Eugene Fischer

Tag: Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Last Books of 2014

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I didn’t get a lot of reading done since my last roundup. Life has gotten in the way, I’m afraid. I have a few books in progress, but soon I’m going to be in Central America and won’t be returning until early next year, so I’m going to go ahead and call my year’s reading here. I’ll do a roundup of all my reading for 2014 later, but for now, the last thirteen capsule reviews.

  1. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders – Political allegory and social satire, but perpetrated with far less subtlety than Saunders’ short stories. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, but it only works because Saunders’ sense of humor lands far more often than it misses. Reads like he felt he hadn’t said enough when he wrote “The Braindead Megaphone,” and so did a fictional version as well.
  2. Dataclysm by Christian Rudder – Rudder is a cofounder of OKCupid and was the author of the OKTrends blog. This book is a recapitulation and expansion of the kinds of analysis he did there. I think many of the articles are of general interest, but the OKCupid analysis in particular fascinated me as a user of the site. For example, he publishes lists of words that are most likely to be used in profiles by only a single ethnicity. Four of the ones on the list for white people are in my profile.
  3. What If? by Randall Munroe – Mostly articles from the What If? blog. My favorite part was the intermittent samples of the weirdest or most upsetting questions people had submitted. My copy, though, had typesetting issues; in several places there were empty rectangles where there should have been mathematical symbols.
  4. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – Jeff’s Southern Reach trilogy has been much talked about this year, and well liked by many of my friends. I waited until all three books were available to start it. This book I found mildly entertaining and pleasantly paced, but little more.
  5. Authority by Jeff VanderMeer – I did not enjoy this book. I found it one-note and overlong. I will not be finishing the trilogy.
  6. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman – Very fun. A collection of fabulations with an occasional physicsy bent.
  7. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis – What a gorgeous jewel of a book this is. A tender account of the life of an orphan chess prodigy and addict, who grows to adulthood and must learn to navigate both her talent and her dependencies. A much more optimistic book than The Man Who Fell To Earth, which I think it matches in accomplishment.
  8. More Than This by Patrick Ness – A story of young refugees in a confusing world, an Earth that they only discover after their own deaths. Something I like about all of Ness’s fiction is that there is a palpable sense of menace. He doesn’t have a George R. R. Martin-esque bodycount, but he doesn’t need it. The threats in a Ness novel always feel real.
  9. I Die at Midnight by Kyle Baker – I’d been meaning to read this since I was a teenager. A delightful, stylish noir romp.
  10. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino – This is Kevin Brockmeier’s favorite book by his favorite author, and Carmen Machado loves it too, so I was glad to finally read it. It’s a lovely book, clever, funny, frequently surprising. I don’t think it hit me as hard as it does Kevin and Carmen, though. While I liked it, I occasionally found it overly twee.
  11. Man v. Nature by Diane Cook –An impressive debut collection. I read it in an airport and on airplanes, and barely noticed the travel, except during the stories with explicit sexual content. Her sex writing is legitimately sexy, which made it feel weird to be reading in close contact with strangers in narrow aircraft seats.
  12. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill – I was already a fan of her short stories, and now I know she’s excellent in the long form as well. Veronica is full of tangled, tricky insight. I’ve quoted it previously on the blog, and expect I’ll be writing about it more in the future.
  13. Megalex by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fred Beltran – Not worth it. There’s nothing in here that wasn’t done first and better in the earlier Jodoverse graphic novels, and the ending is too rushed to have any power. For Jodorowsky completists only.

The Next Twenty Books of 2014

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When I did my roundup of the first 20 books I read this year, I noticed that only three of them were written by women. I wanted to even up that ratio a bit, so made a point of bumping books by women to the top of the stack for this group.

  1. Technopriests: Supreme Collection by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zoran Janjetov, and Fred Beltran. This was the last major branch of the Jodoverse that I hadn’t read. Jodorowsky remains one of my favorite writers, for his sheer bonkers extravagance, and having recently re-read the Jodoverse books added an extra layer of delight when I recently saw Jodorowsky’s Dune.
  2. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. For such a slim volume, I loved the tonal breadth of this collection. These were stories originally published in Swedish and translated by the author, and they are weird and wonderful. A brief, delightful read.
  3. Crash by J. G. Ballard. I found this difficult to finish. For about the first 80 pages I was engaged, but it became punishingly repetitive by the end. The fetishistic novelty wore off long before the book ended, and there was little else to recommend it. Many people whose opinions I respect are fans of Ballard, but I’m still trying to cultivate an appreciation for much of his work.
  4. Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine. I read this on an airplane and hardly noticed the time passing. It’s kaleidoscopic steampunk with gorgeous images on every page, fragmented into short chapters that build momentum like an avalanche. Genevieve’s second book is coming out tomorrow, and I can’t wait to read it.
  5. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany. This book is… odd. Good, thought provoking. But very strange. It’s surprising to me–in a positive way, mind!–that it’s considered a classic of science fiction. I doubt though that I’m going to be revisiting this book as often as I will Nova.
  6. Saga, vol. 3 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about an ongoing comic series as I am about Saga. Each new trade is an insta-buy.
  7. The Adventures of Alyx by Joanna Russ. I’m glad I read this, though on the whole I enjoyed it less than I thought I would. A couple of the pieces here I found compelling, but the majority was coldly intellectual with an efficiency of prose that I found tiring even as I thought it admirable. I liked We Who Are About To better, but will still be reading more Russ.
  8. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. Monica is a Clarion classmate of mine and a dear friend, and so it is a delight to report that her first novel is an explosive debut. Ambitious and engrossing. I consumed it in two days and then spent the next week of my life thinking about it, wandering store aisles and taking unconscious inventory of the provisions I would need if I woke up in the future Monica created. It’s not so far away. We all might wake up there yet.
  9. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I’d been meaning to read Shirley Jackson’s novels for years, and decided to start here. Ho-lee shit. It’s as brilliant as everyone said it was.
  10. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s a teacher of mine and a friend, so it was a pleasurable but unusual experience to read his first foray into memoir. He has evoked the seventh grade so keenly that I felt my own bubble up as I read, which, as I later told him across a lunch table, put me in the weird position of feeling possessive of someone else’s childhood.
  11. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. I think, were it not for Flowers For Algernon exploring some of the same ground first and more accessibly, this would be considered a classic. I thought it an excellent book, though one for which I had to look up many words. I also felt unsure about the ending. It was convincingly rendered, but somehow didn’t fully satisfy. Still, I recommend the book. I think this is the most fully-imagined 1st person voice of increasing intelligence I’ve read.
  12. Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler. I’d been waiting years to read these stories, and finally getting to do so was both thrilling and bittersweet. This was, so far as I know, my last unread Butler fiction. I wrote about it more here.
  13. Blame by Michelle Huneven. Though she was never one of my teachers, Michelle was on faculty at Iowa when I applied, and is I think one of the people responsible for me getting accepted there. This is the first of her books I’ve read, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s a novel that sprawls decades and resists tidiness, catching something that feels very true in its tangles. On the strength of this book I’ll be picking up her new one soon.
  14. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. My first time reading Wyndham. He was clearly brilliant, and the book is good, but I’m not sure I approached it from the right frame of mind. As is sometimes the case with classic apocalyptica, Triffids belabors ideas that have, since it was published, become cliche. The combination of that and the antiquated, one-note masculinity of the main character kept me from enjoying the novel as much as I otherwise might have. There’s a lot to appreciate here, but I wish I’d gone in with a more historical literary curiosity.
  15. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s a great book that I had problems with. I wrote about them at some length.
  16. Liar by Justine Larbalestier. After The Sparrow I was in the mood for some YA. This hit the spot. It’s like a young person’s introduction to the unreliable narrator. Great fun.
  17. The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi. I got an ARC of this novella at the Tiptree auction a couple of years ago. When I read it, it was immediately obvious how I would want to use it pedagogically if I ever teach my Fantasy Writing class again.
  18. Osborn: Evil Incarcerated by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. I enjoyed this, but suspect I would have liked it more had I been previously familiar with the characters. With the talent at Marvel these days, having been a DC kid is feeling more and more like having backed the wrong horse.
  19. The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. More YA, and more wonderful reading. This book is like Octavia Bulter’s Kindred, but for young readers.
  20. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. I had read stories from this, but never the whole thing. As I recently wrote some fiction in the second person, I wanted to finally fix that. A deservingly famous collection.

The First Twenty Books of 2014

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As previously mentioned, graduate school was hell on my reading. To get back in the groove I resolved that this year I would read at least one book a week. Twelve weeks in, I’m ahead of schedule. Here are the first twenty books I’ve read this year. (Collage above made with this online tool.)

  1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This one failed to impress me, and I doubt I will read any other books in the series.
  2. Solaris: The Definitive Edition by Stanislaw Lem (audiobook). This is the new translation direct from Polish released in 2008. I’d tried to read the previous translation once, which was actually a retranslation from French, and found it unimpressive. I loved the direct translation, though, and can see why it’s held in such esteem among Lem’s works.
  3. Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin. This is a reread, inspired by the book’s presence on Kevin Brockmeier’s list of his 50 favorite SFF books. I thought it delightful fun the first time, and I still feel that way about it. It’s a collection of linked short stories, but both times I’ve read it in a single sitting.
  4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is really a gorgeous, ambitious book. Carmen Machado loves it, and had been recommending it for a few years. The novel’s formal conceit is that it is narrated by Death, and while this is achieved with great sensitivity and beautiful language, my own lack of affection for Cartesian dualism means I found it less affecting than I otherwise might. I suspect that’s why I merely really liked it rather than loving it.
  5. Superman/Shazam: First Thunder by Judd Winick and Joshua Middleton. I was inspired to read this by Justin Pierce, who posted to Facebook a page from it in which Superman is furious when he learns that Captain Marvel is a transformed child. That scene was probably the best thing in the book, but it was fun.
  6. The Genocides by Thomas Disch. This is another one from Kevin’s list. It’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever fully enjoyed. Humanity is uncomplicatedly eliminated as unseen aliens turn the planet into a monoculture for a genetically engineered crop. As unremitting an apocalypse as I’ve ever read.
  7. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. This, as is obvious if you’ve clicked the very first link in the first paragraph, is a reread. I bought a bunch of copies of the play and threw a table reading party. We all drank mulled wine and hammed it up.
  8. Options by Robert Sheckley. After Van Choojitarom challenged people to come up with a novel odder than Voyage to Arcturus (which I still need to read), I offered this as a possibility. When I was 16 it seemed to me merely a memorably enthusiastic work of metafiction. Reading it now, though, it strikes me as an absurdist take on the difficulties of the creative process. Reading it makes me feel like I do when I’m struggling at the keyboard, and yet it’s entertaining. It’s also short enough that despite the overt metafictional elements, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Might be my favorite Sheckley now. (Note if you’re planning to give it a shot, I’m pretty sure the opening few chapters intentionally read as terribly-written. Which is to say, I think they are well written, but in intentionally bad prose.)
  9. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Yet another from Kevin’s list. I read it as a kid and didn’t find it terribly impressive then, by Kevin’ and Jo Walton’s appreciation for the book convinced me to give it another chance. They were right. It’s really an excellent book, for all the reasons Jo outlines. Also, I realize I must have been under ten years old the last time I read it, because I remember thinking that if the events in the book were to happen, I would have been among the posthuman cohort.
  10. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I’d never read one of her novels, and this one won the Hugo award in 1977, so seemed a good place to start. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I liked the opening section well enough, and the writing is good throughout, but I found culture of the clone generations unconvincing.
  11. Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. I love everything by Fowler I’ve ever read, which is several short stories and now three novels. This one is now my second favorite, behind We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, my favorite novel I read last year. Sarah Canary is lyrical and brilliant. Also, this is yet another one from Kevin’s list, which has yet to lead me astray.
  12. The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis. This is the last of Tevis’s science fiction novels that I hadn’t read, after reading The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird last year. I have yet to read anything by Tevis I don’t find engrossing, but this is a weird one. The opening I loved so much it seemed on pace to become a favorite, but toward the end the book takes a turn that I’m still trying to figure out my feelings toward. I still liked it, but I think less than the previous two.
  13. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. I’d read a few of these stories before, such as “Secretary” (the basis for the movie) and “A Romantic Weekend”(a favorite of mine), but never the whole collection. It’s good. Completely unsentimental psychological realism, full of obsessions and kinks. I’ve got another Gaitskill collection on deck for later.
  14. The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This was a reread that I assigned my science fiction writing class, in advance of Ted doing a Skype visit. I think this book is perfect.
  15. Hawkeye vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and David Aja. This was a gift from Matt when I visited Portland. It’s great fun, deserving of all the superlatives on the cover. Each issue is a tiny, clever action movie, the cleverest one from the point of view of a dog.
  16. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. After Portland I find myself on a bit of a comics kick. This is the third of the Century volumes, and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Harry Potter as the antichrist was fun enough, but at this point LoEG seems more about enacting its conceit than about telling a story. Still, there were some nice tender scenes between Orlando and Mina.
  17. Weapons of the Metabarons by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Travis Charest, and Zoran Janjetov. A fairly forgettable addendum to an unforgettable series. I bought an omnibus collection of the original Metabarons series in Portland and will probably reread it soon.
  18. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s writing is beautiful. This book is about a city populated by everyone who is dead but still remembered by someone alive, and what happens to that city when everyone on Earth starts to die.
  19. Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty. I bought this book on the strength of its chapter titles, which are things like “Now I will dismember the world with my hands” and “But I eat them up, Frederico, I eat them up.” This book was…strange. Not bad, but not good either. I’m not convinced that it is about anything except itself. It’s an internally consistent system of symbolism that doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to the real world. The language was very entertaining, but it’s verbal fireworks bursting above an insubstantial landscape.
  20. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I liked this more than Century: 2009, because it’s more strongly narrative and because I enjoyed the H. P. Lovecraft and John Campbell references. Still a minor work, though.