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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

Romeo and Juliet (1595) by William Shakespeare

Romeo climbs Juliet's balcony in the play's iconic scene

I do have some recollection of reading the famous play Romeo and Juliet in high school, as most Americans do. We even took a field trip to see it performed live. However, like most students of teen age, I paid the great work little respect and thus recall almost none of my previous read, nor the experience of seeing the play itself, and thus was able to experience it again with fresher eyes.

I've always viewed Shakespeare's work as being rather stuffy and impenetrable. Probably this is due to the early modern English language in which his plays are written. Thankfully, I thoroughly destroyed this barrier in the past with a complete reading of the King James Version of the Holy Bible. No work of early modern English will ever intimidate me after completing such a slog as that, and I was able to experience Romeo and Juliet in a far more natural manner than I was probably ever able to while studying it in school.

Shakespeare's actually quite different from my previous view of him. The early pages of Romeo and Juliet left me staggered not from his poetic, creative, beautiful dialogue (although it does feature plenty of that), but with the experience of reading Romeo and Mercutio's sharp, barb-like dialogue between one another and pausing, dumbstruck, with the thought of: "Hold on a second... Was that a dick joke? In Shakespeare!?"

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

Yes, yes it was. It was a dick joke. There are plenty of vagina jokes, too!

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry 

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Surprisingly (at least to me—a Shakespearean neophyte), various clever, bawdy references are peppered throughout.

Reading such dialogue is amusing, mostly due to my previous notion that Shakespeare's work was utterly proper and academic, but also due to the everlasting notion that the generations before ours were always somehow better than us; more polite, more proper, more civilized. And it's nice to be reminded so often while reading literature that that's certainly not the case. That it never was. That even highly educated nobility, decked out in their expensive, colorful livery, were still shamelessly making dick jokes with their pals as they drank at a party.

And so I learned that Romeo and Juliet often reads as a modern romantic comedy. The first half of the play is strikingly casual, entertaining, and humorous. I swept through its pages with relative ease compared to how challenging I used to find his work—I attempted to read Macbeth several years ago and failed inside the first dozen pages. I can only imagine that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have greatly enjoyed such levity.

This kind of light, comic romance would be fully disarming to one who was not already aware of the play's conclusion. My reading of the play undoubtedly suffered at the spoiling of this reveal, as I expect most readers' must be. With hindsight, I came to admire the deftness with which Shakespeare sets up the tragic ending. The play's paciness also helps this along, as it moves quickly from scene to scene and wastes little time with unnecessary diversion.



As I read, I grew to respect Shakespeare not as some high-minded artist, but rather as an exceptional entertainer. Of course, some of this is lost on us modern day readers, as there's a bit of a time barrier. But I still enjoyed Romeo and Juliet far more than I expected to. If I had to level a criticism at the play, it would probably fall more on the medium with which I experienced it rather than any of the text itself. Reading a play in written form is always going to fall short of the full experience of seeing it live, and I found myself craving some exposition to help illustrate the scene for me; something which I would not have felt had I been witnessing the stage production rather than reading it.

Regardless; a worthwhile experience. And I look forward to reading more Shakespeare soon.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck

Everyone who reads classic literature as an adult has picked up a book they were forced to read as a teenager and had a completely different experience the second time around. I had just this experience with Of Mice and Men, and I've had it before with certain other books that are part of the typical American educational curriculum—my recent re-read of The Great Gatsby provided a similar experience.

I'm not an educator, nor am I particularly well-versed in raising children. But I still can't help but criticize the choice to make this book such a cornerstone of teenage literary education because there seems to be so little for children and teenagers to relate to within its pages. The gentle giant trope could be one, sure. But what felt most poignant for me was Steinbeck's clear reference to the American dream, and his constant depiction of how hopeless the lives and futures of these men (and the woman) are.

American adults are constantly enraptured by the future. We're thinking about retirement, house maintenance, debt management. Marriage, children. We're thinking about our five-year-plan, or relocating to a more affordable or more luxurious area. We're considering career changes. I'd go as far as to say this kind of thinking is a universal aspect of daily American life. And these characters are no different in this regard. They dream big, but they're their own worst enemies. They constantly plan to grow a stake of money with which to buy land, but they end up blowing it on whoring and gambling, or being struck by misfortune, and their best-laid plans (of mice and men OHHH, HE SAID IT! HE SAID THE TITLE!) going awry. This is something intensely, viscerally understood and feared by adults, and a thought I believe is probably hopelessly lost on children and teenagers who've never had to provide for themselves and who've never been dominated by their dreams for—and worries about—the future. It's why I believe I garnered nothing from Of Mice and Men when I first read it as a 13-year-old, but the story ended up resonating so strongly with me as a 35-year-old.

We're constantly confronted with the other face of these characters' dreams; their doubts and learned cynicism. Candy—the elderly, maimed white man who's forced to allow his dog to be euthanized—is a figure who has almost nothing left to hope for, but still allows himself to believe in the dream of owning and working his own land. Crooks, the beaten-down black man, even taps into this hope briefly, before being cruelly cowed once again by Curley's wife in a blunt exhibit of the racial power hierarchy that was excruciating to read. These characters are facing lives and tribulations far more extreme than yours truly, and probably more severe than most of the folks with access to the internet reading this write-up. But modern readers are still readily able to relate to them. We've all sat at our desk at work, dreaming about quitting our job and picking up and moving to Europe, or thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, or volunteering in Antarctica—only to be swiftly removed of this possibility once our student loan payments and credit card bills come due later in the month.

John Steinbeck

The story carries on in this manner nearly throughout; relatable and all the more poignant and tragic for it. Candy's dog and a character at the end of the story fail in their tasks and are euthanized, no longer able to provide for themselves and dealt with in a manner meant to end further suffering. George is tragically forced to destroy the symbol and the constant reminder of the existence of all of his hopes and dreams. The characters who experience frustration when denied the means to reach their dreams often lash out at one-another in helplessness; Curley's wife is unnecessarily cruel to Crooks, as Crooks was unnecessarily cruel to Lenny beforehand. Curley is frustrated with his existence and finds life unfulfilling and lashes out at anyone unlucky enough to be near him. These people damage each other constantly and their frustrations lead to in-fighting when cooperation makes so much more sense, but they simply can't help venting their dissatisfaction. Their cyclical lives continue on like Ouroboros, perpetuating their misery, still retaining a grain of hope but ultimately being discarded once their usefulness is gone. Crooks and Candy themselves both rally against this inevitable obsolescence—Candy is aged and maimed but insists on his ability to work, Crooks' body is failing him but he stubbornly continues to cling to what little he has. The book asks us what these people have to live for. They'll never escape these circumstances, but hope is nevertheless present, inextinguishable. 

It's an excellent, tight novella and there are few wasted pages. Steinbeck succeeds in depicting contemporary slang in a manner far better than some of his peers alongside whom he stands in the pantheon of American literature. Perhaps the only bone I have to pick with the story is the jarring, out-of-character visions Lenny seems to have in the closing pages. I found them so irrational and unnatural as to wonder how they made it into the text without being edited out. Lennie is not a person who's capable even of moment-to-moment problem-solving or planning; how is he suddenly able to roleplay a conversation with George, or his long-dead Aunt? It felt a bit too melodramatic and indulgent to me, and I think the conclusion of the book plays out far better without its inclusion.

Regardless, this is a book well-worth reading. It says a lot about American life even today, and it says a lot about the human condition: How unceasingly we dare to dream, how frustrating life can be when those dreams are dashed, and how we're all-too-ready to take that frustration out on each other when our hopes turn to ash and we're forced back to the drawing board. Contrary to the tragic arc of this book, it actually left me hopeful—hopeful for the future, and inspired not to give up on my grand plans and dreams, most of which will likely never come to fruition but remain important nonetheless.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) by Raymond Carver

One day a thousand years from now, whoever is living on this planet will unearth some of Carver's short stories from some old, burned out bookshop they've just excavated. They'll get to work meticulously translating it and they'll learn everything they need to know about latter-half 20th century American culture just from his work. Raymond Carver is our Geoffrey Chaucer and his short stories are our Canterbury Tales. He reminds me of Ernest Hemingway in that his work is almost always more than the sum of its parts. His prose is simple, dirty, and direct. But what he says with it is profound in his muted way. Reading him feels like brushing your hand against some dirty slate, or chucking an old, broken cinder block into a refuse pile. His short fiction is the holey work glove of 20th century American literature. And I mean that in the best possible way. If Hemingway had lived forever, perhaps Raymond Carver is what the injuries and trials of later life would have crushed him into.

Carver manages to capture everything about daily American ennui with such sparseness and subtlety; our insecurities and failures, our hopes and dreams, our faded love for one-another and our boredom and lack of inspiration. These stories are no more than vignettes into everyday working class life, but they're often so poignant and relatable for that. Carver's characters feel so real, sad, detestable, and pitiable. Mostly insecure, unsuccessful, cigarette-ash-covered and beer-soaked middle-aged men, they feel like your creepy uncle. Everybody has the unfortunate privilege of knowing somebody like these characters. So many of them have this putrid, embarrassing artery of insecurity running through every fiber of their being and polluting everything they do. You can trace it from their actions back down to their core like branches to the trunk of a tree. Their insecurity damages everything around them.

In the story They're Not Your Husband, Earl's insecurity tears his wife down—seemingly a hard-working, earnest woman, at least from what we're shown. It's painful for us to witness, and even harsher when considering how real it feels, despite being fiction. It begs us to question Earl, himself: Is this a man who's down on his luck, as it would seem? Or is this perhaps a man whose own shallow, passive aggressive actions have led to his unemployment? Maybe it's so affecting because we can all see traces of ourselves, at our worst, in Carver's characters. Like looking into a filthy mirror. Carver makes sure to get out of the way and let his characters do the talking with simplistic, direct prose and dialogue. And his stories are more affecting for it.

I discovered him via an interest in Haruki Murakami's work and hearing that Carver's short fiction was a strong influence on him, and never is this clearer than in the story Are You A Doctor? A phone call from a strange woman, a chance encounter peppered with romanticism... And someone making tea.

These sorts of chance encounters and the mystery that accompanies them are now a thing of the past, and the mystery that makes them provocative is somewhat lost on those of us living in the modern world, in which any name can be googled in ten seconds on a smartphone. A phone call from a stranger will never again be as mysterious as it once was, but Carver's story helps those raised in the era of smartphones understand how dangerous and compelling such a meeting once was.

Another story titled Nobody Said Anything features an expertly crafted narrative voice of your typical hormone-flooded teenage boy—a horny, lonely creature playing hooky from school and searching for something that would more entertainingly occupy his worthless time. The kid's loneliness goes from typical to pitiable to depressing over the short course of the narrative. The closing lines of the story manage to flip our feeling of him completely from mild disgust to pity.

Civilization's continuing consumption and desolation of nature seemed to be a theme running through the undercurrent of the story. The airport encroaches on the creek the boy fishes to such an extent that the fish are bloated and unrecognizable, its waters are ground down to a slimy trickle when they used to be surging and flush with healthy fish. The boys' fishing represents this as well, as they gleefully and methodically pursue their warped prey in order to kill and dismember it in a fashion that renders their actions more savage than you'd expect. It feels like Tom Sawyer written in the dark, postmodern hopelessness of Cormac McCarthy rather than the satirical gallows humor of Mark Twain.

What's in Alaska features more humor than most of the others, which was a nice change of pace. Many of Carver's stories are so bleak and grey that it helps to have a palate cleanser once in a while. I also enjoyed the layers to this one, as it's heavily hinted that one of the characters is cheating on another with a third.
My overall favorite is probably Jerry and Molly and Sam which sees a man decide to abandon the family dog, eventually ending in his experiencing an epiphany. The story is so heartrending and the change in the narrator is so genuine and real that finishing it left me reeling. I had to set the book down and take a break afterwards just to think about it, and it's amazing to me that a story clocking in at fewer than 20 pages can have such an effect.

There's always a lot packed in to the few pages Carver dedicates to each story. I never feel good after reading him, but that's not really the point. I don't think 'fun' is the right word to describe his stories, but there is joy in reading them for me—perhaps because I'm in a better place in my life now but can still easily recognize poorer times passed in which I felt bled through with the same negative emotions and existential anxiety that these characters seem to, and I can subconsciously, optimistically urge them onward towards more hopeful, carefree lifestyles once they become more aged. So reading them is cathartic and—unexpectedly—generates optimism within me.

The value of good literature is that it imparts life experience onto us. It allows us to live and feel life situations we'd never experience ourselves. And although some of these early stories are a bit too subtle for their own good, Carver's still excellent at drawing emotion from the reader with so little. Even past death he continues to create a love for the medium of the short story within his readers regardless of demographics and interests. He's certainly done so for me over the past year.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Ligeia (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe entrances us with a similar story to Morella (which I loved), but to lesser effect. His typical overwriting is present and has a strong effect on our tally of the narrator's sanity (or lack thereof). Portions of the short story are startling beautiful despite their nearly purple nature, and the climax—although good—did not affect me as much as Morella's did.

Still good stuff from Poe.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Little Hatred (2019) (The First Law, #8) by Joe Abercrombie

I dislike fantasy. But Joe Abercrombie does two things far better than most fantasy writers:

1) He's very funny. His penchant for gallows humor is nearly unmatched, and the quality of his comedy stands out even more when compared to the humorless, stodgy lot that are contemporary writers of fantasy.

2) He writes incredible characters. In a sub-genre defined by inch-deep cardboard cut-outs given life by unextinguished, unrealized teenage power-fantasies that read as if they're written by 12-year old boys, Abercrombie's deep, interesting, human characters from various, unique demographics are a joy to read.

Neither of these qualities are any less than you'd expect from his newest work, but he does add something I haven't yet seen from him: He builds an incredibly interesting world.

Abercrombie's "Circle of the World" setting has always felt simply like it existed so that he could populate it with interesting characters. It was always rather pedestrian as far as fantasy worlds go—it's not poorly constructed, it's just sort of by-the-book. There are guys with swords here, other guys with swords there, there are some barbarians, there's some magic, etc. Nothing too extraordinary. But with A Little Hatred he's taken this opportunity to progress the technology level of his world into an Industrial Revolution, and the skill and education with which he's done so has made all the difference.

The nobility of Adua reeks of the heights of the Holy Roman Empire, the politicking of which is legendary. Toss in a bit of Dickensian poverty and an uppity, socialistic peasantry torn straight from the French Revolution and you've got the setting for A Little Hatred. The setting became the chief character for me, something that hasn't happened in any of his books thus far. That's not to say that the human characters are lacking, either. They're solid, interesting, and witty, with their own quirks and faults to keep things honest. The easy violence of newcomer Gunnar Broad is particularly my taste, and Savine dan Glokta's gleeful lack of a social conscience made her chapters endlessly entertaining when she begins to experience the events of the story.

Abercrombie surprised me with his quality several times through my reading of A Little Hatred.

Early on, a revolt is presented as a typically socialist Utopian action, with all the rah-rah propagandist one-liners you'd expect. I rolled my eyes at this portion of the plot, wondering if Abercrombie's personal politics had polluted his storytelling—Until it turned out like nearly every other socialist revolution in history has; with the replacement of the old regime (if you will) with starving, rioting, chaos, and eventually a new regime altogether too familiar to what was just toppled. He had deftly set me up and knocked me down, perhaps expecting all the while that I'd have a reaction like I did. Looking back, I admit that I probably should have seen such a development coming, but I'd rather credit Abercrombie's skill as a writer than admit my own gullibility.

Another occurrence was towards the end, featuring a character being an on-the-nose, close-minded nationalistic racist. His depiction as such grew a little too anachronistic and cliche for my tastes, until our perspective changes and another character accurately appraises the first as simply a little too 'provincial' and casually racist.

Abercrombie demonstrates his education and self-awareness in these instances, and it's quite refreshing. His characters are nuanced and they feel like real people because of that nuance. Abercrombie regularly demonstrates the expertise with what motivates human beings that great writers consistently possess, and the world-turning events which take place in his fiction feel like real history, demonstrating an education in such matters that writers of fantasy frequently lack. He doesn't give in to the masturbatory, 'this-is-what-the-world-should-be-like' tendencies that lesser fantasy writers do, and thus doesn't suffer the same penalties to your suspension of disbelief that other fantasy novels do. I've seen readers paint him as a relentless cynic, but you know what they say: 'A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist' and all that.

This book does suffer a bit from first-episode-of-a-trilogy-syndrome. I was so enthralled by Valbeck's social strife that I found myself struggling to care about the conflict in the North beyond revisiting its interesting characters—some of whom we're already well acquainted with from the prior books in the First Law series. It all feels a bit too sprawling, but I would be surprised if this sprawl isn't justified in the events of later books. I guess I've just got to wait and trust for now, something I have no problem doing considering the way this book comes together and ends on a superb note.

I once read someone say that Haruki Murakami 'feels like he writes books just for me'. That's how I feel about Abercrombie. His cynicism, humor, and characters always seem to hit the bulls-eye of what I'm looking for in modern fiction. If you're familiar with Abercrombie then you know what you're going to get: It's pulpy, campy, morbidly hilarious, and oddly relateable. The former two are found—mostly unintentionally—in nearly every fantasy novel penned today. But the latter two are what make Abercrombie special, and his surprisingly improved ability to craft an intriguing, genuine setting has provided a new angle to chew on.

I'm definitely looking forward to next book.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He stood and stared into the distance for a long while; he knew this spot particularly well. While attending university it often happened — a hundred times, perhaps, usually on his way home — that he would pause at precisely this spot, look intently at this truly magnificent panorama and every time be almost amazed by the obscure, irresolvable impression it made on him. An inexplicable chill came over him as he gazed at this magnificence; this gorgeous scene was filled for him by some dumb, deaf spirit... He marvelled every time at this sombre, mysterious impression and, distrusting himself, put off any attempt to explain it. Now, all of a sudden, those old questions of his, that old bewilderment, came back to him sharply, and it was no accident, he felt, that they'd come back now. The simple fact that he'd stopped at the very same spot as before seemed outlandish and bizarre, as if he really had imagined that now he could think the same old thoughts as before, take an interest in the same old subjects and scenes that had interested him... such a short while ago. He almost found it funny, yet his chest felt so tight it hurt. In the depths, down below, somewhere just visible beneath his feet, this old past appeared to him in its entirety, those old thoughts, old problems, old subjects, old impressions, and this whole panorama, and he himself, and everything, everything... It was as if he were flying off somewhere, higher and higher, and everything was vanishing before his eyes... Making an involuntary movement with his hand, he suddenly sensed the twenty-copeck piece in his fist. He unclenched his hand, stared hard at the coin, drew back his arm and hurled the coin into the water; then he turned round and set off home. It felt as if he'd taken a pair of scissors and cut himself off from everyone and everything, there and then.

I once read someone say somewhere that behind the grim and grit of one of the most famous examples of literary realism lies a surprisingly traditional moralist in Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

It must have been so jarring for the 19th century denizens of St. Petersburg to read such a gripping, low, accurate portrayal of their city. Crime and Punishment, for me, hit its hardest through its suffocating, stuffy, and sloppy depictions of the city and its cramped apartments and public houses. Contrary to the cliche'd Russian setting, this novel takes place at the height of Summer. A hundred years before air conditioning would be invented left one of the world's most famously freezing countries a stifling mire, and Dostoyevsky chooses to show us some of its poorest inhabitants. They're riddled with illness, they drink too much, their clothing is falling to tatters. They live in glorified closets and sleep on cots and old couches. I felt myself there with them throughout the book thanks to Dostoyevsky's fantastic scene-setting.

His characters are equal to the quality the setting provides. Raskolnikov is a more fleshed-out, named version of the same man who narrates Notes from Underground . He's deeply flawed and realistically motivated. Dostoyevsky seems to have such a connection to this young, haughty, disillusioned type of person that I assume it could only come from deep within himself. Perhaps Raskolnikov is a young Dostoyevsky; maybe he was changed so significantly by his time in the gulag labor camps that he looked back on his former self in order to craft this novel.

I was surprised to read several reviews praising Raskolnikov, however. He's a fantastic protagonist; a Byronic anti-hero, and he's a joy to read and to examine. But I've constantly heard that this is a novel that makes you 'root for the bad guy', or pull for Raskolnikov to 'win'. I never felt that. Although he's undoubtedly interesting to read, I was almost immediately turned off by his inner monologue. Raskolnikov is a whiny, entitled pissant . His arrogance is unmatched by any other character in the entire novel. He's a young man with nothing; he's poor and subsists on money given to him by others. He's created nothing, he does nothing of value, yet he thinks of himself as a great genius. No reason is given to us for his failure to succeed, despite his having several advantages over the characters who surround him. Marmeladov is crippled with alcoholism, for example. His wife is ill and forced to care for their children. Their daughter is penniless and forced into prostitution as a result. These are characters dealing with severe adversity. What about Raskolnikov? Well, he was a student. He thinks himself clever and intelligent, so he must have been a good student. His education was paid for by his mother and sister, so he doesn't have to worry about that. But when we meet him, he's dropped out, and is not seeking work. Why? His internal monologue rambles on, often suggesting that he's just too good for it all. He's Napoleon, reborn! A great man for a new generation! Yet none of his actions have suggested this. He is a clever talker at times, and a methodical thinker. But none of this is put into any sort of practical success, and I despised him for his seemingly undeserved high opinion of himself. Never once did I root for him to succeed in his titular crime and get away with it. Instead I found myself attached mostly to Porfiry Petrovich and Dunya, the two most intelligent, wily, and likable and respectable characters in the entire thing, and hoping that Raskolnikov would be taken down a peg.

Aside from the evocative descriptions of St. Petersburg in the summer, perhaps my favorite scene in the entire novel is that of the crime itself and the riveting manner in which the criminal escapes the scene of it. I found myself glued to the pages as I read, entranced by Dostoyevsky's masterful weaving of the episode. But although the cat-and-mouse scenes that follow between Raskolnikov and Porfiry Petrovich are similarly suspenseful, I found this narrative too frequently broken up by lengthy discussions of philosophy between the characters. The footnotes present in my Penguin Deluxe edition were extremely helpful in this regard, as it appears that Dostoyevsky is using his characters as mouthpieces in order to debunk some contemporary socioeconomic theories. Perhaps this might be interesting to those reading this novel who might have an interest in such theories, and it certainly must have been a novel inclusion when it was published in its time, but I felt that these portions overstayed their welcome at times and broke up the pace of the main narrative in too jagged and clumsy a manner.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) by Haruki Murakami

I've read a lot of Murakami lately so I I took my time with this one.

Murakami seems to have begun to come into his own (or at least discovered some new inspiration) after the publishing of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle . Both this and Wind-Up Bird were deeper, more fruitful reads than the book published immediately prior, South of the Border, West of the Sun —Which I would not recommend.

Sputnik Sweetheart has a more intriguing premise than most of Murakami's novels, which start off relatively uninspired and then careen between different, nonsensical-yet-intriguing vignettes. It also pleasingly abandons some of the more common tropes he had been relying on up until this point that have begun to grow tired to somebody like me who has read most of his stuff. There are no lost cats and no wells (though they're mentioned to cheesy effect to those of us who have read Murakami before), though jazz does make an appearance. Sumire is probably his best, most 'whole' female character yet, and his exploration of her sexuality feels genuine rather than the perverted musings of a horny old man (a common criticism of Murakami that I've never found accurate), and he avoids any cloying sentiment that often gets caught up in love-triangle-literature. It's also paced far better than South of the Border—which was a novel clocking in at a scant 200-pages that felt like it was twice that length due to its meandering melodrama and the monotonous time we were forced to spend in the protagonist's less-than-pleasing brainspace.

This paciness was helped by Murakami's strong scenario writing. Being stranded on the top of a stopped Ferris Wheel, for example, is such a viscerally terrifying experience, much like the well of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. That said, you can still see the same tropes redressed in different clothing; though the Ferris Wheel incident is affecting, it serves little difference in the story as the well did in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. So I do still sometimes have a difficult time putting up with Murakami's formulaic tendencies, but this book is well-executed enough that it's still worth reading.

Sputnik Sweetheart is as underrated a Murakami book as Dance Dance Dance , except you don't have to read three books before Sputnik for it to have its full impact, like you do with Dance since it's book #4 in a series.

I'm looking forward to getting into some of Murakami's most famous works—Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84—as my chronological read of Murakami's oeuvre continues.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Hedge Knight (1998) (The Tales of Dunk and Egg, #1) by George R.R. Martin

I've written both ostentatiously and at length about my love for Martin's Ice and Fire world. While The Hedge Knight digs into some of Martin's preferred themes regarding honor and character, his novellas generally have a far different tone than the main series.

Dunk is a more genuine, naive, and straightforward character than Martin typically writes. He's blessed with prodigious size and strength, making his earnest, do-gooder character something that he can get away with (just barely) in the story. That he does gives the story a far more whimsical, light-hearted tone (again—generally) when compared to some of the occurrences in both A Song of Ice and Fire and Fire & Blood, though it can still be quite gritty in its depiction of cruelty and violence.

One of Martin's favorite themes—and undeniably a core theme to ASOIAF—is the use of legally and socially permissible violence by those in power, against those without power. It shows up constantly in the main series and it's the main plot-mover in The Hedge Knight. Dunk endears himself to us not by being intelligent or particularly skilled, and not even by trying to do the right thing—but simply by doing it, without thinking. That it's not a conscious decision is both what makes it endearing and what makes it interesting. Dunk does not choose to be protect the weak after considering the potentially drastic consequences of doing so, he just does, because that's the kind of person he is.

As to be expected by its short length and 'novella' moniker, this is very much narrow-scope Martin. There's no real worldbuilding, and though his characterization is as enticing as ever, it takes more of a backseat to the two leads—Neither of whom serve more than a perfunctory role in moving things forward. The real meat of this lean serving is the conflict it follows, and the strength of the action writing at its conclusion. I don't typically think of Martin as a great writer of action sequences or thrilling narratives (at least, not any longer, since I've read A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons), but The Hedge Knight's brevity and action makes it a great treat for those with an interesting in the setting, and features enough depth to place it alongside the main series' more weighty and literary offerings. Highly recommended novella.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Fire & Blood (2018) (A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R.R. Martin

I so badly wanted to hate this book.

I was so angry when GRRM announced its publishing. Like many other ASOIAF fans, I viewed it as the reason that the eagerly anticipated The Winds of Winter had been pushed so far back from its expected publishing date of 2015-2016. I vowed not to purchase Fire & Blood, instead wishing to wait for Winds in order to 'punish' Martin for his insolence in choosing to finish the first leg of this offshoot in lieu of completing the next chapter of his magnum opus. So I didn't purchase this on its release date—the first time I've done this with an ASOIAF book since I began reading the series nearly a decade ago.

The moment of truth came in Budapest's Franz List International Airport just last month. I had been sick for nearly two weeks with that pervasive, annoying traveler's cold that seems to make you just sick enough that you can't enjoy anything, but not so sick that you're confined to your bed. So you stay ill for weeks at a time, never resting enough to get better, and feeling like garbage the entire time. I still had a number of hours until my flight left, but I had finished the book I brought on the trip with me and had no other means of killing time aside from browsing social media on my phone like some sort of a plebeian. So I wandered over to one of the stores near my gate and perused their selection of books, which—luckily enough for me, being the monoglot American that I am—were all in English. And, staring me right in the face, right in front of the stack, was an English language version of Martin's Fire & Blood, Volume 1. At the time my head felt as if it might detach and float away, and my faculties were dulled by a persistent sore throat. So my steadfast commitment to boycotting this Targaryen tome weakened, and I purchased it and decided to see if it was worth the time.

As I read my opinion of it went from, "this is all just shit from The World of Ice and Fire, what the hell?", to "okay, this is a pretty inspired portrait of a (fictional) enlightened despot", to being brought nearly to tears by the so-called Death of the Dragons.

God damn it, George. You got me again. I wish you'd just go away. And by that, I mean, please defy all the odds and keep writing these books for another 30+ years.

Perhaps it's best to first discuss what the book is not. Gone is the limited third person narrative that Martin uses to such great effect in the mainline ASOIAF series. Fire & Blood feels like George had all of these ideas for storytelling in his head, continuously building over the years. He'd sprinkle them here and there throughout the mainline ASOIAF series, of course—but eventually, his mind reached critical mass, and he just had to unload them. First to Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson (the authors of the previous world book, The World of Ice and Fire), and then onto the page himself with this book.

So these are very much summarized versions of various events Martin has dreamt up, though he does allow for a flourish of style or dialogue here and there. And that might put some folks off. But it also allows Martin to forget about some of the shackles the limited third person perspective places upon him; he can now jump from cherry-to-cherry, neglecting the rest of the sundae, and give us the best bits. While the book loses the atmospheric quality of the mainline series, it gains the punch of a quickly paced, impactful narrative and loses the weakness that is the glacial pacing of both A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons.

Fire & Blood starts off with its weakest portion—the conquest of Aegon and his sisters—but grows more and more enticing from there. The characters and reign of Jaehaerys and Alysanne, and, perhaps most affecting, the civil war in the dance of the dragons, are superbly affecting and quite entertaining to read. Martin proves his storytelling is as strong as ever, despite the criticisms he has received for his most recent entries in A Song of Ice and Fire and the flak he's caught by publishing this book prior to The Winds of Winter.

The dance of the dragons, in particular, is one of the most singularly affecting events of the entire series. Martin spends little time focused on the great dragons of the Targaryen dynasty, preferring to tell us mostly of the Targaryens themselves. Despite this, the dragons come to occupy a place as treasured pets, or beasts of war, rather than the unreal, magical monsters that they are. They are viewed more as 'parts of the family' rather than simply tools of war; children are raised alongside them, occupying the same cradle as the eggs, and love them as they would a family dog that has been assigned to be their companion for most of their lives.

I'm an animal lover, and viewing the dragons in this light created an attachment I hadn't realized had developed until I read through the dance of the dragons—or, as Martin tells us in the text, what some historians prefer to refer to as "the dying of the dragons". The dance of the dragons wasn't just a massive blow to Targaryen power within Westeros, but a massive blow to Westerosi civilization itself, the catastrophic loss of such total war is put into terms that we thus feel personally and emotionally with passages such as this one:

Silverwing had taken to the sky as the carnage began, circling the battlefield for hours, soaring on the hot winds rising from the fires below. Only after dark did she descend, to land beside her slain cousins. Later, singers would tell of how she thrice lifted Vermithor's wing with her nose, as if to make him fly again.

Martin's strong anti-war and anti-feudalist themes from the main series continue to occupy the backbone of his storytelling. If you're looking for something smart, rather than just something fantastical, you can find that here, too. It's convenient that the chapters involving the reign of Jaehaerys and Alysanne—the quintessential enlightened monarchs, who rule (mostly) successfully, and justly—are followed by those whose incompetence eventually led to the devastating civil war that destroyed most of the dynasty's power. As we're reminded of, time and time again, near-absolute power is a fickle thing, as capable of creating boom as it is bust. And the war which follows is, like nearly all wars fought within Martin's fiction, a net negative. Little is gained from the conflict, but much prosperity is lost, as is often the case with war in the real world.

So I suppose the real question is whether or not you'll view this change in storytelling style as a real hurdle. It's far less easy to lose yourself in this book when compared to the reading experience of the main series. It's basically a summarized version of an entire book series that Martin rightly realized he'd never be able to write. To me, it's no less worthwhile even considering the change of format—But I'm a massive fan of this world, this series, and Martin's storytelling and themes. So if you feel similarly about A Song of Ice and Fire, and you don't feel too put off by the fact that Fire & Blood reads like a summarized series, then you should definitely give it a shot. I cracked into it expecting another dry tome involving some excellent worldbuilding, but found it packed full of intriguing characters and storytelling, despite its format falling a bit short of that of the main series.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1964) (George Smiley, #3) by John le Carré

John le Carré does such a good job at keeping things light, concrete, and distinctly unromantic. His realism stands in stark contrast to the more famous spies such as Bond and Bourne, and it's something I appreciate. I much prefer the more subtle mind-gamey style of spy fiction over the frenetic, action-packed Bourne or the suave-overload style Bond.

The plot twists and turns and feels natural considering the writer's own prior career in counterintelligence. His workmanlike prose gets the job done and stays out of the way, and I plowed through the book very quickly due to its readability. This was an airplane-read for me and I read it so quickly that I had to pick up something else from the airport bookshop in Budapest. So it's a pageturner for sure. I don't read much spy fiction (yet), but I'd recommend this to those looking to get into the subgenre—the same manner in which it was recommended to me.

The only real criticism I'd level at Spy was that I found the relationship at the heart of the novel to feel a bit contrived and unearned, but perhaps that's a reflection of the protagonist's desperation. In general, the book focuses more on the plot than its characters, which is probably something necessary for the subgenre of spy fiction, though not something that is totally to my personal taste. I did quite enjoy reading Leamas, though. There's something very appealing about the slovenly-yet-competent protagonist. I suppose that's why mad scientists are so entertaining to read, too.

The climactic scenes of the novel are easily its best, and what makes everything worthwhile. Fantastic ending, too.

I look forward to reading more of le Carré's work in the future.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Dance With Dragons (2011) (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5) by George R.R. Martin

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read any A Song of Ice and Fire novels yet!

Re-reading both this and A Feast For Crows has been a far different experience than my first time through.

The first time I read A Dance With Dragons was back after its release in 2011. As someone who first read the series in 2010, this is the first A Song of Ice and Fire novel I had the pleasure of reading upon release. I had pretty much the same reaction as everybody else back then; a muffled "meh". Dance introduced some really interesting characters that will strongly impact the books to come, and it has some excellent subplots that it starts up and resolves in just this book, but it doesn't do a whole lot to actually move the plot forward. Rather, it's setting the stage for the coming books and the supposed climax that we may or may not ever read penned from Martin's hand. 

Martin's clearly grown as a writer since 1996, so it goes as no surprise that A Dance With Dragons is probably his best written book if you're strictly looking at his prose. The voice of these characters is as strong as ever, too. But it does have some huge weakness. Its pace as a novel sucks; it meanders a lot. If you love Martin's world as much I do, then that's not much of a problem, because for me learning more about this world is, in itself, entertaining. But I've heard plenty of criticism of its languid plot and I can definitely understand them. However I think Martin's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't at this point, because these middle two books chew on a ton of really important material that is probably going to be necessary to introduce the audience to before the closing books drop, and losing this stuff would make for simpler—and probably poorer—resolutions in later novels.

I've begun to look at A Song of Ice and Fire (hereafter referred to by its popular acronym "ASOIAF") not so much as a series of novels, but as one grand epic that has to be clumsily split into novels to allow it to be printed. A Dance With Dragons, in its currently published form, is basically an unfinished novel by Martin's own admission:

My original intent was to end DANCE with the two big battles, yes… intercutting between the two of them, each told through several different points of view. And both battles were partially written. But NOT COMPLETE, which became the issue. Also, maybe even more to the point, not yet good enough in my estimation. Battles are bloody hard, and I wanted these to be great.

The book had already been scheduled for publication, I had blown through several previous deadlines, and we simply ran out of time. Initially I decided to push one battle back to WINDS to focus on the other, but that did not work either, and neither of the sequences came together the way I wanted them to, so ultimately the choice came down to moving both of the battles to WINDS or cancelling the planned publication and pushing back DANCE. And given how far ahead publishers schedule their releases, the pushback would not have been a few days or a few weeks, but at least half a year, and maybe longer.

Also, DANCE was already very long, and the battles would have made it substantially longer. That could also have affected the pricing.

Did we make the right decision? I don’t know, even to this day. I understand your frustration, and some days I do feel the same way. But back then I had the fans howling after DANCE the same way they are howling after WINDS now, and my publishers really really did not want to push back again. And DANCE, even without the battles, was extremely well received — yes, there were dissenters, I know that, readers who did not like the book as well as the earlier volumes, but out in the wider world, DANCE had extremely strong sales, rode the bestseller lists for a long long time. It was a Hugo finalist, won the Locus Award for best fantasy of the year, and was named by TIME magazine as the book of the year. So even without the battles, it worked pretty well… but part of me still wonders if we made the right choice.

These things are not easy. Those who think they are have obviously never written anything, or had to deal with the realities of publishing.

So we see that he did not originally want to publish Dance as-is, because it lacks a climax, but his hand was forced by both its length and his publishers. I believe this series has outgrown the novel format, which is interesting considering that ASOIAF brought Martin from screenwriting back to bookwriting because it was too vast to put on screen. Now it's grown even too vast for hardcover. I've heard it suggested in the past that an episodic format might work better for ASOIAF, too, but I reject this due to the nature of how Martin writes these books. Since he doesn't outline and writes off the top of his noggin, he's often rewriting material he's already finished to allow for a specific plot point he thinks of later in the process of constructing a novel. Once a chapter in an episodic serial is published, the ship has sailed—it's no longer rewritable. And I think part of what makes ASOIAF so dense and fruitful to read and reread is that Martin does spend so much time rewriting and refining his ideas in this manner. And part of what helps his characters to feel so much like real people is that the plot is driven by them rather than the other way around. Martin doesn't come up with character motivations to suit his outline, he crafts his narrative around what his characters—real, fully formed people in his mind—would do when presented with a certain situation. This is also why he has so much trouble getting them where they need to be in order to move the narrative forward—something that is clearly an issue in Dance since we have a dozen different characters all heading to Meereen, and Martin clearly struggles with keeping the logistics realistic (something the television adaptation Game of Thrones chucked completely out the window since it proved too taxing for their writers to manage) and the sequencing of the characters' arrivals in line with what he wanted to occur in the plot.

So this book was clearly born of difficult labor. Martin has stated as much and you can tell just by reading it. Aside from complaints about its pace and the total lack of a climax, though, Martin's character writing and the themes he explores are as strong as they have ever been. The themes Martin explores and the tone in which he does it is mostly why I'm infatuated with these novels. That interest and my taste for slower, more contemplative media also reflects why I don't care much for the show—which is far more campy, more casual with its violence, more anachronistic with its dialogue, and more bombastic with its action sequences. (I've been regularly accused of snobbery due to this, but I view it simply as a matter of taste: I've always preferred political dramas and over action flicks, wordy cRPGs over platformers, or le Carre over Fleming. This is because I'm a boring sweatpants-wearing nerd, not because I'm an intelligent, superior academic.)

Both Feast and Dance suffer greatly from middle-book-syndrome; they don't really go anywhere since they're busy picking up the pieces of the first books and building steam for the next books, but each contains a lot of smaller, self-contained stories that are extremely worthwhile. In Feast, Brienne's journeys lead her to deal with the common people of Westeros, the minor lords, and the dirt poor, drunken hedge knights—classes of people who are often never mentioned in epic fantasy unless they tie specifically to the protagonist's origins, or they are the protagonist. Spending time in these settings doesn't really further the plot, but it lets Martin examine the effect of war on the lives of the little people and make some important statements about it. This, again, differs from epic fantasy: The War of the Five Kings wasn't a glorious cause hellbent on avenging the fallen hero Ned Stark, it was a collapse of political discourse that led to a chaotic conflict which has now killed and ruined the lives of thousands. It was a net negative, a horrible thing that should have been prevented at all costs but was allowed to continue by the misuse of power to the detriment of all. Another fruitful detour featured in Feast was Jaime's dirty work in wrapping up the war, in which we get to see the uncelebrated after-actions of military clean-up against small pockets of continuing resistance that generally gets left out of epic fantasy as well. War is a messy thing, and GRRM doesn't spare us from its realities in order to make it more glorious and sterile like nearly all other epic fantasy did before he began writing these novels.

Dance spends a lot of time with these meandering subplots, too. Feast and the first two-thirds of Dance are very similar books in this regard, but I find Feast to be more atmospheric and immersive; a book with a more relaxed pace that lets you more passively take in the sights and sounds. Dance, on the other hand, is more sprawling. It lacks the tight focus of Feast—a book wholly concerned with the devastation of war in Westeros and the political mobilization of those remaining who still have strength—instead bringing us from the Bolton-ruled North, through the sea, through Essos, and to the Eastern city of Meereen, which is ruled by Daenerys, herself the target of several characters who seek to prop her up as a political bastion behind which to stand against the chaos present in Westeros—of which we saw plenty in Feast. If Dance's weakness is its languid plot that spends too much time examining the difficulty of ruling, its strength, then, is that it has much more rewarding and emotionally resonant subplots than Feast does.



Final Warning! Heavy spoilers involving several plot arcs with Dance follow:

Quentyn Martell and the deconstruction of the grand adventure

Quentyn Martell's story is entirely contained within A Dance With Dragons. We know his father and sister already, but for the first time we meet him and his friends. His arc is begun and resolved entirely within Dance, and initially it seemed quite pointless to me. But there's a poignant, subversive story within this arc that I find incredibly important to what Martin's trying to say with this entire series. What happens when the likable hero's journey goes wrong? What happens when his friends die, and he fails? How does he deal with this? Can a hero still be heroic through abject failure? Quentyn gains nothing in this quest—he goes east, his friends all die, he dies, and nothing changes. Are bravery and strength of spirit in the absence of anything else still worthwhile? You've already subconsciously posited your answer to this by how worthwhile you think reading Quentyn's arc was: If you find his story pointless, then things like honor and kindness are completely meaningless in and of themselves and only matter when they lead to success and accomplishment. But Quentyn is so earnest, likable, and naive, that it's impossible for me not to root for him. Reading through a second time and knowing all along where this was headed was sad and depressing, and it's supposed to be. Quentyn dreads his task all along, but has long since resolved that he will either succeed or die. And he does. It's poetic and brilliant and it's a microcosm of the statement Martin has been making all along: The weak, the powerless, and the guileless do not succeed except by exceedingly rare dumb luck or, more commonly, as tools in the vast machinations of their betters. And that this is even true when they're kind and well-meaning.

Jon Connington provides a nice foil for Tyrion

At this point Tyrion's a far different character than the Tyrion of the television series. He's been beaten down and his previously cynical-but-good persona has been warped by the events of past novels. He's lost everything; he's murdered his own father and his lover and he's unforgivably estranged from his brother. He sinks completely into alcoholism and he no longer seems to care about positively affecting the world around him. He rapes a prostitute in one of the most difficult chapters to read in the entire novel. Tyrion has always flirted with the role of Byronic anti-hero, but he finally slips fully into it in Dance. It's painful to read about for the first half of the book, as the lovable, capable underdog has been beaten into cruelty, and most people don't like it for that reason. But this is a common turn for somebody who has seen what he's seen. How else would he react to the events of the previous books? He's been competent and seen success in his given tasks, he's protected innocents, he was exceptionally noble to Sansa when he had complete power over her. In his mind, he's done everything right and he should be a hero, yet still nobody trusts him and the common people view him as an outright villain. The system has failed him, his family has failed him, so he finally breaks and gives in, because why not? Nothing he does will ever change peoples' minds. He may as well become the villain they see him as. So he slips fully into his cynicism.

Theon Greyjoy and the ultimate redemption arc

Theon's arc dives deeper into some of Martin's core themes; namely the misuse of power and violence, and the increasing chaos caused by Westeros' recent political instability. It's also, surprisingly, one of the few heroic arcs in Dance. When I first read this book I never thought we'd see Theon again. When I realized Reek was Theon, I never thought that a redemption arc was what Martin had planned for him. I should have known after how deftly Martin has written Jaime that no matter how detestable their previous actions, no character is beyond redemption. I found myself rooting hard for the broken, insane Theon before the end of the book. His arc is probably my favorite in Dance. Jeyne Poole, occupying the role of faux-Arya, is perhaps the only character who has it worse than Theon in this book. Theon is presumably the only one aside from Roose who knows her true identity, yet his risks something worse than his own death to save her. Martin shows us here that honor and goodness can come from the most unlikely sources; once an arrogant, cruel member of the nobility, Theon now gives up everything to save this one meaningless girl who doesn't matter whatsoever, at the risk of severe suffering, simply because it's the right thing to do.

One of Dance's new themes that a lot of readers seem to have slept on is religion and its impact on society and government in times of crisis. Most folks don't recall this now but one of the harshest general criticisms of ASOIAF pre-Dance was that Martin tended to shove religion—a huge, central portion of many peoples' lives in the medieval period, and a core aspect of the type of feudalistic society that Martin is putting under a microscope—to the rear so he could explore more modern themes such as honor, gender politics, the use of violence, and political power. And when he did deal with religion, it always seemed to feel plastic and lacked the studious examination that he dedicated to other aspects of life within feudalism. He remedies this weakness in Dance with a core portion of the King's Landing plot line dealing with religious fervor that feels genuine and will surely have a huge impact in later books.

It's been eight years since the publication of A Dance With Dragons. Waiting for The Winds of Winter has become an infamous meme; book readers' version of gamers' collective wait for Half-Life 3 (it's never coming out, guys; give it up). Half of ASOIAF's previously hardcore fanbase lies dormant, ready to read but no longer really caring about the series like they did in 2011, when internet message boards were awash with new discussions and new theories seemingly by the day. Yet here I still am, reading and rereading these books every few years.

I'm more positive than most, and I do strongly believe that Winds will eventually release, and that it will be the best book in the series since A Storm of Swords . But if Martin should pass away tomorrow, should we never see another book in this series, it would still be my single favorite piece of media ever. The world, the themes Martin chooses to explore, the tone in which he does it, and the amazing characters that drive it all are all untouched by any other piece of media. It's so enjoyable to me, it aligns so perfectly with my interests and with my own personal worldview, that I can't help but to love every bit of it. I'm nothing but thankful that it exists in its current form, and even if we never see another novel by Martin, I'm content to have read what's been published.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

“I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.”

“Foes and false friends are all around me, Lord Davos. They infest my city like roaches, and at night I feel them crawling over me.” The fat man’s fingers coiled into a fist, and all his chins trembled. “My son Wendel came to the Twins a guest. He ate Lord Walder’s bread and salt, and hung his sword upon the wall to feast with his friends. And they murdered him. Murdered, I say, and may the Freys choke upon their fables. I drink with Jared, jape with Symond, promise Rhaegar the hand of my own beloved granddaughter…but never think that means I have forgotten. The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer’s farce is almost done. My son is home.”

“Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.”

“Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths.”

“So young," said Wyman Manderly, "Though mayhaps this was a blessing. Had he lived he would've grown up to be a Frey.”

“Give me priests who are fat and corrupt and cynical,(...) the sort who like to sit on soft satin cushions, nibble sweetmeats, and diddle little boys. It's the ones who believe in gods who make the trouble. (Tyrion)”

“A fair bargain leaves both sides unhappy.”

“When treating with liars, even an honest man must lie.”

“The most insidious thing about bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it.”

“Proud men might shout that they would sooner die free than live as slaves, but pride was cheap. When the steel struck the flint, such men were rare as dragon's teeth; elsewise the world would not have been so full of slaves. There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave, the dwarf reflected. Their choice may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.”

“There was an agelessness about him, a stillness; on Roose Bolton's face, rage and joy looked much the same.”

“Every battle is a gamble, Snow. The man who does nothing also takes a risk.”

“Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth's wing, and past, present, and future are one.”

“Up in the hills we say that autumn kisses you, but winter fucks you hard.”

“Many good men have been bad kings, Maester Aemon used to say, and some bad men have been good kings.”