“It’s not a rip-off, it’s an homage.”

The second of my BEA haul, this alternately frustrating and compelling fantasy novel aimed at the NPR set is getting a major publicity push, with not just an official website but also multiple fictional ones as well. (The fan art could be more believable — where are the air-brushed animals with women’s boobs? — but the fake university site is quite clever.)

The story concerns a teenage misfit genius who is mysteriously whisked off to magic school. A huge chunk of the first third of the book is so entirely like the Harry Potter novels that I stayed with it only because the high quality writing suggested it had to be going somewhere. The middle third is written, I think, with the intention of subverting much of those boarding-school-wizard expectations, and then the last third, cheerfully spoiled by the back cover so don’t read it, is the most nuanced.

There are some really standout scenes: the guy with the branch, the thing with the geese — you’ll know when you get there. And then a lot of characters sitting around chatting like normal college kids. And in another 100 pages or so, another awesome scene. I didn’t mind hanging around waiting, but it felt like a real wasted opportunity.

(Speaking of which, Grossman, who is slightly older than me, has his supposedly dissolute post-adolescents hosting elaborate dinner parties and sipping fancy after-dinner liqueurs. I know young people are ever-more sophisticated, but those are activities I do for fun now. When I was 22 I drank Midori Sours and ordered buffalo wings by the dozen.)

It’s not totally a success, but I’m glad I read it and I do recommend it. It’s been more than a month now and some scenes continue to stick with me. On sale August 2009.

I went to Book Expo America this year and mailed back two boxes of books just like I did at the American Library Association conference last year. I think this year’s crop will be less fruitful than ALA’s, but I know I got a few good books already, and one of them is the new Miéville. I got it signed for Dan and then promptly confiscated to read first. Miéville has a lot of adoring female fans who wear glasses.

I read both Perdido Street Station and The Scar and enjoyed them, but I’m not enamored of his flowery language. The City & The City is in a completely different deliberately hard-boiled style and for me that was a big win.

I prefer my sci-fi and fantasy crossed with some other genre. Here it’s police procedural. That’s obvious from the first page; what I couldn’t tell for some time was whether the book really was fantasy or sci-fi at all. I certainly won’t spoil that. Most of the intrigue in the first half is in understanding the world model; to ruin that would be tragic.

Like a true detective story you don’t get into the head of the first-person narrator much, except obliquely. I didn’t really connect with the secondary characters either. Both choices seem deliberate. This is an ideas book, not a character one. I spent a lot of time imagining how it could be adapted into film. I think it could be done right, but failing to do so would be spectacularly bad.

The book isn’t totally cerebral either. There’s action. There’s murder! By the end, I was turning pages to get to the resolution, even though I was pretty sure how things would end up (I was right). There’s a good mix of tied-up and loose ends. Recommended.

At the end of 2008 a number of book blogs published their best-of lists, and whenever I had a spare minute I made a point of hunting down the Amazon Kindle sample chapters. Netherland came up repeatedly, and when it made the news recently (the president is apparently reading it) I started the sample. By now I was a little tired of back-to-back stories set in 19th century London anyway. (I was surprised to discover it’s possible for me to get sick of them, even if they do have zombies.)

Free sample chapters are, to my mind, the greatest thing about the Kindle, way cooler than e-ink or free wireless. Sampling has changed the way I choose books in the way that digital purchasing changed the way I consume music. I reject more books than I buy after checking out the samples, but I churn through books much more quickly. Amazon doesn’t care which books I buy, as long as I buy many, so this is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Anyway, Netherland was one I bought immediately after finishing the sample. This first-person narrative is told from the point of view of a European expat in contemporary New York. I’m not sure I’ve read much in the way of non-American perspectives on living in the US that weren’t explicitly political or satirical. I’m not a New Yorker either but I’m in the city quite often (I wrote this on the train home from there, in fact), so New York is perpetually
both familiar and alien.

I don’t do plot in my writeups, generally, and I won’t start here.
The reason to read this book is for its lyricism anyway.

The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvelously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. “‘Ook, ‘ook!” he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turnup, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and — I knew this because I had dressed him — his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spider-Man shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and full of light.

This book clearly was written for only one person — me — and yet it’s been enormously popular and has already landed its author lucrative book and movie deals. I’m happy for him, because even though I thought the novel was ultimately a disappointment, I still smile when I think about it.

Like many Onion articles, the title is the best part and then the story is unevenly funny the rest of the way through. To recap if for some reason you haven’t heard, the novel is at least 80% original text (heavily condensed) and 20% “bone-crunching zombie mayhem.” Your mileage may vary, but for me the zombie mayhem didn’t work as often as it should have.

I suppose “spoilers” follow.

Some things slot in nicely — the soldiers are garrisoned at Meryton to repel not the French but the undead menace. Elizabeth Bennett’s friend Charlotte agrees to marry the odious Mr. Collins because she’s already infected by the zombie plague. (If you want to read that as a feminist metaphor about brainwashing otherwise intelligent young women into loveless marriages, I won’t stop you, but it’s probably overreaching.) And perhaps the most perfect scene in the book is Darcy’s first declaration of love, the original dialogue interspersed with Elizabeth physically kicking his ass:

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the slightest grief which I might have felt in beheading you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.”

This is funny. Other stuff, not so much. I could not buy the Bennett sisters (and even more, Lady Catherine de Bourgh) as karate masters. Zombie Charlotte is funny when subtle but gets increasingly less so. The arc of the story and its ending aren’t subverted in any interesting way. And I definitely didn’t need all those ninjas.

But complaining about the book feels churlish. It’s a funny concept. The cover art is great. Someone will take this idea and execute it better, maybe even Seth Grahame-Smith.

Everybody was talking about Bolaño this year because of 2666, but Dan got 2666 for Christmas and I got The Savage Detectives. We started reading them around the same time, and despite the fact that 2666 is at least twice as long, I finished a month later.

I’m not sure what my problem is with Latin American literature. These two books weren’t written in the same language, much less from the same country, but there’s something about them both that just made reading a grind. Maybe it’s wading through all those names.

There are extraordinary passages in The Savage Detectives, though, and I knew that the ending would be transformative. I’m glad I read it. I just don’t think I got it.

Magical realism is exactly the kind of genre I should like but for some reason I just don’t. I want more magic or more realism and less of both (here it was the “magic” that was lacking). Again, there were individual scenes and even whole chapters in Dona Flor that were funny and incisive and great, but the story wasn’t propulsive for me. I could stop reading this and have no particular motivation to pick it up again. I do want to learn more about Bahian cuisine, though, which sounds fantastic.

I have a feeling that these are some of the last of the good books in my haul from ALA, but I plan to dig through the pile once more and survey the wreckage.

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

This is a young adult novel being marketed as adult fiction, but that’s no complaint. It’s a hugely fun book and I’m glad I read it. I’m sure the film rights have been snapped up already.

Kids rarely want to read about other kids their own age (most “teen” books are read by precocious 10-12 year-olds). In this case, the main character is twelve but much of the plot might be lost on children younger than that, so I’m not sure what age I’d recommend it for. Probably I am being a stuffy grownup; my favorite book when I was 12 was 1984.

Anyway, most stuffy grownups with affection towards adventure stories will enjoy this too. It’s well-written with memorable characters and a satisfying fable-like ending.

The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan

It takes a certain dedication to read a 600-page historical novel about India from a first author with no reviews or even a back-cover blurb as a guide, but I have that moral fortitude. Also if I hadn’t liked it after 20-some pages I would’ve given up. I liked it, so I finished it.

The inter-generational story is sprawling, slow at times, and messy — all in an appealing way. It opens in 1896 and marches on through the years. Without a synopsis I didn’t know how far into the future it would progress, which lent a nice tension. Although there are characters who strive for modernity — especially those appearing after the 1930s — none felt anachronistic. In fact, I spent a lot of time wanting to slap some sense into these people. But when it was over I was sad to leave them behind.

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard

I think that I like historical fiction, but maybe I really don’t. There are a number of things that are almost inevitably true in historical fiction that drive me absolutely up the wall:

• There’s always a character (often the protagonist) who is wise beyond his time period
• Someone famous wanders through the plot, no matter how improbably
• No one really sounds like they’re actually from the period in which they’re living

The Black Tower is about an amazingly prescient proto-detective and his amazingly prescient doctor sidekick who uncover a plot to kill Louis XVII of France, who had been presumed to have died in prison during the Revolution. I enjoyed it in a goofy way for awhile before it totally went off the rails.

One of the reasons I liked The 19th Wife was that the author took pains to make the first-person historical narrative feel like it was contemporary to the period. Having a real contemporary account to base it on certainly must’ve helped. I can’t say the same for Bayard, but if you’re on vacation and have a thing for French history (and no hangups on historical accuracy), you might enjoy it.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

I just now skimmed through some reviews in the mainstream press and most of them
begin like this one in the New York Times: “I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome.”

I thought this historical fiction novel was great.

The writing is bleakly funny and totally appropriate for a story about a starving city full of cannibals. While I don’t know anything at all about Russia or Russians, I believed that the characters might have existed and might’ve talked like that. The level of detail — real or imagined — felt perfect. Nobody famous blunders into the story; presumably Stalin had already purged them.

I had only one complaint, also mentioned by several reviewers, about the ending being too pat, but it’s forgivable. Highly recommended.

I’m not sure what it says about my state of mind or the global economy but I immediately followed this with The Road by Cormac MacCarthy, which I bought on my Kindle. This was my honeymoon vacation reading.

(NPR has excerpted the first chapter of City of Thieves, although this part is literally like none other in the book, as the entire remainder of the story is told in the past.)

This was a pre-release copy but the book had come out by the time I read it, so I already knew it had gotten good reviews. It’s one of those parallel-stories-separated-in-time novels, and as is often the case the best parts are the historical fiction. Ebershoff fictionalizes an actual 19th century memoir with the much-superior title, Wife no.19, or the story of a life in bondage. Being a complete exposé of Mormonism, and revealing the sorrows, sacrifices and sufferings of women in polygamy. At least I don’t have to explain the plot.

Anyway, I recommend it. Don’t read it if you’re a woman and have recently been dicked over by a guy, though. Especially if you own a weapon.

In my free book feeding frenzy I picked up a few young adult novels without realizing it. I decided to give this one a chance because it was British and therefore automatically more interesting (also it had originally been published by Oxford University Press, which I flatter myself by thinking is a mark of quality).

Despite the goofy title, as a suspense novel it’s not bad. There are some genuinely creepy scenes. I can imagine that a young adult suspense story is likely to be superior to one for adults because the prose is necessarily more clear and events move along at a good clip.

The problem is that like any number of other horror, fantasy or science fiction books with wildly inexplicable happenings, it doesn’t actually resolve to any conclusion. The open-ended “I guess we’ll never know what really happened” ending is okay for high school creative writing classes but it just does not cut it in published fiction. Authors: if you don’t know how your story ends, figure that out before you write the book.

A bigger surprise than the ooh-so-mysterious ending is that the UK cover is, for once, far inferior. Those fonts, they burn!

My most exciting personal development at the American Library Association conference was shipping back two huge boxes of free books. I learned from various attendees that running around the expo floor madly grabbing freebies is a sure sign of a publishing conference newbie and even a little bit gauche, but hey, nobody was reimbursing me more than $1000 in conference and travel fees.  Gimme my damn free books.

After the initial rush I felt silly shipping back all these books that, as one librarian said, “nobody ever reads,” so I’m going to make an effort to at least give all of them a chapter’s worth of a chance. There are 26 books in total.

The big score of the conference was a pre-release copy of the new Neal Stephenson, Anathem:

Spoiler-free summary: it’s good. I didn’t read the Baroque Cycle because I was waiting to find out if I’d like it, and I’m told I wouldn’t. I enjoyed Anathem though. So did Dan, although we liked different parts in different measures. It comes with a CD of various styles of chant, and while I like my music slow, repetitive and hypnotic, I had to rip it out of the player after track 3 to avoid escalating hostility.

If you already know you will read this then you’ll probably like it, and if you enjoy math and physics — well, then you would’ve read it anyway. I’m not sure if anyone who wasn’t already a nerd would be into it, although it might be possible to make it into a decent popular film.

I don’t like fantasy as a rule, but The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss had some pretty enthusiastic reviews on the back (“One of the best stories told in any medium in a decade” the Onion AV Club, wrote, breathlessly).

It’s… okay. It’s part one of three and pretty much stops rather than ends. Without giving away too much of the plot, I will say that it about a talented orphan boy at a boarding school for students of magic where he must use his skills to battle evil. Quite.

It’s actually not much like the Harry Potter novels, in fact, but a set-up like that is going to invite comparisons. The writing is pretty good. There aren’t any names with apostrophes in them. I’ll read the other two books in the series when they came out. I’ll probably even pay for them.

A victory for free content: positive advance word on a new book and two future sales in a series I’d have never read.

By E. A. Vander Veer
First Edition January 2008
Pages: 268
Series: The Missing Manuals
ISBN 10: 0-596-51769-6

Note: This was a review copy I received for free

I’ve done a bit of writing and editing for O’Reilly on the programming side which means I’ve come to expect a certain dry, technical style. That’s rarely a bad thing, though, as any developer who has suffered through someone else’s cutesy variable names can attest.

But this is a manual for a web site — already an inherently ridiculous concept — and what’s more, it’s a manual on Facebook. Currently on my Facebook home page:

• J– is now a fan of Fall Out Boy
• T– received a “fluff gift”
• Oh and Southwest airlines is apparently having a fare sale

These are not likely to be the subjects of the next Knuth book.

So on the lighter topic of Facebook.com and Facebook apps, it’s appropriate to interject some personality and wit:

Facebook lets you join only one regional network at a time. If you try to add a second, Facebook simply replaces the first with the second. That’s kind of annoying if you’re a multiple home owner, but on the bright side, you own multiple homes.

Plus, I’ll admit it, I learned some things. Facebook has an annoying habit of renaming concepts that already have names, so for example I had no idea that Notes were actual blog entries, and could be imported from external blog sources (I use a third-party app for that). I was also inspired to finally figure out how to get added to the network of my college alma mater, and start a new network for my company. So hey, useful.

The book has sound advice throughout in terms of the fuzzier aspects of Facebook: how to maintain a modicum of privacy, how to use the system to promote yourself or your employer. (The author also recognizes that the first thing everyone does is look up their exes, and provides helpful tips for that too.)

I hadn’t seen any of the Missing Manual series before so the layout was new to me. For me, a tech book just needs some text and an animal woodcut but for a popular “technical” book it’s pretty nice — lots of useful callouts in soothing colors and no incomprehensible icons or annoying cartoons. I don’t know if I’d recommend this book to any of my friends who are clearly all-too-capable of using Facebook already, but I totally recommend it for your boss who wants to know what this “MyFace” thing is he keeps hearing about.