Station Eleven (2011) by Emily St. John Mandel

There are a number of things to like in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

The structure of the book is scattered, but not overly so. She manages it with admirable skill, always varying the experience for the reader and never feeling too disorganized or too jarring in her transitions. The variety in formats, settings, and time periods for any given chapter are quite compelling and serve to keep the experience fresh and engaging. I particularly enjoyed the bits of epistolary and loved how they changed up the narrative.

Additionally, St. John Mandel is subdued, effective writer of prose and a skilled writer of characters. Although I felt a bit tired of the the-way-it-used-to-be bits and thought she went back to the well a bit too often in that regard, I did very much enjoy her exploration of her characters' feelings. Character was the big winner for me in Station Eleven. I felt engaged and drawn to characters like Arthur and Miranda, particularly. By the end I grew to dislike Arthur, but he felt like a real human being to me, whereas he could have come off as a flimsy caricature of the typical Hollywood actor. Miranda, likewise, is fresh and entertaining as a career-oriented corporate type who manages, miraculously, not to be insufferable. Both characters feel well-rounded and both are stumbling through life, attempting to find contentment. I enjoyed their narratives.

However, Station Eleven falters in how cliched its post-apocalypse setting feels.

Initially the premise is unique and interesting: A traveling theater troupe in a ruined world! What an idea. The promise of existentialist themes drew me in immediately and it was, indeed, what got me to pick up this book in the first place. Survival is not enough is an idea I find compelling and worthy of exploration. Unfortunately the post-apocalypse narrative doesn't do very much with its unique premise or its stated themes. Instead it tends to rely on tried-and-true post apocalypse tropes that you've seen and heard a thousand times before. Scavenging in ruined locales, human beings falling prey to savagery, and, of course, the stale, overused meme that is religious-nutjobs-in-the-apocalypse. I found the character of the prophet to be so dry and uninteresting I couldn't even manage to bring myself to be repulsed by his cackling, boring evildoing.

I suppose it's possible that much of the past decade's post-apocalypse fiction has spoiled Station Eleven for me with the Seinfeld effect, but so much of it is so stale at this point that I couldn't bring myself to enjoy almost any of the post-apocalypse scenes. Fiction such as The Walking Dead and The Last of Us have already depicted these post-apocalyptic tropes so much more skillfully, more well-rounded, more engaging than Station Eleven does that I ended up feeling like this book including its post-apocalypse content as a selling point—"Nerds love post-apocalyptic shit!"—when St. John Mandel really wanted to tell a story about Arthur and his many failures, Miranda and her successes, and so on. For me, the latter is far more interesting and engaging than the former, and I wish this book had leaned more heavily on exploring these interesting characters and spent far less time in the post-apocalypse sandbox where so many others have already built and left superior sandcastles before.

⭐⭐

Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson

So much of cyberpunk attempts to ape Gibson's style without realizing what makes it so special. Blade Runner is set in a broken world of dark grays and synthetic food. No sunlight, fake humans, broken society. The Matrix is a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic in which human life has been all but extinguished, taken over by humorless robots. Cyberpunk media nowadays often depicts human society on death's doorstep, hanging on by a thread. The world, and, by extension, its rulers—our human species—are already dead. We just don't know it yet.

William Gibson may be a cynical bastard, his bleak outlook sometimes bordering on dark humor, but his world is anything but dead. On the contrary, it's packed so full to the brim of living, writhing humanity that it jumps out at you on nearly every page.

He remembered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

This isn't the romantic life-begets-life, happy-go-lucky style of humanity, but the Dostoyevskian irrationality of the human animal on full display. Gibson's characters are hopeless drug addicts, violent malcontents, sexual deviants, empty shells filled with emotional scar tissue. But through all of this, they're intensely human. They're equal parts numbness and societal ennui as they are emotionally wild, angry, lustful. They make poor financial decisions on a whim, they get high before a big job with full knowledge that the comedown will affect their capabilities, they become emotional and, by extension, reckless; which puts them in great danger. Neuromancer bleeds humanity—a special sort of irony for a science fiction novel about the activities of an artificial intelligence, and one which was penned in the 1980s. And so much of what makes this novel special for me is an all-powerful artificial intelligence being faced with such irrationality. It's brilliant and impactful and caused a lengthy bout of introspection for me in which I identified certain episodes of my life in which I, myself, had acted so irrationally.

As unpredictable as the human animal is, the end tally of all of our actions often seem angled toward the same goal: Happiness. Fleeting as it is, impossible as our chase for sustained contentedness might be, we still reach for it. With hard drugs the night before a big job, with lustful, meaningless sex, with pointless consumerism.

Gibson's world is special in its richness, density, texture, and the layers present in each new locale our dirty, globe-hopping "protagonists" set foot: There's new tech on top of slightly out of date tech on top of corrugated iron, rust, broken pipes, and dirt which seem as if they're relics of the 19th century. Gibson's gift for layering his world is readily apparent and his scene-setting opening paragraphs are exquisite and unforgettable. His admirable quality as a writer of prose only enhances the impact of such stage-setting. It's a pleasure slipping into Gibson's world, and such is certainly why this novel continues to remain popular decades after its publishing.

The grungey hipsterism this book constantly displays is fully campy, almost corny, but somehow it all works. There's such an original feel represented by this world, its characters, and this plot. It's quite unlike anything else, science fiction or otherwise. Neuromancer deals with technology slipping its lead and running amok, and it deals with humanity's betrayal of itself through its own irrationality. The prescience of the former made it a noteworthy science fiction novel on its release; the latter makes a continually impactful work that is still widely read and enjoyed to this day.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Raymond Carver

It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

As I made clear in my review for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, I love Raymond Carver.

What he does is like magic. His combination of a compelling scene, genuine characters, and gruff voice always seem to come together as a sum more than their parts. It's amazing to me he can pack so much emotional payoff in sometimes as little as just ten pages, and using such spare prose. He's a master of subtlety; a master of the craft who's able to impart big feeling is small action and with few words.

This collection of short stories sees Carver regularly rely on the common motif of broken relationships. Right off the bat, Why Don't You Dance? is a great example of this, fashioning a poignant narrative on the life cycle of relationships in typically spare prose over a short length that has the same impact of stories exponentially longer. The majority of the stories present in this collection take place in and around the ruins and the downslide of relationships that are doomed to fail, or have already. These are something all adults have experienced at least once in their lives, and they have always left their mark on us and changed us somehow. Thus the experience of reading them hits all the more harder. Carver's characters are not good people; they're lazy, incompetent, petty, and bitter. But we can relate to that, too, because—if we're being honest with ourselves—we've all experienced such character flaws in ourselves, just like we've experienced doomed and broken relationships.

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

Some of the images Carver creates here are far more striking than anything I recall in his previous collection (such as a boy seeing his mother kissing a man 'with the television going' while spying through a window, a mentally disabled man and his attachment to his bass pond, and others). He also has a penchant for disarming the reader with his subtle, everyday depictions of working class life, only to hit them with a burst of unexpected violence or tragedy near the end of the stories.

Carver's brilliant and this is masterful work. The best fiction is that which turns a mirror toward us, forcing us to admit to ourselves our flaws and idiosyncrasies, and become better, more self-aware people, and Raymond Carver's collections of short stories do just that.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1937) by Ernest Hemingway

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

There's so much to like in this book. Hemingway's writing is genuine; his knowledge feels authentic and he's choosing to depict a conflict that doesn't receive much attention, despite its outcome dictating the next several decades of Spanish history. The Spanish Civil War is viewed by many as a tragic lost cause, but the nuance present in both sides and the greater global conflict that was simmering at the time provides an intensely fertile ground for morally gray characters and factions and timeless, enthralling storytelling. The questions asked by this book are numerous, and nearly all of them are compelling: Is the lesser of two evils really worth fighting for, even if it means you're essentially fighting for evil? Which types of people would choose to fight, and which would abstain? Do two wrongs make a right? When, if ever, is it acceptable to answer atrocity with atrocity? How do human beings act and think when faced with death?

Hemingway's depiction of guerrilla warfare seems so authentic. There's a hurry-up-and-wait structure to the entire book that seems appropriate to what I understand of military campaigns, the popular adage that war is ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent sheer terror seems apt. The cast of characters throughout more than half of the book spend their time keeping a post, scouting, eating, and drinking, with not much of anything happening. The guerrilla nature of the war shows itself with the lack of discipline of several of the main character's comrades-in-arms; a man leaves his post to hunt a rabbit, for example. The left's guerrillas hide in caves in the woods, sustained mostly by their need not to fight for the right. The right, with their warplanes, and finely maintained cavalry, seem a tier above, rendering the conflict's appearance even more hopeless for the left. But any sympathetic drive to root for the underdogs is dampened by Hemingway's deft touch in painting both sides as being vulnerable to executing the same atrocities. Early in the narrative, a scenario recounted depicting the savage execution of suspected Fascist sympathizers is brutal enough to encourage us to pick a side only after having ingested a sizable boulder of salt.

War is ugly; civil war is uglier, and I applaud Hemingway for pulling no punches in its depiction. It'd have been too easy to have made one side too sympathetic, and Hemingway resists the urge, making the narrative that much more enticing and thought-provoking. For Whom The Bell Tolls is not a smash-the-fash treatise for unthinking banner-wavers. He further humanizes the Republicans and Communists; depicting those of the Party in their full bureaucratic sloth and incompetence, an image which would only become so popular and recognizable decades later. Both sides are riddled with human fallibility, both sides equal parts detestable and sympathetic. The fascists and the communists may be equally guilty of cruelty, ignorance, and malice on a grand scale, but at the end of the day they're made up of human beings, and the further you focus down to the individual, the more we recognize ourselves in them. The more we realize—hopefully, if our heads aren't so firmly planted within our asses—that we are all capable of the same atrocities, given the circumstances. That war is hell, and we are all its devils. Such an idea is well-worn and almost cliched in our modern day, but back in Hemingway's 1937, it must have been rather refreshing to read.

Hemingway in Spain

The more I've read of Hemingway, the more I've felt that there's a core flaw in the way he writes relationships. It makes an appearance in A Farewell to Arms, as it makes an appearance in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In both books, the core "romance" feels utterly shallow. On making contact with the guerrillas in the hills, Robert Jordan meets Maria, a beautiful young Spanish woman scarred by the conflict at the heart of the novel. The two fall for one another almost immediately, and instantly begin a tryst. When separating this relationship from context, it's ridiculous. There is no common interest, no connection between these two characters. Robert Jordan is a hardened, competent soldier, likely very attractive. Maria is a young, comely woman herself. That's it. That's the romance. There's no series of conversations in which the two get to know one another's morals and interests, what makes each tick, etc. They're just attracted to one another and they begin sleeping together. The relationship doesn't hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and I found myself bored to tears by it, rolling my eyes at each instance in which Jordan professes his undying love for his beau, whom he had just met 2 days ago and knew very little about.

However, when considering the context of the great conflict occurring around them, I believe the connection makes more sense. It's even remarked on by Jordan himself, partway through the novel in a conversation with Agustin; that their relationship occurs the way it does because they lack time to get to know one another. I think there's more to it than that, and I think the characters are aware of it. As with A Farewell to Arms, I began to view the relationship as two doomed people latching on to one another; the two of them shipwrecked and drowning sailors desperately grasping for driftwood after a storm. They aren't actually in love with one another, they're just desperate for something to hold onto; an endgame, something to look forward to, a prayer to chant to themselves in the quiet moments, when the war seems hopeless—"I will take Maria with me and marry her after the war... We'll go live somewhere quiet". Maria is Robert Jordan's candle in the dark, his vision of a better time once the conflict is over. His hope that life can go back to normal, that the conflict might end and he might settle quietly once more. A rationalization he tells himself, when knowing, just beneath the surface, that he is overwhelmingly likely to die in the hills at any moment. Such is the hopelessness of the conflict he finds himself embroiled in.

Whether Hemingway intends this to be the case, or whether he's just inept at depicting a meaningful, deep relationship between two human beings is anyone's guess. After reading The Sun Also Rises, I tend toward belief in the former rather than the latter. And, in any case, Hemingway is dead—both proverbially and literally—and his literature lives on for us to interpret as we will.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a deep, nuanced view of civil war, of war in general, of soldiers and death and duty, and what all of those things force us to experience when we're faced with them. And, perhaps most compelling of all: The change they force in us if we're lucky enough to survive them. How we act in the face of death is part of what makes us human, after all. A human being's mortality tends to define us, and I think that's at the core of what Hemingway writes. Not just in this book, but all of his books.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Man Called Ove (2014) by Fredrik Backman

Ove, our narrator, is a grouchy old man, overly obsessed with following the rules. He's curmudgeonly and close-minded. However, he represents something all people should aspire to: He knows exactly who he is and what he wants.

He’s never understood young people who natter on about “finding themselves.” He used to hear that nonstop from all those thirty-year-olds at work. All they ever talked about was how they wanted more “leisure time,” as if that was the only point of working: to get to the point when one didn’t have to do it.

In this fashion he's somewhat of a mythical creature. Since a very early age Ove has consciously recognized his strengths: He's a handyman; good with machines and desiring of work that allows him to use his hands to fix a problem. So Ove needs very little to be happy; a job that allows him to diagnose problems, tinker, and arrive at solutions.

Ove is fallible in that he is a wholly concrete thinker. There is no room for the abstract in Ove's world. Everything he does makes sense on paper. The problem with this, of course, is that human beings often don't. So Ove finds himself struggling, particularly when dealing with people. I enjoyed this aspect of the book and, indeed, found its narrator to be compelling for this purpose. Backman continues to throw colorful characters at Ove, and it's enjoyable watching him respond. Ove could easily have fallen prey to cliché, but his touching moments when dealing with people who are worlds different from him made for some nice twists in Ove's story:

He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.

A Man Called Ove is cloying at times, and obviously shoots for for sentimentality, but the character of Ove's back is strong enough to bear the brunt of it, and Backman—earnest in what he's set out to do—is a skilled enough writer in his tuned-down, low-key way that it all somehow works without feeling like it's trying too hard:

“I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.” They stood in silence for a long time, with their arms around each other. And at long last she lifted her face towards his, and looked into his eyes with great seriousness. “You have to love me twice as much now,” she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second—and last—time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

A Man Called Ove is ultimately a very light read, but it's earnest and it's happy, and we could all use a bit of that these days. It doesn't quite reach the happy-go-lucky heights of something like Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, but it strives for it, and it doesn't strive poorly, and sometimes that's enough. Highly recommendable to pretty much everyone, easy to read, and competently crafted.

⭐⭐⭐

Abaddon's Gate (2013) (The Expanse, #3) by James S.A. Corey

There's a cardinal sin of fiction in which the writer (or in this case, writers) stop using their characters to work through questions and predicaments they find interesting, and begin using them to lecture their readers and pontificate instead on the solutions the writers believe to be correct. If I want to be instructed, I'll read non-fiction. When I pick up fiction, it's to exercise my empathy muscle and to gain valuable context to use via the lived experience of others, so that I may arrive at my own conclusions with as much information and emotional experience as possible. Fiction provides this in a way which non-fiction does not; it allows us to experience emotions that we'd never be in a position to experience in real life. I will likely never travel in a space ship. I will surely (hopefully?) never come into contact with alien technology. I will likely never be in a crew like the one in the Rocinante, nor will I experience a political conflict like the one between Earth and Mars. I read series like Expanse to try and sample how I might apply my own moral compass in reaction to such things. I don't read it to have the authors tell me how I should be solving the problems that arise within this world.

I bring this up because a strength of Corey's Expanse series is its characters. The crew of the Rocinante work really well together on the page. They have a really endearing dynamic, and each are memorable in their own way. They call forth a Kingesque vibe of the lovable losers; people who are altogether competent, but have suffered some downturn in their lives which have placed them on the path of the less fortunate. It's enjoyable riding along with them and watching them grow. They feel like friends.

Unfortunately there are notable instances in this book in which certain characters stop talking like themselves, and start speaking with the voice of the authors. You can feel the writers' hands on the scales as they artificially manipulate dialogue and character interaction to make a point, which is never good. Nobody wants to feel like they're reading propaganda, and at times that's what Expanse feels like. Of course, some great writers do this quite often, but James S.A. Corey—in my opinion—are not skilled enough writers to pull it off in a way which feels natural. Done wrong, it's crippling. And in Expanse, it's jarring and immersion-breaking, causing me to wonder where the characters I've known and grown to like have gone, and why the authors are choosing so obviously to insert their own voices in these characters' mouths. Characters will pull a complete one-eighty on a decision they've just made in less than a page, and suddenly say something like "wow, jeez, I am such an asshole! That was wrong of me!". This is clearly not a natural piece of character growth—it's the author appearing within the story, and letting the reader know they think their character is being an asshole and is wrong. True change in a deeply held opinion does not occur like this in human beings; people will often break before they bend. True change in opinion requires catastrophe, pain, tragedy, and James S.A. Corey do not seem to understand that. When things like this occur in the story, it breaks the characters completely, rendering them flimsy cardboard cut-outs of the human beings they used to be to us. And it's frequently glaringly obvious why the writers are doing it—They want to speak from on high to their readers by creating a contrived situation in which their character does something the writers find distasteful, and then continuing by lecturing their readers on how wrong it is through the mouth of said character. It's insulting and amateurish. Allow your characters to be human, and grant your readers the benefit of the doubt in that they might read the situation correctly. The best fiction presents complex, inspired problems and allows its characters to approach solving these problems from various different positions. If the writer is writing fiction to teach their readers a lesson, their fiction is probably shit.

Although I do enjoy the characters when they're themselves and not James S.A. Corey, Expanse's strength has always been in the fresh world Corey have created. It's nice reading a space opera which preserves the laws of physics, rather than handwaves them away with technology so advanced it may as well be magic (looking at you, Mass Effect). Expanse's political dynamic between Earth, Mars, and the belt is engrossing and intriguing, and it plays off of very human aspects such as prejudice, fear of the unknown, and greed. It all works really well and it's the single strongest aspect of this series that keeps me coming back.

In addition to their falling victim to speaking through their characters' mouths, Corey are not very skilled writers of prose. Maybe this is just me donning my book-snob hat for a go at the new and popular thing, but there are notable instances of clumsy prose that seem, to my ear, to require editing (and if anybody's an expert on shit prose, it's me, lemme tell ya).

It was the smart thing. The wise one. He was neither smart nor wise.

 

An hour or two with some structural steel and a couple welders and the place could be almost defensible. He hoped it wouldn’t need to be. Except that he hoped it would.

Egad.

I can excuse some shoddy sentences if the book is strongly plotted, and Expanse usually is. However I've noticed, particularly in Abaddon's Gate, that the authors have begun to press a thumb on the scale in their plotting in the same groan-inducing way they tend to speak through their characters' mouths in order to lecture their readers. There are multiple instances in Abaddon's Gate in which the plot is clearly manipulated by impossibly coincidental circumstances that challenge the reader's suspension of disbelief in order to get the plot to where the writers clearly want it to go. Characters will make unlikely jumps to conclusions in order to facilitate the decision the writers want them to make. Characters will show up just in the nick of time to save someone's life.

There's one particularly egregious instance at about the midway point of the book in which one of the key character's lives is at stake. At first I congratulated Corey, as killing this character would have taken admirable writing cojones, and the waves created from the character's death would have significantly impacted all of the characters in the story, thus changing several major characters and putting them on a darker turn and presenting them with new challenges that I'd have found fascinating, and further propelling them down the road of change.

But it doesn't happen. Instead of being a fantastic, growth-inducing moment, it's played for a cheap thrill, because ultimately, that's the kind of story Expanse is. When the chips are down, Corey make it clear that their story has no real aspirations of affecting its readers in a profound way. Instead, it becomes a schlocky, disposable network television soap opera. A character who has no reason to spare their victim suddenly hesitates for no reason, then another character shows up, coincidentally, just in the nick of time, and prevents the murder from occurring. It's really too bad, because such a turn would have been really intriguing.

This sort of thing happens regularly, and it's disappointing. This series was originally created as a world in which to set a roleplaying game, and it shows, because worldbuilding is the only thing it does truly well. Expanse could have been so much more. It could have been ambitious; the framework (its worldbuilding and character construction) is in place for it to become a space opera with literary aspirations, dedicated to exploring big ideas and challenging the humanity of its characters. Instead, it relies on flimsy and artificial character turns and clichéd, convenient plot turns. It leans too heavily on these ultimately disposable turns that serve only to get the reader's gander up for a dozen pages or so, before dissipating in a typically wimpy manner common to most low-effort fiction. Thus it ends up affecting nothing at all, and the entire series is relegated to an airport-read-for-nerds that will be forgotten just a few weeks after the reader has finished consuming it. 

Expanse is a sugary treat, one which is enjoyable at the moment, but ultimately not satiating in the same way a hearty meal such as A Song of Ice and Fire aspires to, and is. Despite what Corey frequently say, it has no true aspirations to telling a human story and affecting its readers. It just likes to think that it does. And so Expanse is, to me, one of the few works of fiction that makes for a better television series than it does a novel series.

⭐

Kafka on the Shore (2006) by Haruki Murakami

Ah, Murakami-san. I've quite liked some of your work, but the more surreal of your novels have always seemed to fall flat for me. 

Kafka on the Shore is perhaps the most surreal novel of his I've read, and it's trash. I'm sure that statement will ruffle some feathers, and I'm sure some will simply retort that I 'didn't get it', but in my opinion Kafka on the Shore is utter nonsense with very little substance and almost nothing beyond some unique imagery to make it a worthwhile endeavor to carve through its near-500 pages of bullshit.

Reading Kafka on the Shore is like meeting an oddball at a party. A skinny fellow at the snack stand with dyed blue hair and wearing a smart blue blazer and tie, sipping a non-alcoholic selzer-water and eating fritos dipped in honey mustard. What a curious fellow, you think, he must be interesting! You chat him up about all manner of things; turns out he's actually a lepidopterist. Whoa, never met one of those before! He doesn't drink, nor use recreational drugs, because he believes they're poison and wants to keep his body and mind sharp. He has incredibly deep knowledge about things you've never even considered. His job is to manage inventories of cold film storage for classic TV shows, so he spends his days around golden age television cans and regales you with odd stories about Car 54 and Gunsmoke and how TV just ain't how it used to be. You take down his number and want to hang out with him to hear more about these things you've never thought about; to learn more about the dark corners of life experience you've never even considered.

You hang out with this individual a few more times, learning more and more. But eventually, something starts to bother you. Beyond these oddball pursuits, you begin to get a sense that there's just not much there. You eventually learn he simply hates the taste of beer, and he actually does smoke marijuana every so often. He doesn't actually collect butterflies yet, though he is interested in the hobby. At the moment he just likes to read a lot of Nabokov and finds the hobby a fascinating affectation, so he seeks to emulate it. His vocation is not something he's actually passionate or romantic about—he simply works part time on contract at a warehouse that happens to store these classic TV film canisters, and he's caught a glimpse of them before.

You realize he's just a guy. A regular dude. There's really not all that much special about him. He goes to work, he comes home, he pays his bills. The things he recognizes as being cool are pretty interesting, you admit, but he doesn't have such a deep, compelling knowledge of them after all.

He has nothing to say beyond, "Hey man, check this out. Isn't this pretty cool?".

That's Murakami's fiction to me.

Haruki Murakami

On the surface Murakami's work seems profound, different, fresh, compelling. But when you dig a bit deeper, there's very little actual substance there. Murakami's fiction is very light on story and humanity, and very heavy on imagery that doesn't actually say much at all. The more I read his stuff, the more I suspect he's an utter charlatan, carefully crafting his fiction so that what you're reading appears to be the tip of the iceberg when, in reality, it's a cardboard prop painted blue floating along on the sea, depthless.

Writing fiction is a strange beast. In my experience, it feels almost like reverse-dreaming. Instead of sleeping and passively experiencing random imagery from your brain, you are drawing that imagery from your brain and putting it down in order to augment whatever story you're planning on telling. You're actively sorting through your own lived experience and pulling pieces from your subconscious to shape your story and your characters in a compelling, genuine manner. Murakami does this exceptionally well. He's completely honest with himself, and the imagery which seems to fascinate him is often quite enchanting. Often times the quirks he's depicting are enough to carry the scene, alone, and his workmanlike prose facilitates this perfectly by getting out of the way and letting the images take center stage.

But there's just not much else there. Murakami is a poor storyteller. His characters are frequently flat and seem to make arbitrary, nonsensical decisions. Many of his novels feature contrived conflict that isn't really all that interesting, or (as is the case in Kafka), no conflict at all. His pacing is often too blown out because he needs to give himself such space to indulge in these episodes of wading into the odd imagery and scenarios he finds so fascinating. Further—and perhaps most egregious—at times he treats his fiction as if it's little more than an avenue from which to explore his fetishistic interests; eg. young girls' breasts, or being masturbated by your sister. If you're hitting me with your kinks, you better be saying something important with them. If you're not using them as a means to a storytelling end that's going to make your fiction more thematically impactful, then you're just engaging in literary masturbation. It's leaving me feeling dirty, like the writer is pulling a Louis C.K. and sitting in the corner jacking off and I'm standing there in the locked room, forced to watch.

The more I read Murakami, the more it feels like his fiction is just a vehicle from which he imparts ideas he finds interesting. That's not a problem, really. The best writers also do this—George R.R. Martin cannot stop depicting romantic hearts stuck in cynical worlds, Ernest Hemingway is utterly entranced with the idea of death and how each mortal man and beast faces it, James Joyce is obsessed with Catholicism and Irish politics. What Murakami lacks, though, and what's so severely damaging to his work, is that there's no storytelling foundation on which all of this imagery might sit, rendering such imagery ultimately meaningless. Martin's characters are so human you'll swear they're standing right next to you, Hemingway's devastating plotting will break you for a full week, Joyce's prose and humor will make you feel the love and the passion of his characters' so deeply your chest cavity will burn with their fervor. Murakami, however, only has his imagery and not much else. His books are a set of really nice windows and skylights sitting on a lawn, with no house into which they might be installed. While they might have augmented a proper story enough to propel it into the realm of profundity, they have zero utility. Yeah, those are some great windows, but who the hell needs just a window? Alone, they're useless. Just like Murakami's imagery.

Kafka on the Shore is a nonsensical story with vast pretentions of grandeur. Murakami gives us two empty vessels to follow; an angsty, horny teenager and a developmentally disabled old man. The teenager reads as if he's written to be intelligent and interesting, though I found him mostly petulant and boring. The old man was the more likable of the two, and his quirk was something I found endearing and interesting, but ultimately not much is done with it. The real problem is that neither of these characters have any concrete conflict driving them forward. There's very little forcing them to change, and so we meander through the plot with them, never fully invested in their struggles, never fully caring about who they are. Murakami hits you with some shit, sure—an incest fetish, some shocking depictions of violence against animals, and various bits of nonsense I find impossible to take seriously (building a magic flute, oh my!)—but without a concrete story to carry it along, it all felt meaningless and silly, like a Jackson Pollock, except it's just random house paint spilled on a driveway rather than something constructed on an actual canvas.

If you enjoy the surreal and aren't a big stickler for, you know, actual storytelling? Maybe you'll like this book. I hated it and I'm eager to move on from it to something else.

⭐

Mystic River (2001) by Dennis Lehane

What if I'm wrong?

One of the most blessedly introspective questions in existence; intensely important to personal growth and paramount to properly balancing our interaction with other human beings. One which prevents us from committing mistakes everywhere on the spectrum from minor social faux pas to great atrocity.

What if I'm wrong?

A sobering, humbling question to ask oneself. One which must be asked—or, at least, certainly deserves to be asked more than it is.

Not a popular question, of course. What if I'm wrong? douses all of our haughty, unearned self-righteousness like sand on a grease fire. Four words which heave us from our high horse and dump us right back in the muck with The Rabble™, one which no longer lets us confide in simple saying "people are stupid". It sets us back to square one and takes away a great deal of our strenuously accrued self-worth. Self-worth which, had we been looking in the mirror in the first place, we'd have realized has been built on a foundation of wet sand. Our great castles of ourselves, constructed with muck and lurching sickly to one side, about to collapse, only to be shored up with more mud and bullshit. We look at it and tell ourselves it's Neuschwanstein. Look! Look at how intelligent I am. How righteous and morally good, how altruistic. I am never unjustly unkind, I do not make mistakes. The people I hurt and speak down to deserve it.

I am not wrong.

Jimmy Marcus knows it. He'll make this right, because he's the only one who can. The police are too hamstrung by red tape and ineptitude, they're too slow and too imprecise. What Jimmy fails to realize is that his must is a want. Jimmy wants to quench his grief with violence and vigilante justice, and he can't bring himself to stop and properly analyze things around him, because he's too clouded with tragedy.

This is the crux of the novel. The blind spots we sport as individuals, and how they're remedied via added perspective. People are irrational. Often they are stupid, petty, and violent; they kill and hurt others for the worst reasons. And the actions of the book serve only to reinforce this idea. But even considering this, our only cure for these tendencies of self-delusion are via cool self-critique, often with the help of those same irrational, stupid, petty, and violent peers and loved ones. Lone wolves often exhibit an inherent weakness in that they fall prey to believing their own bullshit. There are no checks and balances, and they sometimes make heinous mistakes which may have been remedied with just give more minutes of honest self-critique or added perspective. But such hard looks in the mirror are so much less desirable than a flimsy sense of self-righteous fury.

Being alone does not strengthen our resolve, it merely removes all the external influences which temper it, refine it. Being alone removes important blocks in the foundation of our decision-making process and gives us a false sense of confidence that this solution is the right one. It's not that there are no flaws or no better hypotheses when we are alone, it's that we are blind to them. Like a hive mind, our processing power shrinks when we have no other human beings to present us with alternate solutions or flaws in our perception.

But oftentimes, we don't want to see them. That makes it all so difficult. No, we want the bullshit solution. It's the easiest, the quickest, and, most importantly, it's the most satisfying. I don't want to know that the fine nuances of someone else's lived experience makes their opinions and their actions just as valid as my own, I want them to be a stupid, misguided fool with bad ideas—bad ideas which I can blast down with my own vitriol. They are in the wrong, you see. They are so in the wrong, and I am so hurt, that I am justified in committing violence against them.

Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance and lies. And ignorance and lies were often underrated. Most people Brendan knew couldn't make it through the day without a saucerful of ignorance and a side of lies.

 

The bullshit solution. I get you, Jimmy Marcus. I wish I didn't, but I get you.

Mystic River is, above all else, a tragedy. The moving parts present are phenomenally well-orchestrated by Lehane. His character writing is superb; particularly his construction of Dave Boyle, the emotionally stunted crux on which the fates of the novel weave their tapestry. Dave's inner dialogue toward the end of the book felt, to me, like a genuine depiction of mental illness. Dave Boyle isn't a deranged lunatic, looking to burn Gotham and gleefully manipulate the bat man in his games. He's not the cannibalistic professor hiding behind a sheen of aristocracy and education in order to better facilitate his heinous crimes... Dave's just a guy. He's a guy with a wife and kid, a guy struggling to do better, struggling to be someone good but hopelessly hamstrung by past trauma. And god, it works. Because who hasn't been there? Who hasn't felt frustrated and inadequate, who hasn't genuinely wished to be better, more altruistic, more giving and loving, a better parent and a better significant other? Dave's struggles are a magnitude above anything I've ever dealt with, of course, because I've been fortunate in ways that he hasn't been. But nevertheless, Dave is someone everyone can identify with. Dave is universal. Life breaks us all, in the end—and sometimes in the during. We are all broken creatures with our own inadequacies and our own past trauma, and we are all trying to do better. We will all die trying to do better. We're all Dave. We're just not as Dave as Dave is.

I've never been that great a fan of Lehane's hard-boiled street-guy voice, but in Mystic River, particularly, it seems a bit more restrained. Lehane's capable of producing some great sentences and some phenomenal character writing, and this helps buffer the feeling that, sometimes, he's trying just a bit too hard to be the cool guy writing a cool narrative.

He woke up with the dream draining thickly from the back of his brainpan, the lint and fuzz of it clinging to the undersides of his eyelids and the upper layer of his tongue. He kept his eyes closed as the alarm clock kept beeping, hoping that it was merely a new dream, that he was still sleeping, that the beeping only beeped in his mind.

 

The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.

He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn't just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you'd fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.

It's not pretty, but ultimately the story goes where it needs to. I think most readers will be struck with a sense of, "Oh, shit... Please don't do this. Don't go where I think you're going..." It's fairly obvious the route the story will take by about the halfway mark, but the way Lehane brings it there shows skill. His dialogue is excellent and the inner monologues of his characters are consistently enjoyable. Their grief and their anger is palpable. None of it feels melodramatic or clichéd, which is a significant accomplishment considering how easy it is for the writer to go overboard from tragedy to melodrama.

Please note: Spoilers follow the image.

Ultimately, I felt the whodunit was rendered a bit unsatisfying by the conclusion of the novel. I had figured from about the mid-point of the book that Brendan's brother Ray was the one who had killed Katie, but I suspected his motive had been to keep his brother—the sole person in his life he loves, and his caretaker and sole confidant—near him, and to keep him from running away with Katie to Las Vegas. Perhaps this is still the case, but it's never outright stated by Ray or the police investigating the crime. It's left for the reader to infer, and the characters investigating the crime merely chalk it up to a random killing; two psychopathic teenagers out to shoot somebody for no good reason. I'm not sure if Lehane expects us to infer Ray's motives or not, but I found the in-text explanation to be relatively unsatisfying.

Additionally, I felt Brendan's and Katie's relationship could have used a bit of added backstory. What was it Katie saw in Brendan? Brendan in Katie? Was it merely that Brendan wanted an escape from his awful family situation? That doesn't really fly for Katie; she has a large family who loves her and she has a future. So what was it that attracted these two people so strongly to one another?

Ultimately, these are relatively minor gripes. Mystic River is a really good book. It's strongly themed and it leaves you with questions to gnaw on, but it's also a superb slow-burn mystery-thriller with well-defined characters which, once it gets going in its second act, doesn't really take its foot off the gas.

Lehane's good. He knows how to entertain, but perhaps more importantly, he has ideas and he has questions. I look forward to reading more of his stuff.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote is an odd book. Often considered the first modern novel, it reads more like a collection of short stories. While there are a series of strong overarching themes which permeate the book, there's not really any general overarching story. The titular Don and his companion Sancho Panza travel the land, writing wrongs, making silly mistakes, and getting into various amusing hijinks. And, really, that's enough to carry things.

Cervantes is, above all else, a superb writer of comedy. His dialogue, double entendres, and knack for writing physical comedy are the most consistently excellent aspect of Don Quixote. In many cases it reads like a far more modern comedy; the slapstick is constant and always humorous and the comedy, in general, never feels forced or routine. Above all else, this book is funny, and that's not something you can say about many 17th century classics.

None of the comedy would be possible, of course, without an adequate translation from the original Spanish. Edith Grossman's translation is more than up to the task; it reads flowingly and beautifully and includes excellent footnotes illuminating Cervantes' clever wordplay in the original Spanish that is lost in the English text. So natural is Grossman's work that I would regularly forget that I was reading a translation at all, until I came across a bit that needed to be rectified with these footnotes. This is such a superb feat of translation that I have grown to consider this to be the best translation of literature I have read thus far. It's utterly fantastic. I can't say enough positive things about Grossman's work here.

Don Quixote is popularly known as a celebration of romanticism, but often reads quite the opposite. Quixote is responsible for various damages to property and grievous injury among the poor people he comes into contact with, including the wanton killing of several sheep in a shepherd's flock, the disruption of funeral rites resulting in a peasant's leg being broken (which, during the time period, may in extreme cases be as good as a death sentence if it removes a peasant's ability to work the land), and other such instances. I found myself disliking Don Quixote early, and found these stories to be an example of why living a make-believe life with your head in the clouds is a terrible thing, rather than an admirable quality. Quite different than what I expected, and the reputation this book has.

Sancho Panza, representing the practical realist, quickly became my favorite character. Although he appears otherwise, he's more intelligent than Quixote and often goes along with the titular character's hijinks in full awareness of their ridiculousness, if only to garner a flask of wine as a result. He's a lovable scoundrel, whereas I view Don Quixote a moronic, mentally ill, misled figure. I understand that that's part of Quixote's charm, but it didn't work for me. Perhaps I'm too cynical to appreciate the whimsy in the moon-brained romantic, and thus instead gravitate towards the ill-bred rogue.

With this book, Cervantes reminds me of a 400-year old Quentin Tarantino; a man so hopelessly in love with his favorite medium that it bleeds through his work, constantly making itself known. There are an endless number of references to romantic renaissance fiction from years past within these pages, works on works that I've never heard of, all helpfully cited in the footnotes of this edition. I found it amusing that Don Quixote, in its contemporary period, was a strongly influenced spin-off and commentary of works already in existence, despite its existence to us as a ground-breaking work of originality. Also amusing is the fact that Cervantes always planned the book to be concluded at the end of its first part, and only found himself driven to write the second part when unofficial sequels to his initial great work were being produced. The second part is a bit of a departure in style, but stands up to the first, in my opinion. It makes me curious as to the quality of said unofficial sequels that were produced.

This isn't my favorite book, but it was a whole heap of a lot more enjoyable than I expected it to be, and I'm wholly unsurprised that it maintains its reputation, more than four centuries after its inception.

⭐⭐⭐

The Drop (2014) by Dennis Lehane

The Drop reads pacily and feels more like a novella than a full novel, despite its multiple viewpoints.

Not a huge fan of Lehane's voice in this novel. It reminded me a bit of King's, but felt at times it was trying a bit too hard to affect a gritty, street-wise tone and some of the clipped sentences and slang felt too how-do-you-do-fellow-Bostonians to me. The prose in general was workmanlike, though Lehane is more than capable of pulling off a great sentence when he wants to:

Happiness destroyed was worth wrapping your arms around because it always hugged you back.

What I found Lehane to be best at was his characters. Bob jumped off the page for me as a subtle, thoughtful man who was far more on the inside than he outwardly appeared. His dedication to his faith made sense and the nuance with which Lehane writes him prevents him from spiraling into Catholic cliché. Bob is plagued by guilt and self-flagellates in the form of limiting his interaction with other people, effectively enforcing a crippling loneliness on himself, denying himself the key relationships that human beings require in order to survive. This isn't made clear to the reader immediately until he's contrasted on the page by Torres, another seemingly devote Catholic. As we get to know Torres we realize that his devotion to his church seems little more than lip service. He sins, confesses, and takes communion, never really displaying any guilt or regret in the way Bob does. Bob prevents himself from confessing and taking communion out of a deep guilt, and constantly feels the pressure of his religion, feeling he does not deserve to be forgiven for what he's done. I liked the depth.

The Drop is an enjoyable novel, perhaps a bit scattered between its many viewpoint characters (for its size, at least), but its explosive climax and twist more than make up for its shortcomings. An entertaining read with some sufficient character depth to keep your mind satiated.

⭐⭐⭐

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

It's been a while since I last read a book that was so undone simply by its own popularity.

Stoker relies so strongly on the air of mystery to carry Dracula's experience, and the very fact that this book has become such a pop culture phenomenon completely undoes that aspect of its strength. Everyone reading this book already knows the answers to the most tantalizing questions Stoker poses: they know Dracula is a vampire, they know his castle is supernatural, they know Lucy's odd ailment is due to having her blood sucked. Surely Stoker knew that such mysteries would create fear and unsettlement in his contemporary audiences, but modern readers—long inundated with the Twilights and the Blades and the Interview with the Vampires and the Castlevanias—are already well-informed about (and enamored with) vampirism in action and horror films of various sorts and will be able to pick up on this stuff nearly immediately. This isn't the first time I've considered such a disarmament of a novel's strengths in plotting by pop culture, and such a thing continues to fascinate me.

The book's titular Count Dracula

Regardless of the fact that this novel has been innately spoiled, I was able to appreciate Stoker's careful crafting of the mystery from a more objective point-of-view, and I respect how he pushed his contemporary readers forward through the plot by asking them what, exactly, was going on here. It's skillfully rendered and impeccably paced; drip-feeding new reveals to the reader. But I couldn't help being robbed of this enjoyment by being easily able to guess what was happening, and so the book subjectively loses this core aspect of its quality and renders much of its investigation as much more dry and rote than it should be. These reveals are robbed of their impact and thus the new discoveries of Van Helsing and co. feel more like busywork than like the new and surprising bits of information they ought to be.

Many readers say that Dracula was their introduction to classic literature in general, and to Victorian literature more specifically, and I think it makes a superb bridge into both for the newer reader. Stoker's prose is surprisingly clean and easily readable, yet still aesthetically pleasing. This kind of novel perhaps represents the bridge from the earlier, stuffier, more labyrinthine prose of high Victorian literature into the more easily consumable, yet still pleasing modernist literature I tend to love so much. I like Dickens as much as the next guy, but he does get a bit long in the tongue at times, which often threatens to undo his propensity for sheer prosaic beauty.

Stoker's prose doesn't quite hit Dickensian highs, but it more than gets the job done for me:

There was a deliberate voluptuousness that was both thrilling and repulsive. And as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal till I could see in the moonlight the moisture. Then lapped the white, sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited. 

 

Never did tombs look so ghastly white. Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night. 

 

The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life - animal life - was not the only thing that could pass away. 

I've always been a fan of the epistolary structure, though I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps having everything strictly segregated by chapter appeals to the overly orderly, anal being inside of me. While I enjoy this 'found footage' style of novel, I do have to say that Stoker's use of voice between his viewpoint characters left a lot to be desired for me.

Bram Stoker

The novel begins very enjoyably as we're thrust into Jonathan Harker's view. His voice seems appropriately proper and Victorian, and the mystery we're confronted with is relatively fresh, atmospheric, and intriguing. Harker is somewhat relatable as being a stranger-in-a-strange place. Later in the novel, the reader moves on to the other male characters, such as Sewell, Arthur, and Quincy Morris who seem to share an identically proper, buttoned-up, curiously professional characterization to Harker, despite the new characters being from drastically different places in life; Sewell being a physician, Arthur being Lord Goldalming, and Quincey Morris being from Texas. Surely the last of them, at least, would feel remarkably different? The two female characters of Mina and Lucy suffer similar lack of differentiation—the lines and actions of one would suit the other perfectly. And so the characters felt, in general, unremarkable to me and I did not feel myself empathizing with them, since they did not feel unique to me.

The one character safe from this criticism is, of course, Dr. Van Helsing, our resident kooky mad scientist-type. I found myself picturing him as sort of a Christopher Lloyd type from Back to the Future. An eccentric, friendly quack doctor on whose breadth of knowledge regarding the supernatural you can count. His optimistic, hopeful manner was apparent to me and was a nice change of mouthfeel from the deliberately dark and Gothic touches residing throughout the rest of the story. 

I found his dialogue to be particularly brilliant; I enjoy that you can hear just a touch of Van Helsing's Dutch accent in his dialogue:

It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.

This sort of dialogue crafting is brilliantly subtle—only slight errors here and there—but just deliberate enough to affect the voice of the character. I really enjoyed the dialogue throughout Dracula and found it to be one of Stoker's strengths. He handles others, such as the cockney London working class accent, with similar skill. This is not something common to writers of even the greatest horror literature, so I appreciated it here.

Outside of Van Helsing, of course, I found little to differentiate these characters and thus was forced instead to rely instead on the atmosphere and the norms of Victorian London to carry me along, which, most of the time, was more than enough. Stoker is adept at painting a scene, especially those drenched in Gothic horror tropes, and I enjoyed the novel mostly just for that.

So, while I found some of Dracula to be wanting, I did like a lot of it, and I believe its structure and the ease at which its prose can be read makes it a fantastic introduction both to Victorian literature and to classic literature in general. I'll likely recommend it to new readers of the classics quite regularly from here on out, but its flaws keep it from sitting the pantheon next to my very favorite novels.

It's just a shame that so much of Dracula happens to be undone by its own popularity. But it's hard to hold that against it.

⭐⭐⭐

A Clash of Kings (1998) (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2) by George R.R. Martin

More than a decade ago when I first read these books, Martin's A Clash of Kings was among my least favorite of the lot.

The first novel of this series, A Game of Thrones, ends rather explosively. And so the beginning of Clash has to spend some time picking up the scattered pieces, and replacing those broken in the last book on the board. We're immediately introduced to a new set of characters: Davos, Stannis, Melisandre. I have the specific recollection of a feeling of frustration the first time I read these chapters. I didn't care for these new people—I was far more concerned with what had happened to the characters I'd just left as I completed Thrones.

On re-reading the series, though, I've got the distinct feeling that I'm revisiting old friends from times past. Stannis and Davos are two of my favorite characters in the series, and it was a joy to crack open some of these chapters once again. My perspective was thus vastly different opening this book to re-read it than it was to read it for the first time. A Clash of Kings is relatively unfettered from the shackles that bind A Game of Thrones; that is, the responsibility of teaching new readers all about this world. Thrones suffers a bit from a roughness of style and pacing due to this, but Clash is refreshingly free of it, for the most part.

Despite that freer feeling, the beginning of this book does dial back the tension a bit in order to introduce its new characters. I think, in general, Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series suffers greatly from this sort of "dial-it-back-and-reset-the-board" feeling that you get with books such as Clash, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance With Dragons. These are such massive, unwieldy novels which include so many different characters and locales that it must be absurdly difficult for Martin to keep the train propelled on the tracks. Thus we're struck with these jagged sorts of starts and stops as he introduces new players (sometimes over hundreds of pages) to continue forcing the plot along, in addition to bringing in new locales to keep things fresh.

And it certainly remains fresh. This is the third time I've read this book, and I must confess I enjoyed it more this time than either of the first two times I read it. Martin's prose can get awfully schlocky at times (something seemingly all fantasy falls victim to with varying regularity) but somehow this campiness manages to work for me—someone for whom campiness falls flat and alienates, 9 times out of 10.

The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond. Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice.

So there is magic beyond the Wall after all.

Outside of its context, Jon's rumination on a late Autumn morning in the far north reads more than a tad purple and overwrought. But once you've taken this journey with Jon and shared his nerves, his camaraderie, the absence of his siblings... Well, it seems just the right time to hit the reader with a cloud of purple prose as Jon takes a moment and appreciates his surroundings, setting aside his tension, fear, and the realization of the danger he's in. Martin's not regularly given to this sort of attempt at profundity, so when it does happen, it's refreshing. It never feels like he's trying too hard.

With this book, as with others in the series, the characters bear the brunt of the load and carry my enjoyment. Tyrion Lannister's wit is told to us as much as it's shown to us in the first book, but when placed in a position of political power in Clash, it's readily displayed in each chapter. The dialogue between him and the other political figures in this book (Cersei, Varys, Littlefinger, Lancel, Janos, etc.) is superbly enjoyable. Martin paints political maneuvering with a deep enough stroke that it feels more realistic than most fantasy (which is given to an absurdly shallow and limited view of politics and governance that drives me batty), but never does it become so labyrinthine that it fails to still be fun. Martin's penchant for snappy, cinematic dialogue also helps it along greatly:

“Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”
“So power is a mummer’s trick?”
“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
Tyrion smiled. “Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I’d feel sad about it.”
“I will take that as high praise.”

Much of the book includes this kind of politicking, although it's interspersed with various fantastical meanderings that pepper Martin's series and make the books enjoyable to experience from an imaginative standpoint. Jon's rambles north of the wall into the wild lands and Daenerys' experiences in the House of the Undying Ones tickle my mind's eye. But the real star of the book, for me, is undoubtedly the political plays of characters such as Tyrion, along with the military maneuvering and staging of generals Stannis Baratheon and Robb Stark, and how expertly these events tick the tension upwards to the book's (literally) explosive climax.

The closing chapters of the book abandon this character interplay for outright action, and it all feels earned. The tension bursts in such an enjoyable way, and one of the major conflicts of the books is resolved in a way which doesn't feel too clean, nor does any of the culling feel like it's made for shock value alone. Martin's third-person limited structure provides three viewpoint characters for this climactic event, and all feel as if they have a unique voice and perspective of the climactic events. None tread on the others and all keep the action flowing at a perfect pace. I blew through the last 200 pages or so with unexpected alacrity.

Although I'm not a huge fan of fantasy, nor genre fiction in general, I can't help but love this series. It does feature some of the hallmarks of those subgenres, but it's so strongly themed, its characters are so well-realized, its imagery is so compelling, and its dialogue is such a pleasure to read that I can't seem to get enough of them. I'll probably read and re-read these books continuously until I die, and even if the series is never finished, I'll still be nothing but thankful for Martin's work and the hours of enjoyment these books have brought to my life.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry

I was at a college house party once, more than a decade ago. I had just gotten an insignificant job writing about video games for an online publication. It didn't pay much, but I was a broke college student who enjoyed writing and I had been playing video games since before I could read, so it was a good match. I had been discussing this with one of my good friends when an acquaintance butted in. 

He was a friend-of-a-friend type; the kind of person who sits on the periphery of these conversations and, rather than seeming awkward, radiates a haughty, above-it-all air with a shit-eating grin that makes you want to toss a blunt object into their teeth like they're bowling pins.

Let's call him Jake.

Jake was not a tall fellow, but what he lacked in length he made up for in thickness. He had bleached blond spiky hair, embarrassingly poor tattoos, and the kind of beach muscles that would make a Jersey Shore cast member blush. I didn't know him well, but he seemed an affable enough sort when we did make small talk. I don't even remember how we came to know him—probably a friend of one of my girlfriend's friend's boyfriend's.

Jake made his entrance into my periphery and loomed under me. "You're still playing video games!? You gotta stop playing video games, man." He chuckled, subtly imparting to me how ridiculous my hobby was, and how silly it made me look. His comment was timed to perfectly coincide with the end of the conversation that was happening just prior—my friend to whom I was just speaking had already ambled on and was now out of earshot of Jake's comments.

This was nearly 15 years ago, but I can still remember Jake's sneering face in my mind's eye.

I was completely taken aback. Video games and those who play them have never enjoyed a sterling reputation, of course—and that reputation has decreased exponentially during the years since this conversation happened. But Jake's words were an openly made, mocking criticism the likes of which I hadn't heard since I'd been called a nerd in grade school.

At first I didn't respond, just gaped at him like an idiot, which likely confirmed his judgment of me.

"Well, they are paying me," I eventually managed, and left Jake to wallow in his smugness.

I assume that justification meant little to him—someone who wouldn't be caught dead doing such a detestable thing as playing a video game, paid or not—and, to be honest, the justification itself meant almost nothing to me. I'd have gone on playing video games whether I was being paid to or not, simply because I loved them. A few days later, after the embarrassment passed, I thought again about the incident, recoiled, and became internally angry about it. Who is he to judge my hobbies!? That anger eventually dampened, too, and gave way to introspection. Jake's statement left a lingering question in my mind: Why do I play video games? What is it that I enjoy so much about them? Why can I sit down at my computer desk and be so wholly locked into this experience that it would take a monumental sense of responsibility and discipline to move myself away from it? Why, when I think back on certain periods of my life, do I immediately think about which video games I was playing around that time?

And, further: Is this all of this adoration artificial? Maybe they are just a complete waste of time, and I've been tricked into thinking otherwise. Perhaps video games satiate my mind the way cotton candy might fill your stomach when you're hungry—completely lacking in any actual substance, and better replaced by something more substantial. Maybe everyone sees this except me, and I'm being a fool about it.

I am nothing if not a hobbyist, and over the past 15 years I've asked myself these kinds of questions about my hobbies many times:

"Is this worthwhile?" 

"What value does this offer me?"

"Is this enriching my life?"

The process has become what I consider to be a healthy habit with regards to how I spend my free time. In recent years I've begun to develop an answer to that question when I've asked it of my lifelong infatuation with video games.

Video games can be deceptive to those who play them, and even moreso to those who don't. On the surface, it's easy to see why they're so attractive: They look beautiful (especially nowadays), they provide a steady dopamine drip by feeding the player bite-sized rewards for accomplishing menial tasks, and they immerse their players with heaping doses of escapism, allowing them to forget their troubles—sometimes to great fault, as gaming addiction is a very real thing which destroys lives by allowing the player to so effectively ignore their problems while their entire life crumbles around them.

But for me, games go beyond those minor benefits, and their value easily eclipses their pitfalls. My favorite moments in games often come when I feel a completely foreign sense of place; when I'm existing, as another person, in a place so foreign to me that I'd never have thought it up on my own. My senses are assaulted by this notion of otherworldliness and my brain regularly struggles to accept such a novel experience.

I'm on a planet far out into the depths of the Milky Way, staring at twin suns as the wind howls around me.

I'm on horseback in a quiet orchard in a fantasy world, trotting slowly along past a giant windmill.

It's 2029 in Prague, and I'm taking a moment of respite in my apartment as an unsettled city howls curses around me.

So when I think of what actual value it is that video games impart on my life, I'm left ignoring the moment-to-moment satisfaction of leveling up or getting a new piece of gear, and instead focusing on this intense feeling of having been at such a unique place at a certain point in my life. The experience of existing in this reality alone, of adapting to its rules and thinking critically about its events, is a worthwhile endeavor even in a vacuum, but it's profoundly affecting within the context of the current challenges one is faced with in their life; playing a game about human social relationships after a difficult break-up, or a game which examines a struggle you know about personally such as substance abuse. Even something as simple as an open world game which takes place in a city to which you've been.

These places may not exist in reality, and few of them are experiences which you could have in the real world. But these fantastical experiences have bled into my psyche and the challenges they've proposed to my thought processes exist now not only as a memory, but as a part of who I am; a part of the way I think about and affect the real world around me. I've lived other lives, I've spoken with people who do not actually exist. I've considered their problems and how I might impact them. I've enriched my own life experience and thought processes with each new "place" I visit, and I truly believe I've become a more empathetic, considerate person because I have played so many video games.

The Dunwich Horror (1929) by H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is undoubtedly a master of atmospheric writing. His strength is in setting scenes and crafting an appropriate mood with which to manage the experience he's looking for from his readers. The opening paragraph of The Dunwich Horror is a fine example of this skill:

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Beyond that, though, I have to make the striking confession that I think I hate H.P. Lovecraft's work.

Reading Lovecraft's stories are, to me, the horror equivalent of reading a trashy romance paperback on a crowded train. You've got to have significant self-confidence to take undampened pleasure in reading this sort of thing in public. Lovecraft's naming conventions and otherworldly jargon always read undeniably cheesy to me. The actions which take place in the story and his characters' absurdly overdone gravitas in reaction to them always strike me as so unnatural and overly saturated that I find them impossible to take seriously:

"Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...." rang the hideous croaking out of space. "Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...." 

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..."

Perhaps that's part of the charm. I have never been a fan of camp. It often falls deafly on me and I gather no amusement from it whatsoever. I feel a lot of the same vibe shared between Lovecraft's stories and cheesy '80s horror films. So maybe that's what I'm missing here. Either way, the content of these stories and the way in which they are told is not something that appeals to me, and given that I am now several stories into Lovecraft's oeuvre, I expect they will never appeal to me the way they appeal to Lovecraft's fans.

Undoubtedly inspired by far better writers such as Poe, Lovecraft falls into some of the same complaints I have with Poe's work (although I love him, generally); he relies on some of the same woefully overdone dialogue in fruitless attempts to reconstruct the vernacular of the time period which he depicts:

"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front winders. An' then ... an' then...."

I won't mince words here: This is utter garbage. I cannot stand it, and I refuse to read it. Perhaps I'm missing out on key story turns by skipping this stinking trash, but I'd rather stop reading the story than plod through this kind of thing. I level the same complaints towards Poe when he resorts to this crap, and Lovecraft has no excuse because folksy vernacular has already been depicted in a far better manner by writers prior to him from which he ought to have taken inspiration.

I find it more than passing amusing that some works created in the modern day which are undoubtedly inspired by Lovecraft appeal to me far more than the work of the man himself. I think this is a credit to his imagination and the atmospheric quality of his writing, but also affected by his lack of ability as an actual storyteller and his lack of properly managing the tone of his stories. They've never struck me as particularly terrifying, either; this could be due to the fact that he so often leans heavily on fear of the other; that which is foreign to us. This was surely more revolting and disconcerting to one such as Lovecraft, who is often criticized in modern circles for being a racist and a xenophobe. Such an enlightened, open-minded thinker as myself is utterly unaffected by such archaic thinking. Kidding aside; this brand of horror doesn't work for me, although the otherworldliness of his cosmic horror is something I do find enticing. I suspect his aesthetic is strongly responsible for why I gravitate towards Lovecraftian horror, but not Lovecraft's horror.

The more of Lovecraft I read, the less I like him. Which is ironic considering that Lovecraft relies so much on the horror of the unknown, the unknowable, and the other... And his mythology is so much more strange and enticing when you know very little about it.

⭐

Animal Farm (1944) by George Orwell

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly.

As a traditional liberal I'm not above admitting that my enjoyment of this book is carried by a healthy amount of confirmation bias. That admittance aside, I found Orwell's blatantly allegorical and satirical effort impossible to put down.

Animal Farm doesn't overstay its welcome, which is good; its 'gimmick' would have worn itself out before too long had the pagecount been heftier. More than anything, it's thoroughly amusing. The setting and characters are immediately silly and thus disarming, allowing for the later events of the story to be that much more affecting. This is not a book which has any pretension towards profundity; it's not all that deep and doesn't spend much time ruminating on the ideas its lambasting. Rather, it reads angrily; with a thoroughly frustrated air to me. Orwell's distaste for the Soviet Union at a time when his government had been somewhat unperturbed by Stalin's actions is palpable, and reading between Animal Farm's lines in this fashion was an added layer of entertainment for me. Orwell succeeds in transferring his bitter opposition to the grinding, cancerous, malformed wheel of Stalinism and puts together an affecting, cautionary tale on revolution—despite its glossy layer of silly satire. I had myself fully prepared for Orwell's satire and was thus caught off-guard by just how affecting the impact of the story's climax was.

Orwell's ever a master satirist, but, even more deeply, he also regularly succeeds at making the emotional impact of his storytelling resonate with his readers. Animal Farm's tight, pacey narrative and initially disarming silliness which gives way to emotional, affecting storytelling make it worth a read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Game of Thrones (1996) (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read A Game of Thrones yet!

Some random morning, 2010: I wake up on a couch with a splitting headache after about 5 hours of sleep. My mind instantly reverts to my default plan of attack in such situations: 'You are to commence immediately in dumping an obscene amount of coffee down our gullet and finding a bagel by any means necessary'. Aye-aye, brain.

I recall now that my friends and I had hit it hard the night prior and I had been too drunk to drive home. The sun blares with gusto through the front window of their apartment. It's summer-time, or maybe late spring? I don't remember. It doesn't matter.

I drag my feet over to the kitchen to prep the coffee maker when one of my buddies exits his bedroom and shuffles off to the bathroom, looking as shitty as I feel. I hear the toilet flush and he exits a moment later. I spare a longing thought for my own toothbrush, miles away at my own place. My friend's eyes are glued to his phone the whole way over (presumably to a text message—we had very few fancy apps ten years back). He reaches blindly for an upside-down mug. Finally he looks up at me and speaks the first words of the day:

"Hey, have you ever heard of Game of Thrones?" He asks.

"Wharrght!" I barely caught what he said. My brain's going to take a few minutes to warm up, and several hours to get back to functioning at peak capacity. I'm experienced in dealing with this situation and I know not to push the organ too hard, too early.

"New fantasy series HBO is doing. It's in development. My brother is really excited for it, he's obsessed with the books. He keeps texting me news about casting and all this other crap. He won't shut up about it."

I would go on to buy A Game of Thrones shortly after this conversation occurred to see what all the fuss was about. Amazon was already a thing, after all, even back then.

—

I was fortunate enough to read A Game of Thrones prior to the release of its television adaptation. I was able to explore it with no prior notions of what kind of a writer George R.R. Martin was. I didn't expect anybody to die terribly. All I knew was that it was fantasy, and hey, I liked the Lord of the Rings movies, right? So why not give this a shot since it comes so highly recommended?

I think this way of falling into A Song of Ice and Fire is exceedingly rare to the folks approaching this series now since it's discussed in pretty much every avenue of pop culture, be it nightly talk shows or water cooler discussions in the office.

I mean, it really is everywhere. A few years ago I was in Spain, walking along the beach after dinner, and I saw Jon Snow's moody face staring at me (below). 

A random Jon Snow sighting in southern Spain

I pity that so many people will lack the unreal experience of having their expectations completely shattered by this book. It's almost impossible to come into it blind unless you've been living under a rock for the past 8 years.

It's hard to discuss A Game of Thrones in a vacuum without considering how much of a pop culture icon it is. But in strict terms of its craft, I think what's perhaps most impressive about this book is how expertly Martin drip-feeds us his worldbuilding and characters. Not once did I feel that I was overwhelmed with too much information, though this did happen to me in the beginning of A Clash of Kings, which I felt dragged terribly as it introduces new characters and picks up the pieces of the devastating conclusion of A Game of Thrones. But its predecessor suffers nothing like that, which is an astounding feat considering just how much exposition is thrown at us in similar first novels of fantasy series. The world slowly reveals itself to you, becoming more and more enticing along the way. And you grow to like most of these characters immediately, because they feel like real people.

The only archetypes that really exist here are those Martin puts in place specifically to tear down. Sometimes it seems like this book exists as a challenge to the most popular sorts of fantasy that has existed, and, indeed, still exists, like stuff written by Brandon Sanderson, for example. It's as if Martin has taken existing characters from other fantasy stories and placed them in a realistic feudal society. We see at the conclusion of this novel what happens when the upright, uncompromisingly moralistic, ne'er-do-poor Eddard Stark comes face to face with the political machinations of real world feudalism, where absolute power is free to be had by whomever is most adept at grasping for it. I have the distinct memory of reading the scene in which Eddard is executed and simply refusing to believe it actually happened. "No way, no how. Arya didn't actually see him die, right? It had to have been a double or something." I was in such disbelief that he was actually executed. Surely Martin expected his readers to have this reaction, because he dangles right in front of your freaking eyes exactly what would have happened in other books: Cersei states that Eddard will be allowed to take the black and join his bastard son Jon at the wall, presumably to redeem himself at sometime later in the story and set things right again. "What a nice story development! I see where this is going!" But nope, he gets killed. Right there, suddenly, on the whim of one sporadic decision by Joffrey. It's such a wonderfully realistic twist in the story, yet it's devastating and impossible to anticipate.

As a former history undergrad, the plot of ASOIAF reminds me perhaps most of reading actual history, with all its convolutedness, rather than any other fictional genre—even fantasy, the one to which it technically belongs. Eddard's execution created such regret of what could have been, and the later novels in ASOIAF are filled with stuff exactly like it. It's what could have happened after Augustus' death if Germanicus had not died and instead survived to heroically take the purple. It's the knowledge that could have been preserved had the Library of Alexandria not burned to the ground. It's the glory of golden age Baghdad—the height of medicine and education around the globe in the 13th century—had the Mongols not sacked the city, salted its earth, and filled in its irrigation canals. These are the kinds of grand tragedies that exist in history; tragedies that you feel in your gut, tragedies that make you sick to think about, and ASOIAF was the first time I've ever come close to experiencing this kind of visceral regret while reading fiction. It's able to accomplish this mainly with its worldbuilding (which makes the world actually feel like it's thousands of years old) and its phenomenal character writing.

I graduated college in 2007. I did so much reading—mostly of incredibly dry and boring histories—that I spent nearly three years without picking up more than a book or two. I was almost completely burned out on the act of reading itself and preferred to spend my free time playing video games or watching television. Reading A Game of Thrones was thus a bridge to me; a bridge which led me from history to fiction, and, in a more metaphorical sense, the first of many such bridges which led me to inhabiting the person I am today. It made reading "history" fun again, and opened up the entirely new world of fiction to me, which has immutably changed me for the better. Martin reminded me of what is so fantastic about reading fiction by writing characters that feel like real people and subverting the tropes of an entire genre.

I read maybe 3 books in 2009. I read 62 in 2019. I carry either a book or my e-reader everywhere with me. I listen to audiobooks when I drive, shower, or do the dishes. I spend nearly all of my free "me-time" reading. It's become my chief hobby, something I never thought possible after finishing college.

That's what George R.R. Martin did for me, and why this series is so important to me. George R.R. Martin made me a reader again.

—

The apartment my three friends occupied nearly ten years ago is long gone. The building is still there, but that place is no more. Sometimes I still drive past it on my way elsewhere and remember that morning.

Now we're all in our thirties and fondly remember our wild-and-woolly nights out in our early twenties. Two of my friends are married. One has a child. One now lives across the country from us, in Texas. Sometimes a song or a smell hits me with a blast of nostalgia for that time in my life, and sometimes I see Martin's book series on my shelf and get hit with a similar feeling.

We may have gone our separate ways, but it's impossible not to think about them and that time when I reread this series and recall where I first heard of it and how it has changed the way I live on a daily basis. I can only hope future books I read will have some semblance of the impact that this one has had on my life.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐