Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2nd reading)

#524
Title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2nd reading)
Author: J. K. Rowling
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2007
 759 pages (17 disks)

Second time, this one on CD. The pacing is much better when I'm listening rather than racing through it in the hours after its release.

Fire (The Seven Kingdoms #2)

#523
Title: Fire (The Seven Kingdoms #2)
Author: Kristin Cashore
Publisher: Dial
Year: 2009
466 pages

I enjoyed this in its own right, and I enjoyed it as a prequel to Graceling. Fire is another strong female protagonist whose relationships with men are more mutual than is sometimes the case in fantasy/swords and sorcery novels. Intertwined with Fire's story is that of Leck, who appeared in an important role in Graceling. While that book focused on the lands where gracelings arise, here the story concerns beautiful monsters, of whom Fire is one.

Quite aside from the story and the writing, both of which held my interest, I want to appreciate several aspects of the story. First, the non-marital sexual and romantic relationships were nicely described without gratuitous sex scenes. Second, the existence of same-sex relationships was acknowledged neutrally and without much emphasis by the narration and characters. Third, you've got to love a young adult novel where the protagonist's travels are thwarted by her monster-attracting menstrual blood. Now that's an interesting twist.

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1

#522
Title: City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1)
Author: Cassandra Clare
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Year: 2007
 493 pages

Many of the reviews of this book, and many of the emotions in those reviews, focus more on the reviewers' relationships with Cassandra Clare and her writings in the world of online Harry Potter fandom. I see that I read one of her novellas or novel sections several years ago, but didn't associate it with her authorship of The Mortal Instruments. I leave the articulation of those disputes to other reviewers. To the charge that City of Bones or her other writings plagiarize the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I couldn't say. To the critique that they are derivative, I note that when I read the very first Star Wars novel, purchased from Science Fiction Book Club before there was a movie, I thought, What a piece of thieving crap. I still think this. I am much less troubled by Clare's book because it makes much better, creative, and expansive use of its fantasy/urban fantasy/science fiction/mythoreligious roots and sources. It's fresh and, to me, unangering compared to the wholesale larceny committed by the first Star Wars,* or Eragon, or The Sword of Shannara (or even many parts of the story of a certain boy wizard). If anything, I am much more tired of the Betty Sue cute teen girl who suffers the ambivalence of being the apex (or possibly nadir) of a love triangle. Often, the action stalls here for tremulous or truculent conversations between adolescents whose time might be better spent slaughtering the demon who is attacking them.

While the writing wasn't sterling, I wasn't pulled out of the narrative by it too often, and Clare's worldbuilding, while sometimes holding the possibility of inconsistencies, was ambitious. As a first novel it kept my attention and showed promise.

*(Star Wars From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, 1976)

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

#521
Title: Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
Author: Nick Reding
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Year: 2009
269 pages

Read as an audiobook. An absorbing, educational, and grim history of methamphetamine production and distribution in the Midwest, punctuated by the stories of meth makers, users, and the people trying to shut it down. The criticism that Reding got some geography wrong is picayune and of little consequence, though I agree that it is a problem that should be corrected. More concerning is Reding's reductive concept of how meth is a drug that uniquely fits the American work ethic, and that meth use and addiction pretty much comes down to bad eco0nomic times. For one thing, I'm sure people in Southeast Asia, where it's manufactured in Burma/Myanmar and is a long-time favorite of long-haul truck drivers, could tell an equally compelling story about the meaning of meth and how it fits their culture. For another thing, sociology aside, meth is inexpensive, a compelling high, and quite addictive.

The Dead and the Gone

#520
Title: The Dead and the Gone
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Publisher: Graphia
Year: 2009
321 pages

A companion to the post-apocalyptic Life As We Knew It, this young adult novel tells the story of the same events from the experience of a teenage boy in New York City. Though he is male, I found this version more frightening, perhaps because there were more people but fewer trustworthy adults around.

I do have one nagging criticism, which is that trying to break in through the doors of apartments in NYC is impossible. Go to the basement and get a fire axe, then chop through an interior wall, or rappel from a higher floor and kick in a window.

Brain Death

#519 
Title: Brain DeathAuthor: Sandra Wilkinson
Publisher: Pinnacle
Year: 1988
396 pages

It's hard even to tag this as "disappointing" when I knew what it was going into it--the kind of fiction that a hospital worker brings to the nursing station in a grocery bag full of similar books that are functionally disposable. In this regard, Brain Death did not fail to deliver what it promised. It did serve  the function of causing me to re-evaluate my book for Bahrain, QuixotiQ, in a kinder light. I read it because it was there. My sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and I all read it while agreeing it was dreadful, not unlike kvetching about how nasty those stale chips are while eating the whole bag.

You know this book's ilk--its characters and scenes are those of pornography--ill-defined suites that are sparsely detailed except for some emblem or notation that is intended to signify "hospital" or "brokerage after hours" or "millionaire's yacht." The worn carpets and nondescript nightstands, though, say that the action has nothing to do with the setting that has been asserted.  Peopling this world are "administrators" or "doctors" or "young men from the countryside who are confused and alone in the big city." The "nurses" or "teachers" wear "diamond" tiaras; the "doctors" or "electricians" or "police officers" are saviors or menaces. Any resemblance of set to purported story is incidental.

You don't need a spoiler tag on this, right? I can't even find a cover photo on the web. The action here takes place in a Boston hospital. Since I worked in a Boston hospital at the time this book was published, I have a good basis for comparison. For better or worse, we had no sentient computer, evil medical research cabal, or vituperative board members. Anyone psychotic (whether patient or staff) was easy to identify and generally not destructive. To my knowledge, our hospital had far fewer homicides than plague the protagonist's institution, and had we had multiple homicides, severed legs left in closets, etc., I feel certain that our administrator and her cop boyfriend wouldn't have been the ones to try to figure it out, heroically rising from their hospital beds again and again to right wrongs and rout the bad guys. Also, if a large number of our nurses were raped in an only nebulously related way, I imagine we'd have put a guard in the parking lot.

About this sentient computer--I have nothing against artificial intelligence stories, but I loathe bad science fiction by writers of other genres who seem to believe that the reader is entirely credulous and that logic has no place in the reader's participation in solving the mystery/thriller. I'll promise you one thing--if I ever managed the use of a sentient computer, I would damn well make sure there was a "threat to the safety of self or others" alert mechanism for patient or staff confidences to said sentient computer. Even in 1988, before HIPAA, we would have prioritized that, evil medical research cabal or no evil medical research cabal.

QuixotiQ

#518
Title: QuixotiQ
Author: Ali Al Saeed
Publisher: iUniverse
Year: 2004
Country: Bahrain
192 pages

Why is the last Q capitalized? We don't learn the answer to this rather obvious question in this first Bahraini novel published in English. That it has won awards speaks to the importance of this publication, but not its quality. There may be something of Bahrain in the themes or tone of the story, but I don't have a way to evaluate it. It seems to take place in the U.S., England, or somewhere similar. The events and plot seem to intend to convey that we cannot escape our (frightening, horrific, intertwined) destinies, but that why things should happen to us, in particular, is random or chaotic. This is the best sense I can make of the novel, which reads like a good second draft in a college fiction writing class. There is something there, but the powerful and genuine aspect of the novel has not yet emerged. The English itself is intermediate EFL level with sudden changes of tense within sentences, misused words, infelicities of grammar, and technically correct but awkward constructions.

I applaud the effort. I may read the only other book I could find by a Bahraini, though I thought when I bought it that he was Qatari: A Line in the Sea: The Qatar v. Bahrain Border Dispute in the World Court--Oh yes, be still, my heart.

Woman at Point Zero

#517
Title: Woman at Point ZeroAuthor: Nawal el Saadawi
Publisher: Zed Books
Year: 1983
 112 pages

A tightly constructed fictional study of PTSD, deceptively simply told within a clinical frame narrative given more credibility by the author's professional work. The protagonist committed a murder after betrayal after betrayal and a reductive cultural version of male-female relations. In this cultural regard, it is not very different from many stories, both actual and fictional, of the oppression many women experience in other African countries, regardless of religion or economics. A fine example of Nawal el Saadawi's themes and writing skill.

Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

#516
Title: Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2004
Country: Slovenia
188 pages

Slovenia may be a more hopping joint than I realized. Imagine Žižek as your college philosophy instructor. Mine (in the days when instructors smoked in the classroom) would pace back and forth on a slightly raised stage flanked by two columns (Ionic, if memory serves). As he intoned about Aristotle or Hobbes, he would light a cigarette, then deposit it on the edge of an ashtray on the end of the plinth to which he had walked. He often wound up with a burning cigarette on either side, and occasionally would lift one to to his mouth, seeming bemused when he discovered that he was already smoking another cigarette. I picture Žižek as that professor, but perhaps more ironic and, as befits a man who cites Lacan so frequently, with a fistful of burning stogies. This has little to do with Žižek, but is evoked because sometimes Žižek's essays seem to have little to do with the topic at hand, and sometimes the sense of them is obscured as if by clouds of smoke.

This rather dense yet sometimes loosely constructed volume collects three related essays that take as their starting point, and sometimes their end point, the war in Iraq. More specifically, the war in Iraq as its unconscious/subtextual metaphors and logic are unpacked, sometimes crisply and sometimes murkily. How many analyses of U.S. military decisions have you read that are based on Freudian dream interpretation? So it's intellectually fun, if sometimes obscure. The first and third cohere reasonably even if one (let me be frank: this one) cannot always follow or does not always agree with his associations or conclusions. The second lost me, though I even took notes in an attempt to wrest its meaning (phallus) from it to appropriate as my own. No dice. What's a girl who's only taken a few graduate semiotics classes to do?

As when I read many works of philosophy, religion, or conspiracy, I was frustrated at times by how self-referential a passage would become. Admittedly, Žižek does less of this than some maddening philosophers whom I shall not mention. I enjoy the aesthetic and balance of ideas that are internally harmonious, but also want to see sufficient outside referents and (and this is the feminist deconstructionist in me) acknowledgment that the idea or phenomenon under discussion could be understood differently without having to argue that one perception is always more accurate than others. This seems like an enactment of capitalist ideals or a pissing contest, probably not what Žižek had in mind.

Stories of Women

#515
Title: Stories of WomenPhotographer: Shanta Rao
Text: Charles-Henri Favrod and Sèlim Nassib
Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
Year: 1995
136 pages

Not actually stories of women, but black and white art photos of women and settings from East Africa. There is a great deal of portraiture, not always sharply focused, in dark interiors that seem more claustrophobic than cozy.

Title: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

#514
Title: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
Author: John Elder Robison 
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year: 2007
317 pages

It's fascinating to read this memoir by Augusten Burroughs's older brother. Both this book and Burroughs's A Wolf at the Table have an emotional focus on their father, and it's fascinating to compare their perspectives by reading these synchronic narratives. Robison's father is sometimes frightening but also pathetic, whereas Burroughs, the younger, experienced him more consistently as terrifying.

Robison's writing is generally clear and coherent. Though there are occasional Aspy forays into a welter of technical details, the tone and content are often interpersonally sophisticated and sweet, as when he takes on a doggy persona to express affection and vulnerability to his wife.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

#513
Title: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
Author: Tom Reiss
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2005
476 pages

Rather than thinking of this as a biography, it may be more accurate to consider it a story of a man and his life in their historical context. I know that may not be a salient distinction for some, but I've read a good number of reviews that complain about the story being overly inclusive, padded, or wordy. It may be better to treat it as a text in which Lev Nussimbaum is an interesting and emblematic exemplar of the tensions and identity strains of the region in this era. Taking Nussimbaum's story as the point of depature and return, Reiss interweaves the story of a man--both Jewish and Muslim, Asian and European, Nussimbaum and Kurban Said and Essad Bey--with the events that shaped modern Euro-Asian history and the Jewish experience in the Old World. Reiss does this with only occasional repetitions and digressions that are too lengthy. I was least held by the end of the book, where Nussimbaum's story seemed to be wrapped up with an excess of brevity and alacrity. A good reflective and summative end note would have managed this problem.

Nightlight: A Parody

#512
Title: Nightlight: A Parody
Author: Harvard Lampoon
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2009
154 pages

Bored of the Rings was funny. Nightlight is closer to Doon: Not really funny enough. Twilight cries out for parody, but like Bella in the first few books, the reader's desire will not be gratified. There are some funny ideas, key among which is that Edwart is about as far from a cool vampire as you can get, but it's not enough to sustain the book in its own right.

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3)

#511
Title: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3)
Author: Suzanne Collins
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2010
400 pages

Another action-packed account of Katniss as she becomes a larger than life symbol of the revolution, still can't really manage her own image, and is ultimately utilized by more players and for more ends than she can imagine. This is a novel about spinning out of control, and Collins adroitly renders the vertiginous plunge (sometimes with literal plunges into monster-filled sewers).

I have no objection to the deaths and destruction of the ongoing and climactic fights. This is a dystopian novel, and it's time those teenagers got off my lawn and thought about how you can suffer losses, bleakness, and even love triangles that don't include any vampires. However, I didn't initially find the conclusion satisfying. It's a little like Rowling's deflating retreat-to-the suburbs epilogue, plus a heaping cup full of post-traumatic stress. As I've sat with it, though, I find it becoming if not more appealing, more palatable. It's not even the action of the ending that concerns me, but the timing and sagginess of it. I may have to read it again to be more specific than that.