Reading Well: Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The sequel to Sleeping Giants , Waking Gods (2017) continues Sylvain Neuvel‘s story of human encounters with radically advanced technology.

It follows the same structure: interviews and journal entries and transcribed conversations; and, again surprisingly to me, somehow it still manages to be a page turner.

I think this is partially because of the absolutely inscrutable nature of the aliens: they don’t communicate, they just appear, and without any warning, they wreck massive destruction upon humanity, wiping out hundreds of thousands of people without explanation or clear cause.

That is the strength of the book, the sense of how humanity might respond to a truly lost cause, facing impossible odds without even the possibility of surrender. That context helps bring the humanity of the characters to the forefront.

There is, of course, a way out, but the procedural nature of the solution to save humanity is, for me, the weakest part of the book: the crisis is more compelling than the cure.

There is a third book, and at some point (once it’s released in paperback) we’ll see how it all ends up. Until then, if the description of Sleeping Giants seemed attractive, so will Waking Gods.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Trying to make this a different answer than with Sleeping Giants, I would move to Neuvel’s willingness to create an inscrutable adversary. It takes a lot of trust to believe your readers will buy into an antagonist whose motivations remain quite opaque.

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Reading Well: When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost by Joan Morgan

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I meant to read When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) along with Tricia Rose’s work. But the book was back-ordered, so I was unable to dive into Joan Morgan‘s manifesto until more recently.

This is the quote that first brought Chickenheads to my attention:

Any feminism that fails to acknowledge that black folks in 90’s America are living and trying to love in a war zone is useless to our struggle against sexism.

Though it’s often portrayed as part of the problem, rap music is essential to that struggle because it takes us straight to the battlefield. […]

Yeah, sistas are hurt when we hear brothers calling us bitches and hos. But the real crime isn’t the name-calling, it’s their failure to love us – to be our brothers in the way that we commit ourselves to being their sistas.

But recognize: Any man who doesn’t truly love himself is incapable of loving us in the healthy way we need to be loved. It’s extremely telling that men who can only refer to us as “bitches” and “hos” refer to themselves only as “niggas.”

It’s fairly exemplary of Morgan’s style–insightful, conversational, rooted both in common language and uncompromising analysis.

Chickenheads is, as a whole, much more focused on issues around being an African-American women in America (among them the complicated relationship between activist, perhaps even “woke,” thought and the term feminism) than it is about hip hop, specifically. That’s not a critique, not by a far shot, although it was a surprise.

There is something dated about the book–it is fantastic as a set of insights grounded in the 1990s and early 2000s, but its lack of attention to issues of globalization, LBQTx thought and issues, and its overall heteronormativity, make it clearly a product of a certain moment.

Still, it’s a compelling read, perhaps most of all in its embrace of ambiguity: Morgan is willing to stare into the mirror and accept that her desires are, in fact, sometimes contradictory, and that the need to critique behavior does not remove the demand to love and support individuals through their own struggles.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I think the way Morgan mixes academic, psuedo-academic, and common language is incredibly effective. It almost never hits the ear as forced or unusual, and it simultaneously increases the readability and credibility of her work.

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Reading Well: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Posted on October 2, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is a pleasant diversion wrapped around a very intriguing idea: the protagonist, a thirty year old Russian aristocrat, is, in 1922, sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. His house happens to be the Metropol, Moscow’s grand old hotel (at a time when such things either existed or are easily mythologized).

While exiled from a luxurious suite to a tiny attic room, the Count remains elegant, unflappable, and an attractive, insightful character. This is both the strength and weakness of the novel: strength, because an engaging protagonist is a pretty great thing for a writer to have; weakness because other characters–especially female characters–seem thin in comparison (they often have very strong and memorable entrances, and then fade from there).

But the bustle of the hotel, and the Count’s ability to transform that controlled chaos into a sense of home, largely carry the novel, making it a good character study. One note: I learned less about the progression of Soviet life over the five decades spanned by the novel than anticipated. The Count is, essentially, an idealized westerner, and the novel could have been enriched, in my view, by a more nuanced–even, sympathetic–view of those changes.

Still, the Count will stick with you, as well the hotel itself (the building, and all of its passageways, corridors and, especially, restaurants is really the second most important character in the book).

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I really like the way the plot sets constraints on the rest of the novel, and how sympathetically Towles embraces those limits. Part of the enjoyment of the novel is wondering if it can stay engaging, given the somewhat limited cast and totally limited setting. For the most part, it does!

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Reading Well: Provenance by Ann Leckie

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Set in the same universe as The Ancillary Trilogy, Ann Leckie‘s Provenance (2017) is, essentially, a police procedural. Leckie’s ability to create both characters you care about and cultural settings deep enough to hold your attention shines through, but your enjoyment of Provenance probably boils down to how much you enjoy whodunnits served up with heavy doses of political maneuverings.

This is very much old-school interpretations of WWI type stuff, where world (galactic, in this case) wars can be started or prevented by killing or saving Arch Duke Ferdinand. It’s full of intrigue, sibling rivalry, aliens in disguise, and sordid love affairs.

More interesting for me is an underlying conceit: the primary cultural group is obsessed with their own history, prizing memento’s from historical events–napkins used by so-and-so, invitations, pottery, each carefully signed and dated–as highly coveted objects of status. Selfies have been replaced by souvenir collages. The story hinges on the question of what happens when those relics are falsified, or when the events they commemorate are revealed to not have occurred in quite the way the history books declare.

I am curious about how long Leckie stays in this universe–there are certainly more stories to tell here, and while I think the Ancillary Trilogy is more rewarding than Provenance, I’ll be happy to stick around for a few more of them.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Write mysteries. The creative process behind them baffles me–I know so little about what is going to happen when I write, intricate plot points that are revealed by later action just seem like an impossible task. I am more likely to have a crime occur that is never solved, I think.

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Reading Well: Binti: Home & Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

These two books complete the trilogy started with Binti, and easily make Nnedi Okorafor the most reviewed writer here on Reading Well. Certainly, I am a fan, but that’s also a product of Okorafor’s tendency to write in what are at most long novellas: it’s all very easily consumed over just a few sessions.

Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade (both 2017) take up where Binti left off, and continue the story of our young, mathematically gifted namesake who remains precocious, emotionally scarred, and in therapy. This last is a minor plot point, but an example of how Okorafor plays with the genre, preferring to imagine Binti’s life as vividly problematic–and real–as it could be, instead of a boarding school fantasy set in a scifi context.

The final two books trace Binti’s return home, her discovery of some disturbing (yet somewhat obvious) revelations about her family’s past, and her role in brokering peace between two warring factions. There’s even a cellular reconstruction that is dramatic more as you wonder how Okorafor is going to ressurect Binti than thinking she might actually kill her main character.

Still, the story is creative as all get out, and the core characters–Binti, a peer compatriot, and the alien life form with which she is genetically bonded–are all well drawn. If you want to keep a finger on the pulse of contemporary YA fiction, and are interested in what a non-European take on that through a scifi lens might feel like, this is a rewarding, quick read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

It’s nothing new: Okorafor’s creativity is immense, and daunting, and she respects it to the point that she doesn’t feel the need to over-explain parts of it. That may be the most impressive thing of all to me: the immense trust she places in her readers.

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Reading Well: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

Posted on September 4, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2000 and translated into English in 2006, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is at most a novella, coming in at under 100 not-full-paperback size pages. The fact that César Aira has been successful publishing works at this length is quite remarkable. Aira had been unknown to me, clearly a lack on my part given his reputation as one of the more important voices in contemporary Spanish language literature.

Living somewhere at the edges of historical fiction, the story traces a trip made by the German landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas. There is some back story here–Rugendas is a minor, yet noteworthy, figure in art history, largely because of his contributions to the landscape painting methodology championed by Alexander von Humboldt and because of his prolific output which documented the peoples and practices of South America–especially Brazil and Argentina–at a time where little pictorial record existed for European consumption.

But the novella is really about art and the relationship of the artist to their art. Rugendas is repeatedly struck by lightning during a storm, an experience that leaves him both disfigured and in an uncertain mental state. There are no clear conclusions here: Aira seems to enjoy exploring the state of his characters without a need for a clear declaration of intent.

It’s a very quick read, and one that may stay with you longer than anticipated: Aira’s skill is obvious, and the questions raised about the source of art, the role of prescriptive systems of production in its creation (Humboldt had rules for the creation of landscapes, and for what made them worthy of being recorded on canvas), and the source of inspiration all play with each other in subtle and thought-provoking ways.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I tend to this length quite naturally (when not working on the massive, unending novel). So having a model for actually publishing them is somewhat inspiring!

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Reading Well: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2017, Jesmyn Ward‘s Sing, Unburied, Sing is actually the 3rd entry in a loose trilogy, but it is the first I have read.

It is magnificent.

The plot is disarmingly simple: two children, deeply dependent on each other; a mother prone to violence and drug use; a grandfather trying to provide a safe and stable world; a grandmother suffering from cancer. Add a road trip to fetch the children’s father on his release from prison, sprinkle in incisive details of rural poverty and a dash of magical realism, stir it up, and that’s it.

But, there is so much more: there are the literal ghosts of the past that litter the Mississippi delta, there is the heritage of second sight that traces through the family, and above all else, there is the language. Ward’s words are magical, surprising, lyrical, and richly emotive. It’s probably not a book for everyone: the subject matter is difficult (drug use, child abuse, and contemporary and historical racial violence all play a part) and the emotional honesty often unsettling.

The novel alternates its point of view each chapter, which works exceedingly well in Ward’s hands. Each voice is distinct and, as importantly, each character’s innate intelligence and insight shines through: even for those whose actions are problematic, their motivations are clear and understandable.

There are some things to nitpick–a level of repetition of character traits, some scenes that don’t do enough to move the story forward. Whatever. For me, this novel was an amazing ride, one that left me immediately ordering the preceding two books.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The language. Ward’s sentences skip and stutter, offering sharp insight and surprising connections between the landscape, the weather, the characters’ emotions, and their internal and external struggles. The skill and creativity that is on display is, for a writer, both inspiring and intimidating.

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Reading Well: Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2016, Sylvain Neuvel‘s Sleeping Giants is the first book in a trilogy. It’s a delightful, surprising, quick read, exploring what might happen if we discovered a giant robot powered by massively advanced technology whose pieces are scattered across the globe, buried deep under the Earth.

We don’t get very far in book one–really just to the putting the pieces of the puzzle together. What makes the book so engaging is Neuvel’s success in a form that would seem to resist deep engagement with the reader: most of the chapters are interviews between a nameless government operative (think Deep Throat from the X-Files, if the reference makes sense) and the main characters. There is no description, just the interview transcript. The other chapters are diary entries.

Yet, somehow, the characters shine through and their struggles–with each other, with solving the puzzle of the technology, with its implications–all matter, and are handled quite effectively. I was surprised to reach the end wanting to read the rest of the trilogy, but I was, and I look forward to doing so!

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The form thing is the clear accomplishment here. To succeed at a structure that, if described objectively (a series of interviews punctuated by a small handful of journal entries), I think many would insist that is a pretty difficult road to travel for what is, essentially, a first-contact sci-fi story. But it works, and thinking about why and how seems worthwhile. (Hint: characters you care about matter …)

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Reading Well: Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Lucifer’s Hammer, first published in 1977, is a result of the fruitful collaboration between Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This is a page-turner of a sci fi/disaster novel, focusing on the impact of a sizable comet colliding with the Earth.

The book got some attention at publication for its attempts at being “scientifically realistic” (whatever that means) at depicting the devastation such a comet strike would cause. I wonder if those models hold up 50 years on: we’re talking about 800 foot tidal waves and the simultaneous activation of most volcanic activity on the planet, with strikes concentrated from the California coast through the Gulf of Mexico and into the Atlantic. It reads plausibly, though.

The novel suffers from being a product of its time in two ways. First, the Cold War mechanics of the geopolitical reactions to the comet are clearly rooted in the realities of the 1970s (and are key to a nice plot line that revolves around a US/USSR joint attempt to observe the comet from space); second, the non-western world gets pretty short shrift. Africa is dismissed with the destruction of its coastal areas and South America is waved away as being awash in chaos and revolution.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is how much time–nearly half the novel–is spent before impact, introducing a large cast of characters in different Californian locations, ranging from a playboy who jointly discovers the comet to various politicians to a gangster looking to take advantage of rich people fleeing their homes to just “normal” folks reacting to the possibility of a looming disaster. There is an attempt to build some suspense as to whether the comet will hit or not, but the cover and the blurbs on the back of the book (not to mention the title) give that away well before you start reading.

Still, it’s a nice choice, as it makes the characters matter to the reader in ways that otherwise could be more challenging; and, it raises the stakes for seeing how these characters will respond to the disaster.

There is something … innocent about Lucifer’s Hammer. We are a bit desensitized to dystopian futures, and most contemporary writing move very quickly into the rapid destruction of morality and ethical behavior. Niven and Pournelle don’t avoid those topics, but this novel is grounded in a time when our faith in science, technology, and even humanity was higher than it is right now. That makes it a surprisingly refreshing read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Niven and Pournelle make some interesting choices in the final 1/3 of the book in terms of not detailing major events, but rather moving straight to a scene after the event, and using that to both shed light on what just happened and hit a beat in the plot of the characters involved. It’s a challenge to pull off–and they largely do–and something I think I could learn from, as I tend to want to write out every. single. thing. that happens.

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Reading Well: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

This is the second book by Paul Auster to appear here, after In the Country of Last Things. 4 3 2 1 is a much more literary, serious work, and one that explores a concept dear to most writers’ imaginations: what other lives could be lived by a character?

Starting with a single chapter about the first of his family to emigrate to America, the novel divides into four streams, each following the life of the same character through four different possible lives. In each, his parents are the same people, but their circumstances change, sometimes slightly and sometimes quite dramatically; likewise a set of characters–friends, lovers, extended family–appear in multiple streams, sometimes as bit players and sometimes with leading roles.

Auster tends to write in very long sentences, sentences that often go on for a page or more, extended by a prolific use of commas, with clauses and detailed explanations sprinkled in for good effect at every turn, creating a slow, languid rhythm that carries the novel forward, and making it a gentle read containing detailed explanations of the motivations and reactions of his characters, something that makes it even more surprising when the narrative finally comes to rest, pausing for a moment with the calm respite of a period, and perhaps a descriptive clause. Whew.

As long as that stylistic choice is not offputting, the book is consistently good and at times fascinating: all four versions of the protagonist are deeply involved in sports (baseball and basketball, sometimes singly and sometimes both) but the eventual role of that involvement varies greatly; his childhood is formed by the different fortunes encountered by his parents and, equally, their different reactions to those circumstances; even his search for love and friendship is similar, yet unique, across the four stories.

Auster clearly has a great love for New York–while the protagonist is raised in suburban New Jersey, his escapes to Manhattan are consistent throughout, and the wider, global events of the 1960s are seen through the narrower lens of NYC and, more specifically, the happenings on and around the Columbia campus.

There is a risk in this kind of endeavor that the exercise overwhelms the narrative–that is, the sleight of hand involved in the four parallel stories becomes the primary focus. Auster avoids this (although some may disagree about the success of the final chapter, which re-unites the narratives), and provides a rewarding, intriguing read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I am sometimes tempted by the long sentence thing. They feel much more “literary” somehow, but I can’t really pull it off. More than that, the confidence that is needed to take a not-terribly-unusual writing exercise and turn it into a successful novel is admirable, and something I certainly don’t have at this point.

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