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Oct. 4th, 2013
Currently reading: I'm between books again, so I'm going back through a book of Sherlock Holmes pastiche short fiction and reading the ones I skipped the first time. The results are about as good as you'd expect.
Recently read: I re-read Robert Harris's Fatherland, the book that made alternate history a semi-respectable genre by selling a million copies in 1992. I still liked it on re-read; the plot is page-turny and the protagonist, Xavier March, is interesting if perhaps a little too moral and outspoken to be believable as someone who has not only survived but has been a career police officer, and thus in close contact with the SS and the Gestapo, throughout decades of Nazi rule. Charlie (short for Charlotte) Maguire, the young American journalist who becomes March's associate and love interest, is more of a cipher. And I'd like to know why it is that in this kind of book, the world-weary male protagonist always has a romance with a beautiful, much MUCH younger woman. Why do they never meet beautiful, intelligent, competent women of their own age? (Now that I think of it, there's sort of an explanation for March, in that women of his own age in Nazi Germany are mostly long-married housewives who for decades have been discouraged from thinking about anything but raising children for the state. Those rare women who aren't mothers of ten are in the SS. Still, it's an annoying trope. And I note that both Fatherland and Len Deighton's SS-GB have their heroes fall in love with a young, beautiful American journalist. I wonder if the trope is that strong and specific, or if Harris was deliberately borrowing from Deighton? His journalist is at least portrayed in a much less sexist way than Deighton's.) Anyway, I think what I liked best about Fatherland on this read were all the little details that show the cultural emptiness of Nazism, from the sanitized music on the radio to the museums of Nazi propaganda to the replacement of traditional holidays with new National Socialist ones.
I also read Charles Stross's The Jennifer Morgue, one of his series of books about a British occult secret service. I wanted to like it much more than I actually liked it. I think I wanted a serious book with that premise, but Stross's book is comically exaggerated and full of pop culture in-jokes. with a hero who exemplifies much of what irritates me the most about geek culture. It also felt like it was patting itself on the back for its own cleverness much more than it deserved. I mean, jokes about the failings of Windows and the evils of PowerPoint were pretty dated even in 2006. One especially frustrating thing was that Stross kept using verbiage that suggested a complex underlying magical system--stuff about semiotics and how teams of occult commandos need a trained philosopher--but verbiage was all it was. There was never a clear sense of how magic worked, except by authorial fiat, which not only frustrated my intellectual interest but also made it difficult to care about the magical stuff, since Stross was so clearly going to manipulate it to work in whatever way the plot dictated. Also, the book was full of unexpected and out-of-place Americanisms, which I assume is an artefact of it being revised for American publication. I don't want to blame Stross for it, but it's weird when, for example, an aging upper-class Englishman of the old-public-school-tie type describes something as "crazy-ass."
What I'm reading next: Probably the final book in Ian Tregillis's Milkweed series (another "Second World War with magic" alternate history), but I need to re-read the earlier two books first, because they're complex and I don't remember them well. I'm not wildly enthusiastic about Tregillis, but there's nothing I am wildly enthusiastic about reading right now. *sigh* I want to read Melissa Scott's recent books but I can't afford to buy them and my library doesn't carry them.
Recently read: I re-read Robert Harris's Fatherland, the book that made alternate history a semi-respectable genre by selling a million copies in 1992. I still liked it on re-read; the plot is page-turny and the protagonist, Xavier March, is interesting if perhaps a little too moral and outspoken to be believable as someone who has not only survived but has been a career police officer, and thus in close contact with the SS and the Gestapo, throughout decades of Nazi rule. Charlie (short for Charlotte) Maguire, the young American journalist who becomes March's associate and love interest, is more of a cipher. And I'd like to know why it is that in this kind of book, the world-weary male protagonist always has a romance with a beautiful, much MUCH younger woman. Why do they never meet beautiful, intelligent, competent women of their own age? (Now that I think of it, there's sort of an explanation for March, in that women of his own age in Nazi Germany are mostly long-married housewives who for decades have been discouraged from thinking about anything but raising children for the state. Those rare women who aren't mothers of ten are in the SS. Still, it's an annoying trope. And I note that both Fatherland and Len Deighton's SS-GB have their heroes fall in love with a young, beautiful American journalist. I wonder if the trope is that strong and specific, or if Harris was deliberately borrowing from Deighton? His journalist is at least portrayed in a much less sexist way than Deighton's.) Anyway, I think what I liked best about Fatherland on this read were all the little details that show the cultural emptiness of Nazism, from the sanitized music on the radio to the museums of Nazi propaganda to the replacement of traditional holidays with new National Socialist ones.
I also read Charles Stross's The Jennifer Morgue, one of his series of books about a British occult secret service. I wanted to like it much more than I actually liked it. I think I wanted a serious book with that premise, but Stross's book is comically exaggerated and full of pop culture in-jokes. with a hero who exemplifies much of what irritates me the most about geek culture. It also felt like it was patting itself on the back for its own cleverness much more than it deserved. I mean, jokes about the failings of Windows and the evils of PowerPoint were pretty dated even in 2006. One especially frustrating thing was that Stross kept using verbiage that suggested a complex underlying magical system--stuff about semiotics and how teams of occult commandos need a trained philosopher--but verbiage was all it was. There was never a clear sense of how magic worked, except by authorial fiat, which not only frustrated my intellectual interest but also made it difficult to care about the magical stuff, since Stross was so clearly going to manipulate it to work in whatever way the plot dictated. Also, the book was full of unexpected and out-of-place Americanisms, which I assume is an artefact of it being revised for American publication. I don't want to blame Stross for it, but it's weird when, for example, an aging upper-class Englishman of the old-public-school-tie type describes something as "crazy-ass."
What I'm reading next: Probably the final book in Ian Tregillis's Milkweed series (another "Second World War with magic" alternate history), but I need to re-read the earlier two books first, because they're complex and I don't remember them well. I'm not wildly enthusiastic about Tregillis, but there's nothing I am wildly enthusiastic about reading right now. *sigh* I want to read Melissa Scott's recent books but I can't afford to buy them and my library doesn't carry them.