needs more demons? maybe.

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

Inconsistent tone continues to bother me a bit. At its extremes, Prospero in Hell incorporates both (brief) moments of gross-out horror and (not quite so brief) dreamy, catalog-of-wonders interludes that place the plot on hold (Millhauser’s From the Realm of Morpheus came to mind when the book slipped into this mode).

My biggest gripe, again, is structural. Prospero in Hell is a novel when judged by word count, but very clearly the second act of a three-act play; it ends with an almost literal cliffhanger. It’s been nearly two years since I read Prospero Lost, and I struggled to recall relevant details despite a generous sprinkling of “remember when this happened” moments. If Lamplighter wraps up her story satisfyingly we’ll have three good fantasy novels in our universe — but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a single, slightly leaner and even better novel in some alternate universe where publishing dictates are a little different.

However, there’s no chance I’ll wait two years to read Prospero Regained. Prospero in Hell was a lot of fun, incorporating some nifty variations on the classic texts it references, an impressive array of (mostly but not exclusively European) mythic and folkloric elements, some big plot twists (including two that caught me unawares), more satisfying character development than the first book, and clever applications and extrapolations of magical powers.

needs more demons? on balance, no.

Black Mass lays out, in eminently readable and often shocking detail, the incredible story of how Bulger and Steve Flemmi co-opted the Boston FBI, using their role as informants against the Mafia to eliminate their rivals and evade other local and federal law enforcement agencies. They even “tipped off” the Feds to crimes they committed (or ordered), casting suspicion on players they would like out of play. I read the first chapter thinking Black Mass must be a glamorized and highly speculative account — and then I reviewed Lehr and O’Neill’s copious and rigorous notes on their sources, and revised my opinion. (This was a two-bookmark book for me: one for the body of the text, one for the endnotes.) In fact, Lehr and O’Neill, career journalists both, are studiously careful to avoid speculation (or any possible grounds for libel). They stop short, for instance, of suggesting that Bulger and Flemmi’s “handler” at the FBI, John Connolly, or his boss John Morris, might literally be described as gangsters with deep cover as FBI agents. Lehr and O’Neill point out Connolly’s boyhood in Bulger’s turf, and the amazingly paltry quantity of established bribes to Morris, and leave the reader the option to make inferences. (Morris allegedly sold himself out for roughly 7 grand and some wine, which even in 80’s dollars seems awfully cheap.) Lehr and O’Neill are likewise cautious in how they characterize Whitey Bulger’s relationship with his brother, former President of the Massachusetts Senate, William Bulger. But they do ensure that I will never look at the State Street building quite the same way again.

I did form some reservations as I read the book. First, the extent to which Connolly and Morris are demonized tends to largely exonerate others in the FBI. Second, many events presented as fact in the book are primarily sourced by sworn testimony from professional criminals — individuals for whom lying effectively is an essential skill. (Lehr and O’Neill are careful to note when testimony disagrees, in fact, but almost always portray one version as authoritative in the main text. Finally, Lehr and O’Neill’s role in shaping the story clearly renders them very much non-impartial: their own reportage helped focus public opinion and create pressure to prosecute Bulger and to examine his relationship with the FBI. So I’m not inclined to accept absolutely everything at face value; their are clearly agendas at work. But the preponderance of evidence that it’s all mostly true seems overwhelming.

needs more demons? nuh uh.

It wasn’t quite perfect. I strongly suspect a dose of roman à clef, which means in part that while most details are contemporary, a few jangly notes seem to belong to an earlier decade. More significantly, Donnie is maybe a little too oblivious to some of the clues he’s thrown (God knows teen boys can be plenty clueless, but the reader may get impatient waiting for him to put pieces together). But overall I liked this very much. Lyga consistently avoids obvious, pat plot choices, and I found his characters believable and emotionally compelling.

needs more demons? No. and I will absolutely, positively read more from Lyga.

I fared better with it this time around, although I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success. It opens with the world in a Cuban Missile Crisis-ish moment of nuclear terror. Charles Wallace, with the aid of yet another otherworldly companion, must avert catastrophe through an arduous series of jaunts through time (with some of the might-have-been aspects of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol).

The villain with his finger on The Button is one of a pair of brothers, one peaceable and noble, one hawkish and power-mad, who cyclically reenact their conflict throughout many generations. Charles Wallace must restore the balance to save the world.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is far more ambitious than A Wrinkle in Time or A Wind in the Door — it has a rigorous formal structure derived from a medieval prayer. L’Engle uses legends of ancient Welsh visitors to the New World to symbolize clashes between innocence and worldliness.

The characters enmeshed in similar conflicts over the centuries also have similar names, and sometimes I had a little trouble keeping the generations straight. (Then again, so does one of the characters in the story.) As on a my first reading, I thought it was a bit heavy-handed, rather obvious, and a little repetitive. I also think that some of L’Engle’s pasts are portrayed more convincingly than others.

But this this time around I was more aware of the music of L’Engle’s prose — there are some lovely and vivid moments, and overall I found it more satisfying.

needs more demons? possibly.

I think this was mostly because of Proginoskes, an unusual and seriously awesome character.

But it’s not possible for me to sustain my former opinion of the novels’ relative merit this time around. The events in A Wind in the Door clearly happen after those in A Wrinkle in Time, but the characters seem curiously unaware of those events — they have to go through the passage of disbelief deal all over again. Some fantasists — Tim Powers comes to mind — employ this deliberately, with the implication that the human mind blots out events that violate our understanding of the universe as soon as they’re over. (Characters in some of Powers’ fiction have their most explicit encounter with the unreal when they’re pretty much blotto, which helps.) But first, there’s zero textual support for this interpretation in A Wind in the Door, and second, it runs counter to the thematic content of the novels, which is about increasing mental openness and spiritual awareness. Speaking of which . . .

They’re basically the same book, thematically. Meg has to move a little farther along the same path, but it is pretty clearly the same path, and even the nature of the specific plot threat is somewhat similar.

Other things that struck me:

• Since I made a big deal of the explicit Christian textual references in “Wrinkle,” I should probably mention that it’s dialed way, way down here, and mixed with a healthy dollop of pantheism.
• There’s some pretty cool scientific extrapolation/invention, but also some sloppy stuff, with “parsec” being used as a unit of time one of the most glaring. (Just like Star Wars!)
• At a certain point the novel gets kinda amazingly non-concrete. I was actually reminded a wee bit of Woolf’s The Waves.

needs more demons? Mmmaybe. But I do still love it.

• Yowza, one of my all-time favorite novels starts with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Did she do that on purpose? I feel like almost any editor in the current decade would just stop there. It wasn’t L’Engle’s first novel, but still.
• As a kid, I didn’t think of this as a particularly Christian book. I was probably kind of obtuse, I don’t remember really noticing the Christian symbolism in Narnia either, until The Last Battle, where it sort of whops you over the head with an anvil. So this time I was more aware that L’Engle frames her good-versus-evil conflict in a context that’s congruent with Christianity. Narnia aside, explicit Christian references seem a bit more prevalent throughout than I remember from other children’s/young adult fantasies. Maybe if I revisit Cooper’s Dark is Rising cycle I’ll just find further evidence of my former obtuseness.
• This book was published in 1962 (and according to Wikipedia written even earlier). A few aspects betray its age — some dated slang mostly, and Calvin’s behavior toward Meg seems a little presumptuous in spots. But it’s striking how current, even progressive, most of this is. A tough, but credibly fallible, girl hero! Her equally tough scientist mom!
• Speaking of which, there are strains of Christianity that are either implicitly or even explicitly anti-science. They draw a lot of media attention and sadly have a lot of influence on school textbooks in some districts. L’Engle is not that sort of Christian at all. Huzzah!
• Wow, what a long, long shadow this book has cast. When this book was released, I don’t think anyone would have described young adult (or “tween,” ugh) fantasy as a genre — because there was Narnia, The Hobbit, this, and darned little else. Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe books, I suppose, maybe a few others. And by 1962 I suspect Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander’s first novels were well underway. But still, I think you could make a case that this book is about as influential on young adult fantasy as The Velvet Underground and Nico was on indie rock.
• Wow, that ending seems abrupt. Both the resolution of the conflict, and the wrap-up after it. I think an author in the current climate would have been encouraged to pad it out a lot more, if not to stretch the plot across multiple sets of covers.
• I won’t confess to how long ago I last read this, but it’s got to be decades, plural. And there were whole chapters I’d so nearly forgotten that I didn’t know quite was next. But oh my goodness, there were whole paragraphs I could literally still quote verbatim. I could feel them getting near: here comes the ant metaphor of travel via warped space, and the moment where I know both what Meg can’t do and what she can do.

needs more demons? Of course not. Goes without saying.

This seemed like a good reason to learn more, so I decided to read a few of the many books about Google.

I started with Steven Levy’s. It isn’t a corporate puff piece, but with direct participation from key players like founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and longtime CEO Eric Schmidt, it’s the closest thing to an “official” Google book. It’s not entirely uncritical of Google, but it’s tone is generally favorable. It’s divided into eight parts, covering Google’s history, Google’s Internet ad innovations, Google’s culture (including the initial Gmail privacy flap), Google’s physical infrastructure, Android and YouTube, Google’s ethical and privacy dilemmas in dealing with China, Google’s (and more significantly, ex-Googler’s) relationship to domestic politics in general and the Obama campaign/presidency in particular), and Google’s efforts in social media spaces.

It generally seems well-sourced and -supported, with copious footnotes. Levy occasionally speculates on things that are not public knowledge, but in general his guesses seem pretty rational.

Overall I found it credible, readable, and informative, and often engaging and entertaining.

needs more demons? no.

During our month of wandering around the United Kingdom we intended to have fun and failed. Finding our flat was an ordeal and I won’t bore you with our tales of misadventure. I can’t help but remember the bedsit we found in Brighton as an act of desperation to end our wanderings. Electricity in the bedsit was coin operated. You ran out of coins, you ran out of light. I had always heard of such things in the old world,but in all my travels this was my first coin-op bedsit. I was feeling robust enough to be amused. Warren, on the other hand, sat on the edge of the bed catatonic, staring at the wood chip wallpaper.

needs more demons? James Clerk Maxwell is mentioned several times, but his famed little critters never come up. But I can’t really say that’s a flaw.