The Warlock in Spite of Himself by Christopher Stasheff

The Warlock Series, book 1

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Fairly standard fantasy fiction. If you like fantasy fiction, you will probably enjoy this one enough for it to be worthwhile. If not, not.

We have a normal fantasy world where our hero gets a few dustings of science opera toys. Our hero fights his opponents at their specialties and wins, in between swoons from half the female cast (Heinlein?). He is a tireless crusader for his ideals who is frequently drawn in by the lure of love. You know roughly how this story goes, and it is not a bad telling of it.

The cover calls it a mix of Science and Sorcery. Practically, we have sorcery, with an occasional scientific explanation or technological toy, which has the same effect as a magic item. The great value is that our hero, Rod Gallowglass, is an innocent who can get explanations from the rest of the cast while giving modern or scientific explanations. It is a great device for tossing a modern character into a fantasy story, someone who can both ask, "Huh?" and put things in normal terms. Who in the medieval era is going to explain the risks of transitioning from monarchy through constitutional monarchy to democracy without sounding like Dennis from Holy Grail? Toss in an off-worlder, and your problem is solved.

Actually, that happens in a lot of science fiction, doesn't it? In fantasy, it is less often your main character who is that outsider. Okay, Harry Potter, if you've heard of him. I seem to be losing this argument with myself.

It is a solid piece of genre fiction: not something likely to be part of the literary canon a century hence, but an enjoyable tale. If you are focusing on the great works of man, skip it; if you have ever just turned on the TV and watched whatever episode of whichever series of Law & Order is on, you know what I mean.

Of course, I offered this to fantasy fans at the top, and if you would so classify yourself, you understand the pleasures of genre fiction. If not, sorry that you read this far.

Amazon link (seems to be out of print)

Do Not Go Naked into Your Next Presentation by Ron Hoff

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Prepare. Personally connect with your audience on an emotional level. There are some details and anecdotes, too. There, you have read the book.

Amazon link

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

Rating - 4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)

Stargirl is one of the best books ever.

Stargirl herself is a wonderful character. She is uplifting and expressive. She reminds us that life is beautiful, to be embraced fully. The world is a great place to be, full of wonders great and small. Love is a good thing. A smile is worth having.

It is hard to address simple truths without sounding trite, as that last paragraph probably did. A great piece of art can take a small theme and explore it, flesh out a picture of a time, a place, a feeling. Reading Stargirl is like bathing in sunlight.

Stargirl captures perfectly a sense of life. Better, it captures two, because our narrator, Leo, is a completely different person. Through his eyes, we see Stargirl's world and how it intersects with his own. The characters are true to themselves. The world reacts appropriately.

There are so many books where the plot or characters ring hollow at times, that something was thrown in to make a point or because the author could not carry out the characters effectively. Every character here speaks with his or her own voice, win or lose. There is never a sense of, "S/he wouldn't do that!" There is only one scene that does not seem to flow perfectly naturally.

Stargirl, despite bringing light, is not always happy. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes bad things happen. All of these make sense; the author does not heap unnecessary suffering on her, but actions have consequences, not always good. The picture is nuanced, without ever being unclear.

Leo is the perfect narrator, and you can grow to hate him for it. A character named Wayne Parr is held out as the essence of banal conformity, but Leo seems a better embodiment. Leo is not even exceptional in that respect, averagely average, middlingly middling. He is another sheep in the flock, as greatful to be in the fold as George Babbitt. He sees something special and wants it to be normal; he loves what makes it unique and wants to take that away so that it will fit with the rest of his life.

What does she see in him?

The book explores a deep yet clear picture of the world. We butt against the limits of Leo's perspective as narrator, so some of the insights are just strongly implied. I respect writing that makes a view perfectly clear without having that Aesop or John Galt moment of explicit moralizing. We even have that scene in the denouement where the father figure is supposed to hand down the lesson to the protagonist; he explicitly stops, does not complete it. It works. If it is not clear to you what has happened, you need reflection, not proselytizing.


Stargirl is 180 pages at a YA reading level. Skip going to the theater for a movie; it will take about as long to read the book. You will be hard-pressed to find something that gives as much for the time spent.

Amazon link (hardcover)

SWF Seeks Same by John Lutz

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This is better known as Single White Female. That was a movie, from 1992 (wow I'm old). I recall seeing most of it on cable years ago, and I acquired a copy of the book at a library book sale ($3 a bag). I apparently feel the need to apologize for owning this, although the book preceded the movie.

It is ugly. Ugly people living in an ugly place.

By appearances, that is unfair. The characters are almost uniformly described as being attractive; indeed, our protagonist is described every few chapters, often through eyes appraising her appearance. No, the people are ugly for how they think and act. We have our protagonist Allie, who gradually loses her sense of agency; our cheating boyfriend, who is generally scummy; our villainous roommate (can it be a spoiler if it is on the cover and a part of the popular lexicon?), who varies between a worshipful mouse and a psychopath; the lascivious employer; a variety of lascivious supporting male characters; and a fatherly police officer, who is literally too useless to get out of his chair without stopping to catch his breath. I hereby find all the characters repellent and unsympathetic, and I want you all out of my life.

Allie starts with some potential to be a strong person. She is an independent-minded businesswoman, capable of making it on her own in the big city (that was unfairly trite of you, reviewer). Then we take the point of view of someone ogling her for chapter three and get three examples of how she is a poor judge of people before page 50, including her recognition of this. This could be called "foreshadowing" when she picks a roommate based on the girl's personality.

We do have one minor character who fails to have serious flaws, Graham (the neighbor, a smaller part than in the film). He mostly stands outside the story. Does it look too much like the author is engaging in self-insertion if the most decent human being is a writer working a script with the same name as the book?

I suppose that if I had been thinking of it as a horror novel from the onset, the flow of the book would have been more natural. We are used to having horror heroines be generally useless in the face of adversity.

Some parts are good. The set-up has interesting variations from the film, notably that Hedra is a secret roommate in the book. Your doppleganger becomes a bit more worrisome when your neighbors would not notice your being killed and replaced. The City is always an anonymous place, where no one knows each other, and is in all ways darker than the film's set-up.

The ending comes together pretty well. The quality drops as we proceed through the second half of the story, but it picks up again when we get to Hedra's perspective. After seeing our heroine descend into panic and helplessness, it is nice to see someone with drive. She folds nicely into the denouement.

Mostly, though, I was left with that sense of ugliness I started with. The City is dirty, befouling, a dark place filled with people whose lives are best left unseen. I would recommend against inviting them into your library or your life.

Amazon link (seems to be out of print)

Blindness by José Saramago

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

The writing style is absorbing but tiring. "Sparsely punctuated" is how someone described it, which is fair. Lots of commas, not much else, no quotation marks. Very few paragraph breaks, so the page is just a solid block of text. This is somewhat imposing, but when you start reading, one thing rolls into the next and you proceed abruptly from one page to the next. The action proceeds without pause. The story remains comprehensible despite the unusual style, and the few times you cannot identify a speaker, that is either intentional or harmless.

The other stylistic oddity is that the characters have no names. Since they have unique identifiers, they effectively just have really long names ("the girl with dark glasses"). This only gets annoying when it is commented upon. We are told several times that the blind need no names. Apparently, each needs a unique and consistent identifier, but not a name. Make of that what you will. There is presumably a philosophical point there about disembodied voices and persons who lose their concepts of self, but mostly it comes across as irrelevant or annoying. Maybe that is just me. Maybe that is the translation. It could be just me; if my vision gets any worse, I will have a very personal stake in whether the blind are fully human.

The book's general answer is a "no" on that one, by the way. (Plot? Themes? Worth mentioning in a book review.) The blind are left with human desires and aspirations but a complete sense of helplessness. This is probably not unfair; blind an entire country and there will be issues until people adjust. Vision is our primary sense as humans, so taking that away takes away quite a bit. It does not take long for things to go from externally imposed helplessness to Lord of the Flies. The perspective is that humans are needy, desirous things, and the veneer of civilization is thin.

Perhaps things could look up in the long run. The species would need to reestablish itself sometime, presumably at a lower level until we figured out how to go about rebuilding a society without sight. We do not follow things to any long run, so perhaps Saramago's vision (no pun intended) is not so bleak.

I am not going to summarize the plot any further. I have already labeled the book "worth reading," and you can look at the dust jacket or back cover if you want a summary. Actually, I am going to hit a few more points, so if you want to go in completely blind (somewhat intended) without plot points, break off now and don't read the jacket/cover. I treasure those times I can approach a book, film, or show in complete ignorance.

Of course, while it is an interesting story, the plot is not really the point here, is it? You can easily summarize the book in a few sentences. The point is the emotional impact along the way. Things are bleak. Life has a particular shade of hopelessness.

So what other book is the right basis of comparison? Camus's The Plague seems obvious, and putting the Black Death next to the White Sickness seems about right. Man's Search for Meaning? Appropriate on a couple of levels. The latest quarantine book I read is Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, which like this is only half a quarantine book. Quarantine books all seem to make the same points: life in quarantine sucks, supplies are never sufficient, human nature quickly frays into its darker aspects, people die in panic when the problem will be solved shortly.

We are taught that the prisoner's dilemma suggests helping others when the future is uncertain; our protagonist always does, while everyone else around seems to be assuming that the game is about to end. Apparently, most people believe that an uncertain future is a short one, a self-fulfilling prophecy in these books. Your best bet is to be "tough but fair"; "fair" quickly translates to "mutually predatory" in so many stories. At least our more sympathetic characters do not actively try to spread suffering.

One last observation: advertising a rape on the cover does not make me want to read the book more. Given the frequency with which female protagonists are sexually abused in modern literature, this may just be my own idiosyncrasy, but having a rape in the book does not increase by enjoyment of it.

Perhaps odd for a first review. Ah well. My blog, my random observations. Find a copy in the library sometime.

José Saramago on Wikipedia
PTN book club discussion of Blindness
Amazon link

[/edit] How could I fail to mention? I appreciate a symbol for the degradation of humanity as much as the next guy, but could we please employ it in a way that does not involve referring to feces at least twice a page? It is disturbing and fetishistic.

Introduction

As an undergrad, when discussing a little-known British poet, a beloved professor commented that she had contributed a few middling quality sonnets to the literary canon. However much of the body of her work exists, all that anyone is likely to read is the few poems that had been selected as her best work, and even those were not required reading to consider yourself a well-read person. The implication, however, was that this was a good writer. If a lifetime of work produces a few middling quality sonnets, that is a respectable contribution to the world.

This is not sarcasm. Imagine if everyone contributed one must read sonnet to the world. Do you have time to read 6,500,000,000 sonnets in your life, to say nothing of the billions from previous generations? If you read 1000 poems per hour for 100 years, you would not be up to a billion. What if everyone wrote an entire page worth reading, or horrors an entire book? Annie Dillard encourages you not to write a great book, because the world already has too many to read.

With that in mind, we present some book reviews. The goal is simple: separate the wheat from the chaff. You must pass up some things in life. You do not have time to read, listen to, or watch everything that already exists, and more is being created every second. So hopefully we can steer you towards some things that are worthwhile and away from some that are not.

The rating system is simple:
4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)
3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
2: not worth reading (skip it)
1: not worth considering (burn it)

Tastes vary. Some books will be marginal between scores, so our assessments might vary. I err on the side of 3 rather than 2, generally, but a slower reader might not. If we consistently disagree, then use that as a reliable guide: if you hate everything I love, read what I hate.

Also, I expect to discuss books with a few others via this. With that, let us begin.