It's been a pretty good year. My count of new books read this year is 63. Aside from those reviewed earlier on this blog, there are a couple I want to mention as especially memorable for 2007 - good and bad.
The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier - and this was recommended by Oprah! Ok, the man himself is talented and an icon, but please, next time hire a better ghostwriter. Or get one, sir, for if you wrote this yourself it just proves you should stick to acting. Could have been great -- the material he had to work with promises an intriguing story but somehow it never ties together. Interesting bit here and there, but disjointed overall. And there is a lot of stuff hidden, I dare say. You can tell that probably the best stuff has been left out. Why write a biography if not to tell the truth?
Naomi Novik has impressed me with her first novel, His Majesty's Dragon, which I read in 2006, so this year I picked up the other two novels in the series, Throne of Jade and The Black Powder War. She has great concepts - in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, what if there were dragons? Yes there are navies and ground forces to fight the wars, but in addition, dragons are used as aircraft, some of them so large that they carry large crews and heavy weapons. The central character, Will Laurence, bonds with the dragon Temeraire. In Throne of Jade, they journey to China and back, which is exciting, interesting, and beautifully written. Black Powder War focuses on the war itself, not quite so compelling, but still worth reading.
Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent was a very good memoir on a very interesting subject, as Norah decided to research what it was like to be a man in society from the inside, and took on the identity of Ned. What are men like when women aren't around? Are they really unable to talk about their feelings? Are their social roles as constricted as women's seem to be? An excellent view from the "other side".
Dearly Devoted Dexter - the second book by Jeff Lindsay on the character (now also a Showtime series) of Dexter, a serial killer who only kills bad guys. This is one rare occurance when the series outshines the books.
Others worth a look - Stephenie Meyer's young adult/vampire trilogy - Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse. Kate Braestrup's memoir, Here if you Need Me. And Barack Obama's early memoir, Dreams from My Father.
I also re-read during the year, usually when I run out of new books to be read or when I want to head back into something familiar and loved. This year my favorite re-read is The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye. Set during the British government's rule of India, it layers in politics and war with the tale of a young English boy born and orphaned in India, who is adopted by his Indian nurse and believes himself to be her son until she died when he is eleven. He's packed back to England for a "proper education" then returns to India as a British officer. His past has never let go of him and he reunites with a princess that he knew as a child. A long book, but one that is beautifully descriptive of India and her people.
Happy New Year... and good reading to you in 2008.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Shadow Game, Mind Game
These two are the first of a series by Christine Feehan, and are classified as "paranormal romance" if you want to look at genre labeling. To me, they just prove that I will read just about anything, no matter how trite. I bought five books in the series on the recommendation of a colleague, and for the first time I am questioning her taste.
The problem is, the premise of these books has great potential, but the author wastes a lot of it.
In Shadow Game, Feehan sets up the group of paranormals known as GhostWalkers. These are people with enhanced psychic abilities of various kinds, developed through clandestine experiments by Doctor Peter Whitney. Years earlier, he "acquired" throwaway female orphan children from foreign countries that had odd abilities, sequestered them, and trained them so their abilities would grow. Most of the children developed difficulties that he couldn't deal with, so he placed them with various caretakers. But he kept Lily as his adopted daughter, and trained her to follow in his footsteps as a scientist -- without telling her exactly what he was up to.
Skip forward to the present day, and Shadow Game discovers that Dr. Whitney now has a group of military men who volunteered to have their abilities enhanced also, and who were assigned to work as a team in covert operations. However, there is a traitor in the military command who wants to shut down the operation and is killing off some of the team. The others are imprisoned in a laboratory. One of them, Captain Ryland Miller, is attracted to Lily and she feels the same way about him. When her father is killed, she uses her money and position as the new head of the research facility to rescue the men. And she and Miller get it on. And get it on. And get it on.
Long on lovemaking and exploration of their mutual attraction, and very short on credible plot, Shadow Game is a shadow of what it could have been.
In Mind Game, the author's pattern emerges as one of the team members is assigned to track down one of the young girls, now grown to womanhood, who knows nothing about the GhostWalkers. Obviously, each book in the series is now going to be a pairing-off of a male team member with one of the lost young women from the group that Lily trained with. Plot advancement is scattered lightly -- very lightly -- amidst pages of erotic prose. I expect more of the same in the remaining books. (To be honest, I am now skipping the sex scenes to get to the passages that actually advance the story.)
Bottom line: Mindless Games
The problem is, the premise of these books has great potential, but the author wastes a lot of it.
In Shadow Game, Feehan sets up the group of paranormals known as GhostWalkers. These are people with enhanced psychic abilities of various kinds, developed through clandestine experiments by Doctor Peter Whitney. Years earlier, he "acquired" throwaway female orphan children from foreign countries that had odd abilities, sequestered them, and trained them so their abilities would grow. Most of the children developed difficulties that he couldn't deal with, so he placed them with various caretakers. But he kept Lily as his adopted daughter, and trained her to follow in his footsteps as a scientist -- without telling her exactly what he was up to.
Skip forward to the present day, and Shadow Game discovers that Dr. Whitney now has a group of military men who volunteered to have their abilities enhanced also, and who were assigned to work as a team in covert operations. However, there is a traitor in the military command who wants to shut down the operation and is killing off some of the team. The others are imprisoned in a laboratory. One of them, Captain Ryland Miller, is attracted to Lily and she feels the same way about him. When her father is killed, she uses her money and position as the new head of the research facility to rescue the men. And she and Miller get it on. And get it on. And get it on.
Long on lovemaking and exploration of their mutual attraction, and very short on credible plot, Shadow Game is a shadow of what it could have been.
In Mind Game, the author's pattern emerges as one of the team members is assigned to track down one of the young girls, now grown to womanhood, who knows nothing about the GhostWalkers. Obviously, each book in the series is now going to be a pairing-off of a male team member with one of the lost young women from the group that Lily trained with. Plot advancement is scattered lightly -- very lightly -- amidst pages of erotic prose. I expect more of the same in the remaining books. (To be honest, I am now skipping the sex scenes to get to the passages that actually advance the story.)
Bottom line: Mindless Games
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Fledgling
Octavia Butler’s final novel is a variation of the vampire myth, but in this case the vampire kind are a distinct race. They cannot make humans into vampires, but instead live with humans in a symbiosis that makes them mutually interdependent.
Shori is a young vampire who has survived an attack that has killed her family and taken her memory. She wakes in pain, injured, blind, and in need of red meat to heal herself. She survives, begins to heal, but she has lost all memory of who and what she is, and has forgotten everything she knew about her family and her kind.
However, she is drawn to a young man who is human, and links him to her by feeding on his blood. The feeding forms a bond that is pleasurable for the human, and essential for the vampire.
Shori is driven to find out what happened to her that left her nearly dead, and when other vampires come looking for survivors of the attack, she connects with them to discover that they are the male line of her family. The compound where she found herself was the home of the female line of the vampire family to which she belongs, but now all the females are gone except for her.
She soon discovers that a war has broken out between two ancient vampire families, sparked by the experimental breeding plan her own family had begun to create vampires that could stay awake and walk in the sunlight. Shori is the one living survivor of these experiments. Other vampire families believe that she is a danger to them, or that she is “unnatural” in her abilities, and thus planned to destroy the new breed of vampire.
Shori learns of the traditions of the vampire society, and brings the killers of her family to trial in the vampire tradition, but finds her own motives questioned and herself as much on trial as those who killed her family.
Octavia Butler was one of the rare science fiction authors to deal with race in her work, and is startlingly innovative. Most of her work deals with rogue talents, genetic manipulation, and other ways in which her characters are “born different”. Relationships are highlighted – Butler’s methodology is to give a character a gift that is also a burden, then see how she or he deals with it, both internally and in interactions with other people.
I am sorry, also, that this may be the last book I will see from Butler – she obviously wrote Fledgling as the first of a series on the vampire kind and I would have enjoyed seeing where she was planning to go with it.
Bottom line: Sharply written, it gets into your blood.
Shori is a young vampire who has survived an attack that has killed her family and taken her memory. She wakes in pain, injured, blind, and in need of red meat to heal herself. She survives, begins to heal, but she has lost all memory of who and what she is, and has forgotten everything she knew about her family and her kind.
However, she is drawn to a young man who is human, and links him to her by feeding on his blood. The feeding forms a bond that is pleasurable for the human, and essential for the vampire.
Shori is driven to find out what happened to her that left her nearly dead, and when other vampires come looking for survivors of the attack, she connects with them to discover that they are the male line of her family. The compound where she found herself was the home of the female line of the vampire family to which she belongs, but now all the females are gone except for her.
She soon discovers that a war has broken out between two ancient vampire families, sparked by the experimental breeding plan her own family had begun to create vampires that could stay awake and walk in the sunlight. Shori is the one living survivor of these experiments. Other vampire families believe that she is a danger to them, or that she is “unnatural” in her abilities, and thus planned to destroy the new breed of vampire.
Shori learns of the traditions of the vampire society, and brings the killers of her family to trial in the vampire tradition, but finds her own motives questioned and herself as much on trial as those who killed her family.
Octavia Butler was one of the rare science fiction authors to deal with race in her work, and is startlingly innovative. Most of her work deals with rogue talents, genetic manipulation, and other ways in which her characters are “born different”. Relationships are highlighted – Butler’s methodology is to give a character a gift that is also a burden, then see how she or he deals with it, both internally and in interactions with other people.
I am sorry, also, that this may be the last book I will see from Butler – she obviously wrote Fledgling as the first of a series on the vampire kind and I would have enjoyed seeing where she was planning to go with it.
Bottom line: Sharply written, it gets into your blood.
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