Reading Roundup, December 2009

Despite having a whole bunch of stuff to do this month, I naturally managed to squeeze in a  few books here and there — otherwise I’d be an utter failure as a human being and bibliophile, yes? A few of the books I won’t mention — they’re top secret — as they will end up as reviews on this site in 2010. Next year, in fact, I plan on returning to a regular review schedule, tentatively set as bi-weekly (or fortnightly for those of you fresh from the seventeenth century).

So, what was on the plate for December?

Firstly, I dove into a big book club omnibus of Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series, which in new to me. While Vance is best known for his Dying Earth books, he also wrote a lot of space opera and planetary romance. The Demon Princes are five books that are more or less space opera investigative thrillers, and concern one man’s quest for revenge against five powerful crime lords. Vance’s characteristic wit and imagination are on display and, as always, there are a few truly startling and novel details scattered about the books. While I’ve only read the first two, The Star King and The Killing Machine, I haven’t found them as breezily enjoyable as other Vance, such as the Planet of Adventure series or individual books like The Dragon Masters. Still, Vance is Vance, and everything of his I’ve read is worth reading.

I also read a few graphic novels in December. Continuing with the truly excellent Dark Horse Conan series from Busiek and Nord with their read their adaptation of “The God in the Bowl.” Really interesting thing about these stories is the new material they manage to weave around the canonical Howard, and thus in the graphic novel the events of “The God in the Bowl” are part of a larger conflict involving Thoth-Amun. Consistently good stuff — I’ve had to really check my impulse to burn through all of these instead of savoring them over time. I also read Stan Sakai’s Space Usagi, which is a scifi version of his classic Usagi Yojimbo stories. This was a loaner from a friend, and I hadn’t looked at a Sakai comic since I was a preteen. His style still appeals, his anthropomorphic characters date from a  time before that word had such weird and fetishistic connotations and strike a balance between being cute and taking themselves seriously. The story itself is one of clan warfare and betrayal — the sort of thing you’d expect at the heart of a samurai tale, only with an added element of scifi aliens, weapons, and planets. A brisk, enjoyable read, and one that made me think a bit more about the stuff I’d almost all but forgotten I enjoyed as a kid.

Another brisk read was Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, a hardboiled detective novel from the heyday of the form. It’s the novel that introduced Nick and Nora Charles to the world (along with their dog Asta) and would later serve as the foundation for a very popular series of films — even though Hammett himself never put them in another novel. It’s taut, unsentimental, liberally splashed with alcohol and low banter, and for some reason I found myself not really liking it all that much. The central mystery that Nick, an ex-detective, and his socialite wife Nora get drawn into is resolved in a fairly interesting way, but still the book felt a bit stale. The film version is in my Netflix queue, maybe I’ll like it better.

I also finished the first ‘Best Of’ anthology from Clarkesworld Magazine, entitled Realms, which I’d been dipping into here and there for a few months. Now, I remember when Clarkesworld was a online book and magazine store, and it was a great place to buy small press stuff and lesser known genre mags — a resource that has sadly not been replaced. And I also remember when the magazine was announced, a free ezine with a huge payrate, right around the time when the bookstore was closing. I honestly figured it wouldn’t amount to anything. Now, some two years later, I’m glad to see I was wrong, as Clarkesworld has proven to deliver some truly great content in the form of stories, articles, and fabulous artwork. Realms is a great collection for anyone curious to see what Clarkesworld is all about — especially if you are like me and tend to prefer paper to glass for your fiction reading.

And, finally, there is the odd little gem Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. A slim novella published in 1884, it’s part Victorian social satire, and part primer for thinking about dimensionality in mathematics. Narrated by an inhabitant of Flatland — a world of two-dimensions — the book looks at both the society of the Flatlanders, and that of the inhabitants of other worlds, such as Lineland. The book really sings when our narrator, ‘A. Square’ is suddenly lifted into Spaceland, a world of three-dimensions, and is taught what this previously unperceived third dimension is all about. A very  interesting, fun, and thought-provoking little book that throws into sharp relief the limits of our own perception, and something I’s recommend to anyone regardless of their geometrical proclivities (or lack thereof).