Librarian, Writer, Bon Vivant
What MG is Reading
What’s on my nightstand, in my bag, on my couch, in the bathroom, in the library…
What I’m Reading 8/8
Aug 8th
Oh you know you were just dying to know.
The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod
Ugh, this book was a pain to find, but a pleasure to read. It’s not published in the US, I have a 
theory on why, so I had to get it second-hand via Amazon. The prices varied from $8 up to $25 depending on the day. I got mine for $5, perfect condition. Silliness.
But the book itself, wonderful. Macleod creates a near-future world where “The Great Rejection” has pushed religion from the public square. No more God-talk in politics, secular government, general suspicion of the faithful. It wasn’t an easy change. “Faith Wars” raged, and God-Squads stamped down on the more vociferous religious protest movements. Much of the middle east is radioactive glass and both the Europe and the US are ravaged by climate change. And now someone is killing priests.
Macleod does not write a screed here. It’s a carefully considered look at how the end of religion in the public square would change society in any number of ways, some good, some dreadful, many of them simply unforeseen.
I don’t think this book has gotten published in the US because it would be a harder sell in the much less secular US than in the UK. It’s a shame, since this is just the kind of book to create dialogue between Theist and Atheist alike.
What can be said about this book other than WOW.
I’m n
ot a superhero fan. Working in a comic shop as a teen my head was jammed full of comic arcane lore (There are 7200 Green Lanterns who patrol 3600 sectors of space) regarding the spandex crowd. I tended to avoid the genre. But a book like this is built for changing minds.
Greg Rucka, of “Queen and Country” fame, writes a bold origin for this Batwoman. The big hubbub when she was introduced a couple years back was her sexual orientation, but Rucka doesn’t turn that into a “Very Special Ally MacBeal”. Rather he makes the fact that Kate Kane (Batwoman) is a lesbian simply that, a fact. She’s gay and has girlfriends and was kicked out of West Point due to the colossal stupidity of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. These are the facts of life for tens of thousands of gay and lesbian people. Rucka is working with truth here.
JH Williams is an artist’s artist. he creates whole new ways of reading comics right there on the page. A boring fight scene is turned into a sort of flip-book. The layout of a secret headquarters is shown in double page continuous panels. He varies style to match time of day, mood, even mindset of the characters. It’s comics are high art.
Cronin’s vampire apocalypse is handled largely off-stage. Apparently the next two books (cause everything is a trilogy now) will go back to this. We get the genre-apocalypse standards such as:
Evil military, dangerous virus, spooky kid, ragtag group of survivors, events and places in the post-apocalyptic world being Capitalized at Random to Emphasize their Import.
The vampires are plenty awful monsters, but for the first 3-400 pages they’re so vaguely described and rarely seen it’s hard to believe the whole world got iced by these creatures.
A lot of comparisons have been made to Stephen King’s “The Stand”, even the man himself heaped praise on Cronin’s work. Me? I just don’t see it. King ended the world in “The Stand” with such a tightening noose of terror. You watched character’s world unravel and you were let alone with them in a planetary graveyard. Cronin skips 90 years past the fall of humanity and gives us a whole new world, a tiny colony of survivors fighting day to day.
I just never got to caring about the characters all that much. Again, King made us look up to Stu Redman, fear Randall Flagg and feel pity for poor damned Harold. Cronin’s survivors feel flat on the page.
All that whining aside, it’s a damn fine written book. Cronin’s turn of phrase is lovely. His descriptions of a broken world are eerie and ooky, even if they fall a bit few and far between. I feel like the failings are largely editorial. This is a 300 page story trapped in a 700 page beast. Whole sub-plots and characters can just go. Though, again from reading interviews not the book, it appears that those characters who seemed extraneous will be revisited in further volumes. That feels like a cheat to me. Spending whole chapters on characters only to see them fade into the background to await their close-up in the sequel? A bit of an irritant.
What I’m Reading 7/18
Jul 18th
I’m actually deep in projects, but here’s what I’ve been reading before bed or stealing snatches of via audio book.
The Kraken by China Mieville
At turns it’s Neil Gaiman, Philip K. Dick and Douglas Adams with the gravitas of H.P. Lovecraft. Yes, China Mieville is of the quality of writer to be mentioned with those fine authors. A London mystery as told by a mystagogue, this is worth your yankee dollars
I was late to the game on the Culture series, my usual abhorrence of spacey-wacy (but not timey-wimey) sci-fi kept me from enjoying Banks loopy galactic utopia. My prejudice only protected me from enjoyment. Matter is a delicate thing, it’s several narratives, all bouncing off each other, and yet not touching for great lengths of the book. Like watching two trains (or in this case three or four) on the same track, all barreling down on each other. It’s a door-stop of a book too, Banks takes his time here. I liked Excession a bit better, because it focused on the deeply strange world of “The Minds”, the enormous and often mad artificial minds that populate, and some say run, the Culture. But then, I’m dork.
The Cleanest Race by B.R. Myers
Here’s some nightmare fuel. Myers takes a fresh look at North Korea and sees something that many western observers have overlooked, racism. North Korea is often written off as a tin-pot dictatorship, Kim Jong Il is seen as a military thug kept in power by some bizarre religious devotion sprung up around his father. Myers looks past that, seeing how the extreme xenophobia and racial mania has shaped North Korea into what is arguably the most isolated nation on the planet. When you think about the possibility of such a state as a nuclear power…well…you won’t sleep easy.