Category Archives: fiction

READING REPORT: January 23, 2015

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If I were a kid today, I’d be diagnosed with ADD in a heartbeat. I rarely read one book straight through. However, I read a lot, and that means I switching from one book to the next–reading a chapter at a time. I do try to read no more than one book of a given type/genre at a time–often unsuccessfully, as you’ll see. With this in mind, I thought I’d experiment with a weekly post on what I’ve been reading that week.

Book-Review-The-Martian

Fiction: The novel that I’m currently reading is Andy Weir’s The Martian. This book is gripping. It’s considered to be one of the best–if not the best–science fiction works of 2014, although it was self-published in 2011. This is a great example of a book that couldn’t get published despite being spectacular, and which will now make a bazillion dollars. It also explains how a 2014 novel is set to have a big budget movie adaptation come out in late 2015. This book is like the movie Gravity set on Mars, except that it’s smarter.  It taps into that visceral fear of what it would be like to die alone in space–not in a flash but with time to know you are going to die. An unlikely, but plausible sounding, set of circumstances result in astronaut Mark Watney being left for dead on the surface of Mars. But, of course, he’s not dead. Watney has to be creative to figure out how to live for four years in hopes that the next manned Mars mission will go forward as planned. It’s a roller coaster ride between him thinking he will surely die and him coming up with clever solutions. If you are into science, it’s particularly intriguing. I’m about 20% of the way through.

 

Foreign Fiction: I’ve also continued to read a Hungarian novel called Quarantine in the Grand Hotel by Jenő Rejtő. This is a silly (in a good way) locked-door murder mystery. I picked it up in Hungary over the holidays, and will probably finish it in the next week or so. (I’m about 2/3rds of the way through, and it’s only a 160 page book.) It’s short, highly readable, and humorous.

I also read a chapter from The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu. A number of authors have picked up the mantle of Sherlock Holmes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  (Not to mention TV shows and movies.) This book is published in India by a Tibetan author who imagines Sherlock Holmes traveled to India and Tibet after he was believed to have been killed (along with Professor Moriarty) in Switzerland. (Going over the falls as depicted in the second Sherlock Holmes movie featuring Robert Downey Jr.) There are three parts to the book: India, Tibet, and Beyond. I’m in the last couple chapters of the first part, most of which takes place in Bombay.

 

Short Stories: I’m about 85% of the way through 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. This is a collection of short fiction of horror / dark suspense. It features authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Eric Van Lustbader, and David Morrell.  All of the  works are short stories except for a novella/short novel by William Peter Batty. The novella is the last piece, and I’ve just started part II of it.

999_Horror&Suspense

 

Martial Arts: I just finished Dr. Anthony Catanese’s The Medical Care of the Judoka, but I posted a review yesterday so I won’t get into that book. My next martial arts book will be The Pyjama Game by Mark Law, but I haven’t yet begun it.

 

Yoga: I’ve been reading two books related to yoga this week. I just finished Chapter 2 of Coulter’s Anatomy of Hatha Yoga. This chapter dealt with the anatomy and physiology of breathing. This book is an excellent resource for yoga teachers, but it’s pretty dense–which may explain why I’m only on Chapter 3. Not only does the chapter give general information on respiration, it also provides information specific to various yogic breathing methods such as abdominal, yogic, thoracic, paradoxical, and diaphragmatic.

The second yoga book I’m reading is Singleton’s Yoga Body, which is a history of yoga postural practice (asana practice). This book presents a controversial thesis, which is that postural practice (asana) wasn’t really a part of mainstream yoga until quite recently, and that it’s as much a product of what happened in the Western world in the early 20th century as it is a result of Indian yogic traditions–if not more. Having finished the first three chapters (about 30% through), I’m not sure whether I buy his argument or not. He has some documentary evidence on his side, but I know there is also a proclivity to equate the current era in which everybody documents laundry day with the past in which many people were much more secretive. It’s also often not true that the most vocal are not the mainstream. He may be correct, but he has yet to wow me. (Part of his argument is people like Max Muller and HP Blavatsky found hatha yoga [the style which most emphasizes posture] to be the domain of conmen and beggars.)


AnatomyHathaYoga_CoulterYogaBody_Singleton

 

Miscellaneous Nonfiction: I’ve got about 70 more pages to finish in a book called How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom. As the title implies, this book is about the science of why people get pleasure from various things from food to sex to freaky sex to art to music, etc. The primary thesis is that there are hidden essences that are the source of pleasure. The chapter I just finished talked about an interesting study in which violinist extraordinaire Joshua Bell went into a subway station and played his $3.5million violin, and barely netted $30–even though there were people passing him who’d paid $200 to hear him in his tuxedo at a concert hall later that evening. The chapter also talked about art forgeries, and how some art is valuable when it’s associated with a famous painter and worthless when it’s a forgery by a presumably equally skilled forger (I say equally skilled because these individuals have been able to pass their work off to experts as a painting by a famous artist. In some cases, they weren’t forgeries but rather originals in the style of the famous artist and submitted as an unknown work found in a basement somewhere.)

HowPleasureWorks

 

I also finished the letter “B” in the book The Painted Word  by Phil Cousineau. This book is organized like a dictionary, except that it only contains certain English language words that the author finds particularly intriguing, and it gives background on usage and how the meanings have migrated. If you love language, you’ll find this book much less painfully boring than I have made it sound.

Painted Word

 

That completes the books I’ve been reading over the past week. I did purchase two books this week, but they’re far down the queue to be read. One is the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentleman by Alan Moore, and the other is Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.

BOOK REVIEW: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

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NeverwhereNeverwhere by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Neverwhere taps into a reader’s imagination and the fantasy that beyond closed doors and locked grates, beyond the prying eyes of common men, lies something magical—not just the mundane sewers and conduits our rational mind tells us exist there. This magical world is “London Below,” and–to a lesser extent–rooftop London. It’s a world that exists below the workaday London that we know. It’s a London of angels and cutthroats, witches and warriors. It’s a London trapped in time, but unconstrained by the laws of physics or men as we know them.

The lead character is Richard Mayhew, a perfectly normal resident of London Above. He has a fine—if boring—job in the business world, and a fiancé isn’t right for him, but who he believes is close enough for an imperfect world by virtue of her being pretty, smart, and capable.

Mayhew is living an ordinary and comfortable life until he and his girlfriend come across an injured young woman on the street. While his fiancé, Jessica, steps over the girl because the couple are on their way to meet Jessica’s VIP boss, Richard refuses to leave the girl. The injured girl is a resident of London Below, and had collapsed to the sidewalk after escaping from the two London Below master assassins who killed her family. It turns out the girl, Door, is from a family whose magical gift is the ability to open doors—even doors that are locked, sealed, or that no one even recognizes the existence of. As no good deed goes unpunished, Richard’s assistance of Door pulls him into the world of London Below, and he soon finds that he’s almost invisible to the residents of London Above and that he’s been forgotten by Jessica, his friends, and his coworkers.

The rest of the book is a hero’s quest in which Door is trying to discover who ordered the assassination of her family and why, and Richard is trying to find out whether (and, if so, how) he can get back his life in London Above. Because the fates of Richard and Door are intertwined, they travel together along with a bodyguard named Hunter and a Marquis / conman in the debt of Door’s father named the Marquis de Carabas.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s highly readable and the reader will be drawn to the fate of the characters. It has that page-turner quality. I’d highly recommend this book for anyone who reads fantasy / speculative fiction–or who doesn’t but is willing to give it a try.

Neil Gaiman is, as always, the master storyteller. When the story calls for humor, it is genuinely funny. When it’s time to be scary, it creates shivers. The storytelling was good enough that I was willing to overlook an ending that—in less capable hands—would have felt flat and too easy.

I didn’t realize that Neverwhere was based on a BBC miniseries. In other words, for a change the book is based on the movie rather than the other way round. However, the book does concisely but vividly portray setting—a task that one might imagine being easier having gone in this developmental direction. And, of course, setting is extremely important in this book. The distinct feel of London Below, London Above, and Rooftop London must be conveyed.

Here is a link to a piece of said BBC miniseries:

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BOOK REVIEW: Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero

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Tears in RainTears in Rain by Rosa Montero

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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The title of this book, Tears in Rain will be instantly recognizable to sci-fi fans as a reference to the Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) monologue at the end of the movie Blade Runner. For those who aren’t familiar, Roy Batty is an android who is about to die as the result of a preset lifespan established in his programming, and he’s reflecting on all those unique experiences that he’s had that will be forever lost with his demise—as tears in rain.

When I picked up this book, I thought it would exist in the Blade Runner universe. It does not. However, it exists in a universe that shares several common features with the world of Blade Runner, and—in fact—it gives a nod to the film as a prescient historic work of fiction. What Montero’s novel has in common with the Ridley Scott film is a world in which there are both humans and androids that have surpassed the uncanny valley—i.e. they are generally indistinguishable from humans (if they want to be.) Furthermore, these androids (also called replicants) have a short and predictable lifespan–though it’s presented as a mysterious flaw rather than intentional programming. Further, there is a degree of tension between humans and replicants (reps.) The book also shares the movie’s film noir feel. The book’s lead character, Bruna Husky is a private dick–if you will—and a replicatant, and she is investigating a series of murders by replicants gone haywire.

The focal point of the book is something not extensively addressed in Blade Runner or that film’s point of origin, the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and that is the need to build memories into these androids so that they can function like humans. Reps discover at some point that all their childhood memories—good and bad—are fake, and this is a point of consternation for Husky. It is the corruption of the memories that leads the replicants to kill. That fact is established almost from the novel’s beginning. What isn’t clear is who is doing it and why, and book follows Husky through her investigation of these questions.

For the most part, I found the book to be readable. It’s a translation from the original, which was written in Spanish. It didn’t have that rare page-turning aura that made me have to find out what would happen next, but it was a good, solid science fiction work. The characters are—as one might expect from my “film noir” comment—overwhelmingly gruff and terse and / or broken people. Not that the unlikable nature of the characters is responsible for the lack of intensity of interest in what will happen to them. I recently read an article about unlikable characters, and it pointed out (correctly in my view) that Nick and Amy Dunne of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl are among the most detestable characters of recent literature, and yet that is a book one can’t put down. It’s difficult but not impossible to build intense interest with such characters.

Interspersed throughout the book are a few multi-page information dumps in the form of reports to an archivist who is a secondary character in the book–and who probably only exists to justify these info dumps. While the dumps aren’t excessive, neither do I think they are necessary. I don’t think there was much information in them that was necessary to the storyline, and what was could have been communicated more smoothly.

Part of Montero’s problem is that by tying her work’s title and important background details to Blade Runner, it becomes almost impossible to not compare her novel to either Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I might have given this work another star if I wasn’t thinking about how it was less visceral than the movie and less clever than Dick’s book. (Without the info dumps or the comparison it would have been a 4-star for me.)

This is a worthwhile read for sci-fi fans.

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BOOK REVIEW: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

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ShantaramShantaram by Gregory David Roberts

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Shantaram is a journey through the life of a convict on the lam, a slum dweller, a prisoner in a crowded Indian jail, a de facto combat medic in the Soviet-Afghan War, and a Bombay gangster. The book is a novel, but mixes in autobiographical elements—at least in broad brush strokes. The author, Gregory David Roberts, was—as with his lead character–an escaped convict who fled his homeland of Australia to find anonymity among the Bombay (now Mumbai) masses. Roberts had taken up armed robbery of banks and institutions to support a heroine habit. However, it’s not clear to what degree the details described in the book echo reality. Roberts is adamant that the other characters in the book are completely fictional, but at least some members of this cast were recognizable as real people—some of whom disagree with the accounting of events in the book.

Most of the book is set in Bombay in the 1980s, and for many the book serves as portrait of the good, the bad, and the ugly of that city. The book picks up with the lead character’s arrival in Bombay, where the gregarious convict soon makes equally vibrant friends. There’s very little backstory, except for one chapter that details the protagonist’s escape from prison. There are occasional mentions of his heroin addiction and crimes peppered throughout the book—often delivered in doleful or apologetic moments. Also, he occasionally mentions the family that is missing in Australia—particularly a daughter—usually when the close nature of Indian familial relationships remind him of what he’s missing. This vague background makes sense as this was supposed to be book two in a quartet. Another book is supposed to be coming out called The Mountain Shadow, that I suspect would be the third book of this quartet.

The book excels at creating characters that are multidimensional in the extreme, but who one still finds engaging. The protagonist and several major characters should be unbelievable, given the degree to which they mix virtue and vice, cynicism and idealism. However, maybe they reflect human nature more than we’d like to admit.

Consider the protagonist. He is called “Shantaram” by the family of his best friend in Bombay. Shantaram means “man of peace,” and that’s supposedly what those characters saw in him, but he’s also a man of violence—by his own admission. He’s stabbed, beaten, and shot at other people, and continues to do so. It’s not just the lead character who is like this. It’s the same for his love interest, his gangster friends, his Mujahedeen friends, and his fellow prisoners. Many of them are anti-heroes, and others vacillate between hero and villain. “Doing the wrong thing for the right reason,” is a recurring theme throughout the book.

It should be noted that the anti-hero characters are also the source of loathing for those who hate the book—and there are those who hate it. It’s not just the frequent and raw violence from the “man of God’s peace,” but how the book glorifies gangsters—at least some gangsters.

There was one feature of the book that made this acceptable to me, and that’s that the character knows he’s flawed. As with any veiled autobiographical book, there’s probably some dancing events around to make the characters look more reasonable and likable than they really were. However, Shantaram does admit his mistakes and flaws. One can see how an element of self-loathing plays into these people’s behavior. The virtuous half of Shantaram can be seen as a desire for redemption.

One of the best encapsulations of his self-loathing is when Shantaram gets a promotion in the Bombay mafia, and he tries to recruit a couple of his friends from the slum. He is shocked to find that they would rather stay slum-dwellers who eke out an existence than to make good money breaking the law—even if only as document couriers (the documents being fake passports and the like.) [To be honest but non-PC, if you think Roberts glorifies gangsters, you should see how he glorifies slum-dwellers.] Shantaram also envies a man who refuses assistance to get his sentence reduced after the virtuous slum-dweller killed a horrible person in the heat of passion. In both of these cases, he has a “who must I be?” moment. Maybe that’s why we believe that this ex-junkie mobster would set up a free clinic in the slum or help his friends without question, he’s in a constant search for redemption. It could be said that the engine of this book is the search for redemption, but it’s a Promethean task because Shantaram keeps accruing karmic penalties in his tight-rope walk between good and evil—or maybe a damaged moral compass.

The book weighs in at almost a thousand pages, but it does a good job of keeping one reading. There many exhilarating and tragic events to keep one turning pages such as a fight against a cholera outbreak in the slum, torture in a Bombay prison, taking fire in the mountains of Afghanistan, the deaths of close friends, and fighting turf wars between factions of the Bombay mafia. However, the glue that binds all those climactic points together is the tension created by the various relationships from the expat community to the slums to the Mumbai mob.

Love it or loathe it, Shantaram is a powerful book. I define “powerful” as attracting love and hate at the extreme. This isn’t a book one feels indifferent about. I’d recommend it for a general audience.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Strain, Vol. 1 by David Lapham et. al.

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The Strain Volume 1The Strain Volume 1 by David Lapham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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I sometimes wonder what Bram Stoker would think about the fact that his work spurred an entire industry of copy-cats. Everybody thinks that they can make an interesting and novel contribution to this vampiric genre. In very few cases, see: Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, they are correct. However, even though most of these works don’t take us into uncharted territory, they can still be entertaining. In fact, some of the versions that stay true to the concept seem more entertaining than others that moved into new territory but are patently stupid. I’m speaking, of course, of Twilight and other vampire-as-romance books that feed a widespread malady of the age afflicting teenage girls and, sadly, middle-aged women. I think The Strain, Volume 1 makes for an interesting and entertaining modern-day vampire story, without being particularly brilliant or groundbreaking.

The Strain, Volume 1 is the first installment of a graphic novel adaptation of the novel written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The Introduction states that the graphic novel isn’t meant to precisely mirror del Toro and Hogan’s prose novel. I haven’t read the del Toro / Hogan book, but the synopsis indicates that at least the beginning and the characters are largely the same. I can’t comment as to how much the two works differ in detail, and whether the authors of the first book emphasized the difference so as to encourage readers to pick up both books (instead of cannibalizing each other), versus because the works are truly substantively different.

The inciting incident, apparently for the novel as well as the comic, occurs when a commercial jet liner lands in New York, coming to a stop and going out of contact with the tower. It turns out that all but three of the individuals on the plane are dead.

The graphic novel weaves together the story from two perspectives. First, the lead in the story is Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, a Center for Disease Control (CDC) employee who heads a rapid response team. As circumstances somehow indicate that this event involves a biological or toxic substance—though they have no ability to see into the plane, Goodweather’s team is called to investigate. (How they concluded with such high certainty that it was a substance in CDC’s bailiwick and not smoke inhalation or a terrorist hijacking is beyond me. But the CDC team enters on the heels of SWAT, and with operational control.) However, it’s a graphic novel with limited page constraints, so I didn’t grade too harshly on this particular type of credulity stretcher.

Second, the graphic novel begins with a vignette from the point of view of Abraham Setrakian who is a holocaust survivor and former Vampire hunter. Setrakian knows what is going on from his experience in the old world. It’s this odd couple pairing of an old man who knows an unbelievable truth and a scientist who doesn’t believe in the supernatural that makes this work interesting. The latter anchors the work in the world as we know it, but the former adds an element of mystery and charm. These mixed atmospherics are where this work really excels. The two men end up teaming up to fight a threat that will spread with unchecked fury unless they do something about it.

Unlike the hunky Vampires of Twilight fame, the vampires in Lapham’s work are meant to be as repulsive as possible. They have six-foot tongues with stingers by which they take their blood meals, and the giant slobbery maws necessary to accommodate such an appendage. Instead of having a new twist on the Vampire story, this work attempts to create value added in part by putting the horror back into Vampires in a big way (also, through skillful atmospherics.)

It should also be noted that this isn’t a work for young kids. That should go without saying, I know. Freak-show parents who reason that it’s only violence, and who have no problem with their child seeing someone take a shotgun blast to the chest, but who’ll write a death threat to networks, publishers, or congressmen if said shotgun blast exposes a nipple should be forewarned that the work has a short but sexually graphic section in it—in addition to all the stakings and proboscis stabbings.

This was an entertaining enough horror-genre take on the Vampire. Scientists may find it a bit ridiculous that their comic book counterparts go about their jobs sticking their hands in unknown substances found at the site of the mysterious deaths of almost 200 people. However, despite some credulity challenges, the book creates an interesting atmosphere for a vampire story.

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BOOK REVIEW: VALIS by Philip K. Dick

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VALIS (VALIS Trilogy, #1)VALIS by Philip K. Dick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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VALIS is the first book in a final—unfinished–trilogy of Philip K. Dick. The other two books of the trilogy were to be The Divine Invasion (finished) and an unfinished book that would have been entitled The Owl in Daylight. Some (notably people who want to sell books at any cost) will claim that The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is the last novel of this trilogy. It’s true that “Transmigration” was Dick’s last complete book and that it shares a domain at the nexus of religion and science fiction with the VALIS trilogy, but it wasn’t intended to be part of the trilogy.

“Trippy” might be the best word to describe VALIS. The narrator is a writer named Phil, who we know from details like the mention of past titles is really the book’s author, Philip K. Dick. The lead character is a man named Horselover Fat. If one is reading carefully, one learns early that Horselover Fat and Phil are one in the same—although we don’t learn until late in the novel that Philip means “fond of horses” in Greek and Dick means “fat” in German. For most of the novel Phil speaks of Horselover Fat as though he was an entirely separate person, and even describes times when the two were said to be in two different places (Horselover goes on a global search for the new messiah, while Phil seemingly stays home.) There’s a point late in the novel in which Phil is “cured,” and his multi-personality delusion disappears.

It’s hard to concisely describe what the book is about because it’s so strange and ranging. One can easily vacillate between thinking it’s brilliant and that it’s gobbledygook. Horselover Fat is in search of a messiah, and he thinks he can simultaneously see the world as it is and as it was in Roman times. He has visions that he comes to believe were laser transmitted into his brain. He is writing a rambling exegesis that features throughout the book in random order as seems “relevant.”

Horselover has friends that are in their own ways both less and more crazy than he—not including Phil who is actually one in the same and, therefore, is equally insane. His big break comes when one of these friends, Kevin, introduces him to a surrealist film that seems completely incomprehensible, but—given their laser beamed “inside knowledge”—they’re able to discern clues in what seems like nonsense. This leads them to rock star and actress, respectively, Eric and Linda Lampton. (While I was under the impression that this was a thinly veiled pseudonym for Eric Clapton, it was apparently a more sophisticated pseudonym for David Bowie.) It turns out that the Lamptons are even crazier than Horselover / Phil, but—nonetheless–they do have the messiah with them in the form of an immaculately conceived two-year old girl named Sophia. I won’t get into what happens next as I don’t want to give away too much.

The ending is not strong, but that’s the nature of writing in trilogies (or multi-book sequences more generally.)

If you are wondering about the title, VALIS is the name of the surrealist film that leads Horselover and his folks to the Lamptons (who were involved with the film along with an electronic musician who is supposedly supposed to represent Brian Eno.) In said fictional film the acronym stands for “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” and it’s an artificial intelligence and / or god.

If you like Philip K. Dick for his clever and clear science fiction story arcs, you may like this work but you probably won’t find it to be Dick at his best. If you like Philip K. Dick for taking you on a walk inside the mind of a drug-addled and bat-shit crazy genius, you’ll find this to be one of his best works.

I found it to be an intriguing read and would recommend it for lovers of the strange.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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The AlchemistThe Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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This is a short and simple book. Its premise can be summed up as “follow your dreams and all will work out.” It’s about a shepherd boy from Andalusia in southern Spain who yearns to travel. He sells his flock and sets out to do just that. Over the course of the book, he crosses North Africa from Gibraltar to the pyramids of Egypt and back. Along the way he faces many setbacks and barriers, but his willingness to adopt a positive attitude and roll up his sleeves and get to work allows him to overcome these obstacles. As he travels, mysterious guides and mentors–most notably the title-roled Alchemist–show up along the way to induce him to keep going rather than giving up.

As with The Coroner’s Lunch, which I reviewed a couple of reviews back, there’s a supernatural component to this book that seems superfluous. First, the supernatural element doesn’t add much to the story. Second, to my mind, if you are trying to sell the notion that you can make your dreams come true (in this self-helpy sort of way), having your character live in a world of magic detracts from that message. The take away for the reader may be, “Sure, the shepherd boy could do it, he lives in a world in which people can turn lead into gold. In my world, bound by laws of thermodynamics and whatnot, things are not so simple.”

You will note that my middling rating is anomalous. Having skimmed through reviews of this book, I found they were overwhelmingly divided between 5 star and 1 star reviews. It’s rare for one to see the same book being cast both in the best and worst book role by various readers. However, that seems to be the case for this book. Some people adore this book and consider it life-changing. Others think it’s oversimplified tripe for granola-munching potheads and/or six-year olds. I suspect that Coelho is quite pleased. I know—as a writer—if you can’t get someone to love your book, you want them to despise it. Mediocrity doesn’t put one in good stead for building readership. Hate is a passionate response; it means the book struck some kind of chord. Clunkers are remembered just like perfect melodies; it’s the so-so performances that vanish into the background—or the bargain bin.

Unlike the lovers and haters, I found this book to be just alright. It presents some good ideas, but not novel ideas, and it does so in a clear but not brilliant way. It wouldn’t hurt to read it as it’s very short and highly readable.

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BOOK REVIEW: Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

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Make Room! Make Room!Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Knowing that this book was the basis of the movie Soylent Green, I expected a very different book. While I haven’t seen the movie Soylent Green, I–like everybody not living under a rock–knew that the movie’s big twist was that “Soylent green is people!” Meaning, society has unwittingly been led into cannibalism.

I wouldn’t so much categorize Make Room! Make Room! as dystopian science fiction as I would a detective story that happens to take place in a Malthusian dystopia. (For those unfamiliar with the work of Thomas Malthus, he predicted a massive crash resulting from the fact that human population in his day [18-19th century] was growing much faster than food production and resource discovery. Some dismiss Malthus as a doom-and-gloomer who was unable to foresee that great technological breakthroughs would make it possible for humanity to support its growing numbers. Others, like Harry Harrison, have maintained that it’s merely a matter of time before humanity outstrips its resources and Malthus’s prediction is vindicated.)

While the story is about a detective investigating the death of a wealthy businessman/criminal and said officer’s love affair with the deceased man’s girl, Malthus’s idea sets the tone of this novel. Written in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! describes the world of 1999 as one in which food and drinking water are in scarce supply. Harrison predicted the population would then be 7 billion. He was off a bit. The population in 1999 was closer to 6 billion. While we have presently reached 7+billion, we aren’t surviving off SOYbeans and LENTils (SOY-LENT, get it) for protein.

It’s probably good that the story is about crime and romance, because when it becomes too focused on the Malthusian dystopia—rather than letting it play in the background and give the story a visceral edge—the book can be a bit preachy. This is best exemplified by the brief diatribes of Sol, the protagonist’s roommate and the character that occasionally drags us out of this fictional story and into a lecture on the dangers of unchecked population growth. Such brief lectures might have been well worthwhile if the author (and Malthus) had been correct, but they read a bit alarmist in the wake of both men’s overreaction (or incorrect timelines?) Readers with strong feelings on the subject of birth control may find that issue positively or negatively impacts one’s perception of the book depending upon one’s stance on the issue, but most will find it to be just an another issue that dates the work.

If this had just been about the 1999 Malthusian dystopia, it might be so dated as to be unreadable today. However, the story is more timeless than that—if with an inescapable retro feel.

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BOOK REVIEW: Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy by Bradley Sands

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Sorry I Ruined Your OrgySorry I Ruined Your Orgy by Bradley Sands

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Contrary to the title, this isn’t an etiquette primer on how to make amends for a poor performance at a friend’s sexual soiree. It’s a collection of absurdist flash fiction that takes its name from a its introductory story in which a man shows up to an orgy wearing a bear costume and proceeds to behave badly.

Most of these stories are under a page long and few are longer than three pages. The stories don’t make sense, and are not intended to. (If they do make sense, the author has failed.) Instead, they are designed to subvert expectations to the maximum extent possible. Subverted expectations being the foundation of humor, there will be chuckles. However, it’s not just humor. It’s about defying one’s ability to judge what’s around the next corner by resisting any temptation to observe socio-cultural conventions about what could possibly and properly come next. Like spoken word acts, these stories are meant to invoke a response in the reader by surprises of language—often jarring surprises—more than by way of meaning.

If you are the type who doesn’t take words too seriously and take to absurdity like it’s a Zen koan, you might enjoy this brief work for the tickling it gives one’s mind. If you’re the type who takes words very seriously and are prone to get bent out of shape by “inappropriate” or loose word use, you will hate it and should avoid the trauma of reading it.

I’ll elaborate on my last statement. Irreverence, impiety, and a proclivity for the shocking are a few of the characteristics that go hand-in-hand with subverting expectations and conventions. Because of this, there’s a fair amount of profanity and jarring concepts included in the mix. I’ll offer one example of such a jarring concept that’s included in the book: “rape camp.” If you’re prone to be offended by the loose use of the word “rape,” then probably the only more reprehensible phrase than “rape camp” would be “rape fiesta” (though, to be fair, in the book a rape camp is more like a concentration camp than a summer camp.)

As a litmus test of how you’ll respond to this work, imagine opening a Hallmark card and reading the following sentence as contained in this book, “Sorry your grandma died! She molested me when I was eight.” If—despite realizing that it’s so wrong—you can’t help but grin, you’ll like this book. If your impulse is to write the author hate mail, you should avoid reading it.

It should be noted that the book is not all rape, molestation, and orgies. The book mostly consists of less prurient attempts to achieve the unexpected and/or shocking.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill

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The Coroner's Lunch (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #1)The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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The Coroner’s Lunch uses a popular and intriguing technique of setting a crime novel in an unconventional landscape. Like Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels (most famously Gorky Park), James Church’s Inspector O novels (e.g. A Corpse in the Koryo), or Laura Joh Rowland’s Sano Ichirō samurai detective novels, Cotterill’s book places a protagonist staunchly devoted to the truth into a sea of ideologues who value appearances more than facts and who will do anything to maintain their precarious grasp on power.

This approach appeals for a couple of reasons. First, it maintains a line of tension in terms of the world against the protagonist on top of whatever other plot conflicts may exist (criminal against investigator.) It also allows us to recognize the virtues that we find appealing amid a people that we think are a world apart.

While crime fiction is plot driven, this particular variant requires strong character development. We must have a lead character that stands out against the bleak landscape of the authoritarian regime that employs him. However, at the same time, the character mustn’t stand out by being bold and defiant in the manner we might expect of a crime novel set in New York City. Such a character is unbelievable amid totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union, North Korea, feudal Japan, or—in Cotterill’s case—Laos, circa 1975. We can’t believe such a character wouldn’t be killed by leaders who have people summarily executed on a regular basis. So the character must be clever, adroit at manipulating the system, and a quiet anti-ideologue.

Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun largely fits the mold, but is a little more irreverent than usual. The old doctor is drafted into being Laos’ national coroner because most of the educated class has fled the country–this despite the fact that Paiboun’s medical expertise is not in forensics. The ultimate source of his bold demeanor is that he is an old man, and he figures that there’s not much that they can do to him. If he were to be executed he wouldn’t lose much longevity over his natural lifespan, and if they sent him to camp, it wouldn’t be as foreboding as the places he has once been. Additionally, he has a highly placed friend, and—beyond that–they can’t replace him in short order. Making Paiboun disappear as Communist regimes were known to do is not an option. Still Siri is clever and does know how to ride the line without tipping across it.

The plot revolves around two crimes. The first is the death of the wife of a high-ranking Party official. The second is the discovery of three Vietnamese government agents in a lake in rural Laos. Both of these cases are high-profile and create incentives to keep truth from coming out.

One element of Cotterill’s novel that is outside the mold for this type of book involves supernatural activities. It seems that–like The Sixth Sense’s Macualay Culkin—Dr. Paiboun sees dead people. Perhaps this device was added to set the novel apart from others in the aforementioned class. For me, this approach seemed superfluous and disadvantageous. Siri’s “gift” kind of detracts from his strength of character because it’s not so much his brilliant mind that is solving murders as the victims giving him hints.

I will say that this supernatural element is introduced in a great way and that it could have been used throughout the novel to a much better effect. When the dead people first visit him, it’s in the form of a dream. At first we don’t know whether his subconscious worked out the solution or whether there is something supernatural going on. However, the author adds a manipulation of the material world so that we know this is supposed to have really happened and later this becomes abundantly clear. I think it would have been better to maintain the ambiguity. People reach solutions to difficult problems through sleep all the time, but we don’t live in a world in which the physical is manipulated supernaturally. Not that there is anything wrong with supernatural fiction (I read a lot of it.) However, crime fiction works best in a realistic world, as does historical fiction. This novel straddles those two genres, and throwing in supernatural events muddles the setting a bit.

Overall, I thought the book was well-written and the main character was humorous and intriguing. If you liked the kind of books I mentioned in the first paragraph, I believe you’ll like adding this to the mix.

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