needs more demons?

It took a while for The Lightning Thief to win me over. For much of its length, it felt too nakedly calculated to appeal to Harry Potter fans (with the interesting, but hardly unique, added dimension of a basis in Greek mythology). The character dynamic between Percy Jackson and his pals seemed a bit too Potter-esque, and there are several superficial plot congruities as well. (To be fair, there’s plenty that’s different, too: Jackson has more ‘tude than Potter, and a few interesting foibles, of which my favorite was his dyslexia.)

But I found myself unexpectedly involved with and satisfied by the concluding handful of chapters. I was expecting a twist, but not quite the twist that was delivered, and Riordan resolved at least one conflict I expected to be dragged out through at least another novel. I was at first thinking I’d part company with Jackson after finishing this volume, but I’ve been persuaded to go a little farther.

needs more demons? kinda, but (weak start + strong finish) > (strong start + weak finish)

This past Christmas afforded me the happy opportunity of researching what-next-after-Potter? books for a young relation, and of course I’m reading a bunch myself. This book shares the plot detail of a mysterious train platform leading to another world*, but what it reminded me of most was Roald Dahl, perhaps because cute, quirky, and creepy are mixed in similar measure. I also thought that if James P. Blaylock tried his hand at a children’s book, he might produce something with a similar whimsical reworking of folktale tropes into a modern context. I thought the narrative was a little slow to gather steam, but it was surprisingly and satisfyingly suspenseful once it got going. I look forward to exploring Ibbotson’s work further.

* if anything, Ibbotson might have influenced Rowling; not the other way ’round. Unless one of the authors has a time machine

needs more demons? no.

There’s a lot of craft I admire in The Funny Man. Initially, chapters alternate between the titular character’s first-person narration of his manslaughter trial in the present, and third-person narration of the funny man’s career arc. (For a while I was mildly irritated by the funny man’s namelessness, but it’s eventually justified; the novel is really about the nature of celebrity and the main character’s lack of a specific identity is significant.) It’s perhaps a third of the way through the novel that it pulls what for me was its best trick: at first it’s grittily naturalistic. The opening depictions of how a person richer and more famous than anyone I’ve ever met lives correlate so well with my limited experience of richer and more prominent people that they were almost too credible. But at a certain point it becomes clear that the funny man is an unreliable narrator (the nature and extent of the narrator’s unreliability is perhaps the novel’s second major concern). But the narrator’s transition into unreliability — and the novel’s shift from naturalistic fiction to satire — are both slippery and hard to pin down.

As a whole, though, the book didn’t work for me. Which could be almost as much about me as about the book.

I generally think it’s lame when a review of fiction or film criticizes the unlikeability or lack of empathy with characters, but the funny man was both contemptible and dull in a way I found hard to get past and impossible to root for. Partly this is because the novel’s theme requires both the standard rags/riches/rehab plotline and that the character be largely a cipher, a stand-in for the concept of celebrity with minimal individuality. But I’m also just not very interested in the phenomenon of celebrity. I’ve thought that at a certain level celebrities stop being human by most useful definitions of the word since Warren Zevon’s song “Splendid Isolation” pointed it out to me. I’m often weirded out when real people express opinions about the moral choices of the mysterious people in magazines with only first names in the headlines. So maybe I’m just fundamentally not the right audience for this book.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, both while reading it and afterwards, so it had that going for it.

And I should mention that even if I didn’t like the book, I enjoyed some of its descriptions, for instance,

The woman is young, like right out of journalism school, and she had that green smell about her. She is tiny and dark, with short hair sculpted into a soft fin across the top of her head. She wears black exclusively. Her ears are small and pointed. She looks like an elf as raised and outfitted by eighties new wave musicians.

needs more demons? kinda.

This young adult novel, told in the protagonist’s diary entries, mostly detailing a flight across a hostile land in the company of a handsome prince, offers many opportunities for Lee to play with and subvert assorted fairy tale conventions. This ranges from minor details — female characters who are overweight, old, and/or bald are described as beautiful, huzzah — to a general “things may not be as they first appear” theme which manifests itself in a variety of contexts. The mood of the milieu is more post-technological decadent than pre-industrial; Claidi, our first person guide, describes it economically and impressionistically. The diary entry form has some weaknesses; since we only read what Claidi thinks is worth writing down, evolutions in her relationships with other characters sometimes seem a bit unfounded. The ending was a bit abrupt, and definitely had some elements of “set up the next book.”

needs more demons? maybe.

I can’t say The Dead Path didn’t get its hooks into me: I finished the final hundred pages at a single sitting, anxious for one of its characters, in particular, to escape the morass. There are some clever aspects to how it works an old religion into a modern tale; Irwin’ prose is reliably serviceable and occasionally better than that.

But the aspects that annoyed me outweighed those that intrigued me. Even as worry for a character quickened my pulse, I felt manipulated by the specifics of the threat. The main protagonist, Nicholas Close, repeatedly makes choices of such tooth-gnashing stupidity that it was difficult to maintain sympathy for him. The reader learns early on that Close sees ghosts. People-who-see-the-dead is such a well-explored device that there are “I see dead pixels” t-shirts parodying it; Irwin approaches it with a heavy-handed thoroughness, as if it were so fresh that it demanded a great deal of exposition.

The recurring motif of large quantities of large spiders at first just seemed lazy — an automatic gross-out for many people, with no subtlety — but eventually I got desensitized to it. Meanwhile, the repeated juxtaposition of arachnoid imagery with aged female sexuality suggests that they’re intended to be viewed as parallel scopes of horror, which I find unpleasantly close to misogyny.

needs more demons? well, not literally

Dealing with Dragons shares several traits with the fantasies of Dianna Wynne Jones. It assumes familiarity with fairytale conventions and tropes, and reworks and subverts them, with a particular focus on excising sexism and adding subtle metatextual humor. Princess Cimorene is the sort of strong, quick-witted, and self-reliant protagonist who could easily be at home in Jones’ fiction. Wrede stands up well to the comparison. Her world-building is perhaps a little less rigorous, but the emotional tone is a little warmer. Wrede’s dragons aren’t quite like any others I’ve ever encountered, which in and of itself is a notable accomplishment. Dealing with Dragons works as a proper self-contained novel, not merely the first clump of chapters in a single story, but I look forward to reading more from Wrede.

needs more demons? no.

Real journalists have to turn in their year’s best lists to be published in the month of December, a practice which invariably makes me cringe. “What,” I always think to myself, “if in the dregs of the year* you hear/see/read something amazing that demands you re-order the list?” And it happens from time to time. Treasure Island!!! is one of those list-upending books.

I read Stevenson’s Treasure Island to prepare (which is definitely recommended, although perhaps not strictly necessary) and it made me want to write more action-oriented stories. (My writing is very low on captures, escapes, fisticuffs, harrowing escapades at sea, and such.) Treasure Island!!!’s narrator’s response is an order of magnitude more drastic: she wants her life to be more action-oriented. She adopts the “core values” she derives from Treasure Island as justification for some pretty beastly behavior.

Treasure Island!!! made me guffaw and snort and want to hurl the book across the room. Levine’s prose tempts me to deploy tired metaphors of sharp things. Her narrator’s head-space is as compelling and colorfully-rendered as an epic traffic pile up: flashing lights, sirens, and a grisly smear that simultaneously repels and draws the eye. (Levine has a real knack for sentences like a frighteningly abrupt downward elevator-lurch.)

I want to read everything else Levine writes forever.**

* or even in January
** I am seethingly impatient to get our internets back so I can order her previous short story collection from Caketrain.
needs more demons? noway nohow

I’m keen to read Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! and I thought I should probably acquaint myself with Stevenson’s classic first, to catch any references there might be. I’d never read any Stevenson before; his prose was a bit richer than I was expecting, with some evocative and economical descriptions, particularly of his harsh and unlovely treasure isle. The plot was plenty snappy, with captures, escapes, crosses, double-crosses, skullduggery, and skullbashery. The sailors’ language, for all that it’s basically G-rated, was colorful, vivid, and sometimes pleasantly difficult to parse. (Among other things, Stevenson seems to assume I’m more conversant with sailing terminology than I am.) It also gave me a slightly different perspective on the relationship between nautical discipline and the threat of mutiny. I liked it.

needs more demons? avast!

I’ve enjoyed Black’s fiction for adult and young adult readers, and The Field Guide, the first volume of “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” demonstrates a similar playful attitude toward well-established tropes. At the outset the Graces are moving into a spooky new house, but in contrast to more traditional fare, the Graces have recently become a single-parent family. Jared’s been acting out in response to the stress of the divorce anyway, so when strange things happen in the house, his siblings and mother assume he’s responsible. The Field Guide wraps up this plot conflict, but clearly serves as a prequel more than a stand-alone work.

needs more demons? no.

As the name might suggest, Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works takes a breezy, irreverent approach to introducing typography to the lay reader. It does a good job of explaining the vocabulary of the field. It demonstrates how elements of of a typeface contribute to legibility in various contexts. And it introduces the fundamental concept of maintaining balance between line length, kerning, and leading. It explores a wide range of text applications — books, advertising, memos, etc. — with several examples of fonts and layout approaches that might be appropriate for each. (Although the book is published by Adobe, fonts from other type foundries are mentioned as well.)

It doesn’t go deep. It mentions typeface classifications like “Didone” and “Garalde” without exploring the distinctions. The authors frequently discuss the mood or tone of a group of typefaces but rarely discuss the elements of the font that establish the tone; when listing similar fonts they seldom explicitly discuss the differences between them.

Although I read the second edition, updated in 2002, the section on web typography is, perhaps inevitably, dangerously out of date.

Overall this was substantially more useful than Never Use More Than Two Different Typefaces. It should help an amateur do a less amateurish job of laying out type; and it should enable a design professional without a solid typography background to talk with one who does.