Books: Shadowheart by Tad Williams (2010)

Tad Williams is a great talent at world building, and for no more other reason than that, he is brilliant at what he does. Fantasy has always depended upon an author’s ability to create a believable world with easily defined characters to make up for all the fairies, elves, gnomes, dwarfs and magical monsters that inhabit the world they create. The success of The Lord of Rings trilogy as a book series and movies always hinged on how much real humanity you brought to the characters.

However, at times, much like the late Robert Jordan, these authors get so wrapped up in their universes, that the books become bloated and so long that you wonder if the a good editor needs to stand up and say, enough is enough. 

This series, originally planned as trilogy, but became a tetralogy (much like his Otherland series) due to many things, I’m sure. And I praised the last book, Shadowrise, as a book that moved swiftly and felt that there was not much Williams could have cut to shorten to a trilogy. But for the first time reading Williams, I feel he went on too long. Shadowheart, at 722 pages, goes on forever. To me, it’s about 300 pages too long (the first half took me forever to get through). 

We do see all the puzzle pieces finally falling into place, as we begin to understand why Southmarch is so important to the Gods of this series. The characters, and there are many, are separated into so many stories –some less interesting than others- that the action is sometimes forgotten for these little character pieces. Which is not say I don’t like a well-drawn out tale of character plotting; it just that when you are approaching the finale, some of these stories should have been ended by now, or at least truncated.

Still, I give Williams accolades for ending the series in a less than happier way. It reminds us that while war, power and death are some horrible aspects of life, it never ends with everyone living happily ever after.

Books: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (1996)

Why, fifteen years after its publication am I finally getting to A Game of Thrones, the first book in George R.R. Martins epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire? After all, I’ve been a fan of epic fantasy for nearly 30 years. I’ve read so much of the genre, why not this?

As I’ve written before, part of the reason I’ve sort of abandoned the genre is due to its length, and the number of years between volumes. It started with Robert Jordan and his Wheel of Time series. Begun in 1992, Jordan said the series was to be seven volumes- I’m of the opinion that most series should be only three volumes. Anyways, after a year between books, the publication dates got longer and it became clear Jordan had no intention of making the Wheel series 7 books. And tragically, Jordan would never live to see his series end, as he passed away in September of 2007, even though he was –supposedly- one volume away from finishing it. When Brandon Sanderson was chosen to finish the series, using Jordan’s copious notes, he realized that it could not be done in only one volume. Yes, the final book would be split into three.

But even Sanderson ran into some problems finishing it. The first volume was released in November 2009, the second a year later with the last planned for November 2011. But now the final volume will be released in March of 2012 -20 years after it began. 

That, to me, is way too long to wait for a conclusion. 

And I think, Martin’s series will take just as long, but will only be (supposedly) seven volumes. Between 1996 and 2005 he put out 4 books in the series. It took 6 more years for book five, to finally  find its place on the bookshelves, which was released this past July. With 2 more books to go –and Martin recently said he’s at work on book six, and is estimating it will be about 1,500 pages- and even if it takes him another five years between each, he’ll finish them in 2021, some 25 years after it began. 

Again, that is way too long to force fans to wait. 

Of course, the HBO series based on the first book also spurned an interest to finally begin this series. I’ve yet to see it, but I thought this first book was good, and I’m kind of excited to see. After all, the series has gotten a lot of praise, including a few Emmys. But here lies a problem. Season two, which launches in 2012, is based on book two of the series. A third season, while not confirmed with HBO, is already in the works for 2013. If the cable net wants to continue to the end, theoretically, season 4 would air in 2014, season five in 2015, which means Martin would need to get book six out by 2015 -just four years from now- to be ready by 2016. And the span between book 6 and 7 gets shorter to be ready to air on HBO by 2017. It's all speculation, for sure, and interest of viewers have a tendency to wane, so who knows if HBO will want to finish the novels.

So, A Game of Thrones is well written, despite its length and 500,000 characters you are desperately trying to remember (this was what eventually caused me to put Jordan’s series down) and the multiple names of Gods and objects. If anyone has watched The Tudors, this series is just like it – except it’s a dysfunctional family multiplied by 7 kingdoms. Everyone is out for power, for glory and will kill as quickly as they breathe. It’s extremely violent, with enough spouting blood to fill a few Stephen King novels.

But that being said, Martin has created a very real world of say 13th Century England. It’s not a pleasant place to live, and treachery, faith and great river are never far away. But he balances the violence with humor –the character of Tyrion appears to be Martin’s favorite (and the fans love him, and actor Peter Dinklage won an Emmy for portraying him as well). 

So book two looms next, though I might skip it to finish Tad Williams Shadowmarch series.

Books: The Poet by Michael Connelly (1996)

Jack McEvoy specializes in death. As a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, he has seen every kind of murder. But his professional bravado doesn’t lessen the brutal shock of learning that his only brother is dead, a suicide. Jack’s brother was a homicide detective, and he had been depressed about a recent murder case, a hideously grisly one, that he’d been unable to solve. McEvoy decides that the best way to exorcise his grief is by writing a feature on police suicides. But when he begins his research, he quickly arrives at a stunning revelation. Following his leads, protecting his sources, muscling his way inside a federal investigation, Jack grabs hold of what is clearly the story of a lifetime. He also knows that in taking on the story, he’s making himself the most visible target for a murderer who has eluded the greatest investigators alive.

This was the first book I read by the prolific Michael Connelly. And while I enjoy a good thriller, the sensational type that comes out today –the endless serial killers of that fake James Patterson, the ever growing trend in true crime books- is very disturbing. Serial killers fascinate us, and unlike the cop shows or books of the past, which seemed to keep the more horrific details hidden, today we are given every detail, no matter how disturbing it is. And thanks to procedural shows like the CSI franchise, the Law & Order franchise and Criminal Minds the camera gets right in there; we see the knife, the bullet tearing into flesh. And we see how disgusting human beings can be. Maybe that’s why I like fantasy so much? Real versus make believe?

The Poet is well written, and Connelly knows how to pace the book so you have to continue reading, and he is a million times better than James Patterson, but I still thought he brought way too many twists in the novel. And like all crime thrillers of the last 2 decades, it’s an outside force that puts the puzzle pieces together. Am I really to believe that the FBI failed to pick-up on trails that killer was leaving? 

One thing I found interesting was this novel was released in 1996 (probably written in ’95) and how 15 years has changed in technology. The internet was there, but in its infancy. No one had mobile phones, and fax machines were how the FBI got their info when not in the office. It’s a reminder on how police work was difficult then (there is a part set in a Santa Monica police station where they fingerprint a suspect, but because it’s not set up with a data base, he goes free. That would not happen today). It seems amazing how the police and the FBI could find people; it seemed to come down to pure luck and a lot of coincidences.

Connelly wrote a sequel called The Narrows a few years ago. I might eventually pick that up. Maybe.

Books: Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr (1960)

Set in a Roman Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the story spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the fictional Albertian Order of Leibowitz take up the mission of preserving the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the day the outside world is again ready for it.

A highly literary science fiction novel, with his conflicts between the scientist's search for truth and the state's power, and a cyclical motif make it an interesting, if laborious read.

I mean, I get the theme that man has a habit of repeating himself, that we destroy, rebuild and will destroy again. Perhaps some 50 years ago when this was published, people were more inclined to fear nuclear weapons. Sure, we still do today, but man's inhumanity to man is pretty consistent.

As for the religious dogma, well that was interesting. Insomuch as I understood little of it. A bit dry, a bit dramatic and pretty depressing. I had wanted to read it for a while, but to be honest, I don't find anything that made this book so special to win a Hugo Award.

Books: 11/22/63 by Stephen King (2011)

There’s nothing like time-travel stories that fuel my imagination. I love the whole concept of it, whether it being a trip to the past or the future. Perhaps that is where my love of Doctor Who comes from, the potential idea that somehow a trip to the past can be easily done as a trip to the grocery store. 

Of course, beyond Einstein’s theory that states time-travel is not possible –and even with people like Stephen Hawking sort of agreeing with it – it has never stopped science fiction writers from writing books about, or Hollywood cranking out TV and movies about the ability to change your past or future. 

It’s also created a college industry on how to handle the rules of time-travel. Up until the idea of quantum mechanics –the idea that there really in a finite number of universes than one single lane- most writes explored time travel just that way, time was a one-lane highway that stretched into the past and the future. How they dealt with paradoxes and the rather unique idea of the butterfly effect (which, according to Wikipedia is an element of science called chaos theory: the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state) was a fun part of their story. One the other tropes of science fiction has been the watershed moments in history, events that would be described as a point in history where the world turned on a dime. The best example was the Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, where one person, Edith Keeler, was the junction point between two different time-lines, one where Hitler succeed in his campaign and the one we all have lived with (or, in Doctor Who terms, a fixed point in history). 

One of the biggest watershed moments of the last 50 years –not including the events of 9/11- was the assassination of JKF. Since his murder in 1963, many science fiction authors along with a boat load of historians, has pondered what might have happened to the world had JFK survived beyond that November 22, 1963 in Dallas. 

In 11/22/63, Stephen King –not a science fiction author per se- takes on one fictions greatest “What if’s,” along with the many conspiracy theories that have unwound like spinning top since that sunny day in Texas. The crux of the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy is that a person like Lee Harvey Oswald was too insignificant and not clever enough to do it alone (and King makes this part of his novel). But here is where Occam’s Razor comes into play. The theory goes “that when two competing ideas seem to explain the facts, the simpler is likely to be the true idea” (or, as Arthur Conan Dolye wrote for his Sherlock Holmes character: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”). 

Such issues motivate 11/22/63, which deals with a man named Jake Epping, who goes back in time to derail Kennedy's date with death. So King invokes the butterfly effect for this long novel. Every action taken in the past has an effect on the future, which means even the best intentions often have unintended consequences. Jake discovers that early in the novel, when he tries to save a man he knows from a childhood catastrophe, only to learn, upon returning to the present, that in the new world he's created, his acquaintance was killed in Vietnam. 

Fortunately, the past resets each time he visits it, which means Jake can make things right simply by taking another journey in time.

What makes this book so long –and some may argue at 842 its four hundred too long, especially on the heels of his 2009 1,000 plus tome Under the Dome- is the “rabbit hole” to the past lands him in September 1958, five years before the assassination. This forces Jake to live in the “Land of Ago” as King puts it, until he can prevent Kennedy’s murder. But long-time fans of King (those “constant readers” he calls them) will understand King’s fascination with the past. Like author Peter Straub, King remembers the 1950s and Sixties with great love. He takes great detail and pains to explain the “Land of Ago,” and some may find that boring. 

Back in 2001 when Stephen King and Peter Straub wrote their follow-up to 1984’s The Talisman, that book was more of a stop-off to King’s long Dark Tower series than a true sequel to the first book. King never intended The Talisman ever to be connected to that seven volume series, but somewhere along the way Black House got folded into it. In 11/22/63, King gives us a sort-of follow-up to his 1986 novel It, as Jake Epping spends a good portion of the first 300 hundred pages hanging around Derry, Maine (the town featured in that novel, which has also popped up in other stories) in the present and 1958 –where he meets Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier of that novel, just after the events of the First Ritual of Chud. So for fans, this little diversion from the theme of the novel is fun. But I can assume some detractors will wonder why he stops off in Derry for so long. But Dallas is a character as much as the people, and to me, for anyone to truly understand that city of 1963, King had to use his fictional town of Derry –an extra place of ugliness where horrible things happen, yet the people who live there seem to exist in the ether of indifference- as a mirror to explain what happened that Friday before Thanksgiving in 1963. 

The last half of the book is about Jake’s life in the past, as he settles down and falls in love with a woman who makes him question where he truly sits in time. We get a detailed history –some true, some made up- about Oswald’s role before he shot the president from the School House Book Depository. And while there have been tons a books published on the assassination, King tries (somewhat) to humanize Oswald. He’s portrayed still as bitter man, derisive, and a wife-beater. But there was, at times, where history and fantasy sort intermixed and you a sense –maybe- that all Oswald ever wanted in his sad little life was to leave a mark.

Books: The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde (2006)

Sometimes, especially in his Thursday Next series, Fforde does not explore the other characters too much. I mean, Thursday is well rounded, nearly three dimensional person, but a lot of the times, you don’t get much more than two-dimensional with the supporting ones. Ironically, in The Fourth Bear, the second novel in Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime series, he allows some of the supporting characters to move a bit forward. 

After all the glory that Jack Spratt got solving of the Humpty Dumpty murder case four months ago is now gone, a series of blunders and mishaps – the biggest being the Red Riding Hood murder investigation where a few people were eaten by the wolf – has found the NCD under the gun to be disbanded. And because of the Riding Hood case, Jack is been ordered to take a psych evaluation and some time off. Shortly after this, the sinister psychopath The Gingerbread Man has escaped from the mental asylum that Jack put him into twenty years ago, and he's going on a rampage, while a death of a reporter named Goldilocks – a huge advocate for the bear population living in the area- gives DS Mary Mary  (who finds romance with a fellow officer) a chance shine, whether she wants it or not. But a simple investigation uncovers a more sinister plot that may go high up. Also, why goes Jack keeping running into the Gingerbread Man, only to be left alive? And what do the intricacies of bear society, the illegal trafficking in black market porridge, and a theme park based on the Battle of the Somme have to do with each other?

The Fourth Bear is a stronger book than The Big Over Easy (as I’ve mentioned before about Fforde’s World Building style sometimes gets in the way of the plot), because I actually think the story is more effective. His weirdness, his silly humor, his ability to create a coherent universe that makes some sort of logical sense is what makes these books (and his Thursday Next books) a delight to read. These series of novels -what makes a good writer, I think- allows Fforde to let his imagination run wild and the reader is awarded greatly because of it.

Books: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (2010)

Taking a page from 1984 and other dystopian novels, Jasper Fforde creates a horrid English future, but without the usual tropes of the genre such as storm troopers, surveillance robots, or a super-computer. What time in the future this new series is set is not fully revealed, but Fforde does give hints, suggesting that (from my point of view) its somewhere in the late 24th or early 25th Century. History is relegated to a centuries-ago "Previous," which came to an abrupt end by "Something That Happened."

In Shades of Grey we are introduced to the citizens of Chromatacia who are layered by color, which are funneled and continually adjusted by underground pipes that also maintain the greener than green parks and brightly hued storefronts of a society whose leader, the axiom-prone Munsell, may or may not exist. Chromatacia has a sort of Boy Scout way of doing things insomuch as merits are given out for good behavior and keeping the status quo. Demerits are given for some of the smallest infractions, and they come with instructions on how humility is better. Humility keeps people from asking too many questions and thus keeps it populace busy doing pointless tasks. At the top are the arrogant Yellows and the bottom is the Greys, who are treated with a sort of respect (because “rules are rules,”) but are treated like cheap labor –which is a problem, as there seems to be a labor shortage going on. What we have in between is an assortment of color-coded middles with Last Names right out of any paint catalog. All these middles are in an endless quest for any sort of minor upward mobility that will enhance their color. And here, you are what you see, and perception is limited by an individual's access to gradations of his own or other colors, and social order depends upon the incuriosity of its citizens from birth until they die, appropriately, of the dread disease Mildew. But like any totalitarian society, there are leaks and there are traces of that long gone society all over the place. The traces that remain of that bygone world are available to a ghostly underclass that roams free because the populace is under orders to pretend they're invisible, or to those with enhanced perception. 

Entering stage left, is 20 year-old Eddie Russett and his father into the Outer Fringe town of East Carmine. Eddie has a middling color, but he’s also gifted with a powerful ability to see more Red than he should, but he’s been sort of “exiled” here after running afoul of Prefects of his home town, Jade-Under-Lime, who did not like his idea of improving queue lines. But things go a bit out of hand almost as so as he arrives, as he discovers Jane –a Grey with an attitude who threatens to break Eddie’s jaw- who seems to hold secrets about many things. Soon Eddie discovers the leaks within Chromatacia, East Carmine and the Head Office. And his curiosity about the death of a resident and his desire to be closer to Jane may end up getting him killed as he begins to understand that all is not well.

In Shades of Grey, we see a lot of bad things happen to good people (keep in mind Spock’s saying of the “needs of the many”), and we see a creative spin on a totalitarian society by the ever clever Jasper Fforde, who also created another brilliant universe with his Thursday Next series. The one drawback to Shades of Grey is that Fforde seems to enjoy this World Building so much so, at times, it costs in the narrative flow of the book. Like the first Thursday Next book, which seemed to take forever to get going due to this, Grey suffers the same fate. Still, if you stick with it, your rewarded with Fforde’s brilliant, literate humor and supporting characters right out of a Charles Dickens novel.

Books: The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde (2005)

The Big Over Easy was Jasper Fforde’s first novel, yet when it failed to get a release, it was shelved. After the success of his first four Thursday Next novels, Fforde revisited this novel, extensively re-writing it to fit in the same (somewhat) alternate universe that his Thursday Next series. 

In this universe, the public judges its police force by how exciting and glamorous their cases are, so they can be followed in the (fictional) Amazing Crime Stories magazine. It is here we tumble into the seedy underbelly of the nursery crime. Inspector Jack Spratt (who had a cameo in The Well of Lost Plots), is a family man and head of the Nursery Crime Division, and with funding resources in slim decline, and a bungled case of the death of The Big Bad Wolf where he tried to have the pigs brought up murder charges, he’s in need of something big to save his career. He’s assigned investigating the murder of ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius van Dumpty, AKA Humpty Dumpty, who is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town.

What to Spratt and partner DS Mary Mary might first look like a suicide (and more importantly, his boss wants it to be), turns more sinister as they investigate - money laundering, deceit and lovers all over the place.

After reading Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, one gets the idea that with The Big Over Easy, these are ideas only he could do. His odd mixture of puns -Officer Gretel Kandelstyk-Maeker is one of many –and his riffs on typical mystery motifs is enjoyable (as each chapter begins with articles how albinos are being mistreated as terrorists, or on the banning of “identical twin” plots and such, or featuring stories about Miss Maple and Inspector Dogleash). Unlike his Thursday Next books, this book has a more linear plot, but I would say the reader should peruse the early Thursday Next novels to get a better understanding of Fforde’s motives.

All in all, a good mystery that makes fun of mysteries, while also working on our childhood memories of nursery rhymes.