Good News from the Vatican

Stories Read:
"Good News from the Vatican" by Robert Silverberg

A disappointing week on the short story front! Much of my reading time was spent finishing Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for an SFFaudio Podcast. We recorded that podcast this morning.

My overall reading time was also limited by my interest in everything going on at the Vatican. I've been reading quite a bit, listening to radio and podcasts... my mind and heart are over there, and sometimes you need to just follow your interest.

But how cool is it that the next story on my list was "Good News from the Vatican" by Robert Silverberg? It's a Nebula Award winner that Silverberg says he wrote very quickly so that he'd have a story in Terry Carr's first Universe anthology. I wouldn't call it a particularly deep story, but even though it's comic, it generates thoughts about religions and others as a few outside observers of a Papal Conclave see a robot elected Pope.

I will have plenty of reading time this week, some of which will be taken up reading "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia E. Butler for the next Good Story podcast. It will be a fun week. Upcoming is a Tim Powers novella called "A Time to Cast Away Stones", then some Hard SF - "Luminous" by Greg Egan. After that, stories by Connie Willis and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Tournament of Books: Johnson vs. Semple

This is my first day weighing in on the daily rounds of the Tournament of Books from The Morning News.  The pre-tournament play-in I didn't have anything to say because I'd only read one book of the three.  It ended up being the book selected to move forward, so that was a lucky pick on my part!  You can go back and read what I thought of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk back in November.

Yesterday's round, between The Round House and The Fault in Our Stars - that was too hard for me to make a call on.  I call it a draw.  I just wasn't that impressed with either of them, despite reading rave review after rave review for each of them.  

Today, however, I find I have a little to say.  This round is between The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson and Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple.  I read The Orphan Master's Son last June and the Semple just a few weeks ago. 

vs.

I am almost certain that I will pick a different book from most people in this round.  Where'd You Go Bernadette has a cool factor to it, and I think that will decide it for most people.  Maria Semple is a well-known screenwriter for shows like Arrested Development.  One of the characters on Bunheads carried this book with her on an audition.  (Bunheads is the latest show from the Gilmore Girls creators, don't worry, you aren't missing anything.  It's terrible but I keep watching because I want it to be good.  But I digress.)

There were elements of the Semple that I loved.  The storytelling style in the first half, with fragmented e-mails, letters, reports, etc. - it was so fun to read!  But then it is as if the author doesn't trust her own storytelling, and starts interspersing these elements with narrative from various perspectives, or commentary from the daughter. I found this unnecessary and redundant and not in the same spirit as the rest of the novel. I think she didn't have quite enough faith in the readers to follow the story she was telling!  While I was energized by the first 100 pages or so, the ending left me feeling ambivalent.  The twists in the end were kind of bizarre too, which took away from the formerly successful realism of the book.

On the other hand, The Orphan Master's Son took a long time to warm to.  It was dense and confusing, as the author rarely tells you what is actually happening; he uses the very unreliable narrator of Jun Do to tell the story.  The reader has to work hard to read between the lines of the orphan turned kidnapper turned spy to know what is going on.  We know more than Jun Do does about the situation he lives in, and the author knows we know.  Jun Do may even know, but is forced to accept crazy lies on a daily basis to survive living in North Korea. 

Maybe it is my great love of dystopia and chaos, but so many of the stories we hear from North Korea are bizarre, and this book attempts to explain some of them (in a sometimes humorous way). In fact, humor is an important element throughout The Orphan Master's Son, but more in the sense that you have to laugh or you'll cry. Oppression is ridiculous insanity.


Just for clarity, I'd pick The Orphan Master's Son to win! I feel like reading it again, to untangle more of the layers in my head.  Too bad I sent it off to a friend to read.

New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012 by Charles Simic

New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012 by Charles Simic
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Why I read it: I'm always trying to familiar myself more with living poets, and was pretty unfamiliar with this guy.

I was vaguely aware of Simic as a poet, although I'm not sure I could rattle off any of his lines off the top of my head, so I was happy to take a look at this volume of new and selected poems from NetGalley. The book contains almost four hundred pages of poems selected from various past publications - Selected Early Poems, Unending Blues, The World Doesn't End, The Book of Gods and Devils, Hotel Insomnia, A Wedding in Hell, Walking the Black Cat, Jackstraws, Night Picnic: Poems, My Noiseless Entourage, That Little Something, Master of Disguises, The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems, as well as a selection of new poems. As the subtitle states, these span five decades as well, which is quite the poetic career. Simic was born in Serbia but the poems originate in English, although sometimes his sense of being an outsider comes through.

To get a sense of these poems, I'd like to start at the end. Something he said in one of the new poems struck me as being fairly descriptive of the themes of his poems and poetic outlook in general. This is the last stanza in "Things Need Me:"

Dead alarm clock, empty birdcage, piano I never play,
I'll be your waiter tonight
Ready to take your order,
And you'll be my distinguished dinner guests,
Each one with a story to tell.

Throughout his poems, he seems to imagine the possibilities of what objects had experienced, the potential for story in the people he encounters, and reflecting on events that touched his life in some way. One powerful poem had his birth set within the feelings and emotions of the beginning of World War II.

One thing I always wonder about anthologies or "selected works of X" is what is being left out? How is something chosen for inclusion? Ever since I fell in love with a Teasdale poem that was not included even in her "complete works," I've read poetry volumes with a critical eye. Whether or not it was intentional, I noticed a lot of flies, and a lot of libraries, in the poems that were included.

My favorites were Late Arrival, Filthy Landscape (about a meadow), Eternity's Orphans, In the Library, Evening Talk (reminded me of a friend), and My Secret Identity Is (a tiny tiny two line poem, three if you count the title.)

from "In the Library:"

The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

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The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Why I read it: I've read everything else by Beukes, and jumped at the chance to read this from NetGalley.  It comes out June 4, 2013.

This is almost purely a horror, serial killer novel, except for the time travel element. The story is not told in linear time order, but in the order of events as the killer is experiencing them, as he goes to different time periods from a house that he believes is sending him. The killings are brutal, and he leaves clues that are so spread apart in time they are unlikely to be connected. Then he doesn't finish off one girl, Kirby, who settles into being one of the main, repeated characters in the book.

After finishing I went back and flipped through some of the sections again, only to discover that there was even more layering of people and places than I realized, because I didn't have the connections made in my mind already.

This isn't what I expected from Lauren Beukes, whose previous two novels have bridged cyberpunk and urban fantasy, but that isn't a bad thing. At first I claimed it was nothing like her, but as two of the main characters work for a newspaper and her background is in journalism, you start to see a lot of the author within the work. I kind of missed the urban South African environment that she's written in before, but she captured the various periods of Chicago and its suburbs equally well, along with nuances of American historical culture.

She also is a smart writer. I'm not sure how many horror writers throw in words and phrases like zoetrope, pestilential, tragus, galoot, salacious, "facile placebos," inveigled, apoplectic, palanquin, and "homogeneity of aspiration." The book is well constructed even in what could have been a messy timeline, and doesn't drone on and on in unedited thousands of pages like Stephen King, an author who I'd easily put her up against. I'm not sure I'd want to read it again, because serial killers make me squeamish, but I'd recommend it to horror fans and time travel fans.

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Love in Dystopia

Stories Read:
"Mazirian the Magician" (1950) by Jack Vance
"Speech Sounds" (1983) by Octavia Butler
"The People of Sand and Slag" (2004) by Paolo Bacigalupi
"The Only Death in the City" (1981) by C.J. Cherryh

I stuck with my story list this week, and loved how it turned out. All four stories shared a theme and a broad setting. The theme? Love. The setting? A dystopian future Earth.

"Mazirian the Magician" is the first story in Jack Vance's The Dying Earth series. I believe the first volume (that goes by two titles, The Dying Earth or Mazirian the Magician) is the only volume in the series that's a collection. The rest are novels. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that. This is a science fantasy, which I define as a story set in a far future where much has been forgotten, and magic and science are indistinguishable. A jealous Mazirian hunts a "woman-creature" but can't catch her. The woman-creature is a product from the vats of Turjan, who Mazirian has shrunk and placed in a maze with a tiny dragon. Can a deal be made with Turjan to deliver the prey?

A taste of Jack Vance's style, which I enjoyed:

Mazirian unlocked the threebare except for a stone pedestal supporting a glass-topped box. The box measured a yard on a side and was four or five inches high. Within the box — actually a squared passageway, a run with four right angles — moved two small creatures, one seeking, the other evading. The predator was a small dragon with furious red eyes and a monstrous fanged mouth. It waddled along the passage on six splayed legs, twitching its tail as it went. The other stood only half the size of the dragon — a strong-featured man, stark naked, with a copper fillet binding his long black hair. He moved slightly faster than his pursuer, which still kept relentless chase, using a measure of craft, speeding, doubling back, lurking at the angle in case the man should unwarily step around. By holding himself continually alert, the man was able to stay beyond the reach of the fangs. The man was Turjan, whom Mazirian by trickery had captured several weeks before, reduced in size and thus imprisoned.

It's clear that Vance was an influence on Gene Wolfe.

Next is "Speech Sounds" by the great Octavia Butler. In an afterword to the story, Butler says that it "was conceived in weariness, depression, and sorrow. I began the story feeling little hope or liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back. It always seems to do that."

The setting reminded me a bit of her "Parable" novels. Post-apocalyptic, lawless, yet society keeps trying to move. The opening scene takes place on a bus: an argument between two men, both unable to speak, building up to physical confrontation while the other riders worry for their safety. This was a deserving Hugo winner for Best Short Story in 1984. (NOTE: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is the next book up for discussion over at A Good Story is Hard to Find. It will be posted on March 21.)

Third up is "The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi. I found this in Wastelands, edited by John Joseph Adams. It deals with some genetically modified guards whose job is to protect a mine from intruders. Finding a dog in the mine is a surprising event because (1) no one has seen a living dog for long long while, and (2) how it could survive in the toxic environment of the mine? The discovery turns the thoughts of the guards inward, at least for a while.

Last this week is the best of them all. "The Only Death in the City" by C.J. Cherryh. What a story this was. I added the collection Sunfall to the story list after finding it on this list of Best SF Collections. I saw it there, I haven't read anything by Cherryh, ever, so I added the stories to the list. I'm glad I did! If this one is any indication of Cherryh's talent, I'll be reading plenty of her in the future.

Sunfall is a collection of related stories set in a far future where Earth is a wasteland but some cities still exist and have for thousands of years. This first story is set in Paris, which is walled and consists of levels. They keep building down, down as needed to make room for the living. A beautiful passage:

No one remembered the outside. No one cared. The City was sealed, and had been so for thousands of years.

There were windows, but they were on the uppermost levels, and they were tightly shuttered. The inhabitants feared the sun, for popular rumor held that the sun was a source of vile radiations, unhealthful, a source of plagues. There were windows, but no doors, for no one would choose to leave.

The inhabitants of the city experience reincarnation. Shortly after you die, you are born again in another part of the city. Children announce who they are when they are a year old, and they remember all their past lives, so they are essentially immortal. Into this world is born Alain, who has not been born before. His mother tells him that no matter how long he lives, he'll always be a youth compared to a woman he's fallen in love with. But that doesn't stop him. He plunges ahead, despite the warnings.

Truly a great story, beautifully written, my favorite so far this year. I look forward to the rest of the collection. There are 5 other stories in there:

The Haunted Tower (London)
Ice (Moscow)
Nightgame (Rome)
Highliner (New York)
The General (Peking)

This puts me at 32 stories for the year, but Jenny is at 36!

Next up on the list: "Good News from the Vatican" by Robert Silverberg. Ha! Great timing.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Country: Italy
Why I read it: One of the books listed for Tournament of Books

Publisher summary:

The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 . . . and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.  

I enjoyed this story, alternating between Porto Vergogna (a tiny town in the rocks outside Cinque Terre) in 1962 and more current Hollywood. It traces the lives of several characters in their pursuit of authentic lives. I didn't really connect with most of them, since most except Pasquale had a hard time figuring out what they should be about. Still, it had good pacing and I can understand why so many people ranked it a top book of 2012.  It does make you wonder though, has there ever been a book about someone authentic living in Hollywood?  Does that person exist?  That's the book I'd like to read.

I did like the character of Pat Bender, who for most of his life succeeded because he believed he could, until he stopped.  Heh.

"Life is a blatant act of imagination."

Book Beginnings: Beautiful Ruins

Book: Beautiful Ruins
Author: Jess Walter
Why I am reading it: This is listed on the 2013 Tournament of Books, and I've been trying to read one of them each week. 

Beginning:

"The dying actress arrived in his village the only way one could come directly - in a boat that motored into the cove, lurched past the rock jetty, and bumped against the end of the pier.... All around her, shards of sunlight broke on the flickering waves."

Impressions so far: I know very little about this book and that is all I've read at this point.  I know it made quite a few best of 2012 lists, and several of my Around the World readers read it for Italy.  It looks to be a period piece set on an Italian island, so I imagine I'll enjoy it quite a bit!

The brackets have been released for the Tournament of Books, and I'm only three books away from having read them all.  I'm going to make my own predictions soon, hopefully before the guest judges make their decisions.  What fun is doing the reading if I don't play along? 

If you want to hear more about what I'm reading, friend me on GoodReads. Thanks for stopping by!