#but generally I just think it was boring….. prose was mediocre and characters were all so NOTHING

[uglygirlstatus]

Omg you didnt like one last stop? Two of my friends LOVE it and i cannot be moved to read it <3 im curious why you didnt like it so i can chose to continue to not read it but with a reason

reading the line “that twink contains multitudes” in a published novel made my brain shrivel up

[terramythos]

TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 3 of 26

Title: Shriek: An Afterword (Ambergris #2) (2006)

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Genre/Tags: Weird, Memoir, Historical (like... in a fictional world lol), Horror, Fantasy, War, Mushroompunk (yeah), Postmodern, Female Protagonist, Disabled Protagonist, First Person, Unreliable Narrator.

Rating: 7/10

Date Began: 1/19/2020

Date Finished: 1/29/2020

Shriek: An Afterword is a pseudo-memoir by a woman named Janice Shriek about the troubled lives and relationships of her and her brother Duncan Shriek in the strange, fungus-riddled city of Ambergris. While Janice believes Duncan is dead, he's apparently found her manuscript and makes extensive edits and commentary throughout the story. (This is indicated in parenthetical sentences, like this one.) 

The closer I get to the end, the closer I get to the beginning. Memories waft up out of the ether, out of nothing. They attach themselves to me like the green light, like the fungi that continue to colonize my typewriter. I had to stop for a while -- my fingers ached and, even after all that I have seen, the fungi unnerved me. I spent the time flexing and unflexing my fingers, pacing back and forth. I also spent it going through a box of my father’s old papers -- nothing I haven’t read through a hundred times before... On top, Duncan had placed the dried-up starfish, its skeleton brittle with age. (I kept it there as a reminder to myself. After your letter to me -- which, while reading this account, I sometimes think was written by an entirely different side of your personality -- I wanted to remember that no matter how isolated I might feel, separated from others by secret knowledge, I was still connected. It didn’t help much, though -- it reminded me of how different I had become.) 

To qualify my rating, I have to be honest. This book is officially separated into two parts, and I found Part I -- which makes up about 60% of the novel -- pretty boring. On the other hand, Part II is brilliant, and everything coalesces beautifully in this second act. Is it worth it? I thought it was, but I understand anyone who tries and gives up. 

Even though Shriek is technically a standalone, I would strongly recommend you read City of Saints and Madmen (#1) first. Both Duncan and Janice are key characters in two of those stories (The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris and The Transformation of Martin Lake, respectively), and there are references and connections all over the place. I’m not sure if Shriek does a great job introducing Ambergris to new readers, so people starting here will be pretty lost without reading the first book.

Just to clear the air, I really liked this book... overall. As I said, the first half-or-so of the book was pretty rough, but the second half redeems it in a lot of ways, even justifying certain writing/plot decisions that didn’t gel with me at first. However “it gets good eventually” is not really an excuse for the rough first half. Hence the mediocre rating. I was close to giving this book a 6/10, but I found that I appreciated the first half much more by the time I got to the ending, so that bumped it up a little. Maybe I’ll enjoy this book more on a reread when I can see the patterns and know where they’re leading ahead of time. 

Before I dive into my issues with it, I’d like to discuss the strong points of this novel. 

At a base level, VanderMeer is a great writer. He has a mastery of the English language that always delights me when I read his stuff. So even when I struggled to like this story in the first half, his wordplay and prose were entertaining and thought-provoking. 

I loved the format. The story basically has two protagonists, since you see things from Janice’s point of view and then Duncan’s interpretations-- but it’s in a very postmodern way, not just a perspective switch like most novels do. Duncan’s commentary often brings much needed humor or heartbreak, depending on the situation. 

In particular, any scene in which Janice and Duncan interact directly is brilliant. Janice recalls a scene, but her memory is faulty (like anyone’s), so sometimes she forgets what they talked about, or interpreted an interaction in a certain way. Then Duncan dives in with his own commentary, supplying information Janice didn’t include or forgot, or correcting something she said, or offering an alternate interpretation... these scenes were fascinating to read and some of my favorite parts of the novel. 

There’s a lot of fun revelations and Easter eggs for people who read City of Saints and Madmen. In particular: 

My favorite story in the first book was The Cage, which is a work of fiction  within the universe of Ambergris by a man named Sirin. In particular there is a very creepy and distinct monster that plays a pivotal role in the story. However, since it’s technically fiction within fiction, that monster and the events didn’t really happen in canon... right? Imagine my surprise in this book when Janice encounters and describes a very similar monster. This struck me as odd, until I got to epilogue/afterword at the end... written by Sirin, and everything clicked. He got the idea for his “fictional” monster from Janice’s account in this story. He doesn’t state this outright, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. I loved that. It was like putting a puzzle together and it would have been so easy to miss. And there’s the extra horror that something like that really exists in this world. There was other stuff like this but this one stood out to me, and I’m sure there’s other things I missed. 

This mostly concerns the second half, but the war sequences and memories are horrific and brilliant. It's very World War II-esque with a unique twist to it (the awful fungal bio weapons one of the sides uses). In particular, the war is introduced with a chapter about a ceasefire opera staged in the broken city... without spoiling it, it’s an excellent and intriguing self-contained story. 

And the horror chapter about the Festival, which is conspicuously absent in the rest of the story? Just so goddamn good. VanderMeer strikes just the right chord with me when it comes to horror. It’s always fresh and intensely creepy. 

If you told me this during the first half, I wouldn’t believe you -- but I ended up loving the characters and finding most of their relationships fascinating. This is a heartbreaking story and it really hit home by the end. 

With that lofty praise, what’s my issue with Part I? The simplest way I can put it is that the struggles Duncan and Janice face are so mundane. They would maybe be interesting in a generic work of fiction, but here they felt out of place. For example, Janice’s arc concerns her rise to fame, which leads to success, which leads to lavish parties and orgies, which leads to excesses and a drug addiction, which leads to a suicide attempt, which leads to rehab, which leads to a diminished life of poverty. Yes, these can be interesting and harrowing problems in the right context, but the strongest point of these books is the setting, and there was nothing that tied these events to Ambergris. You could easily go through and change the character/place names and it wouldn’t seem off. 

Duncan is a little more interesting in this regard, because his is a story of obsession. In particular, he’s obsessed with the gray caps (strange humanoid mushroom creatures that haunt the pages of these books), and it takes over his life until he becomes totally discredited as a historian. But even he falls into this trap when he becomes a college professor and has an affair with one of his much younger students (Yikes! Though it is treated as creepy within the story, at least). That takes over most of his character’s emotional core from that point. 

Said student -- Mary Sabon -- is a core antagonist in the story. Janice in particular obsesses over her and her personal vendetta against her, and honestly even with the second part I was never really sold on this or cared about it all that much, so I was disappointed it took up so much of the story. 

All of this would be one thing, but there’s all sorts of tantalizing hints about more interesting things. The gray caps probably have some ulterior motive that no one knows! There’s this crazy eldritch Machine hidden underground! Duncan is sort of turning into a mushroom! But these are only teased before the story pivots back to something comparatively uninteresting. Rather than encouraging me with the cool foreshadowing, it just got grating because it meant there were more interesting events and stories going on that I didn’t get to see for some arbitrary reason. Janice also rambles and goes back and forth quite a bit. This is clearly intentional (after all, you learn in the end this is a mostly unedited draft -- at least in the fiction of the story), but even so, it can be hard to follow at times. 

Part II justifies a lot of this because these hints do pay off. You DO get to see a lot of the interesting stuff in detail at this later point of the story, and it’s not always what you expect. There’s overt and subtle dramatic irony and contrast between what characters go through in the first half versus the stranger, more profound traumas of the second half. You learn Janice is suffering from some severe PTSD and it explains a lot of the manic style in the first half. But again, is it worth 245-ish mediocre (to me) pages? I think that probably depends on the reader. I had a problem with it-- but clearly a lot of people don’t, based on reviews I’ve skimmed. Many put the book down and don’t finish it, but that’s true for any book. Hell, lots of people preferred the first half, so who knows. 

Ultimately, I’m glad I read this book. For me it really does come together in an amazing way toward the end, and I found myself really caring about Janice and Duncan. If you read City of Saints and Madmen and want more of the characters and the world, then definitely give this a try. But it is a pretty niche book as these things go, so I can’t recommend it to everyone. 

Anyway, I’ve come this far -- so I’m going to read Finch, the final (for now?) installment in this universe. 

[brigdh]

Reading Definitely Not Wednesday

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey. A space opera set in the relatively near future. Humans have colonized Mars and the asteroid belt, and a few scattered populations make due on the moons of planets further out. There is, however, no faster-than-light travel, no contact with any solar system beyond our own, no sentient AIs, and no aliens. A major theme of the book is the culture clash between those who live on Earth or Mars – the superpowers of this future – and those who live in the Belt, where mining is the preeminent economy and life is the hardscrabble sort where even water and oxygen have to be imported, never mind concepts like justice and equality. Different characters move from one place to the other or switch allegiances, but their origins are as baked in as we would regard ethnicity or nationality. As one character puts it, "A childhood spent in gravity shaped the way he saw things forever." Corey (who is actually two separate dudes writing under a penname) does a wonderful job of fleshing out the background worldbuilding. I loved references to fungal-culture whiskey, Bhangra as the default elevator muzak, hand gestures exaggerated to be seen through a spacesuit, and largely unintelligible localized slang (“Bomie vacuate like losing air,” the girl said with a chuckle. “Bang-head hops, kennis tu?” / “Ken,” Miller said. /“Now, all new bladeboys. Overhead. I’m out.”). It feels like a more detailed world than a lot of sci-fi does. Which is good, because the characters are not all that compelling. The two POVs are Jim Holden and Detective Miller. Holden is the second-in-command on an unimportant spaceship that works as a freight hauler, moving ice back and forth between the Belt and Saturn. Things change dramatically when a mysterious someone attacks their ship and kills everyone except for Holden and a few others, and he finds himself centrally involved in the runup to war. He has the most generic action-movie-hero personality I can imagine, with no discernable characteristics except 'idealistic' (and I really only know that because other people keep telling him he is), kinda nervous about being suddenly thrust into command but doing a good job, a womanizer (but see, it's okay because he just keeps genuinely falling in love with so many women!), and earnest. He's fine. He's not even objectionable, just incredibly boring. He comes with a crew of entirely indistinguishable followers that I couldn't keep straight, but that's all right because most of them get killed off so I no longer had to try to remember who was who. He also develops a romance that is 100% unbelievable, but I suppose that's what action-movie-heroes do, so who's even surprised. Miller is a detective on Ceres, the largest city in the Belt, who's been hired by a rich family to track down their anarchist, slumming daughter. Miller is an incredibly cliche noir protagonist - alcoholic, divorced, not as good as he used to be, cynical, a little bit corrupt but underneath it all he still remembers his good intentions – but at least that means he has more of a personality than Jim, even if it's a personality you've seen a thousand times before. On the other hand, Miller becomes obsessed with this dead/missing girl in a way that is painfully stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Two things kept this from ruining Leviathan Wakes for me. One, Miller is at least somewhat self-aware about it: This was why he had searched for her. Julie had become the part of him that was capable of human feeling. The symbol of what he could have been if he hadn’t been this. There was no reason to think his imagined Julie had anything in common with the real woman. Meeting her would have been a disappointment for them both. And two, there's a twist near the end that allows Julie to finally have her own voice in the text, and not exist solely as Miller's imagined dependance on her. It takes almost half the book for Miller and Holden to finally cross paths, at which point the missing-girl mystery and the war plot combine and take a twist for a direction I DID NOT SEE COMING. I am ambivalent on whether to spoil this; on the one hand, I read it unprepared and it was incredibly awesome to experience it that way. On the other hand, I suspect this is information that will be a determining factor for many people on whether they want to read it or not. So: halfway through, Leviathan Wakes takes a wild jump and becomes about a zombie outbreak. I would not have previously thought that 'space opera' and 'zombie apocalypse' are two genres that should be combined, but the tension and excitement skyrocket once the book takes this turn, transforming it from average quality to 'I CANNOT STOP READING, MUST FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT'. So, good choice! The sequence with Miller and Holden trapped on a small space station trying to sneak their way past zombie hordes is one of the most thrilling I've read in ages. Leviathan Wakes is the first book in a series (apparently it was originally supposed to be a trilogy, but there's currently eight books out with at least one more planned, along with a batch of short stories) and has also become a show on the Syfy network that I haven't seen. I feel like I've spent a lot of this review complaining, but honestly I mostly enjoyed the book and am planning to read the sequels. The fact that people seem to like the characters from future books more than these ones certainly doesn't hurt! Pig/Pork: Archaeology, Zoology and Edibility by Pia Spry-Marques. A nonfiction book about everything remotely related to the farming and eating of pigs. I expected from the subtitle and the author's personal background that archaeology would be the main focus, but it turns out that's really only the first two chapters, which cover the Paleolithic hunting of wild boar and the original domestication of pigs. The other chapters turn to topics as diverse as experiments on feeding farmed pigs leftovers from restaurants, the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, a special Spanish ham called ibérico de bellota which can only be fed acorns, genetically modifiying pigs so their manure would contain less phosporus, sunburn in pigs, minature pet pigs, organ donation between humans and pigs, the terrifying tapeworms to be acquired from eating raw pork, why pork is a 'white' meat, how to make sausages, theories on why pork is neither halal nor kosher, the use of an enzyme from pig pancreases in wine production, EU food-safety regulations on traditional pork dishes, Cuba's 'Bay of Pigs', the Pig War between the US and Canada in 1859, and Oliver Cromwell's favorite pig breed. Basically if it has the remotest connection to the title, Spry-Marques has included it. She even includes recipes for each chapter, though some of them are clearly more for amusement than actual consumption – I can't imagine anyone having just finished a chapter on how eating raw pork will give you cysts in your brain is eager to try figatellu, a type of uncooked sausage from France. And it would take a braver foodie than me to taste "Asian-inspired pork uterus with green onion and ginger". In fact, as is probably not surprising for any book which touches on factory farming however briefly, you will probably come away not wanting to eat pork at all for a while. Spry-Marques's writing is breezy and conversational, which kept me turning the pages even when the structure was a bit scattered. I wish it were more focused, but it's a great book for anyone who enjoys popular science, history, or food writing. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Song of Blood & Stone by L. Penelope. A YA fantasy novel with some unusual elements. Rather than being set in vaguely medieval England or a dystopian sci-fi future, we're in a country where the technology seems to be around 1900: cars and electric lights exist, but they're restricted to rich cities, and someone coming from rural poverty might well have never seen either. Magic exists, but comes from one's heritage; you're either born with it or not. In Elsira, where our story is set, it's rare to the point of nonexistence. Our heroine Jasminda, however, does have magic, due to her father having been a refugee from the neighboring country of Lagrimar, where magic is common. Elsira and Lagrimar have been constantly at war for hundreds of years, but are separated by a magical Barrier which allows no one to pass through, except on rare occasions when a temporary breach happens and violence erupts. Elsirans are light-skinned and Lagrimari are dark-skinned, so Jasminda has dealt with fairly severe racism throughout her life. The story starts when Jasminda runs across Jack, a Elsiran soldier just back from spying in Lagrimar who has super important information that must get back to the capital as soon as possible; unfortunately Jack has just been shot and is closely pursued by a troop of Lagrimari soldiers. Jasminda and Jack team up, fall in love, and try to prevent the coming outbreak of war. The most revealing thing I can say about Song of Blood & Stone is that it's very, very YA. (As you could probably guess, what with its title that fits exactly into the pattern of the 'YA title' meme currently going around tumblr.) Almost everything that happens is easily predictable from the back cover (Jack's long-withheld backstory is clearly supposed to be a shocking twist, but it's obvious from the moment he appears), the prose is mediocre but fine, good and bad guys are clearly signalled, the real world parallels (racism, treatment of refugees, domestic abuse) are good-hearted but extremely Social Justice 101. On the plus side, the beginning was the worst part and it got better and better as it went along; several developments near the very end were so interesting that I'm tempted to read the sequel, despite my initial boredom. Overall it's not a bad book, but I'd only recommend it to people who are extremely affectionate of the most repetitive tropes of the YA genre. I read this as an ARC from a GoodReads giveaway.

[DW link for easier commenting]

[cipheramnesia]

I grew up as the only member of my tribe

Growing up as a nerd in the 80's and 90's, you generally were expected to be into one or all of:

Star Wars Star Trek Lord of the Rings

These were the model for geek culture in the dark primitive era before the internet brought obscure lovers of obscure media together.

I've discussed my love of Buckaroo Banzai elsewhere. But let me add being a huge fan of Doctor Who (classic), and Elric of Melnibone to the list of geeky obsessions which made me an outsider among my kind. I was not in the tribes. I was the only member of my tribe.

What it means is that you have no one to talk to about the things you love. When I got around to watching the original Star Wars movies as a teenager, I was bored by them. The story was mediocre and the only interesting things to me were the side characters. Why watch a blah Luke Skywalker movie when I can watch what's just like a Han Solo movie in the form of Buckaroo Banzai?

Star Trek was the same. My goodness but those shows felt dull to my youthful mind, first stumbling into Doctor Who at age six. Imagine if you've been drawing fantasy worlds with a giant box of crayolas and then someone tells you that matching up primary color felt shapes is fun. Try to explain to anyone prior to 2005 that you love Doctor Who and they look at you like you're an alien. And it's still not much better because you still have to launch into a soul destroying explanation of this series that's been around since 1968. I think I'm still right, and I think classic Doctor Who is still more exciting with more complex and challenging stories.

The literature might be the worst. I can't decide which version is more lonely. Is it trying to understand why people are excited about hobbits and elves having a series of lunches via the most stultifying writing outside of social theory, while I'm lost in the dreamy romantic prose telling the story of a tragic albino trying to drive the gods out of his world with a soul draining demon sword? Is it the resigned sigh over every last fantasy character derived from Elric in a world that forgot the original fantasy iconoclast? I don't know. I know in my soul that an Elric adaptation by Guilermo del Toro will be the most amazing movie, because the same dark magic in del Toro’s movie embues Elric’s stories.

It wasn't better when I found my fandoms. It was like walking into a crowded room where everyone already knew each other. It was fun for five minutes until I learned no one had the same feelings as I did. Doctor Who is cool not because of the acid trip stories and designs. It's cool because it has complex characters who are driven by complex ideologies instead of social stereotypes. Elric isn't cool for being a badass sword wielding elf. He's cool because he's a tragic figure who doesn't know how to live in a decaying world, who just wants everyone to find peace but only seems to find death.

I'm the only member of my tribe, and it's why I'm like this, or maybe because I'm this way I'm the only member of my tribe. I don't try to fall in love with the stories that no one else know - or that everyone else thinks are actively terrible. I just do. I just love all the weirdos, and they all speak to some very specific thing in my code.

I'm still alone, wondering why I can't share my loves with the world. But listen I'll keep trying because I see other people love the same ideas I love. 

To me, everyone else is the alien. Everyone else speaks a language that seems flat to me. I guess I just see in another spectrum.

Come and see these other colors in the rainbow. I use these stories to rewrite my code in better ways. I just want to share that feeling of suddenly having my mind working better than it was before.

Let Buckaroo Banzai into your head to make it a better place.