ironSoap – Complete

author: George R.R. Martin
name: Paul
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2011/08/26
date added: 2011/08/26
shelves: fantasy, novel
review:
George R. R. Martin gets some heat for his writing prowess, or perhaps, lack thereof. I think this is overstated not because Martin is terribly dynamic with his wordcraft (which he isn’t) or because his narrative voice is particularly noteworthy (which it isn’t), but because where Martin may occasionally struggle to embroider a tale, he excels at crafting one. His skill lies not with the embellishment or wordsmithing but with forging a macro-level tale that explores all the various motivations and mechanisms that lie behind the butterfly effects of both emotional response and the best-laid plans.

By this point (book two) in A Song Of Ice And Fire, most readers will probably have their favorite characters picked out. Fans of swordplay and valiant high fantasy-laced action will probably gravitate toward Jon Snow’s exploits along the Wall. Travelogues will likely appreciate Daenerys Targaryen’s wandering toward an unknown destiny. Those with a soft spot for the underdogs will lean perhaps toward poor broken Bran Stark or puppet of fate Theon Greyjoy. Personally though, I find the scrappy Arya Stark and the wily dwarf Tyrion Lannister to be the most enchanting characters in A Clash of Kings.

My affection for the two characters comes in part from the best of Martin’s writing: His ability to foreshadow remarkable feats based on no other information than the fact that he chooses to dedicate pages to a specific character and his knack for weaving tension and outright excitement from political maneuverings. There is something remarkable about Arya because in spite of her not having much to do throughout book one (A Game of Thrones), and even with several check-ins early in A Clash of Kings, the sense that she is destined for something marvelous is tactile in her chapters. Meanwhile, though Martin includes plenty of military scenes and fights throughout, none are as frantic as the sizzling sequences where a politician-gamer like Tyrion plays at a different kind of swords, the swords of power. These fight scenes—including a particularly memorable one fairly early in the book where the Imp slowly reveals a treacherous decision to a placid captain of the royal guard—waged with tongues instead of blades are as thrilling and deadly as any of Martin’s battle accounts.

Martin still relies far too heavily on certain pet phrases, introducing here “half a hundred” to the others he revisits from A Game of Thrones and too many interesting events in this volume happen off-page, only referenced by other characters as they hear of them (Robb, for instance, has scarcely any time devoted to him despite his war efforts having ripple effects on the POV characters). The bigger issue in A Clash of Kings is that the story begins to careen out of control in terms of scope and characters. Where A Game Of Thrones was sprawling and complex, for the most part it was navigable. Kings, on the other hand, drives forward into a morass of new and minor characters, introducing two additional principal POVs in Theon Greyjoy and Davos Seaworth, both distinct from the scattered points of action previously established. Where the first volume was admirably able to present spatial and human relationships in such a way that maps and character appendices weren’t strictly necessary, Kings begins to read like epic Russian literature in which certain locations or individuals suddenly pop up as vital to the plot where previously they may have been assumed to be of little importance.

Martin challenges readers to keep up with him which I both admire and kind of resent. In a big way I don’t know that the story would be as successful as it is if it were easier to keep up with, if it were smaller as it were. The fact that it is big and ugly and convoluted and no one (least of all the reader) can be entirely sure of what is really going on everywhere at once make the saga dance with a life that rings authentic. Real war and politics and strife is messy and hard to fathom, so why shouldn’t this be as well? Still, it would be nice not to feel like I needed a detailed Wiki to make sense of the dozens of minor lords, hedge knights, lesser houses and geographic relationships just to understand the significance of certain military maneuvers.

I mentioned in my Game of Thrones review that it had restored my faith in the fantasy epic and while A Clash of Kings is a worthy successor, I started to see glimpses of issues I had with other series creep in: Prophecy and meaningful dreaming plays a much more significant role here than in book one, plus magic (deliciously rare in Thrones) plays a bigger part and is hinted at being elevated still. Additionally there are a number of much slower segments in this novel compared to the first. It never truly bogs down to the point where the book becomes tedious, but it does take a bit too long for each of the three major plot threads (Dany, Jon and the war around King’s Landing) to set themselves up for their climactic scenes.

However, when A Clash of Kings is done carefully aligning the dominoes the toppling climax is dynamic and utterly gripping. The final quarter of the book is as intense and readable as any potboiler, in some cases made more so by the grand scale of the thing so meticulously orchestrated to that point. Additionally, I can’t help but praise and admire Martin for his willingness to resist the temptation of many authors (especially fantasy authors) to create overly-convenient macguffins or descend into deus ex machina. It makes the conflict more visceral and the danger more vivid when there isn’t a hope of some magical protector sweeping in at the last minute. In a welcome nod to realism, characters in A Song of Ice and Fire live and die by their resourcefulness and fortune alone.

I do wish this installment was of the same overall quality and relative brisk pacing as its predecessor, but I do grant middle entries in trilogies (though I know this series has expanded beyond the original three volume set) some leeway since they mostly serve to facilitate a drive toward a grand finale. Still, Martin is crafting a powerful tale and the strongest praise I can grant this book is that it has me earnestly looking forward to volume three.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — August 26, 2011 at 09:30AM

author: Suzanne Collins
name: Paul
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/08/09
date added: 2011/08/10
shelves: novel, science-fiction, young-adult
review:
For the first few hours after I finished Mockingjay, the final chapter in the Hunger Games trilogy, I thought I just hated the ending. But as I reflect more on it, I think the entire book was disappointing, even leading up to the final 50 or so pages.

I won’t spoil the end, but here’s the problem I have with it: Up through the finale of Catching Fire (as stunted as it was), even though we see all the events through Katniss’s eyes, her own negative self-image is not what is reflected back from the supporting cast. Throughout the first two installments even when she loathes herself and struggles with her own actions, we see what others see in her, the good they find, the inspiration she ignites. There is a great scene in Catching Fire where Peeta teases Katniss because she can’t see the purity in herself that others do (and occasionally find resentful). In that moment we understand what Peeta is talking about, even when she can’t. Katniss is a survivor and she does what she has to to protect her family, her loved ones, even herself. But she’s motivated by more than just cold self-preservation, she also wants to do the right thing and her actions—even murderous ones—are never beyond the reader’s ability to sympathize.

Where Mockingjay breaks down is that it transforms Katniss from desperate survivor, justifiable murderess, into a stone sociopath. The key is that at some early point in the third book, I stopped rooting for her. She spends an excessive amount of time in the book convalescing which destroys the frantic pacing that made The Hunger Games and Catching Fire so ridiculously readable, and while Suzanne Collins makes an effort to repeat a situation similar to the arena for a third time, it fails. I was able to forgive the Quarter Quell for being a contrivance because it had internal consistency and a suitable lead-in but with Mockingjay the motivations are all wrong and the stakes are too far removed, creating a forced atmosphere. The rest of the story involves the war against the Capitol, but it’s not a war novel—it maybe should have been.

Broadly speaking you can see that sense of Collins reaching desperately to write herself out of a corner throughout the novel. Characters change drastically because they need to in order to maintain a rough similarity to the structures established in books one and two (the love triangle, the conflicted protagonist, the life-or-death stakes) but that need exists only in the author’s head. And even with all that effort, it’s still wildly divergent from the previous entries. The result is a book that tries to split the difference between maintaining what the reader has come to expect from the series and needing to be broader in scope to best serve the story. The tepid middle ground results in a muddled, unfocused plot leading to the unsatisfying conclusion.

It’s bad enough that the ending results in a main character that is nearly impossible to care about, what’s worse is the fact that it feels like an alternate ending from the special features on a DVD: The “dark” take that is interesting in a curious sense but didn’t play well with test audiences. You’re intrigued by what it could say about the characters, but it doesn’t fit well with what we’ve learned about them so far, leaving you relieved that they stuck with the better, lighter conclusion. Except here, this is the only ending we’ve got. And there are so many things wrong with it (again, no specific spoilers, just generalizations): Katniss’s breaking point could have been handled in a dozen different ways but Collins goes for the jugular and as a result undoes everything that matters not just to Katniss, but the reader as well. She never explains Katniss’ actions sufficiently, never contextualizes them so we can get a sense of whether she was justified or maybe will be in the future, never even attempts to make sense of it. And perhaps worst of all, the resolution of the love triangle that has been such a pivotal part of the story until the final pages and epilogue is whipped by in a blur as if it were an afterthought, a non-issue. It’s so incredibly flippant that it made me irritated that I had even cared which suitor she would choose to begin with.

Obviously I have affection for the books, the characters and the series as a whole. If not, I wouldn’t care the way I do about how it ended. But it reminded me of two other trilogies: One is The Matrix movies, where my low opinion of how the story drew to a close affected my overall perception of the earlier movies that I liked so much. The other is Scott Westerfeld‘s Uglies trilogy (since expanded), which did the opposite by letting the books change the world without trying to return to the hook from book one, allowing the story to happen naturally. I don’t have a problem with Collins choosing to go a darker route with her finale than Westerfeld did (though his isn’t exactly a comedy either), but there’s dark and then there’s dismal. Even worse, it feels rushed and incomplete while being dismal.

What I feel is the most frustrating part is that I don’t even feel that a similar outline of this book, expanded differently, would have been as disappointing: Even if the same key events took place with minor revisions it could have been done in a satisfying way. Instead this feels too much like an early draft, one an editor needed to draw big red lines through and say, “Less moping, less grim-for-grim’s-sake, more intrigue, more vitality.” I still recommend the series, and I’m probably more generous with this entry than I should be on the strength of the first two, but I can’t help but warn others that this isn’t the conclusion I wanted from a series that I loved for 700 pages and then resented for about the last 200.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — August 10, 2011 at 09:54AM

author: Masamune Shirow
name: Paul
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2011/07/28
shelves: science-fiction, graphic-novel
review:

from Paul's bookshelf: read — July 28, 2011 at 02:05PM

author: Maurice Sendak
name: Paul
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2011/07/28
shelves:
review:
Despite the clear popularity of this book for children, I’m not actually able to put my finger on what makes it seem to great to some people. The art by Maurice Sendak is quite wonderful in a muted, detail-oriented kind of way, but I can’t escape the notion that the lesson found in the story is “Act like a brat and you can have great adventures.”

from Paul's bookshelf: read — July 28, 2011 at 02:04PM

Anna Calvi “Suzanne & I” (by AnnaCalvi)

Found her from this NPR mini-concert, which is equally awesome: Anna Calvi Tiny Desk Concert.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 26, 2012 at 01:13PM

8bitmaximo:

Every time I see that dude telling women about being sluts or that other dude telling girls about their makeup on my tumblr, I feel like doing this. So I did it.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 26, 2012 at 01:05PM

“I’m Sorry That Christians Judge You”:

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 26, 2012 at 12:54PM

@ironsoap — January 26, 2012 at 11:47AM

Pixies- Debaser (Official Video) (by cnmaccess2)

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 26, 2012 at 10:55AM

Pixies at The Rat, 1986 / Redesign:

(vis swissted)

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 26, 2012 at 10:49AM