This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Having finished rereading all the books in the main Sandman series, I figured I would top it all off with the two stand-alone Sandman volumes. The first of these is Dream Hunters, which was published three years after the 1996 wrap of the main series.
Dream Hunters comes in the form factor of a graphic novel, but it is actually an illustrated short story in five parts. There are a variety of different layouts, including many full page illustrations and some two-page paintings and both horizontal and vertical splits. There is even a double-fold-out illustration, four pages wide. Amano’s inks, pencils and watercolors mingle to create a variety of effects, sometimes clear, other times murky or abstract.
The story is a retelling of a Japanese folk tale, “The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming.” A magical fox falls in love with a lonely monk who maintains a small and forgotten shrine. When a powerful sorcerer tries to kill the monk in his dreams, the fox intercepts those dreams to protect him.
This is one of those classic Sandman side-stories where Dream is involved, but only as a side character. It’s a good story with great art, but not really necessary to pick up unless you’re already in love with the series.
Unlike Dream Hunters, Endless Nights is a proper comic. This is an anthology of stories, each with a different illustrator, and each one focused on one of the seven Endless: Death, Dream, Desire, Delirium, Destruction, Despair, and Destiny. Again, these could be considered side-stories to the main series, but they feel closer to the main series in tone and style, and they do offer a few interesting tidbits for die-hard fans.
Some light is shed on Dream and his interactions with Desire, when they attend a gathering of sentient stars some few billion years ago. We see what might be the first of Dream’s many ill-fated romances, and the source of animosity between Dream and Desire. We also get to see what Destruction is up to in his exile, and hints that he may yet reach a kind of friendly ambivalence with his family, even if they never quite see eye-to-eye.
I really like Endless Nights. If The Wake was the epilogue to the main story, then this feels like a reunion.
I continue to work through the series with my kids. This third book feels like the inflection point to me, still largely plotted in a way to appeal to relatively young kids, but beginning to ramp up the darker themes.
At this point, it’s clear there is something of a formula that the books follow. Again, it leans on couple of mysteries to keep the plot moving. Again, there is a red herring that is pushed hard. Where this book differs is in the long third act, which wraps everything up with a fun time-travel sequence that has to interweave with a series of events that we already read from a different point of view.
While it’s popular to knock the Harry Potter books these days, especially for their plot holes, the time travel opens up a pretty egregious one. Sure, as in Back to the Future, a big deal is made over the “dangers” of seeing yourself while time traveling. But then main characters do it anyway, and it turns out perfectly fine. Unlike Back to the Future, the Harry Potter books barely mention time travel again, which is a little hard to swallow.
I didn’t intend to read House of Leaves again. I was talking with my son about the Backrooms, and how it seemed like it was inspired by House of Leaves. I went to grab my slightly beat-up paperback copy and discovered that it wasn’t on the shelf. Then I remembered I had loaned it to a friend, years ago. So I ordered myself a new copy.
When the book arrived, I popped it open, just to enjoy the sections where the text went all wonky. I went back to the beginning, to see how it started. Before I knew it, I was fully absorbed. It’s probably been over ten years since I last read it, and there was a lot I had forgotten.
House of Leaves is a strange book. At its heart is a horror premise: a house that somehow contains an infinite, shifting, maze-like series of rooms and corridors, where one might become lost forever. Wrapped around that core are multiple layers of frame stories and linguistic complexity.
I could go on about this book, but it’ll have to wait for another post. Suffice to say that it’s just as enjoyable as I remembered, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading something genuinely weird.
What I’m Reading in November
With NaNoWriMo looming, I probably won’t be reading much. If I do get ahead and end up with some free time, I expect I’ll finally get back to The Witcher or delve into a new comics series.
Asteroid City is the latest movie by Wes Anderson, released this summer, but written and filmed during various stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve touched on Wes Anderson once or twice before. He’s a divisive figure who makes movies with a very particular aesthetic. Some people revere him, some can’t stand him.
Asteroid City is, in many ways, just another Anderson film, with many of his usual virtues and foibles. However, I can’t help but feel there was one way it diverged significantly from other Anderson movies, and it was not a positive change. The problem with Asteroid City is its ending.
What Works
Like so many Anderson movies, Asteroid City starts with a frame. The main story is supposed to be a famous play, while the frame is a documentary about the author and the creation of that play. The brunt of the movie follows the plot of the play, with small asides back to the documentary.
In a pastel pastiche of the 1950s, a young scientist convention brings a number of children and their families to the small desert town of Asteroid City. The festivities are interrupted by the brief arrival of a UFO, and the government puts the town under quarantine. However, the children work together to get news of the situation to the outside world, and this results in public pressure to drop the quarantine. The various people who have come together in this strange situation then leave the town and return to their separate lives.
There are a whole host of fairly obvious correlations to the pandemic quarantine in this plot, and the bonds and romances that develop among the characters in a stressful situation. These are all relatable themes; perhaps the most universally relatable themes available to a storyteller in 2023.
I was a little leery of Wes Anderson delving into science-fiction when I first saw trailers for this movie, but the actual sci-fi elements are quite slight, and mostly played for humor. This works well enough in the Andersonian medium, and there’s even a funny little call-back in the “documentary” portion of the movie, where it’s revealed that the alien in the stage play is a masked Jeff Goldblum, the only scene he appears in.
Where it All Falls Apart
As the plot of the convention and the short-lived quarantine wrap up, the movie shifts back to the documentary. In an acting class taught by Willem Dafoe and populated by most of the cast of the movie, there is a discussion about sleep and dreams. Then the group begins to chant, over and over…
“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
It is this chant that ends the “documentary.” When I talked with my wife afterward, this was also the exact point where she said that she gave up on the movie completely.
It’s Weird, So What?
I think it’s safe to say that the average moviegoer finds most Wes Anderson movies to be weird. These movies usually don’t see wide distribution, and they don’t make blockbuster money; they exist on the edge between Hollywood and low-budget art film. They’re not trying to be a realistic depiction of life, and they’re also not full of bombastic special effects like the typical Hollywood blockbuster.
In my opinion, Anderson movies occupy an interesting niche. They’re clearly on the hoity-toity, film festival end of the movie spectrum, but they’re usually plotted in a straightforward way. They’re open to interpretation, but they’re not inscrutable.
Grand Budapest Hotel is partly a love story, and partly about a man who inherits an expensive painting and earns the ire of a the deceased woman’s murderous family. Moonrise Kingdom is about a pair of kids who run away together in the face of an impending hurricane. Isle of Dogs is about a kid looking for his lost dog. The Anderson movies that appeal to wider audiences are the ones with a surface-level plot that is easily understandable. They contain quite a bit that you can appreciate in a single viewing, even if you’re not worried about the vagaries of cinematography or frame stories or aspect ratios.
These movies are still “weird.” They’re still arty and invite all sorts of deep reading. You just don’t need those things to have fun watching the movie. This is where Asteroid City fails its audience.
Most of Asteroid City follows the ethos of an interesting surface layer on top of deeper weirdness. The parts that take place within the play are straightforward, bright, and funny. The parts that take place in the frame story are less straightforward, but they have their share of jokes, and they take up much less screen time. It’s only at the end where this spirals out of control.
The chanting actors are not at all straightforward. Their mantra, “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” has almost nothing to do with the movie on a surface level. It demands that the viewer try to make some non-obvious interpretation in order to square this ending with what they just watched. Anyone in the audience who merely wants to watch and enjoy a movie is immediately excluded.
Even worse, this phrase is chanted over and over and over. The viewer is bludgeoned with it. The movie literally shouts out the importance of this singular phrase. It shows a complete lack of trust in the audience, a fear that we might miss this vital thing if it wasn’t so explicitly spelled out.
You Choose Your Audience
If the movie had ended with the temporary residents of Asteroid City saying their goodbyes and driving away, it would have worked for a “surface-level” audience. It would have welcomed the average moviegoer along with the cinephiles. Instead, it ended with an event that demands interpretation and demeans the audience with a complete lack of subtlety.
And I know, at least anecdotally, that parts of the audience felt excluded. They decided this was not a movie for them.
I don’t know what Anderson was hoping to accomplish with this ending. He may very well have been happy to make something just for the ardent fans. But he made a choice that profoundly affected who can enjoy his movie. These are the kinds of choices we all make in our work, either purposely or by accident.
It’s also worth noting that you can cater to a variety of overlapping audiences. It’s not always a zero-sum game. You can provide an entertaining surface-level plot, with readable character motivations, and still embed deeper ideas, complex metaphors, or mysterious events that are never adequately explained. Nothing can appeal to everyone, but you can make choices that widen or narrow your audience.
There’s nothing wrong with choosing to write something that you know will have a limited audience. If that’s the story you want to tell, then tell it. But think about what you’re doing, and do it as purposely as you can. Make sure you’re not excluding the audience by accident.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
This volume is a collection of stories within a Canterbury Tales-esque frame. A group of strangers from across the Sandman universe get caught in a storm and find shelter at The Worlds’ End, an inn that exists beyond ordinary space and time, and a play on words in a few different ways.
This is, in many respects, the beginning of the end: the final arc of The Sandman series. While this volume is similar to several others, with seemingly disconnected stories set in the same expansive world, it’s laying groundwork for the two volumes to follow.
The end of the book makes this apparent, as the storm quiets, and all the strange guests at the Worlds’ End see a huge procession in the sky. This is a funeral on a cosmic scale, and the dead man is Dream of the Endless.
Finally paying off the foreshadowing in Volume 7 and 8, The Kindly Ones is the largest volume in the series, and the climax of Dream’s story. The dangling plot threads come together, and it’s incredibly appropriate as Dream’s antagonists in this volume are none other than the Fates, who measure and cut the thread of each person’s life.
In the Sandman mythos, the Fates have many aspects, each represented by three women: young, middle-aged, and ancient. They are also called the Furies, embodiment of revenge against those who dare to spill the blood of family.
The Furies are called to action against Dream by Hypolyta Hall, the former super-hero from earlier volumes, who conceived her son within dreams and holds a grudge against Morpheus for “killing” her husband. She’s convinced that Dream has stolen her child. However, the real kidnappers are mere mythological tricksters. It’s Dream’s murder of his own son, Orpheus, that allows the Furies to work against him.
The surface conflict between Dream and the Furies becomes progressively more violent, and we see a number of fan-favorite characters caught in the cross-fire. The bigger question, however, is why this is allowed to happen. Within their specific sphere of influence, the furies have power to equal the Endless, but it seems that Dream is holding back.
Gaiman has shown that he knows how to wrap up a story, so I can only assume that this final ambiguity is on purpose. It’s up to the reader to decide why Dream doesn’t have his heart in the fight. Is he overwhelmed with the shame and guilt of what he did to his son? Is he an exhausted immortal who knows that there will always be another fight, another petty enemy knocking at his doorstep? Does he know himself too well; his obsession with responsibility forcing him into the fight when he could just as easily run away like his brother, Destruction?
In the end, Dream dies. This isn’t a spoiler so much as an inevitability. However, he doesn’t lose. He is prepared for even this eventuality, and a new aspect of Dream appears to take his place.
For my money, this is still probably the single finest volume in comics. Not only does it provide a satisfying conclusion to a great series, but it represents an inflection point in comics that opened the doors to so many great stories in subsequent years.
The Wake is a classic epilogue. The story of Dream (at least the Dream that we’ve followed for 9 volumes) is ended. This last volume sweeps the floors, pus the chairs on the tables, and turns off the lights.
It starts with the funeral that was hinted at in Worlds’ End, a once-in-a-billion-years send-off for one of the Endless. As is appropriate, this somber affair happens in dreams, and many of the side characters from throughout the series are in attendance, even if they don’t all entirely understand what’s happening.
The final few issues are a melancholy mix. We spend a day with Hob, the immortal (but otherwise ordinary) man who met with Dream once each century. His life goes on.
We meet a man exiled from ancient China, who finds himself in one of the “soft places” between waking and dream. He meets the old Dream and the aspect who replaced him. The man doesn’t run from his fate: he meets his exile with dignity.
Finally, we see Shakespeare, near the end of his life. He finishes the second and final play commissioned by the Lord of Dreams. This was the price he paid for the chance to tell stories that would live beyond his own lifetime.
The play is The Tempest, and Dream commissioned it because it is a play about endings. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, we see the possibility that the Lord of Stories wanted just one story about himself. He wanted an ending.
We’re left with the words of a Roman soldier, lost in the place between dreams and waking:
I snagged this book after reading Wendig’s Damn Fine Story. This is an older book, and only barely available as an e-book from one or two retailers.
There was probably a reason for that. On the upside, it only cost a couple bucks.
The book consists of a series of listicles, each on a particular writing topic: antagonists, novel prep, self-publishing, etc. Each has 25 items. It’s apparent that these lists were originally Twitter or blog fodder and were compiled unaltered—a few of them say as much.
I don’t begrudge Wendig for turning these posts into a saleable product, especially since this was published a decade ago, when Wendig was early in his career as a professional writer. The origins of the material show in the lack of cohesive through-line, something that made Damn Fine Story much more satisfying.
Considering the low price, this book isn’t a bad one to pick up, but I wouldn’t suggest reading it cover to cover. Instead, skim through the list of topics and use it as reference. If you’re revising a book (as I am), you might find the section on revision useful. Consult the topics when they’re relevant to you.
This second book establishes a lot of the elements that will repeat through most of the series. Harry spends his summer with his caricature-villain evil aunt, uncle and cousin, before being whisked back to wizard school where he can live happily (apart from wizard Hitler occasionally trying to kill him).
I realized as I was reading this installment that these early Harry Potter books follow a very straightforward formula. A mystery is established early on, and Harry and his friends latch on to a red herring. Clues appear at intervals, and they all seem to support the red herring thesis. In the finale, the truth is revealed, including an explanation for each clue and how it actually pointed toward the real answer.
The first book is all about the kids’ distrust of Snape and the mystery of the package hidden in the guarded corridor. But Snape turns out to merely be a jerk and not the jerk. The second book is all about finding the person opening the chamber of secrets, and the children are fooled into thinking it’s the only adult they actually like and trust. Nope, it’s the ghost of Wizard Hitler!
The moral of the books so far seems to be that adults are untrustworthy. Some are bumbling, some are outright malicious, and a few are well-meaning, but ineffective. Even Dumbledore, often invoked as the most powerful wizard in the world, doesn’t really…do anything useful, at least so far.
As an adult myself, this lesson is a little concerning, but I also know first-hand that adults really are often bumbling, malicious and ineffective. As a starting point for a middle-grade series, it makes a lot of sense. Kids aren’t going to get into interesting adventures if they go whining to the grown-ups whenever they have a life-threatening problem.
What I’m Reading in October
I finished The Sandman series…or did I? There are two more more spin-off volumes: Endless Nights and Dream Hunters. As long as I’m rereading, I might as well include those, right?
I’m also overdue on getting back to The Witcher, and I aim to remedy that with at least one book in October. I’ll be continuing through Harry Potter with my kids, so I expect to get through one or two more of those.
Finally, I’ve started ordering some of the trade paperbacks for comics on my huge list of “acclaimed non-superhero comics of the past 30 years I haven’t read yet.” I’ve been enjoying comics a lot lately, partly because a typical trade paperback is novella-length, and I can feel like I’m reading a lot more books.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson
Transmetropolitan has been on my radar for some time, even though I knew almost nothing about it. It was lodged in my brain alongside a bunch of other 90s-2000s non-superhero comics. I’ve recently discovered just how cheaply you can snag slightly beat-up trade paperbacks of old series at places like ThriftBooks, so I went ahead and purchased the first two volumes of the series just to see if I had any interest.
My feeling coming away from the first volume is that Transmetropolitan is weird for the sake of weird, and that particular brand of “edgy” that was popular in this era, but a little silly in retrospect. It is a depiction of the kind of cultural and technological singularity where almost everything is possible and is probably happening just down the street, but the absolutely schizophrenic nature of that kind of chaos doesn’t really jive with telling a deep or particularly coherent story.
The book begins with former journalist Spider Jerusalem living like a wild-man in a mountain-top cabin surrounded by booby-traps. He is naked, heavily tattooed, and clearly hasn’t gotten a shave or a haircut in a few years. We learn that he was the most famous journalist in a nearby city (simply known as The City), and he gave it all up to move out here. Unfortunately, he signed a contract for a book deal, overdue by five years, and now his publisher is threatening to take the money back. So off he goes, back to The City.
Spider breaks into the offices of his old newsfeed, secures a job and an apartment, removes all his hair with a chemical shower, and gets his trademark glasses out of the totally-not-a-Star-Trek-replicator in his kitchen. Then he turns on the news. There are cryogenic defrostees, people uploaded into nanite clouds, and humans surgically turning themselves into aliens and trying to succeed from The City and create their own colony. As it turns out, these will all be plots for subsequent issues.
The first volume didn’t wow me as an introduction. The chaos of The City struck me as an excuse to just throw any sort of futuristic spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. The characters all range from unpleasant to outright awful, and I have a hard time taking it seriously when the city is called The City and the protagonist has a name like Spider Jerusalem. But hey, it’s the first volume, and a lot of series don’t find their feet right away, so I started in on the next one…
Transmetropolitan (vol. 2)
Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson
I realized partway through this volume that the post-facts world of Transmetropolitan probably seemed more science-fictiony around the year 2000. Nowadays, it’s hardly any different than world outside my window. This certainly isn’t the first piece of sci-fi to satirize politics and religion, only to find that the future went and outdid them. Being subversive and edgy is not a good way to last—yesterday’s shocks are boring to tomorrow’s audience.
I also came to the conclusion that a lot of what rubs me the wrong way about the series is that it’s packed with big, obnoxious allegory. It’s constantly winking and nudging you.
Transmetropolitan doesn’t have an ongoing arc in these first couple volumes. It’s just a series of unrelated stories. This time, we get one about Spider’s assistant’s boyfriend, who decides to download himself into a cloud of nanites. After that, it’s a cryogenically frozen woman who wakes up and discovers that the future is impossible to acclimate to, and that nobody much cares to try and help her. Then there’s Spider’s tour of the “reservations,” hermetically sealed places throughout The City that are built to preserve different cultures and ways of life. Each of these works pretty well as a stand-alone short story, but it didn’t feel like it was building to anything bigger.
Ultimately, I found that Spider Jerusalem was one of the least interesting characters in his own book. It’s possible that some of these disparate threads will eventually weave back together into a larger story, but I wasn’t feeling it after two volumes. I don’t think I’ll be continuing this series.
This is the second Witcher book that’s billed as a short story collection. And it is, but they end up feeling like more than the sum of their parts. There are bigger arcs happening across these stories, continuing the events from the first book.
In addition to the titular Witcher, Dandelion the bard and the sorceress Yennifer are the other main characters. If there is an overall theme across the book, it’s the angst between Geralt and Yennefer, who are both outcasts and troublemakers in their own ways. They each think they can’t make the other person happy, while also being unable to permanently break things off.
There is also a great deal more world-building happening here, including the first mentions of the Wild Hunt, a mysterious recurring event where ghostly warriors cross the sky and portend disaster and war. These stories are still “low to the ground,” but they incorporate a bit more about the nations and politics of the northern kingdoms.
Of course, it wouldn’t be the Witcher without stories about the interactions between humans and magical creatures, whether that be a shapeshifter stealing friends’ identities or a pompous town mayor in love with a mermaid. It also sets up the series of books to follow, as Geralt meets Ciri, the kid princess whose destiny he inadvertently entwined with his own.
Written By Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by P. Craig Russell
Much like Volume 3, Dream Country, this is a set of mostly stand-alone tales where Dream takes on a minor role. There’s a story about Emperor Norton, the real person who declared himself Emperor of the United States of America, a fable about a clan of eastern European werewolves, a tale of young Marco Polo getting lost (and eventually found) in the desert, and story of a spectacular Baghdad, greater than we ever knew it because it was traded into dreams so it might stay perfect forever.
Unlike Dream Country, there are a few things of note that tie back into the broader ongoing plot. For the first time in the series, we actually see “the prodigal,” Destruction, the one member of the Endless who has abdicated his position. We witness a retelling of the ancient Greek tragedy of Orpheus, who is an oracle, and Dream’s son. We see why Orpheus lives eternally as a severed head, and the cause of the rift between him and his father.
These events lead directly into Volume 7, and it really feels like the meandering main story is picking up steam.
The Sandman: Brief Lives (Vol. 7)
Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Jill Thompson
The issues of this arc are labeled as “chapters,” and this is probably the most linear and focused volume since the first. The beginning pulls together several threads from earlier stories, and the end implies a whole lot of bad things are in store for Dream.
Each chapter begins with a sequence of cryptic phrases, like this for chapter one:
Blossom for a lady
Want/not want
The view from the backs of mirrors
Not her sister
Rain in the doorway
The number you have dialed…
They turn out to be little landmarks in the story, a game where the reader can try to guess what might happen from these tidbits, and then check items off the list as they come to pass. It got me thinking how excellent the whole series is at these little things. From the surreal Dave McKean covers and interstitial art to the introductory quotes to the entertainingly themed credits, the Sandman books feel like absolutely every single element was labored over more than was really reasonable. All the little things add up.
The story of this volume centers around the duo of Dream and his youngest sister, Delirium (who used to be Delight). Delirium’s personality is somewhere between a young child and a lunatic, and you get the feeling that the rest of the oh-so-serious Endless family is perpetually humoring her. She decides to go looking for Destruction, the brother that abandoned the rest of the Endless and made it clear that he doesn’t want to be found. Delirium asks her siblings to help her, but one by one they brush her off. When she comes to Dream, the most serious of them all, it’s a surprise that he agrees to go with her. So the pair set off to find Destruction.
Eventually, we learn that Dream had ulterior motives, and never really expected to find Destruction. But he takes his responsibilities seriously, and since he promised to help Delirium, he turns to the one person who has the power to find the Endless, even when they do not want to be found: his own son, Orpheus. For this favor, Orpheus (a severed head who cannot die) asks his father to end his suffering.
The book ends with foreboding. They find Destruction, only to have him leave again. Morpheus returns to his realm, everything neatly wrapped up, and then reveals his chalk-white hands stained with his son’s blood. It’s made clear that there are consequences for the Endless when they spill family blood. The only question is what those consequences will be…
Sometimes I look at the Hitchhikers’ Guide omnibus on my shelf and I think sadly about how I’ll never be able to read another Douglas Adams story for the first time. But if there’s anyone who can compare to Adams, it has to be Terry Pratchett. I’m grateful that unlike Adams, he wrote so prolifically.
There are 41 books in the Discworld series, and I’ve been slowly going through them, picking up new ones at Half Price Books whenever I see them. I’m savoring them, because I know eventually I’ll run out.
Small Gods is about an accidental prophet named Brutha, in the desert land of Omnia, where the people worship the god Om. Omnia is a strict theocracy where the church is the central pillar of life, and it’s not uncommon for supposed sinners to have the badness tortured out of them. Faith is of the utmost importance in Omnia, so it’s especially awkward when Brutha discovers that Om is trapped in the form of a turtle with hardly any godlike powers at all, and this is because nobody besides Brutha actually believes in him anymore.
Brutha goes on a hero’s journey, and despite his best efforts he manages to overthrow the Omnian order, restore (real) belief in Om, and generally start making the country a place where people can live their lives without worrying about being randomly tortured.
Small Gods isn’t my favorite Discworld book, but it’s a parody with plenty of laughs and a few sideways glances toward our world. As usual, an average book by Terry Pratchett is quite good by anyone else’s standards.
One of the joys of being a parent is getting to share things you enjoy with your kids. One of the strange things about being a parent of several children (with a few years in-between) is that I’ve shared a bunch of those things with my eldest kids, and my youngest knows nothing about them. So, although I read the Harry Potter books to my eldest son—and my daughter was sometimes in the general vicinity of the reading—I was told that we should read them again. And now we are.
I’ll say here that I don’t agree with Rowling and the garbage she is now known for spewing on social media. I also think it’s fashionable to criticize books by authors who are deemed terrible people. Despite Rowling acting out, I think the Harry Potter books are perfectly enjoyable.
A lot of the complaints about this series are about all the unbelievable aspects of the world-building. There are a lot of problems with the Wizarding World and its interactions with the regular world that just aren’t addressed. And that’s completely true. But I also think it doesn’t really matter.
The odd thing about this series is that it grew up along with its readership. The first book is very much a children’s story, in its form and in the language it uses. It’s not worried about perfectly consistent world-building, any more than Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks is, because the shape of the story still works. Part of that is because it borrows from fairy tales, starting with the classic evil step parents (or in this case, aunt and uncle), and the orphan boy who is destined to save the world.
So shockingly, my takeaway is that a super-bestselling book that started a huge pop-culture craze and made more money than some small countries does, in fact, do a lot of things well.
What I’m Reading in September
I’ll continue working my way through the Sandman and Witcher series. I might go for a couple brand-new books about writing that I just got. I also recently compiled a list of highly-rated comics from the last 20 years, and I might start working through some of those.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
I was surprised how quickly this volume rushed into the plot that would drive this entire arc. For the first time, we see Dream meet with all of the other Endless, except for the still-unrevealed “prodigal.” His elder brother, Destiny, calls them together for a meeting, because his book (which describes everything that will ever happen) tells him that’s what’s he’s going to do.
In previous volumes, it was revealed that Dream was once in love with a mortal, and when she rebuffed his advances, he got very grumpy about it, and threw her in hell, where she’s been for a few thousand years. For some reason, Dream’s siblings bring this up, and amazingly, for the first time, he realizes that this was a pretty shitty thing to do.
He embarks off to Hell, and Gaiman cleverly sets us up to think that Lucifer is going to fight Morpheus, but when Dream arrives, he finds the Lightbringer shutting everything down. He gets his revenge on Dream by giving him the keys to an emptied Hell.
The rest of the book follows Dream as various old gods come to his kingdom to ask for the keys to Hell, a piece of prime psychic real estate. We see him for the first time as a royal figure, with these mythological figures seeking his favor. He turns out to be adept at navigating the politics of the situation, and he manages to get rid of the key and free his former girlfriend in the process.
I think this might be the first volume that is completely free of any superhero references, which is no big deal in modern comics, but was probably a rarity when it first released.
Volume 5 revisits Barbie (no, not that one), who was first introduced in Volume 2, The Doll’s House. She’s split with Ken (no, that that one either) and now lives in New York, in an apartment building with a whole new set of interesting neighbors. In Volume 2, we saw bits and pieces of Barbies dreams, which were an ongoing fantasy tale where she was the protagonist. Here, we find out that she hasn’t been dreaming for months, and when her dreams return, they bring some very real nightmares with them.
I’m hardly an arbiter of wokeness, but I will say that this story was written in 1991, involves a lesbian couple, a trans woman, and a homeless person with implied mental illness, and feels surprisingly modern and respectful in the way it treats all of these characters. The world around them doesn’t always treat them kindly, but the narrative explores them honestly as people with good aspects and interesting flaws, rather than caricatures.
This volume also barely involves Morpheus. The apartment building crew venture into Barbie’s strange dreams and confront an invading creature. Only at the very end does Dream show up, giving us a few tidbits of info about his past.
I have to say at this point that I had forgotten how meandering the series is. There are certainly bits and pieces of connective tissue: characters that keep coming up, and the ongoing theme of Dream learning how to be more “human” and a bit less of a stodgy, immortal curmudgeon. And hints of a feud with Desire. I’m now halfway through the original run, and there’s no clear overarching conflict apparent. Yet. Luckily, the world, the characters, and the writing are so good that I don’t much mind.
The city of Ambergris left a strong impression on me, and I decided about a year ago that I needed to explore more of Jeff Vandermeer’s work. So I picked up Dead Astronauts, only to find it almost inscrutable. Then I discovered it was actually the second book in a series. I finally got back around to picking up the first book, and that is Borne.
Vandermeer has once again created an amazing setting in the confines of a city. We learn that the Earth has been ravaged by environmental catastrophe and bioengineering run amok, but apart from this, very little is revealed beyond the City. The City has no name, and it is a ruin surrounded by harsh desert. It is inhabited by scavengers, and by Mord, the kaiju-esque 3-story-tall bear. Mord and many other creatures were engineered by the also-unnamed Company, which exists as a huge, white building at the edge of the city, abutted by the holding ponds where the bio-waste and failed experiments are dumped, to eat each other and be eaten, and sometimes to escape into the City.
Borne is about a scavenger, Rachel, and her partner and lover, Wick, a sort of freelance bioengineer who once worked for the Company. They protect and defend their base of operations, a half-ruined apartment building, from scavengers, from another Company alumn called The Magician, and from Mord and his monstrous bear minions. Rachel discovers a piece of biotech, which she calls Borne, who turns out to be a sentient shapeshifter and becomes a sort of surrogate child to her.
I find Vandermeer fascinating because he is frequently riding the very edge of the Principle of Least Necessary Information. This book and the Ambergris stories are all a kind of puzzle that manages to propel you forward through the story while scrounging for hints and clues about what exactly is going on. I devoured this book in a day, because I couldn’t stop reading.
The Strange Bird is a hundred-page story set in the same world as Borne. It starts with some tantalizing bits outside the City, as the titular Strange Bird escapes from a bio-engineering lab and sets off in search of…something…it’s not sure what, but it knows it’s got to find it.
After a series of adventures that leave it considerably worse for wear, the bird arrives in the City and is captured by The Magician. This middle part of the story covers some of the same events from Borne from a different viewpoint, providing more context around the events toward the end of that book.
Eventually, the bird escapes once more, in an entirely new form, and continues its journey. When it finally arrives at its destination, it discovers that the thing it was looking for is long gone, but the ending is bittersweet and it still manages to find some peace at the end of the road.
I was excited to return to Dead Astronauts, now that I had the first two stories in the series fresh in my mind. If Borne rides the edge of Least Necessary Information, Dead Astronauts jumps head-first off the edge. It is experimental in the extreme, living somewhere between poetry and novel. In my original reading, I was lost. With the added context of Borne and The Strange Bird, I was able to follow the story, but I’d be lying if I said I understood everything.
Dead Astronauts has four parts. In the first part, we follow the three “astronauts.” They are Moss, an ever-changing plant creature in the form of a human, Grayson, an actual astronaut with a robotic eye, and Chen, a former Company bio-engineer who sees the world in equations. These three have made it their mission to destroy the Company, and to this end, Moss shunts them between parallel universes to try to find a version of the City and the Company where they can gain an advantage. The Company, however, also coordinates between parallel universes, and in the end, the Company seems to overcome them.
The second part shifts perspective (and uses the rare second-person!) We follow a character who remains unnamed for almost the entire section, living homeless in a city that may be a past version of the City, or may be another place entirely. Creatures from the Company begin to appear , followed by the Company’s agents, biological and robotic. There are pale men who may have some relation to Wick from Borne, and a duck with a broken wing, an innocuous creature that turns out to be a horrible monstrosity.
In the third part, we learn more about what goes on inside the Company. We learn about Charlie X, a character who has appeared in the first two stories in smaller roles, and how intertwined he is with everything that has happened. While we get more information, the origin and the nature of the Company are never entirely explained. Is it responsible for the ruination of earth? Or did it merely take advantage of it? And just how many of its tentacles did it send out across parallel universes? Vandermeer gives plenty of tantalizing clues, but no clear answers.
The final part of the story follows the blue fox, another bio-engineered creature that has appeared here and there in the other stories. The fox shares a connection with Moss, and it can also cross between parallel worlds. In this final part, the different storylines become intertwined across time and the different versions of the city. Causes and effects are all mixed up in twists and loops.
Reading these three books in order, I enjoyed them immensely. If you can accept that not everything will have a clear answer, and you’re interested in puzzling through some of the mysteries, I would highly recommend the series. This is pretty much the pinnacle of literary science-fiction.
I’ll continue The Sandman series, and pick The Witcher series back up as well (in fact, I’m already halfway through the next book). I’m also eyeing some unread books on my bookshelf by Terry Pratchett and Andy Weir. See you in a month.
As far as I can remember, this is only the second Neal Stephenson book I’ve read. The first was Snow Crash. As you’d expect from books written twenty years apart, they’re quite different. From this admittedly tiny sample size, I get the impression that Stephenson has undergone the same transformation as William Gibson, from cyberpunk science-fiction to stories that interpret current technology through a futurist lens: stories that say, ”it’s hard to believe it, but these things could happen today.”
Reamde is a book about ransomware, money laundering through MMORPGs, the Russian mob, and Islamic terrorists in China.
1. Style is an Engine of Story
Sentence-to-sentence, Reamde is a fantastically well-written book. Stephenson’s prose reminds me of literary fiction, because it was just as critical to my enjoyment of the book as the characters or plot. However, the style is very different. It’s not lyrical, it’s clean and precise, but that doesn’t make it any less captivating.
The best way I could describe it is that it feels like walking through the story with Terminator vision—everything overlaid with little details, and targets zooming in to focus your attention on important things.
There are many engines that can power a story, and a strong style like this is a great one, if you can manage it. Since it’s all about how you say it, not what you’re saying, it layers nicely with other engines.
2. Eschew Unnecessary Detail
The level of detail used to describe something—a place, a character—can be an important cue to the reader. Describing something in detail indicates its importance, and explicitly limiting that detail shows a lack of importance.
At one point in the book, some characters meet the pilots of the private jet they will be riding on. The pilots’ introduction is sparse: “He greeted the pilot by name.”
The pilots are necessary to the plot, so they have to be mentioned. Stephenson could have come up with a throw-away name, but this gets across the message just as well. It’s a clue that the pilot will only be relevant for a short while. The reader doesn’t have to worry about remembering the name of yet another side character.
When characters are going to be important (or at least stick around for a while), Stephenson makes sure to introduce them in a way that reveals one or two interesting physical characteristics and something that reveals a bit of their personality. This makes them instantly memorable.
The other great use of this technique is to add detail to accentuate things that will be important to the plot. It’s like a miniature “gun on the mantle.” If you spend time describing a key and a padlock, that lock ought to be important. If you leave garbage out in the forest to attract dangerous animals, some dangerous animals had better show up at some point.
3. Coincidences Strain Believability
Incredible coincidences or lucky breaks aren’t unusual in action/suspense stories like this, but they have to be used carefully.
Reamde’s plot really kicks off with one such coincidence, and it results in several characters getting mixed up with the Russian mob. To me, a crazy coincidence works great as an inciting incident.
Where coincidences start to chafe is when they’re used to repeatedly ratchet up the tension, or even worse, to resolve a problem.
There’s an egregious example of this at the end of Act I of Reamde, where everything that happens in the latter 2/3 of the book hinges on a group of hackers who just happen to live in the same run-down tenements as a terrorist cell. In a city of millions.
There are other examples as well, including several chance meetings among the large cast of characters that end up being vital to the plot later on, and many of the characters being players of the in-story MMO, T’Rain, so that there’s always someone available to log on when it becomes relevant to the plot again.
When I got to the part where bad guys were killed by a cougar, I had to stop reading and look up the stats on cougar attacks. Then I just threw up my hands and accepted that this is what I signed up for. That’s not the kind of reaction you generally want from a reader.
4. Beware Pet Characters
Stephenson is deeply in love with Richard “Dodge” Forthrast. He’s the cool, smart guy who gets along in any social strata and knows all the things. He’s a former pot smuggler turned Silicon Valley CEO. He’s bored of being a billionaire, because he’d rather be out solving some new earth-shattering problems. He is the Golden Boy caricature that people like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos try to project.
Even in a life-threatening situation, he’s having fun, practically on vacation. It’s really only at the very end of the book where he shows any amount of fallibility. Of course, he makes up for it by being the guy who saves the day.
The strangest thing of all is that this is really not his story. Although the perspective jumps around, the bulk of it is from the perspective of Zula, his niece, and she’s the one with a character arc and the most to lose. Yet the story starts and ends with Dodge.
Because Stephenson is a great writer, Dodge is still a fun character, but I’d like him more if he was a little more human and fallible.
5. Structure is a Double-Edged Sword
Like most suspense stories, Reamde has constantly escalating stakes. Every section is essentially “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Things could always get worse (or worse in a new way).
The danger of this constant escalation is that it can quickly ramp to extremes (and well beyond). It’s easy to jump the shark.
In Act II, Reamde splits many of the characters up into separate groups in their own bad situations. I realized pretty quickly that the rest of the book was going to be about how everyone long journey to end up back together in one place, for the final showdown.
However, wrangling everyone back to the same place, at the same time, requires introducing another round of characters and another handful of helpful coincidences.
This made the second half of the book feel considerably more meandering. When everyone finally arrived at the final showdown, there were so many characters involved and so much to resolve that there were literally 100 pages of running gunfights.
By that time, the story had escalated to such extremes that my reaction to the bad guy’s final defeat was a combination of exhaustion and relief that it was done.
Bookends
It’s been a while since I read a book that was such a mix of joys and irritations. I love Stephenson’s prose, but this book did not need to be a thousand pages or finish with a novella-length series of shootouts.
Reamde was released in 2011, so I’m thinking I’ll pick up Stephenson’s latest novel, Termination Shock, sometime soon, just to get the full “bookend” experience of his career so far.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. This month, I continued my reread of the Sandman series, and delved into the Witcher books. I also took a look at a new TTRPG.
As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Mike Dringenberg
The first Sandman trade paperback followed Morpheus (a.k.a. Dream) through his embarrassing imprisonment by a petty modern sorcerer, his escape, and the subsequent retrieval of his magical tools. It also introduced some of his siblings, the immortal personifications known as the Endless.
However, things aren’t yet back to normal. In this second trade paperback, Dream must clean up his kingdom, which fell into disarray in his absence. Several of his minions are missing, including The Corinthian, a murderous nightmare with mouths for eyes. To make matters worse, a Vortex has appeared: a mortal with the ability to tear down the walls between dreams (which turns out to cause a lot of problems). Mixed up in all of it are Dream’s siblings, Desire and Despair, who plan a potentially deadly trap for their older brother.
Through flashbacks, we see stories from Dream’s past, interspersed with his present-day hunt for the escaped dreams and the Vortex. While he is obsessed with his responsibilities, there are some indications that his imprisonment has taught him to have more compassion in his dealings with mortals.
This volume confirms that the series is not afraid to wade into dark topics, with storylines involving an abused child and a convention of serial killers doing the sorts of things you’d expect them to do.
Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Kelley Jones
This volume contains four stand-alone stories set in the Sandman universe. Some involve Dream heavily, some barely, or not at all. They’re all enjoyable in their own way, but not strictly necessary to read if you’re only interested in the “main” storyline.
They include a story about a feline prophet from the perspective of cats, a captive muse used (and abused) by artists for fame and fortune, Shakespeare’s theatre company putting on a play for faeries, and the second story to feature Death, about an un-killable super-hero who wants to die after her powers alienate her from society.
The book ends with some notes, revealing the origins of these stories (namely that Gaiman was itching to do different things after struggling to complete the Doll’s House arc). It includes the original script for Episode 17: Calliope. If you’re interested in writing for comics, it’s a nice side-by-side comparison of script and finished product, from a widely acknowledged master of the craft.
This was a Kickstarter that I backed somewhat on a whim.
It starts with a group of people attending a school reunion. They played table-top RPGs together when they were younger. Now they’re all grown up, and they’re getting together to do one final adventure. Only this game is different. It’s magical, and it transports them, literally, to another world.
It’s basically TTRPG Jumanji.
Die began its life as a comic series. You can read the first issue for free. Now, it’s also a real TTRPG by the same authors. It’s a nice, 400-page hard-bound all-in-one rulebook.
The main innovation the system offers is a doubly-layered story. Players first create a cast of “real life” characters, a group with history and emotional baggage. Then those characters become the paragons (the classes) in the fantasy world of Die.
Die eschews the usual fantasy archetypes. The default rules require each player to play a different class, and each is associated with one of the classic TTRPG dice. Characters can play as…
The Dictator (D4), with the power to alter others’ emotional states
The Fool (D6), who gains incredible luck so long as they’re being dangerously daring or cavalier
The Emotion Knight (D8), who harnesses a specific emotion for martial power and wields a sentient weapon
The Neo (D10), a cyberpunk thief whose powers are fueled by money
The Godbinder (D12), a spiritual mercenary who gains magical powers by going into debt with the divine
The Master (D20), is played by the GM, and can break the rules and cheat at the risk of destroying themselves.
The game is relatively rules-light. It’s a D6 dice-pool game, with the class dice adding a little variety for special skills. The book includes a single chapter bestiary, and very little incidental description of items.
It is also story-light. It doesn’t have a setting so much as a meta-setting, a world with 20 regions that can take the form of whatever settings you want to pull into your game. The Master plays the ultimate villain who forces the players into this alternate world, and all the players must collectively decide whether to stay in the fantasy or leave together. At least, all the players who are alive at the end…
There are some interesting rules for death, where players come back as zombie versions of themselves, capable of regaining life only by taking it from one of the other players. And there are The Fair, the hidden denizens of the world of Die, with their own secret agenda and godlike powers.
I don’t have an active RPG group at the moment, and I haven’t had the chance to play this yet, but it feels like a game designed for veteran players. The two-layered characterization requires players to deeply understand and heavily role-play their characters. It’s unlikely to make for a fun hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. The lack of detailed systems or predefined settings and adventures mean the GM is going to have to either prep a lot or do some excellent improv (and probably both).
Overall, an interesting game book to read, and one I’m happy to have on my shelf, but probably not one I’ll be playing any time soon. For experienced groups who are looking for a new game, it might be a system worth trying.
The Witcher series contains eight entries: a five novel series and three stand-alone books. This is the first: a short story collection. They were originally written in Polish by Andrzej Sapkowski and later translated into a variety of languages, several successful video games, and an ongoing Netflix series that just happens to have released a new season.
These sword-and-sorcery tales take place in an Eastern-European-feeling secondary world and follow the titular Witcher, Geralt, one of a dying group of magic-infused monster hunters. Geralt is often feared and treated poorly because of his mutant nature, and an ongoing theme of the books is that the humans are often more evil than the monsters.
In addition to monsters and humans, there are several non-human races like dwarves, elves, and gnomes. There are hints that these races once ruled the continent, but were long ago ousted by humans and their kingdoms in a series of brutal and attritive wars. Now, they are forced to choose between hopeless rebellions or integration into a society that treats them as dangerous and lesser beings.
Geralt, by virtue of being an outsider among humans, moves between all these different factions and groups, managing to make friends and enemies in equal measure just about everywhere. The stories often hinge on questions of ethics, with Geralt being thrust into situations with no good choices.
This is a great intro to the character and the world. Many of the elements are fantasy staples and little homages to fairy tales, but they’re infused with little twists that make them all feel fresh again.
In the release chronology, this is technically the third book, however it is the first book of the five-part series of novels, and the place to start if you’re less interested in the short stories.
I have to admit, the beginning of the book is a little hard to swallow. The famous troubadour Dandelion sings to a crowd, crooning a thinly veiled ballad about the Witcher, Geralt, and his young princess ward Ciri. For the remainder of the chapter, the crowd of listeners dump exposition about these characters, their past, the world, and the current political situation. Somehow, half a dozen of the people gathered have had run-ins with these people. After that, however, it livens up quickly.
The story mostly follows Geralt and Ciri, and the sorceresses Yennifer and Triss. Ciri is the princess of a kingdom annexed by invaders. While the invasion was halted by an alliance of other kingdoms, war seems to be looming on a variety of fronts, and at least a few dangerous people are looking for Ciri and her Witcher protector.
This book really expands the world with some tantalizing hints of a long and complex history. It’s revealed that monsters came into the world through an event known as the Conjunction of the Spheres, an overlaying of dimensions more than a thousand years previous where things could cross between worlds. Monsters are invasive species, and while many are dangerous, they are not necessarily well-adapted to this world and are generally in decline, leaving Witchers with less work. It is also implied that humans may have entered the world during the Conjunction, explaining how they suddenly started to take over ancient non-human lands.
Sapkowski introduces some interesting anachronisms to his largely medieval setting. Sorcerers and Witchers apparently understand quite a bit about biology, physiology, and the origins of disease, and use a mix of magic and modern(-ish) medicine.
This is a great first book for a series, introducing important characters, building the world, and hinting at bigger mysteries and a villain lurking in the shadows. While Geralt is at home among the common folk (rarely interacting with anyone more important than a mayor in The Last Wish), this book promises an epic fantasy series with plenty of royal politics, assassins, magic, and world-shattering consequences. The characters drive the action, and are largely pulled into these broader political situations against their wills. Geralt is the perfect gruff-but-lovable protagonist, and I look forward to learning more about the cosmology of Sapkowski’s world.
What I’m Reading in July
I’ll continue the Sandman and Witcher series, I’m going to get back to Discworld with my kids, and I’ve got a Neal Stephenson novel I’ve been slowly picking at in e-book that I’m determined to finish.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the second movie in this loosely-connected series, written and directed by Rian Johnson. Although they share the character of Benoit Blanc, the world-famous detective, Glass Onion’s story is completely independent.
Glass Onion follows a group of colorful characters who are invited by their tech billionaire friend to a vacation on his private island. He hosts a murder mystery party where people start dying for real.
Good Parody Has to be Good First
Glass Onion is a parody of the classic murder mystery in many ways. It features tropes like a world-famous detective, a murder mystery party that turns to real murder, a secret twin, a shooting by a gloved hand from just off-screen, and a bullet stopped by an item in a breast pocket.
It also features silliness like a voice shouting “dong” across the island instead of a proper bell, an unexplained dudebro who intrudes in random scenes, Jeremy Renner’s homemade hot sauce, and a rich-guy exercise app that features famous sports figures “on the clock” in a constant live stream, waiting for the rich guy to exercise.
However, all of the tropes and silliness are layered into a well-executed mystery, with a cast of interesting and potentially murderous characters, whose motives and backgrounds come out in a series of reveals that each change our perception of the story.
The titular glass onion is the top room of the billionaire mansion, but also the structure of the story, called out within the dialogue as a metaphor for a mystery where all the layered complications are distractions, and the real answer was obvious all along.
In short, a really good parody must understand exactly what it is parodying. It has to be a good example of the conventional in order to call out the absurd aspects of a genre.
Genre is 50% Superficial
Many of the parts of Glass Onion that feel most like a classic mystery are simple visuals: the entrance and pose of the femme fatale when she first appears, or the sweep of the island’s lighthouse light through the mansion windows after the power goes out.
These things aren’t vital to the story, but they’re visually stunning and they do a tremendous amount of work to set the mood. This is an important lesson for genre writers, many of whom tend to favor plot or characterization over authorial voice and lyricism. It’s good to remember that stylized writing can pull the reader into the story just as effectively as brilliant world-building or dialogue. Ideally, we provide a healthy mix of both.
Bring the Audience Into the Story
The movie came out in 2022, with a brief theatrical release followed by Netflix. It is set in the height of the pandemic, and as it introduces the characters, it also smartly roots the world in its time and place.
We meet the politician taking TV news interviews from her living room, the scientist on a Zoom call at work, the self-centered fashionista hosting a huge unmasked house party, and the “manoshpere” influencer streaming from the house where he lives with his girlfriend and mom. The famous detective, Benoit Blanc, is in the tub, slowly losing his mind out of boredom and losing a game of Among Us with a bunch of celebrities. The bathroom is full of liquor bottles and piles of books.
The cast spends a bit of time solving their puzzle-box invitations to the murder mystery island vacation, revealing little tidbits of who they are before we jump to the luxury yacht trip from the Greek mainland to the island where the remainder of the movie will take place. The characters are given a mysterious concoction that is implied (but not outright stated) to protect them from Covid, and this is the last we see of the masks and social distancing.
What’s interesting about this first half of the first act is that it chooses to start in the midst of the pandemic, even though it has little bearing on the remainder of the movie. It could have done what many movies did, and simply ignored the plague times altogether. Instead, we start in a very relatable (maybe too relatable) time and place, and the movie brings us along into its fantastic world of ultra-wealth and murder.
Easing the audience gently into an unfamiliar world is common in fantasy and science fiction, where the world of the story is often very different from the world we live in. However, Johnson shows that it can be equally effective in a modern mystery story that takes place in a world very similar to ours.
A Mystery Worth Emulating
I really enjoyed Glass Onion. It’s the kind of movie that rewards re-watching, not just to notice all the clever clues hidden throughout, but to study the intricate layering of structural elements. Rian Johnson is frankly showing off. If you’re looking for a great study in constructing a mystery, this is a modern masterpiece of a classic genre.
Good God, I read a lot of books in May. You can find out more about why in another post.
I don’t have the desire or time to write full-on blog posts for every book I read, but I’ve come to appreciate how blogging gives me an opportunity to reflect a little bit more explicitly on what I got out of a book. So, I’m going to start writing these monthly posts to talk about what I’m reading.
If you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
This triply-titled book is the kind of non-fiction that is perfect for fiction writers. It’s full of interesting ideas that could spark a story. Bridle is a little bit “out there,” but this exploration of intelligence comes at an old topic from an interesting perspective.
The book postulates that we should consider a lot more under the umbrella of intelligence than we typically do. The human definition of intelligence always seems to be “things that humans do,” and Bridle argues that this definition dramatically limits our understanding of the universe.
As you might guess from the title, Bridle argues that various animals, plants and machines all have their own varied forms of intelligence, often radically different from our own. He provides some interesting examples to back up his opinions, although some of the leaps of logic toward the end of the book didn’t quite land for me.
This is an introduction to the basics of Zen Buddhism, along with some history and context.
Alan Watts was an odd duck. A British-born writer and speaker who gained popularity after moving to California in the 1950s, he was a priest before becoming enamored with Asian religions and philosophy, and he found a receptive audience in the hippie movement.
I don’t really know if Watts is much appreciated in more mainstream or traditional Zen circles, but he has an entertaining style and a knack for explaining abstract concepts through metaphors and parables aimed at a western audience. His many recorded philosophical lectures have found new life on the internet in the YouTube era.
A fun pair of fantasy novellas set in an Asian-inspired secondary world. Despite a pair of royal twins and a magic system based around elements, these books feel original and fresh. Quick reads full of action and adventure.
What I really appreciated about these books was that all of the magical fantasy action was driven by relatable and varied interpersonal conflicts: disagreements between parents and children, irritation with in-laws, and the loss of loved-ones.
The first book also successfully tricked me into believing that it would end with a big fight, then switched it up at the last second and gave me a more cerebral conclusion.
Originally published in 1945, Animal Farm is a skinny little book that Orwell sometimes described as a fairy story. It’s a modern (for its day) fable about a group of animals that take over the farm, only to have their noble rebellion slowly subverted back into tyranny.
I’ll be the first to say that allegorical novels aren’t exactly the sort of thing I’m very excited to read, and I probably wouldn’t have read this if it wasn’t considered such a classic. However, it’s a very quick read, and entertaining enough that I didn’t regret it.
In many ways, this book feels like an early prototype of Orwell’s 1984, which was published only four years later. Many of the same ideas appear in that book, but in less simple, satirical forms.
These are big “coffee table” books with some great illustrations and images from the movies.
The original book spent a good amount of time on each of Anderson’s first seven movies. While I’m not much of a movie critic, I do have an appreciation for experts talking about the things they love. This was an interesting look into that world. While a lot of it is specific to filmmaking, there are some useful tidbits about building good stories in general.
The second book is a bit thinner, but focused entirely on a single film. For my money, Grand Budapest is Anderson’s best work, but this still felt like more of a deep dive than I needed on the one movie, especially when contrasting it with the first book.
While they may make more of these books as the director continues to make movies, I think these two were enough to satisfy me, and I’ll get off the ride at this stop.
Flash Futures
(Anthology, edited by Eric Fomley)
This was one of my backer rewards from a Kickstarter for The Martian magazine. It’s an anthology of sci-fi flash fiction, generally on the darker side. I have to admit, while there were some enjoyable stories here, I prefer the drabbles on the site.
I think flash fiction is one of the hardest formats to write. I enjoy drabbles and micro-fiction because it’s hard to even tell a coherent story at that length. Pulling it off is a bit of a magic trick. At the 500 or 1000 words of a flash piece, you still can’t tell very much story, but you also don’t have the incredible tightness of a drabble, where you’re fighting to fit every single word and forced to cut words in clever ways.
Hellblazer: Out of Season (Volume 17)
Written by Mike Carey
Art by Chris Brunner, Leonardo Manco, Marcelo Frusin, Steve Dillon
This was a random pick from the library.
I love Constantine as a character, and his whole milieu, but how many times can there be a worldwide supernatural apocalypse event? It seems like it happens every year or so in these books. I really prefer the smaller, more intimate story arcs that focus on just how miserable it is to be in Constantine’s social circle.
I will say, this is a pretty great connecting arc. The twist at the end is interesting, and it creates new characters and problems. It’s a great example of finishing a chunk of episodic story by building a lot of new scaffolding that future stories can be built upon. That’s not always an easy thing to achieve. Good lessons for anyone who wants to write a series.
Not my first time reading this, and it won’t be my last. If you love comics and you haven’t read this book, you are missing out.
It is, by far, the most beautiful Sandman book, and that is a high bar. There are no straight-edged standard panels here. It’s a master-class in all the different ways a comics page can be composed. While the original Sandman was often very dark and brooding, Overture contrasts its serious blacks with all sorts of psychedelic color.
I’ve read some complaints about the story not being as good as the originals. And that might be true, but I also don’t think it’s too far off the original series. Neil Gaiman does his usual Neil Gaiman things, crafting stories that feel simultaneously new and old, familiar and strange, playing around in one of the worlds where he is most comfortable.
Although this is a prequel, I think it definitely ought to be read after the original run. Narratively, the story comes before the other books, but the references and emotional beats are clearly designed as a follow-up.
Reading this again gave me the itch to read even more Sandman. So…
Illustrated by Sam Keith, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Kelley Jones
The big, bad original, from the early days of DC’s Vertigo imprint.
Despite Morpheus (a.k.a. Dream) being almost infinitely old when we first meet him, this is a fantastic origin story. It’s a satisfying arc in its own right, as Morpheus is trapped, escapes, and then has to regain his tools and repair his kingdom. It also sets the tone for the entire series: a delightful mix of modern and ancient stories in a new mythological frame.
Almost all of the issues collected here are dedicated to the main plot, with the exception of the final one. “The Sound of Her Wings” remains one of the greatest single issues of a comic of all time, characterizing Death as a whimsical, kind, and profoundly compassionate older sister to Dream.
What I’m Reading in June
In June I’ll be continuing my re-read of the original Sandman series. I’m also delving into the Witcher series and a brand new TTRPG.
Becoming a Writer is a slim volume written by Dorothea Brand in 1934, based upon her experience as a creative writing teacher. As Brande is quick to point out, this is not a book about stylistic technique or story structure. She’s happy to guide readers to other books for that (and there are far more now than there were in the 30s). This book is exactly what it purports to be: a book about how to become a writer, and not necessarily how to write well.
The intended audience seems to be college students or post-school adults who want to get into writing, but aren’t quite sure how to start. Rather than get into all the technical details, Brande suggests what they need is an understanding of how to get into a writer’s headspace, to learn how to think and work like a writer.
While some of the language feels outmoded and there are one or two references to streetcars, Brande’s book stands up well almost a century after its original publication.
Writing Practice
As a first task for a writer to tackle, Brande suggests getting used to writing daily. The prospective writer must embark on a plan of writing immediately after waking up in the morning, before doing anything else. Once this has become habit, she advocates setting specific writing times based on each day’s schedule, and varying them to get used to writing at any time of day.
As a night owl, I am already fairly miserable in the mornings, even when I do get enough sleep. I’ve tried “morning pages” with mixed success in the past. I’ve decided that this is advice I can follow on the weekends, but I’m hit-or-miss during the week.
On the other hand, I have recently tried scheduling mini writing breaks in the middle of my day. It works surprisingly well, and increases my output a small but noticeable amount.
The Mindful Author
Brande is of the opinion that most writers spend too much time discussing the conscious work that a writer has to do, and not enough on the unconscious part of the writing brain. She believes that much of what makes for great writing comes from this unconscious well of ideas, and that great writers learn to effectively use and cultivate it.
To this end, she offers a series of exercises that sound an awful lot like mindfulness and meditation to the modern ear, but must have seemed rather “out there” when the book was first published.
She encourages writers to pay attention to the world around them, observing it with as much child-like wonder as they can muster, and avoiding distractions. This observation, however, should be followed by carefully describing the exciting bits with exacting and detailed language—practice for the unconscious brain in observing, coupled with practice for the conscious brain in relating the raw experience through words.
She also believes that consuming stories while working on a story of one’s own will contaminate it with other authors’ voices. Instead, to release a writer’s inner genius, she suggests some mostly-mindless, hypnotic activity to help free the unconscious—whether that be walking, cleaning, sewing, etc. She essentially recommends cultivating a meditative state with the story as its focus.
Here There Be Writers
A short book with strong opinions, Becoming a Writer tackles the task of writing in a surprisingly holistic way. On the other hand, it makes sweeping generalizations about artistic sensibilities in almost every word, and I can’t bring myself to believe that those kinds of generalizations ever apply to everyone. But it’s a unique take on the writing book, with ideas that kept me thinking well after I had finished it
Despite being a book of concrete ideas about how to cultivate a good writing process, it is surprisingly romantic—and even borderline mystical—about writers and their art. It treats us as dragons and unicorns, imbued with a certain amount of innate magic, but also gets detailed about the practical care and feeding of these creatures to get optimal results.
If you’re looking for a writing book that is more about getting in the writing headspace, and less about rehashing the hero’s journey for the umpteenth time or tightening up your first five pages, Brande’s book is a good choice.
Words Deferred 