the last 150 or so pages of Don Gately, the main character of the Recovery House arc, laid in a hospital bed hallucinating his life and the Ghost and the truths to complete his Redemption cycle. It is probably DFW’s very best writing and it is deeply compelling writing.

I want to recommend this book. Obviously I enjoyed it. I read the whole book and the required footnotes. The formal requirement is you must like strange, unconventional, and weird literary books that do not conform to the basic novel form.  I would say — start with the essay above, and then the other essays, and then the short stories, and kind of eeeease into it. It’s a very cool book but it is extremely mind-bendy and challenging.