Writing - Barbara DeMarco-Barrett - Pen on Fire (2004)

This book was probably purchased during a book buying binge; those are usually the times I pick up writing instruction books. In this case, I only remember what I wanted this book to do, which was help me find time to write in between the moments of my life.

I'm pretty sure I got it while I still had a job.

Now, I have nothing but time, but I still can't really get myself out of this not-writing funk.

However, I pulled this tome off my bookshelf in anticipation of November, which everyone should know by now is National Novel Writing Month. At this point, I've lost more than I've won; a fact that makes me feel so guilty I refuse to go to a meetup organized by my fellow Las Vegans. I always tell myself that this time I will not lose, but then I do something to kick my own ass after week one.

You're not here to hear about this shit. You're here for this book review.

Honestly, this book is very average. It talks a lot about how women make themselves feel bad for taking time to do their own thing, which is true I think of more than just women, and how if you want to write, you have to work past that to carve out your own bits of time. It also tries to give you resources to develop ideas, as well as stuff having to do with the craft of writing like voice and shit. All and all, average.

The most disappointing part, I think, is the "Living the Life" section, which has more to do with literary agents than actually living a writer's life. Listen, the information on literary agents is great and all, but that has actually not much to do with your own section title. And, there are tons of books that work on that subject that you'd be better off just listing.

It may also be that the book is kind of dated, but the self-publishing world is so hopping, even traditional publishers have to rethink their acceptance guidelines or be left in the dust. Basically, what worked for one person does not work for all.

7/10

Buy it @ Amazon.
Buy it @ Barnes & Noble.

Alternate History - Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004)

This was the book that I stopped reading in order to devour Twilight's Dawn, but don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean that it's a bad book. I certainly wouldn't call it bad. What I would call it is hard.

I got this book for some Christmas or another from my parents. I usually end up with a book haul, because books are cheaper than video games. I didn't read it for a long time because I kept being preoccupied reading other things and with my actual life. In fact, so much time passed between getting it and reading it that I thought it was a very different book than it was. I had created its story in my head, and then was confused when it wasn't it at all.

But that's neither here nor there.

I actually started reading this a couple of times. I just didn't seem able to absorb the first chapter, mostly because a lot happened in a single chapter. I'm not super used to that. But what're you going to do? It took me a while to really get into it, and I fell out of touch with it several times, and not just because I had to look up a word.

This book is hard. I said that at the start. But it's a very high reading level, is what I mean. That isn't to say that you have to reread a sentence in order to figure out what it's saying, but it can be very time-consuming. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say. It was difficult for me because if I missed a single word, I felt like I was going to miss something, which was an honest concern. For instance, there is a recited prophecy in Chapter 13 that, after finishing the book, I flipped back to and was surprised that it told the entirety of the climax. Vague, of course, and incomprehensible until you went through the events at the end of the novel, but a well-executed use of prophecy nonetheless.

I put the novel down several times because the language was hard, the novel was long, and the plot didn't seem to be going anywhere. None of these things make it a bad book. The language being hard actually lent an air to all of the events that a generally modern way of writing would not have been able to convey. The novel was long, but in retrospect, I realize that every chapter served a specific purpose in the story and no piece could have been removed. The only problem is the pacing, in my opinion.

The beginning section introduces you to Mr. Norrell, and then goes out of its way to color him as a horrible little old man. He performs an influential act of magic that introduces the book's main antagonist, but then that antagonist is just bugging a small circle of people for most of the rest of the book. Jonathan Strange is introduced and quickly shipped off to show how magic was used in the Napoleonic Wars. When he comes back, the antagonist sets his sights on Mrs. Strange, and that's when the book finally makes the bad guy seem like a bad guy. But not before some magical dickery from Norrell on the publication of Strange's book.

The vast majority of the book is used to describe the relationship between Norrell and Strange, when I would have appreciated more about the gentleman.

There was a distinctive chapter that led me to put the book down for a week: Chapter 52. It talks rather randomly about a mad old woman with fifty cats living in the Jewish ghetto of Venice. I obviously understand now why the chapter was there, but it seemed like such a random story in the novel at the time that I couldn't bring myself to sit down and continue. If it had had any hooks in previous chapters, I may have been okay with it and continued to read the book without taking a break.

The ending is the best part. I literally sat on the couch and read the last ten chapters enraptured. It was those last ten chapters that made me think (especially with the descriptions of Strange's mad visions) that made me want this book to be made into a movie. While reading it, I didn't understand all the reviews at the front that said that the book, my copy over a thousand pages long, felt too short. That ending was great. It felt like a cut scene in a video game, an epic showdown in a movie. It was awesome. But I wonder if it was the tromping through the rest of the book that allowed for the ending to be so good? Like, if I hadn't felt so frustrated and exhausted through the book, would I have been as engaged in the ending?

I am not denying that this book had a lot to say, the least of which had to do with magic. But the act of reading it is not like a dessert. It isn't sweet and delicious and something to look forward too. It's more like vegetables. (This is where the metaphor falls apart; I regularly prefer vegetables to dessert, but I'm an outlier.) You may or may not enjoy it at the time, but the health effects, the thinking it inspires in you afterwards, makes it seem worth it.

6.5/10

Fantasy - Jacqueline Carey - Banewreaker (2004)

This review may seem kind of schizophrenic; please bear with me. There are a lot of pros and cons at work here.

I finished reading this last night, a couple days ahead of my personal schedule. (Listen, don't ask about my OCD-like reading schedule. It won't make sense and will only make you think I'm nuts.) This had more to do with the fact that I was in real need for some escapism more than this book being good.

For one thing, it's high fantasy. I don't know if I let this on heavily enough in the intro post, but I utterly loathe high fantasy. Fighting orcs in the forest works for video games and maybe even movies, but in books it's boring. That's the main reason that I, who really like fantasy, don't like the fantasy classics and mainstays like Tolkien, Jordan, or Goodkind. Because high fantasy sucks and is rife with archetypes and formula.

This book is definitely hurting from archetypes and formula. The story itself starts with a prologue that is literally their world's creation myth. Fuckin' A. For serious? You can't come up with a better way to establish your pantheon and main conflict than a prologue that talks about how the land was created, and the people, and all that shit? Listen, Jackie, I know you can. What the fuck, sweetheart?

"If you hate high fantasy, why did you read this?" For two reasons, Gentle Reader. One, it was written by Jacqueline Carey. She wrote the Kushiel Trilogy, and then the sequel trilogy about Imriel. Those books are among my very favorites. In high school, I got up at three in the morning to read more of Kushiel's Dart, and read it all morning, and all day, until I finished it. My hands were black with smudged ink from the pages. Very few books in my library have held me like that, and it was a combination of the language, the story, and the characters that held me all the way through.

The language in her writing is much the same here, even though it is in third-person for once. I still don't think that it translates as well from first-person POV to third. It jostles the reader in a way that it didn't in her first-person books. In the first-person books, you could just attribute it to the way that the character thinks. Now it just looks like she is trying to hide something in the multitude of words you have to look up.

BTW, this book is good if you want to get distracted researching what she's talking about. I learned a lot about plate armor and the reproduction of grasses. But I think it was Stephen King in On Writing that said that you shouldn't write fiction to teach someone something.

The story of Banewreaker is this: Lord of the Rings from the perspective of the evil guys. I wish I was kidding. The supposed good guys even have a character among them that is referred to as the "Bearer". He carries a Mcgaffin that has to be taken to the evil land to destroy the power of the evil guy. He has a group that protects him that is split up by an attack by the evil guys. Seriously. These are things that happen. The main characters are actually the people who are the right hand men of the evil guy.

One thing that Carey does seem to try to explore in almost all of the books she's written that I've read is an examination of sex and religion, and how they relate. In her Kushiel books, it's mostly how people use sex to essentially pray and give reverance to their gods. In this series, the evil guy gave humans the ability to fuck and reproduce, and the god Haomane wants him to take this away. Because Sex =  Bad!!! Even though Haomane's own sentient creations, the Ellyl, are dying out because they do not have the desire to reproduce, which is what Satoris, the evil guy, gave Men. There is an Ellyl woman the story surrounds also, who is naive to a goddamn fault. "The whole thing would be over if you just submitted to Haomane's wishes!" What if Haomane is wrong, you fucking cunt? The whole thing stank of blind faith and fundamentalism, and all it did was make me want the main characters to kill her even more. But they refused to, because they are dicks. You have to give the readers something, Jackie.

And for fuck's sake, we know they are elves and orcs. Why are you calling them Ellyl and Fjeltroll? You described a Fjeltroll in detail, and you would have saved space by just calling it an orc. Because it's an orc.

But on the other hand, I was craving escapism, and high fantasy is very good at helping you mentally escape. It probably didn't help that I was also doing a lot of D&D related research, even though our campaign setting isn't going to be high fantasy either... But still.

I don't know if you could tell from my previous statements up there, but there is another reason I read this: this was actually a reread for me. I reread this book, which has a lot of things that I hate. Why did I reread it?

Because I couldn't remember anything that had happened in it.

I'm sorry, but that's essentially a book killer.

5.5/10