Tag: books

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The Children of the Company by Kage Baker

I’m a great fan of Kage Baker’s Company novels, but I found The Children of the Company annoying.

It’s not really a novel, first off; it’s really an amalgamation of short stories. So forget about narrative flow. It’s just patched together by the character Labienus.

And Labienus is a most unpleasant character, for second; he’s a disaffected mortal who is the epitome of a misanthrope. And he’s not Mendoza. Readers want to know! Where’s Mendoza? For that matter, where are most of the previously introduced major characters? Back stories for some of them are fleshed out here, and one character does seem to be disposed of. But in general the grand story arc isn’t advanced.

I felt like I needed a character chart like you use when you read a Russian novel or an annotated timeline. Many of the short stories here intersect, in minor or major ways, with episodes in the other novels or other short stories. But really, do I want to read a book of short stories that just drop tidbits about the larger story?

I know an author’s purpose in writing is bound to be different from my purpose in reading. But this made me want to say: Kage Baker, stop stringing us along. Get on with it and finish the story you’ve started.

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Shadowfall by James Clemens

James Clemens’s Shadowfall is subtitled: Book One of the Godslayer Chronicles. Cheesy, isn’t it? But I liked it. It isn’t horror, it’s fantasy, although it is assuredly dark (rape, mutilation). And there are gods, and there is slaying.

There is an intriguing system of magic, and characters who aren’t easy to pigeonhole as “good” and “bad.”

While there’s a large story arc that isn’t completed (book one, you know?), there’s a satisfying end to the particular plot of this part of the story. So I’m looking forward to the next one, but not with that sense of dissatisfaction that some multi-volume stories give.

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CUSP by Robert A. Metzger

Apparently a Nebula Award-winning author, I’d not heard of Robert Metzger before. The back cover of CUSP certainly has an astounding list of blurbists: David Brin, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and Robert J. Sawyer, each touting it as hard scifi. CUSP starts out as a near-future hard scifi story, but it quickly enters what I’d call fairy-tale land. And to top it off, it has a non-ending ending. If it hadn’t been the only book with me on a short trip, I’m not sure I would have finished it.

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Seeker by Jack McDevitt

SF author Jack McDevitt is new to me, but I enjoyed his recent book Seeker. It’s a pretty straightforward far-future hard SF tale, with some pretty transparent commentary on contemporary U.S. politics. It features characters who appeared in two previous novels, which I think I’ll track down. All in all, not a bad page-turner.

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Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen

Julie Powell’s blog fame has been transmuted into a book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, and 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. It captures not only the joys and sorrows of cooking (and blogging) her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but also life as a secretary in New York on the cusp of 30. It’s very funny and very vulgar. It is not her blog, but grows out of the experience of blogging. If you read her blog, you’ll recognize chunks of the book.

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The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker

Kage Baker’s Company series is one of my favorites. (Time travel, cyborgs, mysterious mysteries with hints and revelations doled out book-by-book. Not for everyone, but then that’s why they make chocolate and vanilla.)

My friend Barbara also likes the Company novels, and didn’t like The Anvil of the World, a fantasy number. On that poor recommendation, I put off reading it for a long time, even though I owned it. I recently did read it (I forget now when–probably after we returned from Canada.) I liked it ok, but it’s definitely on the juvenile side. (It’s not for juveniles, because it’s quite salacious in parts, but the humor is pretty juvenile.)

Baker has a knack for the bizarre, and she gives it free rein here. I’d say try her Company novels first (in order!), and if you like her check this one out of the library. (Same for her short story collections, some of which are hard to find.)

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The Knitting Way

I was so excited about The Knitting Way: A Guide to Spiritual Self-Discovery by Linda Skolnik and Janice MacDaniels. It was delayed from the original publication date; I even called the publisher to find out when it was shipping. I ran right out and bought it.

Never have I been so disappointed. I bought it months ago, but set it aside in disgust before I finished it. Having just read Two Sweaters for My Father, I thought I should just bite the bullet and skim to the end.

Maybe there are just too many barriers between the authors (and their experience) and I. From the introduction: “I [Skolnik] had married when I was a junior in college, working toward a BA (read: Mrs.) degree in psychology at Brooklyn College.” An Mrs. degree? Come on.

From the first chapter, “Knitting into Awareness: Escape versus Care for the Soul,” one sees that apparently “spiritual” means bad poetry:

Knitting defies a
Mass-produced culture that shuns
subsistence, handmade clothes,
clothes which will be kept forever.
This sort of activity does not
improve the GNP.

There are five more stanzas. You get the picture.

Then the chapter launches into free-association writing:

Hear the wind, the sea, and the rolling hills. Listen to the sky. Let your hands dance with the wool. Your fingers see the sheep on the gren hills. The smell of the earth that produced the grass that fed the sheep who gave their fleece lies int he wool. The sound is in the wool. Hear the waves, the sea air, the salt spray that nurtured the wild sheep in the Shetlands and Hebrides. The harmony is found there. It calls us to remember and reach for the comfort of the work of our hands.

And there’s not always much original thought. On pages 10–11:

graph 1: original writing
graph 2: quote from Brenda Ueland in Strength to Your Sword Arm
graph 3: quote from Sherry Anderson and Patricia Hopkins in The Feminine Face of God
graph 4: quote from Rene Dubos’s “masterpiece” A God Within
graph 5: “The opposite of the holy is the superficial,” according to Marc Gafni in Soul Prints. . .“
graph 6: quote from Maurice Nicoll in Living Time and the Integration of the Life
graph 7: quote from Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul
graph 8 (incomplete): continuation of Moore.

It just never got any better as far as I’m concerned. Maybe it’s just what someone else has been thirsting for.

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Two Sweaters for My Father by Perri Klass

Two Sweaters for My Father: Writing about Knitting satisfies on several levels, and is amusing on another (unintended, I’m sure). This is a wonderful collection of essays, mostly published in Knitter’s Magazine. Perri Klass writes about an experience I share: Knitting can calm the mind and help it to be fully present in the moment–including being present to a speaker or other activity. This satisfied me as a knitter and as a religious person.

The unintended amusement is mine as a magazine editor. This book is so obviously the product of magazine publishers. There is the inevitable repetition of essays on a common subject collected from a variety of original settings, which is to be expected in any such collection. But it’s the design that strikes me as odd. There’s a title page, but no half title page, no publication page (it’s in the back, and more on that later). The table of contents has tiny little type, and then each essay opens on a page with the same even, grey “color” as every other page.

The crowning touch is that publication page in the back, where you finally find the copyright and ISBN, acknowledgements and credits, and, of all things, a masthead!

But I quibble. This is actually one of the more rewarding books on the subjective experience of knitting I’ve read.