If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino

Translated from the Italian Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore by William Weaver

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Pomo crap. Abandoned 20% of the way through.

A meta-novel, If on a winter's night a traveler is ten first chapters, bound by a frame story about The Reader who is trying to get ahold of the book. He is thwarted by misprints, incomplete books, wrong titles, and other randomness and malignancies. The frame story is in the second person, so "you" are The Reader.

I am told that the book gets better, but I am not willing to put up with the writing style for long enough to give it the benefit of the doubt. I read it based more on a joke than a recommendation.

The problem is not the post-modernism. While pomo is easy to do badly, that is not the issue here. The gimmick is a clever idea. No, it is the writing itself.

I have cited annoyance with excessive direct characterization before. Putting that in the second person compounds it. Worse, the first couple of sub-stories (and maybe more, although the third one looks coherent) are entirely of that sort. I don't just mean, "John was a dour person," I mean, "The novel here repeats fragments of conversation that seem to have no function beyond that of depicting the daily life of a provincial city." That not an exaggeration; it is a direct quote from the novel, a fully self-referential sub-story that does not give you the initial reference. Part of me respects that, but you can imagine how it can quickly become annoying.

To give you an idea of how the non-self-referential writing is more annoying and cumbersome, I will grant you two sentences from the frame story, after "you" first discover that "you" have a misprinted book:

"You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl in out of the window, even out of the closed window, though the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, beyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where space-time has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity.

My thanks to Bela's Handstand for having that, so I did not need to retype it. There, it is intended to be an inducement to read the book, so if those two sentences make you want hundreds of pages of them, this is your book!

May I recommend Book-A-Minute instead?

Amazon link

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

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

I note that many books have not aged well. Their themes and concerns seem foolish or incomprehensible a few years down the road. A Canticle for Leibowitz has aged well. The writing is excellent, and while its themes are currently on the back burner, they will return.

The book contains three stories, all set in a monastery of the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz. We open a few generations into a new dark age after a full nuclear exchange. Society was destroyed, and the survivors rebelled against science by burning every book or literate person they could find. Leibowitz founded a Catholic order to serve a purpose the Church did in the previous dark age: preserving knowledge. The first story follows a monk who discovers some artifacts of then-Beatus Leibowitz, and it marks the slow march of time in the dark days. It is a tale of humility, patience, and the gentle struggle to keep the darkness back. Centuries later, the second story finds the monks at the dawn of a new renaissance, when science is ready for the books the monks have so carefully preserved. This story contrasts the preservation of knowledge with its use, with a new front in the battle between science and religion. Another leap brings us just past the renewed modern day, to the early days of the space age. War is again brewing: will history repeat itself endlessly, and if so, how will the Order preserve knowledge through another darkness?

We live in a pleasant gap between existential threats. Canticle was written in the late 1950s, still the early days of an entire generation that would live with the daily threat of nuclear annihilation. We somehow survived long enough for the Soviet Union to fall, and there is at present no serious threat of a full nuclear exchange. There are still worries of losing a few cities or maybe an entire continent, but nothing that would completely eliminate human civilization.

That was the last existential threat. We are on the cusp of new ones. Misuse of antibiotics has bred hardier diseases that could become pandemic, and if those are not bad enough, we can genetically engineer worse (and have). Nanotechnology could help us consume all organic life one molecule at a time, very very quickly. If artificial intelligence is possible, we will create one within my lifetime, and an unlimitedly self-improving intelligence can do pretty much whatever it wants. Basically, we have all these great tools coming online, ones that could literally end all suffering; if we mess it up, we could eliminate our species instead. Which is one way to end suffering, I suppose.

In this gap, the old post-apocalyptic works must seem kind of quaint. We still make them, but we tend to worry about computers or the environment turning on us. If that means of a global holocaust is more plausible to you, imagine that having happened in this novel instead of nuclear bombs. It does not change the meaning.

One thing I admire about the book, particularly early on, is the ruthlessness with which it treats its characters. Life in a monastery in the desert in a dark age is not heroic. The world is a harsh place. People die, events conspire against you, and success is never absolute.

"Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back."* The book takes it all well. There is dark humor to be seen in the fall of man and his stumbling rise. What can one do with absurdity but laugh? Little problems are put in their petty places by grand events.

The book benefits from having a bit more religious education than is common. Maybe they knew more latin in the 50s, and certainly the Catholics picked up a bit. If you lack religious knowledge or history, you will miss some things. There are a few jokes in Latin, and a few bits that are unclear without it. The most important one to know is that monks preserved knowledge in monasteries through the dark ages. This book shows history cyclically, and even if the spiral moves slightly upward, you can see the same mistakes and patterns across the millennia.

I say they preserved knowledge, but a point of the first two stories is that they preserved books. Few of the monks understand much of what they are saving and recopying, but they dutifully shield it for the day when someone else will understand. Meanwhile, you get shopping lists with cherubim illuminations, recopied blueprints of items that cannot be remade, and a collection of artifacts whose use and origin are lost.

The writing is excellent, whatever you might think of the stories. They take people and events, grand and small, and paint them as richly as they are needed. There is an attention to detail and an awareness of when no more detail is needed. That kind of balance is something that many authors lack.

Our first story gives us one of those ignorant but dutiful monks. His story shows those conflicts of great and little things. He finds a fallout shelter with items that used to belong to the saint who founded his Order. For the monk, this is a sign that he is called to the priesthood. Over time, he is rewarded and punished for having found them, reporting finding them, creating a sensation, not finding something miraculous enough, and so on. The story is honest about clerical politics and the factors other than holiness at play in who becomes a saint. It is a friendly look at a humble life that played a role in a grander story. The grander story exists, but this is one monk's story.

The second story is less personal, with an eye to the sweeping path of history. War is coming, catastrophic war in which one prince will unite the lands under his rule or depopulate them in the attempt. The priests are still thinking about how to preserve knowledge in the face of war and barbaric ignorance. Their visiting scholar, however, wants to put that knowledge to good use. Science will go forth, the world will reawaken. It is not his problem that science will be put to the use of whichever prince can best use it as a weapon. I get the sense that Miller agrees with the scholar, that science must run free and will inevitably be used in the schemes of the powerful and destructive, but that he wants the priest to be right, that there should be a way to give the knowledge only to those morally prepared to make good use of it. And so the cycle continues.

Here were are, the third story, at the end of a cycle. Can humanity learn better? Can we rely upon it to do so? Can we ever hope for better?

A commentary on art from the second story casts light on a possible solution. The abbot sees a cycle of creation and destruction, and here he decides that it is a good thing in the long run, although problematic at any given time. To be held valuable, a piece must have enough surface pleasantness to appeal to the base with enough depth to appeal to those with fine sensibilities. Much is created over time, across a wide range of appeal and quality. Every now and again, someone cleans it out, and only a small fraction remains. Repeat that across ten or fifteen generations and very little will remain from the original, but what remains is the best of the best of the best. Through the painful rise and fall of civilization, man may yet learn.

Is it telling that this idea never returns? The cleaning process can be random too, so what you end up with differs only in the details from what you started with. If you throw away when you clean out, instead of putting things into storage, you can lose something valuable that will take generations to re-discover, if it can be re-discovered at all. Destruction is easy. Creating and preserving is hard.

The conclusion is mostly positive, but it is not a straight or painless path ahead. How many times can we reset to a slightly better starting point before we get a total crash?

Amazon link

* Is there a source for Marcus Aurelius saying that line, or did Gladiator make it up? (I still need to see Gladiator sometime.) I did not spot the line in the Meditations or anything else from Aurelius.

Batman: Son of the Demon by Mike Barr and Jerry Bingham

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it) (unless you want to learn how to use panel layout in comic books, in which case this is one of the best examples I have seen)

Taking a recommendation from Chris's Invincible Super-Blog, I checked this out. I find that Chris Sims and I often have different tastes.

Batman and Ra's Al Ghul are both after a man named Qayin. Then, Qayin killed Al Ghul's wife; now, he is planning to control Earth's weather. The hero and villain join forces, and Batman's long-running romance with Talia culminates with marriage and a child along the way.

That is a lot of territory to cover in 80 pages. It only works to the extent that you know everything going in, and even then it is pretty thin.

Do you know Ra's Al Ghul? He is one of Batman's best villains, but he is not well known. Perhaps he is better known after having been in Batman Begins, although that will just confuse things because there is no connection between the two characters except the name. Bother, that was a red herring. Anyway, if you do not know who he is going in, you must make do with quick mentions of environmental cleaning, immortality, and the Lazarus Pit. Also, he is Talia's father.

Let's jump to that Talia-Batman relationship. It is entirely background, with no development or even real coherence here. Talia calls Batman "beloved" from her first panel, and they refer to having had a torrid past. And then they get married. Wait, what? Batman is not one to discuss his emotions at great length, but Talia has not merited a "nice to see you" up to that point. She does get a kiss, but I think all of Batman's rogues gallery gets that courtesy.

He then becomes a devoted husband, so I guess he throws himself into his projects. He is patronizingly over-protective once Talia gets pregnant, which is understandable except that Batman is smart enough to know that Talia is a trained assassin. This is not Lois Lane.

These are all capricious jumps. One page is needed to abandon Gotham for weeks (I hope Robin is ready to tame the city on his own), after a one panel deduction of a villain. One page to get married. One page to become a really happy Batman. One page to earn the respect of a global criminal enterprise. One page to encourage a supervillain to shoot people with automatic weapons. And so on. It's all so sudden, then reset.

Then later written out of DC canon, then half-written back in. I will not try to justify DC continuity, which resets every 5-10 years.

Qayin is a stock villain. Strong, crush heads, terrorize world. He even has the scar across his eye. Maybe that was a new idea at the time.

Now that I have torn into it, what is good? Quite a bit, often in moments.

• The opening is classic Batman, fighting a group of criminals (we would call them terrorists now) in a chemical factory. Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson got a very similar scene a few years later, although the art layout feels more like the aforementioned Batman Begins: Batman is an arm from off-panel, a cowl in the shadows. He emerges from the shadows amidst a pile of unconscious bodies.
• The dark humor is good. Batman gets good lines without coming off as campy.
• The parents/children motif runs through, from that first fight to the end. It helps unite an otherwise lurching story.
• The establishing shots on Talia and Qayin are good. Most of Talia's character is implied in a few things, like her language, her knowledge of Alfred and the Batcave, and her relationship with her father. Everything you need to know about Qayin is in a few frames across his few appearances. This is good economy.
• Page 25 is excellent. The art does exactly what it needs to. Talia's chair is off-center but not too close to one side, and the center panels pan us through our main cast in poses that express their roles in the story.

The art, I never say enough about the art. Sorry, I am a verbal guy. The art layout is excellent. Proper sizing and arrangement of comic panels is an underappreciated art, and here it does great work by not calling attention to itself. I am not sure how to express this without examples. We have different sizes of panels, good use of diagonal lines, and characters break the panel walls in ways that feel entirely natural. Some sections go without borders entirely, and the story flows just fine. Taking page 66 as an example, we have four panels of different sizes, with the page as a whole serving as another panel, and they all fit neatly without blocking the image; two elements from that background impinge on the covering boxes, and a borderless image reaches from off-page to layer with everything. If you pay attention to them, the layouts are subtle, surprising, and original. But you never need to pay attention to them, which is another layer of excellence.

As for the art itself, it is not my thing. I do not know if it is the pencil, the inks, or the coloring, but it is not a part of the 1980s style that I like. Faces frequently look half-done, which helps us skim past minor characters but is problematic on major ones. Ra's Al Ghul is the major victim here. Batman's art excels under these conditions, a character of clear lines whose face is already hidden under a mask. Very iconic art on the Bat, although he has somewhat Disney proportions - barrel chest over a tiny tiny waist. Talia falls in-between, with her strength coming from body language. She does well with sketchy imaging, and her face has the necessary detail where she needs it. Qayin's art varies, from evocative in some shots to really shoddy in others. He has a cape?

The color work is interesting, with lots of blues and oranges. Much is given to mood lighting, while a more recent style would not have so much washed out. I accept it as a convention.

Amazon link (out of print)

Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

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

The follow-up to Stargirl had to be disappointing. It is hard to add to one of the best books ever.

Welcome to a year in the life of Stargirl, the first year after Leo. In a new town, she has new people to meet and brighten. Dootsie is the hyperactive little sister she never had; Alvina is the crabby little sister she never had; Betty Lou has not left her house in years; Charlie has spent his years in the cemetery. And Perry is the blue-eyed thief who hates the world but may replace Leo.

It lacks magic. That does not mean fantasy -- Stargirl was a magical character partly because she was genuinely human, not some fantastic creature or unrealistic archetype. She was unusual, but she was more fully human than her supporting cast, more free and fully herself.

This is less. That is the word that comes to mind: less. Stargirl is less, does less, and sees less here. It is noted that Stargirl is wounded, vulnerable, not at full capacity, but that is not something to inflict upon the reader or the character. Why bother having it be Stargirl if it is just a slightly unusual girl who spends more than a year mourning a relationship that lasted less than eight weeks?

Stargirl is less. In Stargirl, she is a flurry of activity and friendliness, reaching unexpected lives and corners. Here, she pays attention to a half-dozen people. She spends most of her time babysitting Dootsie. She showed Leo more little things to appreciate in their short time than she finds for herself in a year here, despite being equipped with a child through whose eyes she can see things anew with wonder.

Can we hit Leo again? There is still no reason for her fondness for Leo. Does our author agree with Archie that Leo was contemptibly beneath her, notable only because Stargirl noted him? She makes a list of reasons why she loves Leo, and almost all of them are (1) because he liked her and (2) contradicted by the list of reasons not to love him. The one thing she keeps recalling is that he talked to her from behind a car.

A different bit of the first book spoiled is the ending. Stargirl left Mica like the Lenape girl of Love, Stargirl, leaping from the world and into legend. Leo was not to have heard from her again, although she kept watching. So much for that.

Without getting into details, the Perry thing is not stellar either. It is good, but nothing special.

It does, however, give us the Honeybees. Now there is a curious trio. Most ladies, especially teenage girls, are not excited about sharing or being part of a harem. Their psychology and worldview could be interesting.

Her father is another enjoyable character. The kids have their moments. Is Dootsie a bit of an obvious device, the uninhibited innocent who was at the center of Stargirl last book? Charlie's story appeals on a personal level.

With that, I am about out of book. The ending feels contrived, unsupported. The characters are more successful elements than the events. We could have used more characters, because we expect Stargirl to touch more lives than that.

I have been pretty down on the book in this review. Sorry about that. As I said, Stargirl set the bar high. It is not bad, and it certainly has good moments, but Love, Stargirl is no Stargirl.

Amazon link

Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition edited by Rich Horton

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

I am in no position to say whether this collection of short stories really is the best of the year. I would guess not, on the belief that Prime Books could not get the rights to all the best fantasy of the year. Still, it is a good collection.

The funny thing is, there is much of the book that I would not recommend. This would be a 2.5 except that the high points are so high as to make the whole collection worth the glance. The two best stories are "Sunbird" and "Empty Places." I will comment mostly on the stories that are worth reading.

"Pip and the Fairies" by Theodora Goss is a gentle opening. It is a wistful story that has very little fantasy in it. Certainly the best parts involve no fantastic elements. I would not go so far as to call it magical realism, but it bears a sense of that or The Faun's Labyrinth.

"Comber" by Gene Wolfe is incomplete. What is there is good, and I believe it succeeds in what the author was trying to do, but it is not an entire and adequate story.

"Three Urban Folk Tales" by Eric Schaller is small but good. It is not great, but it reflects well on its fairy tale ancestors.

"Wax" by Elizabeth Bear is good storytelling with a weak story. It makes leaps that do not make sense in the short page count. Our protagonist is very good, and I am told that this is part of a collection of stories set in the same magical New Amsterdam. That will be worth finding.

"Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died" by Samantha Henderson works only because it is about Jane Austen. Without her as the subject, it would not be worth reading, and it is arguable as it is. There is something wonderful about redoing Ms. Austen's life story with fantastic monsters and daring adventure. Each "Way" is only a few pages, and they are very calm and proper. I recommend the second.

"Sunbird" by Neil Gaiman is perfect. The storytelling is excellent, and you can tell from the first page that this is in classic folk tale form. Even if the story were entirely inadequate, the telling would carry it. If you can only read one story from the collection, read this one; if you can read more, do not read this one first, as it would set an unfair standard.

"Jane" by Marc Laidlaw is an exaggerated version of my issue with "Comber." It paints a picture without fully telling a story. It does a great job of creating a certain sense, but it is intentionally obscure. It is a thriller without the final reveal of what is going on.

"Is There Life After Rehab?" by Pat Cadigan is a fun little bagatelle. Any details would spoil the half the story.

"Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle is one of the headline stories, but I found it disappointing. It is a follow-up to The Last Unicorn, and so it carries a lot of baggage. That gives the reader insight into what is going on, but the story is weak. It feels meaningless. The story does not demand the reuse of the famous characters, and it would have stood stronger without their interference.

"Super-Villains" by Michael Canfield is an odd duck. Most of it is a classic, four-color comic book story, in which an aging Batman stand-in confronts an old foe and considers hanging up the tights. It starts to look at the implications of the conventions, notably secret identities and continually doomed romances, but then it backs away after skimming the surface. Hints of realism give way to a well written but not exceptional superhero story done in text. This story and "Comber" are oddities in the collection, not falling into classical fantasy or the more recent magical realism.

"Empty Places" by Richards Parks is a great story, very simple and character-focused. We spend most of our time walking with two characters, seeing how they act and interact. Both are quite self-aware and forthrightly ask the questions that a tough audience would want. It is light fantasy, with the magic almost irrelevant to the story.

"The Gist Hunter" by Matthew Hughes is an at times (and seemingly intentionally) overwritten Sherlock Holmes story in a sci fi/fantasy setting. The book says that this is the sixth of a series of stories, so we are coming late to the party. It stands on its own. The computer-turned-gremlin is the best part, a useful variant on the common expository interlocutor who brings good sardonic humor to the story.

As a random note, Elizabeth Bear should sell TV rights. "CSI: New Amsterdam" would be awesome.

Amazon link