Mad Times

In 2007 I read a whopping 40 books (actually a few more than that since I’m counting reviews and a few of the year’s reviews encompassed multiple books) which is up about 20% from last year’s total. Not that it matters.

We also watched a bunch of movies (105 compared to 75 last year). The increase may be due to our each watching quite a few flicks solo that the other wouldn’t have cared about. Here’s a list of what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater (only 7). Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc. I realize that all of this nonsense is really only of interest to Becky and me, but whose blog is it anyway?

That doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before (a few repeats are included as noted). We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll expand.

In other anal-retentive data mining, we returned 126 disks to Netflix this year after switching to the three-disk plan in February. That includes most of the TV we watched this year:

• The Book of Daniel (complete series (cancelled in first season))
• Heroes (season 1)
• Joan of Arcadia (season 2 (last))
• Once and Again (season 2 (just Becky))
• Scrubs (first season)
• That 70′s Show (season 1, 2, 3, 4)
• Veronica Mars (season 3 (last))
• Weeds (both of us watched season 1 and Becky toughed it out through season 2)
• Wonderfalls (complete series (cancelled in first season) ended up buying our own copy)

Plus the series we sampled and didn’t continue past the first disk:

• Babylon 5
• Big Love
• Commander in Chief
• Dead Like Me
• Eureka
• How I Met Your Mother
• Star Trek: Enterprise (just Jeff)

I’d heard from a number of quarters that this was good, and hey look, everyone was right! Set in a future where Earth has managed to colonize some other star systems, the colonial defense forces recruit 75-year-old folks from Earth with the promise to return them to fighting shape so they can put in ten years of service in the war against the nasty human-eating aliens. If they manage to survive their ten years they can become colonists themselves and have a whole new life.

I’m not usually a huge fan of military SF, but Scalzi’s army populated with people who have lived a whole life already allows him to sidestep most of the obnoxious cliches that result from putting kids with no experience into military situations. Not that there aren’t any blowhard jerks, but the few who make it through basic training find their arrogance resulting in unfortunate mishaps on the battlefield that are disturbingly enjoyable to read.

Lest you think the book is all guns and gadgets (there are plenty of those. I want a BrainPal.), it’s also got some sex and romance. The romance is mostly in the main character’s love for his dead wife, but it is no less touching for its confinement to the past tense. The other romance would be a big fat spoiler (also a mind-boggling coincidence, but I let it pass).

Great fun, and there’s a sequel (plus a short and a novella if I’m interpreting the internets correctly).

After seeing this picture on local photographer Mark Griffith’s Flickr stream, I followed his link to the Jumping Project Flickr Pool looking for tips on taking jump shots and discovered that the pool was formed in response to the work of Philippe Halsman. I remembered seeing something about a book of jumping portraits by him on BoingBoing or somewhere so I went looking for the book. It’s not in my library, alas, but three other books of his work were: Halsman: a Retrospective (pictured at left), Halsman: Sight and Insight, and Halsman at Work co-authored with his wife Yvonne.

I didn’t know his name, but I knew many of the pictures. For example the classic head shot of Einstein is one of his. Google image search turns up a quick overview. Halsman had over 100 photos on the cover of LIFE magazine.

Retrospective is a collection of photos with only a little bit of commentary and all of the commentary in that book is also present in Sight and Insight which has extensive remembrances about the pictures and their subjects from Halsman. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the personalities of some near-mythical figures. Halsman at Work has not just Philippe’s recollections, but also wife and assistant Yvonne’s and includes some of Yvonne’s photographs, many showing the set up used to produce the portraits which is extreme photographer eye candy.

Each of the books has a few of his jumping portraits and they are uniformly delightful, cracking the veneer of subjects from Richard Nixon to Audrey Hepburn (who if you weren’t in love with her before, seeing her jump should do the trick), Edward Steichen, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marilyn Monroe.

Halsman’s commentary highlights the fact that a photographer’s most important tool is between his ears. And for a portrait photographer that goes double since not only does he have to be an absolute master of the mechanics of taking the photograph he also has to engage with his subject on a level that will distract them from the fact that they’re having their picture taken at all. That Halsman was able to do this with the likes of Churchill and Dali and Einstein implies the brain he was carrying around was pretty amazing.

Third book in Stross’s series about Miriam Beckstein, a woman who discovers that she is part of a family who can step between different alternate versions of the Earth. This volume is thick with intrigue, some of it nearly incomprehensible in its complexity. And yet despite all the plotting and scheming and maneuvering, there is essentially no change in the characters’ conditions in the entire course of the book until its closing pages. It’s a middle book that I think could have been reduced to a couple of chapters with no loss. Disappointing.

Pi is a young boy who finds himself in a lifeboat after the ship carrying his zoo-keeper family from India to Toronto is sunk in the South Pacific. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that he is sharing the lifeboat with a full-grown Bengal tiger.

A friend loaned me this book several years ago and I’m just now finishing it even though I started back then and have picked away at it off and on since. So the first third of the book is a little fuzzy in my memory. This fragmented approach should not reflect badly on the book. I was just flipping through the first third to check some points and reading it now it threatened to pull me in with each paragraph. The style is conversational, digressive, and funny, moving from childhood trials to facts about the zoo animals to religious issues. But the shipwreck promised by the book’s cover doesn’t come until after that first third. Once Pi is in the lifeboat with the tiger it becomes significantly harder to put the book down. I think I have an inkling now, though, of how much more impact the book would have had if I’d had the concentration to read it straight through from the start. Should you read it, I strongly recommend this course.

This is the second book Walton has set in an England which made peace with Hitler’s Germany. Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is again one of the point of view characters. He trades chapters with a new character, Viola Lark who, on the first page of the book, is offered the lead in a gender-swapped production of Hamlet.

The production is dealt a setback when the actress slated to play Hamlet’s mother dies along with another man in an explosion at her house. Inspector Carmichael is assigned to the investigation of the explosion and deaths. The explosion would seem to have nothing to do with the play, but when it’s revealed that Adolf Hitler himself plans to attend the play’s opening night along with the British Prime Minister, things start looking a little more suspicious.

The book highlights how hard it is for people concerned with their everyday lives to believe in atrocities committed in other parts of the world. And even when the atrocities come into focus how hard it is to see how they apply to those mundane lives. Alongside that abstract message, Walton shows how easy it is for her two sympathetic main characters to fall into situations where they may commit terrible acts of their own.

Sixth in Rusch’s Retrieval Artist series. I started with the third book which worked okay, but I wouldn’t recommend starting with this one. There’s just too much back story taken as given. New in this volume is a second primary point of view character (at least I don’t remember the narrative being this split in the other books). We meet a young woman named Talia Shindo whose mother is kidnapped from their home on Jupiter’s moon Callisto by a Recovery Man early in the book. Actually there are several other POV characters too now that I think about it, so maybe I’m misremembering the other books as staying closer to Miles Flint.

The setting of these novels has human culture interacting with a large number of alien species. In these interactions, humans become subject to alien laws. These laws are sometimes viewed by humans as trivial or incomprehensible, so humans created Disappearance Services which are like a witness relocation program on steroids: the offending person is given a new identity and hidden away so the affronted aliens cannot exact their punishment (usually death). Humans being the opportunists that they are, a parallel occupation springs up called a Tracker. Trackers will find disappeared people for the alien governments. They’re not very well liked. Retrieval Artists are like human-sympathetic Trackers, they will find a disappeared person, but only under circumstances where that person would presumably want to be found (e.g., when the violated law changes and their offense is no longer fatal to them, or when they suddenly come into a large sum of money.) Those three occupations were in all the previous books. In this book, Rusch introduces a new one. A Recovery Man is someone with the quasi-legal job of returning wayward possessions to their rightful owners. And yes, the word “possession” there does denote that people are a bit out of the Recovery Man’s normal line.

Meanwhile back on our moon, Miles Flint is still working through the revelations from the previous book, Paloma where he found that his mentor wasn’t the ethical pillar he’d thought she was, and in particular he discovers that some of her transgressions may have involved Miles himself.

The major plot points in this book build off events from previous books in a way that feels a little flimsy, like it didn’t occur to Rusch that this might have been what really happened behind the scenes until now. But while those points strain credulity a bit, the execution of the new story line is good enough, and the newly revealed characters interesting enough that I can forgive her. It can’t be easy to maintain a series whose books each hinge on personally life-changing events for the main character. If a little retconning is required, at least it results in an interesting story.

I’m a little worried about the next book, though. It could easily stray into the territory of cop buddy movie cliche (actually a subgenre of that, but I can’t tell you which one without spoiling this book) if she’s not very careful.

A friend was reading Russell’s The Sparrow for a book group which reminded me that we had this book on the shelf. This one isn’t science fiction, but instead a historical novel set in Northern Italy towards the end of World War II.

There are a number of point of view characters: an Italian soldier, various interconnected Italian Jews and Catholics, families of displaced Jews from other parts of Europe, a few Nazi officers, even a British soldier. The book includes a chart of characters, but I never had to resort to it. The people were all real enough that I easily recognized them when they came back into the spotlight.

I was half-way through the book before I committed to finishing it. My uncertainty was mostly because I wasn’t in a mood that could endure a book about the holocaust. While the camps are a constant lurking presence in the book, it is a mostly unfocused presence. To the characters, the death camps are mostly wild and unbelievable rumors. So while the Jewish characters are trying desperately to avoid capture by the Nazis, they are spared true knowledge of what their fate would be. The reader gets to supply his own sense of sick dread at what capture would really mean. I would have thought this approach would give the book a kind of intimate horror, but instead, for me, it put such a gulf between the characters’ view point and mine that I was never able to sink into the book enough to forget that it was just a book. With this subject matter that was actually a good thing.

Rather than being about the holocaust the book ends up being about the lengths people will go to to protect their neighbors from evil. Practically every character makes personal sacrifices that would be unthinkable in any situation less extreme than that war. The result is both inspiring for what it shows is possible and disheartening for the horrors it takes to make us put aside our differences.

Becky read about this book somewhere and got it from the library then failed to read it. She suggested I take a look at it and I read it. Then it sat around the house for another few weeks after it couldn’t be renewed any longer accruing overdue fines while I caught up on my backlogged book reviews. I couldn’t review it out of order, you see. Sucks to be compulsive.

Two alternating story lines. One set in the present day where Blake, a young boy, discovers a strange book in the St. Jerome’s College Library in Oxford while waiting for his mother who is there doing research. The other story line is set in Germany in 1452 and focuses on a young apprentice to an inventor. The inventor is Johann Gutenberg. The apprentice is Endymion Spring. Into their lives comes a man named Fust who has money to support their efforts to perfect their new book production machine, but also has an obsession of his own that centers around a mysterious chest with even more mysterious contents.

All these mysteries keep the pages turning along. Blake has a childish acceptance of the impossible things that keep happening to him coupled with a burgeoning intellect that tries to find explanations and an emotional fragility that keeps him on the edge of collapse. Unfortunately the other characters are not so richly drawn. And the plot while pleasingly twisty feels thin and capricious as it bounds towards a conclusion that wants to be profound and inevitable but ends up just seeming forced.

Sharyn November is the editorial director of Firebird Books, and this is an anthology of original sf and fantasy short fiction from authors with books published by Firebird. I liked that each story was accompanied by a brief note about the story by its author as well as a bio of the author.

My usual practice with short story collections is to give a couple lines about each story. It’s been a month since I finished it (yes, I’m that far behind in getting reviews written), so we’ll see how well I remember them…

“Cotillion” by Delia Sherman: Since I picked the book up because it was the same publisher as Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin which I’d just reread, I was amused to discover that the first story was another retelling of Tam Lin, this one set in New York City in 1969.

“The Baby in the Night Deposit Box” by Megan Whalen Turner: The entire story came rushing back when I read the title. A fun little changeling story set, as the title implies, in a bank.

“Beauty” by Sherwood Smith: A plain looking princess is kidnapped by a handsome enemy of the kingdom. Based on one of her books, apparently.

“Mariposa” by Nancy Springer: At the doctor’s office, a young woman learns that the cause of her malaise is that she has lost her soul. She goes in search of it. A little on-the-nose, but entertaining in spite of it.

“Max Mondrosch” by Lloyd Alexander: A man fails to find a job despite working quite hard at the search. Odd little tale.

“The Fall of Ys” by Meredith Ann Pierce: A fable of arrogant self-interest. Feels classic.

“Medusa” by Michael Cadnum: Point of view of the title character. Deepens the story.

“The Black Fox” by Emma Bull illustrated by Charles Vess: Sassy comic book version of an old folk song. Fine example of the talents of both Bull and Vess.

“Byndley” by Patricia A. McKillip: Complex tale about a man trying to get back into Faerie.

“The Lady of the Ice Garden” by Kara Dalkey: The Snow Queen reimagined in feudal Japan.

“Hope Chest” by Garth Nix: Another one easily remembered from its title. A baby is left on a railway platform in a small town. Along with the usual cryptic note, this baby comes with a steamer trunk that no one can open. When the baby turns 16 things get interesting.

“Chasing the Wind” by Elizabeth E. Wein: A young woman is flown across Kenya in a single-engine plane in 1950. No traditional fantasy elements here, but the world of a bush pilot is pretty fantastical in a different way.

“Little Dot” by Diana Wynne Jones: Story about a wizard, a beast, and a cat told from the cat’s point of view.

“Remember Me” by Nancy Farmer: A family road trip in the desert, an out-of-place sister finds her place.

“Flotsam” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman: A lost boy shows up at the neighborhood basketball court. Really really lost. I really liked the characters in this one.

“The Flying Woman” by Laurel Winter: Two magical children are abandoned on an island and visited by a flying woman.

I liked all but a couple of them. Good collection.