Book Triad: Women in Fantasy

I'm not planning on turning the blog into nothing but book reviews, or even reviews, but as I said before, I've got a backlog of book review content. In fact, one of the advantages of having a backlog is that I can do a bit of picking and choosing in terms of grouping similar books together so that I actually have something significant to say that applies to all three.In this particular case, that means pairing two recent reads with an older one, by way of contrast. After the break, we have reviews of Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife, and Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child.

I'll warn you in advance--these are all books that got me thinking a fair bit, so the reviews are lengthier than usual AND I have a lot to say afterwards. All worth saying, of course.

Book Triad: Could Be Worse Ever After

Ah, the blog. Or, as it is at the moment, that thing I do when I'm between videogames, just finished a book, and there's no new shows on because it's Super Bowl Sunday. There's been an alarming build up of book triad reviews building up over the course of the last year or so. I haven't done one of these since 2013. My goodness. That means there will also be a lot of me going "wait, wasn't this the book with the guy who did that thing? To that unicorn? Or was it a pegasus?".

Let's get right into my equine questioning, with reviews of Karen Miller's Empress, Jonathan Stroud's Heroes of the Valley, and Peter David's Fable Blood Ties, after the break.

Book Triad: Brandon Mull's Beyonder Trilogy

The usual preamble and excuses for a book triad apply: I've fallen rather thoroughly off my nonfiction wagon, which is nothing new, but this time around, I also fell behind on my Goodreads reviews. It gets more complicated to find the reviews at that point, because the date added and the date finished reading get buried in the overall pile. But it so happens that I now have a stack of reviews ready for posting, and a promise to post more fresh off the digital presses, and so... ladies, gentlemen, other parties interested in the fine art of reading, I give you The Book Triad.
This one's a little different; I read an entire trilogy one after the other, and did a single review, so I'll just post that, with a bit of post-credit commentary at the end.  It'll be a fond trip down memory lane to the ramble-ridden book reviews of yore. So:
A review of

Brandon Mull's Beyonder Trilogy: A World Without Heroes, Seeds of Rebellion, and Chasing the Prophecy

After the break.

Book Triad (Minus Two Books): Graham Harman's The Quadruple Object

In a shocking change of pace, I actually finished a nonfiction book. And the review turned out to be pretty substantial in itself (disproportionately so, given the book's main content is only 140 pages), I thought I'd just post that. Review of Graham Harman's The Quadruple Object, after the break.

Book Triad: Series of Fantasy

So it's been a while since I've done a Book Triad entry. As usual, it's not because I stopped reading. No, I think I could give up the television and the gaming before I gave up the reading. Rather, it's because I've fallen rather thoroughly off my 2 nonfiction / 1 fiction rule.  Eventually, though, you have to just go with the fall, and move on. So without further ado, here is an all fantasy book version of Book Triad. Reviews of

The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks
Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb
River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay

all after the break.

Book Triad: Vampire Heroes, Speculative Philosophy, and a Literal Stairway to Heaven

It's reading week, which admittedly doesn't mean a lot for a grad student who is doing a research assistanceship for a term. Mostly, I just appreciate having fewer students around campus, as I am essentially an agoraphobic misanthrope.  I'm also between chapters at the moment, so I'm trying to capitalize on the week to capitalize on doing all the research I need to do to focus really hard on the next one. 

But that focus is clearly shot, because here I am doing a blog post book triad.  Reviews of

Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural by Victoria Nelson
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Circus Philosophicus by Graham Harman

after the break.

Book Triad: Fun Fiction and Hard Theory

What time is it? It is book review time.

Today, we'll be looking at

Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and Its Digital Future by John Lechte
Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick
Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text by Joanne Watkiss

Reviews after the break.

Book Triad: Superheroes, Cthulu, and some fiction

Guess what!  We're still doing the Book Triad segment! This time, we'll be looking at

Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy by Graham Harman
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films by Roz Kaveney

Reviews after the break.

Book Triad IX: Digital Unfathomables. And more Leafs.

We've got an eclectic set this time around.  A Leafs book, a digital media book, and a sci fi.  Let's get to it.
 We're looking at:

Leafs AbomiNation: The dismayed fan's handbook to why the Leafs stink and how they can rise again by Dave Feeschuk and Michael Grange
Blindsight by Peter Watts
Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation by Beth Coleman

Reviews after the break.

Book Triad: Kings, Leafs, and Eldritch Horrors + Bonus Film Review

My, these book triad things go a lot faster when you're not reading Cloud Atlas.  Speaking of which, under the book reviews is a review of the film Cloud Atlas!  Timely!
Today's trio of books is:
In the Dust of This Planet: The Horror of Philosophy vol 1 by Eugene Thacker
The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healey
Inside Maple Leaf Gardens: The Rise And Fall Of The Toronto Maple Leafs by William Houston

Reviews after the break.

Book Triad: Games and Atlases

It's been a while since the last book triad; it's not that I haven't been reading things, it's that I haven't been finishing them.  But, well, we're here now.  Today's books are:

The Leafs in Autumn by Jack Batten.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form by Anna Anthropy.

Reviews after the break.

Book Triad VII: Digital Humanities and Genetically Modified Rickshaw Girls

There's been a decline in posting recently.  I blame the economy.
Today, we'll be looking at:

The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information by Alan Liu.

Light by John M. Harrison.

How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis  by N. Katherine Hayles
Reviews after the break.

Book Triad VI: Alien Approaches

So it turns out that I read the prerequisite number of books for this one a while ago; I just forgot to post anything.  Whoopsie. 

This time, we'll be look at:
Porn and Pong by Damon Brown

Steal Across the Sky by  Nancy Kress

We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour

Reviews after the break.

Book Triad V: Ian Bogost, Magic Carpets, Serial Killers, and other Latour Litanies

Actually, that's the only Latour Litany here, really.  But it's a nice segue into our first book, and our list of books. This time in Book Triad, we'll be looking at:

Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost
The Secret of Ka by Christopher Pike
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Reviews and other ramblings after the break.

Book Review: Johanna Drucker's The Alphabetic Labyrinth

Yes, it's another book review. Someone recently mentioned to me that all I seem to do here these days is review books.  I don't know what to tell you; I spend most of my time writing and reading, so that's what comes out.  At any rate, it's my birthday on Saturday, so you can count on a personal statement around then, at least.
 
Drucker recounts the history of the alphabet, with a focus on the symbolic meaning people have afforded it over the century.  The book is divided into 10 chapters, which can roughly be thought of as two background chapters, and eight that correspond to various historical periods in Western culture, and how the alphabet was regarded in them.  Chapter 3 starts with the Greek and Roman period, with a focus on how the Greeks considered the alphabet as composed of the fundamental building blocks with which you could build up to a description of the universe. Chapter 4 covers the early Christian eras, in which the power of the written language--and the alphabet--was usually given divine attribution: "I am the alpha and the omega", for example, uses the beginning and end of alphabet as a metaphor for the entirety of existence. Other chapters cover the medieval period and the Church's appropriation of the written word, the Renaissance and the turn to rationalization, and the 18th century and their belief that writing was a necessary condition for the existence of civilization.  (There's a chapter on Kabbalah too.)  Chapter 9 covers the 19th century and the alphabet's role in the debate of creationism vs evolution (was written language divinely inspired, or did it come about naturally?)and the last chapter considers the alphabet in the digital age.

That's a very brief condensation (I've been working on shorter summaries), but it paints the basic picture. Drucker uses a lot of illustrations in the book, which is essential, I think, given the subject matter and the visual nature of the alphabet.  I kind of wish she did a bit more of an introduction, to give a more complete summation of her own stance on the use of the alphabet.  I can understand why she didn't; I think Drucker is really going for historical objectivity than pursuing her own argument, per se.  That said, if the book could be said to have an argument, I think it would be that accounts of the alphabet are always situated in a wider cultural and historical context.  There are plenty of cases, for example, where changes in alphabet are caused by changes in technology.  When we change to the printing press, handwriting becomes something specialized and unique, and writing manuals focus on aesthetic flourish.  But when mass production hits paper production, and industrialization scales up in general, there's a demand for a lot of people who can write notes by hand very quickly, and writing manuals become about getting a job.  There's power struggle embedded in font choice too--two overt examples would be Constantine created a font that was specifically not like previous Roman types, to distance his empire from the previous persecution of Christians, and when Louis XIV ordered the creation of a font that represented the dominating, transcendent nature of his reign.  Likewise, the scholarship about the alphabet had power discourses.  There was the obviously loaded question of what culture invented the first alphabet (the Nazis, for example, weren't very keen on the Semitic claim to that title) and more subtler ones that I mentioned above, such as the evolution vs. creationism issue, or the promotion of Europe's domination by claiming that civilizations needed an evolved written form.  We use and imbue the alphabet with power.

For me personally, the book was a trip down memory lane, as it reminded me in particular of other stuff I've read.  (That's right, we're not just talking about books, we're talking about books that the book reminds me of; maybe I do need a new topic.)  The mystic attributions of the alphabet remind me of Francis Yates' Art of Memory, in that she also covers a lot of the same mystic groups, who imbue similar magical attributes to the concept of the memory palace.  I wonder if there's a connection between alphabet and spatializing memory.  I suppose my off the cuff response would be that they're both about the reverence of knowledge, and preserving knowledge.  Anyway, the script history portion of the book could have been taken directly out of my old textual studies course.  I've complained about the course before, and I'll complain about it now (it was soooo boring), and with God as my witness, someday I'll complain again, but I also have to admit it comes in handy.  Because I was already familiar with uncials and Merovingian book script and so forth, I could follow along with what otherwise would be a very dry reading.  Finally, the book also had a lot of cross-over with Siegfried Zielinski's Deep Time.  First, there was a methodological similarity, as Drucker was interested in people who had the more radical interpretations of the alphabet (my favorite is Alfred Kallir, who argued that letters outlined the human sexual reproduction processes, and that as we spoke, we thus unconsciously reinforced our psyches).  But she's also talking about a lot of the same people--Athanasius Kircher, Giuseppe Balsamo, Raymond Llull.  It's an overlap that makes sense: Drucker discusses most of them in terms of mysticism, universal languages, and cryptography, all of which Zielinski is particularly interested in.  But I was struck by how much of this stuff I'd already come across in other ways.  Like the alphabet moved through power discussions, it moved in and out of European historical traditions.

Finally, though, there's the selfish question: what's in this for me?  As usual, what brought me to this text is the videogame studies, which means the image/text issue is what I'm interested in here.  Image text comparisons aren't really a direct concern with Drucker, but there's enough overlap here for me to find a lot of things useful.  The comparison does come out in full, for example, in the discussion of illuminated letters, which at one point got so complex that people started putting pictures of the book's content in the letters that started the story.  And naturally, some commentators complained, because the seductive images were taking away from the purity of the words' ideas.  That's something I can use; the notion that the alphabet, and by extension, words themselves, speak to some sort of purity of thought.  I can use the discussion on digital font more directly, obviously.  And in general, it'll serve me well to keep in mind that it's never just about the words.  Discussions about the alphabet were discussions situated in much broader discourses, and with text in games, it'll behoove me to keep that in mind.

Later Days.

Book Triad: Humans are Overrated

This book triad the fourth, for those keeping score at home.  For this set, there's:

The Democracy of Objects by Levi Bryant
The Hundred Thousand Kingdom by N. K. Jemisin
Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology

Reviews after the break.

Book Triad: Auschwitz, Robots, and Flagg

I've finished my third trio of literature, and I'm here to tell you all about it. 
For this set, we have:
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive by Giorgio Agamben
The Stand by Stephen King
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Reviews follow after the break.

Book Triad: Try to make a game out of your crippling alienation at the bottom of the ocean.

Welcome to the second edition of triple book reviews.  If you missed last time, the rules are simple. I read two nonfiction books and one fiction, write a paragraph long review of each, and then spend a paragraph on general musing. And them we can all go home. That sounds nice, doesn't it? Without further ado, then, this installment's books are:
 Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
Starfish by Peter Watts
 Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as Cultural Practice

Book Review: Community Triad

I was looking over my list of "leisure time" books, and it occurred to me that, entertaining though they were, they weren't really helping me in terms of studies.  And in a different problem, I was doing well keeping up with my videogame reading, but my other serious reading was falling to the wayside.  So I created a quota system: I could read one fiction for every two nonfiction, and at least one nonfiction had to be relevant to my studies, if you squinted at it a bit.  And afterwards, I thought I'd write about them all.  (By which I mean, copy and paste the Goodreads reviews I already wrote.  Any blog content is good blog content, even if it is self-plagiarization.)  This isn't the old dual book review (God, I hope it won't be)--there will be one paragraph each, and one after to wrap things up.The books this time are:

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks by Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker
The Ambassador's Mission by Trudi Canavan
Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education by Iain Thomson


Reviews after the jump.

Book Review: The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff

Allie's eyes widened.  "Mom, there's a signed photograph of a minotaur on the wall behind the counter."
"Probably Boris."
"He dotted his i with a little heart."
"Definitely Boris.  Your grandmother seemed very fond of him."
Given the way Boris was built, Allie didn't doubt that in the least.
"You are in cattle country, remember."
--The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff

Jebediah Springfield: People, our search is over! On this site we shall build a new town where we can worship freely, govern justly, and grow vast fields of hemp for making rope and blankets.
Shelbyville Manhattan: Yes! And marry our cousins.
Jebediah Springfield: I was- wha... what are you talking about, Shelbyville? Why would we want to marry our cousins?
Shelbyville Manhattan: Because they're so attractive. I... I thought that was the whole point of this journey.
--The Simpsons, "Lemon of Troy."

Urban fantasy is all the rage these days, but frankly, it's not my cup of tea.  Something about the whole "our world, but with magic" rubs me the wrong way.  I think it's the way that, no matter how noble and good the protagonist in such a book appears, they are still usually a part of a vast conspiracy trying to keep the majority of the world from learning the truth about the existence of magic.  Granted, this doesn't apply to every urban fantasy series (the Stackhouse books being a case that has it both ways: the vampires are living openly, but still have a lot of skeletons (and other bodies) in their closets), but it does seem to hold for most of them, even some of the most famous ones.  (That's right, Harry Potter.  I'm calling you a lying liar who lies.  Share some of that Expecto Patronum with the rest of us.)  And really, any genre that has Still, there are a few series I keep up on.  I like  Jim Butcher's Dresden series.  Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson books.  And so, when I saw this book, and saw that Trudi Canavan had written an urban fantasy series, I thought it might be one of the good ones.

Did you catch my mistake there?  That I mixed up my female fantasy writers writing female fantasy characters?  Yeah, that mistake that you caught in a single sentence took me about 100 pages to figure out.  And at that point, it seemed a matter of honor to finish what was in front of me.  So here we are.

The Enchantment Emporium is set in--and this is somewhat a novelty for the genre--Canada, starting in a house in (or at least near) Toronto, but quickly shifting to Calgary.  The central figure is Alysha (Allie) Catherine Gale, a member of a family of witches.  Having recently lost her job, the 24 year old is granted a new opportunity when a letter arrives from her grandmother, bequeathing to Allie her grandmother's Calgary antique shop.  So she travels out west, and receives the other bequeathed item: the mystery of her grandmother's death.  She's soon joined by members of her extended family: her powerful brother David, a gruff Leprechaun named Joe, her cousin and fellow magicker Charlie (Charlotte) Gale, and her gay best friend David.  And if you think the gay best friend thing isn't a source for drama, then you're clearly not well-read in your urban fantasy, as Allie has, of course, had a crush on David all her adult life.  But all of that goes out the window when she meets Graham, a 5'10'' reporter with "remarkably blue eyes," a straight nose that's "a bit on the short side," and a "longish upper lip."  And he just happens to be investigating her grandmother's shop for a story.  Meanwhile, there's a monstrous menace afoot, and it begins with d, and rhymes with "wagon."  Will Allie be able to stop this threat from destroying Calgary?  Will she and Graham put aside their differences and work things out?  Will this working out involve a lot of sexual innuendo?

Yes, yes, and most definitely yes.

So what did I think?  Well, let's call a spade a spade.  For a large part, the urban fantasy genre is essentially a vehicle for delivering supernatural-tinged softcore porn.  There are exceptions--Dresden Files is more of a vehicle for delivering supernatural-tinged action porn--but the Enchantment Emporium is not one of them. And its take on sex flirts with some taboos.  Gale family magic works, in part, in three stages: there's the magic of the young teens and early twenty-somethings, the magic of the mothers, and the magic of the old women, each of which functions slightly differently.  It's basically a maiden-mother-crone deal, though Huff shows admirable restraint in not explicitly naming it as such.  The maiden and mother parts, in particular, function in large part through a commitment to polyandrous and polygamous relations with one's cousins.  (Hence the Simpsons' quotations.)  And, as the quotation suggests, the Gale women aren't above mating with passing minotaurs, dragons, or anything else that tickles their fancy, and if you define that as bestiality, well, to each their own.  Now, I know I have some prudish tendencies, but I'd like to think that it's okay to draw the line at sex with group sex with family members.  But really, that wasn't my problem here.  Rather, it's that we don't actually see any sex: it's one of those books that leads us directly into the bedroom, presents a chapter break just when the pants come off, and then returns to rumpled sheets and two (or in this book, two or more) rather content individuals. I'm not saying I wanted to see that hot cousin action.  (Note that the book has forced me to jump from defending myself from being a  prude to defending myself from being a pervert in about three sentences.)  As a consequence, what starts off as appearing racy quickly becomes a series of running jokes that get run into the ground.  I don't think there's a single character in this book whose sexual prowess isn't at least considered, with the possible exception of Allie's dad.  If this level of innuendo appeared in a male-penned book it would be considered juvenile, and in the interest of sexual equality, I'm willing to call it that here too.

But there were some elements I did like.  Huff deserves some credit for crafting a book composed of a bunch of really strong female protagonists.  Every Gale woman is presented as the sort you would not want to cross, and while that indulges in its own stereotypes (the ball-breaking woman and so forth), it mostly affirms one of the better tropes of the urban fantasy genre: the empowered, kick-ass woman.  This is no Twilight; while the girl may be occasionally fixated on the boy, that fixation doesn't stop her from going out and doing what needs to be done rather than laying about moping.  And Huff also gets points for the localization.  While I never again need to hear anyone say about Calgary that "things are happening here," she clearly knows the city, and that comes out in a series of Canadian references and references more local.  Location is important in urban fantasy, as the title implies.  And while there's nothing in the story that makes it essential to base it in Calgary (basically, anywhere sufficiently far enough away from Ontario and the main family would do), there is enough that places it there to make it seem more than just an afterthought.  Finally, I liked the notion of family that pervades the novel.  Allie has this huge extended family of aunts and cousins, and the attachment of family and what it means in a person's life is essentially the theme of the book, if it can be said to have a theme at all.  As someone who basically only sees his family at Christmas, I approve of that, and envy it, a bit.  Granted, my family skews away from the incestuous side, though.  We're not that close.

The other big detractor of the book, however, is the pacing.  Despite the possible destruction of Calgary, there does not seem to be a lot at stake here, as there's never any doubt that the good guys--girls--will see things through.  Likewise, there's never really any doubt that Allie will wind up with her man of choice.  And the characters don't seem particularly interested either.  Sure, Calgary may end up a smoldering ruin, but first--there's a dinner date to be had.  And yes, Grandmother may say she's dead, but they'll believe it when they see it.  Things move along at a very slow pace, and the usual third act split between the hero and heroine seems particularly perfunctory and contrived.  What that leaves you with is a lot of scenes where everyone stands around slinging witty banter.  And while that can work, if you (like me) got bored with the sexual references somewhere in the first fifty pages, there's not really all that much to keep you here.  Plus, while I'm complaining, there's a running joke about Graham being short: he is five foot ten.  Five foot ten.  As someone a half foot shorter than that, I did not find it particularly amusing.

I know that I'm not the target audience for this book.  But at the same time, I'd argue that top tier urban fantasy appeals to more than its target audience.  The writing's decent, if not stellar, the characters are fine, and I like how it draws on mythology without hitting you over the head with it.  But ultimately, there's just not enough other stuff going on here to keep my interest. 

Later days.