Happy New Year's Eve 2012

Just in the nick of time, all the book reviews from this year are up! I know this will let all my dedicated readers breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, there's some kind of a bug saving the "Link List" on the side of the page. I've spent 15 minutes or so troubleshooting, but since others are reporting similar problems right now, I think I'll just wait for Blogger to update their software.

2012 has been an incredible, dynamic year for The Professor and I. We moved (more than once, truth be told.) Moved out of the tower in The Heights, spent a few months living on the beach,  then went on an incredible road trip across the Great American West. After a month of wandering we landed on a hillside in beautiful British Columbia. I now work with some old friends in the valley down below, creating something fresh. We lost two good friends this year, both Mouse and Perci, but we made a new friend, Sir Sam.

I managed to ship a pretty good game along the way, mostly due to the awesome efforts of the creative geniuses at 343 and the hard working kids at CA. I also worked on several books this year: I made good progress on a rather heavy novel entitled The End of the World as We Know It, pushed further into the adventures of Blackhawk, and collaborated with some really bright folks on the games industry analytics front to create  Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data, to be published by Springer in early 2013.

What does the new year have in store? More books, to be sure! I've got a great stack here beside my desk, and am hip-deep in the middle of four right now, ranging from Camile Paglia to Paladin Press. As mentioned, I've got a few projects in the works as well -- two or three novels and works of fiction. (100 Murders still shows promise, and I promised someone important that I would finish Book 2 of Hunted at some point.) There's been some discussion of creating a revised edition of Social Game Design -- it's a market sector that has evolved rapidly in the last fourteen months -- to focus a bit more on the mobile side of things. And then there's this new game I'm pretty engaged in...

Beyond the creative projects, The Professor and I hope to spend 2013 in Vancouver, and do a little more travelling. I've got one eye on Paris, Busan, and am still itching to get down to Rio at some point...

For now though, off to punish a heavy bag, read a bit, and get ready for tonight's festivities in Gastown.

Here's hoping your 2013 is off to a great start, and filled with commercial, creative, and personal success!

-tf

The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale

The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale

Landsdale has been a bit of a legend in East Texas for more than a decade as the local boy who done good. I’ve always intended to pick up and read one of his novels and thanks to the Senator and KMK’s kind Christmas gift, I was able to read through The Bottoms over two beautiful, relaxing, sunny days in The Heights just before Christmas of 2012.

In The Bottoms, Landsdale has written a murder mystery with a little horror and a lot of southern gothic homage. A black woman is found murdered. The local constable, our hero’s father, begins an investigation. Since this is East Texas in the early 19^th century, no one in the white community is particularly bothered by the slaying.

A few more bodies appear, and the small, segregated East Texas towns begin to respond with fear, lynchings, etc. Ultimately, the identity of the killer is predictable, as is the not-very-surprising third act twist, but the novel is still a satisfying little bit of Thomas Harris meets Harper Lee. The writing is decent overall, though the use of truly corn-pone dialect throughout is a bit much on occasion. 

The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas

The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas

The White Hotel is a strange, unsettling, deeply disturbing book which ends up being a journey which is far more varied and rewarding than its short length presage. The book is structured as a five part sequence, beginning with some incoherent and hallucinatory erotic poetry, a similarly incoherent prose version of the same events, a collection of letters, and some straightforward narrative. The story tells the tale of Lisa, an opera singer, and a patient of Sigmund Freud, and follows her throughout her life, set against (and influenced by) the forty year sweep of history in eastern Europe. The conclusion to the novel is potent stuff, that left me staring out the window of my plane, thinking fresh thoughts about a deeply mined subject…

This is a book I’m very glad I read, though it is deeply troubling, and some of the imagery likely won’t leave me anytime soon. 

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman excels in the short story form. When his ideas get to run amok, but only for a few pages, he comes up with a number of gems. Some work better than others, but the whole treat is still delicious. This book motivated the Halloween 1000 word story challenge that the Doctor and I undertook in October, which resulted in two stories you've probably never read entitled The Altar of Crows and The Dust Man’s Birthday Party.  Turns out, writing truly short fiction is a fantastic way of honing craft skills. 

The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman

The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman is bright, fun, and funny. His new novel, The Visible Man, is both silly and insightful at times. At worst, the main character is an interesting, creepy prick, who CK uses to make some clever observations about modern middle America. He’s also so playful and borderline DFW in his linguistic byplay, that I can’t help but really enjoying most of what goes on here.

That said, the best parts of this book are the excerpts from his upcoming book of essays. The bit about Batman and Bernard Goetz made me excited for more Klosterman wit and observation.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Big family style murder by a teenage boy… The protagonist’s older brother. So she goes back to her hometown as the once-famous only survivor of the killings. She returns because she’s broke, but after decades of prostituting her famous-murder celebrity status for pocket money, she ends up getting involved in trying to unravel the case.

Midwestern darkness abounds. The language is good, and the look back at mid-eighties Satanism scare is… shallow. Then the implausible plotting kicks in. How many killers were in the house that night? The whole thing begins to feel a bit like parts of Scream that got left on the editing room floor. But it’s dirty and sordid and “edgy” as KMK once suggested.

I’ll still probably read more of her stuff. I’m like that. 

77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz

77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz

Bit of a stinker, this one. Old famous house turned apartment building has evil goin’ on. And… not very likeable sketch characters get eaten by the evil. And… Moving on.  

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Angel’s Game is Zafon’s second novel in the not-to-be-read-linearly Barcelona sequence. It’s a lovely mess of a novel, which only really holds together as an explanatory footnote to some of the events of its two more impressive siblings. The language here is usally good, though the diatribes on the motivation behind religion often comes across as a bit sophomoric. The events which occur range from cool to downright silly (the brawling action sequences which dominate one of the latter stages of the novel feel terribly out of place.) The strong presence of the supernatural in the novel all place The Angel’s Game a bit out of step with the other novels in the series, in which the existence of anything truly supernatural is left unclear. Not so here.

Ultimately, I quite like Zafon, and the trilogy of Barcelona novels centered around the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a treat. But The Angel’s Game suffers from an abundance of plotting and pacing issues, and is without a doubt the least successful of the three. 

L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais

L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais

At the base of Capital Hill in Burnaby, just east of the East Hastings junkietown sprawl of Northern East Vancouver lies a hidden gem of a bookstore, specializing in crime and science-fiction. According to the current owner it was once a haven for occult manuscripts as well, and the old owner was considered to be a wizard of some renown (!!). After the former owner moved on or passed away (I was never clear which), the new owner quickly tired of the sinister characters who would appear at odd hours with peculiar arcane requests. He sold off the occult collection en masse and refocused the shop on mysteries and sci-fi. I don’t know if I believe this little tale or not, but the store’s labyrinth little corridors and delightful stacks certainly carry with them the dust and odor of arcana and the occult.

LT, the Professor, and I visited this shop for the first time in sunny September. After he told me the above story, I asked the owner to turn me on to the best mystery novel I’d never heard of. Without hesitation, he presented me with LA Requiem.

LA Requiem tells us a tale of serial murder and police corruption in early nineteen-nineties Los Angeles. We’ve got police corruption, hardboiled noir, a bit of sleazy sex, and some hard choices. Good stuff, if you like the modern potboiler detective thriller.  

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Zafon’s third novel, The Prisoner of Heaven, is a far simpler tale than his first two, likely in response to criticism of his second book, The Angel’s Game. The Prisoner of Heaven tells us the story of Fermin’s incarceration and a manuscript written by a mysterious prisoner, David Martin.

I’d not recommend this one unless you are already trapped in the delightful labyrinth of Zafon’s Barcelona, and the multi-generational epic of the Cemetery of Forgotten books, and the various boys and men who grow up wrapped in it’s mysteries. If, on the other hand, you’d love one last visit to Siempre and Son’s bookstore, and a bit more gothic mystery and romance, The Prisoner of Heaven is a treat. 

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl is Flynn’s newest novel, still only out in hardback as of this writing. I devoured the entire book in one setting while driving across the “ Loneliest Road in America” somewhere in Northern Nevada.

Yet again, Flynn writes a tale that explores a mysterious crime, and in so doing, looks at some of the seedier sides of modern culture. Yet again, an adult returns to the scene of their childhood and gets caught up in strange and criminal doings. In this case though, Flynn explores the notion of marriage as a trap, and provides us with a not-particularly-believable mid-game surprise, which leads to yet another implausible novel.

Her language is good, and her eye for the dark and unpleasant make her interesting, but her plotting so defies suspension of disbelief, that as mysteries, these books don’t work for me. Gone Girl is the least impressive of her three so far. 

Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James

Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James

Picked up the sequel to Fifty Shades in a charming little bookshop on Main Street in Durango Colorado, and read most of it in a bar on a rainy afternoon. Fifty Shades Darker loses most of what makes the first book interesting. After deciding that Grey’s obsessively controlling behavior and fetish for hurting women isn’t so bad after all, our heroine decides she needs to get her some mo’ of that.

Dumb plotting and tepid sex scenes ensue. I didn’t read the third one. 

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

On a long and glorious road trip with The Professor, I decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about. I understand that these pieces started as actual Twilight fan fic. I suppose the Bella / Edward relationship is here, to a point. But there’s no vampirism or supernatural action of any kind. Instead, what we get is an interesting rendering of a wealthy, skilled manipulator of vulnerable young women.

At its best moments, Fifty Shades of Grey is a portrait of a predator that has enough truth to it that, as a reader, I must assume that E.L. James knows whereof she writes. (I'm regularly reminded of Gavin deBecker's warnings when reading about how Grey treats our heroine.) The “contract” was interesting; I’ve never read one before, though I’ve heard about couples who employ them. And I actually quite liked the ending.

At its worst, the book is everything else you’ve heard about it: poorly written, smutty, frustrating, and dirty without being particularly titillating. Needless to say, if words like “butt-plug,” “sadomasochism,” “cum,” or “erection” make you feel uncomfortable, this probably isn’t a book for you. 

The Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

The Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence

Mark Lawrence writes a snotty adolescent boy’s fantasy novel, with enough adult meanness to do George RR Martin proud. The Prince is smart, nasty, and works surprisingly well as an antihero you can easily hate but still want to keep reading about. 

Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

I enjoyed The Windup Girl sufficiently that when LT kindly loaned me a copy of Mr. Bacigalupi’s newest, I eagerly gobbled it up over a quiet weekend on the Third Coast.

Ship Breaker is set in a not-so-distant future Earth in which the petrol has run out, the seas have risen, and the delta between the rich and poor has continued to increase to near third-world levels everywhere. In the ruined beaches near the wreckage of Orleans, Nailer and his friends work as ship breakers, stripping valuable copper and metals from the carcasses of derelict ancient tankers. Their existence is a hard, cruel one, where the strong take what they can from the weak and only the lucky or clever survive for long. Many cyberpunk staples appear, from rampant amphetamine abuse to organ harvesting syndicates, though the networks and AI that likely exist somewhere out there are far beyond the reach of Nailer and his illiterate village of scavengers.

When a massive “City Killer” storm deposits a strange bit of scavenge int.Nailer’s world, he is propelled into an adventure. The novel has a bit of young adult bildungsroman learning and growing, and likely has only about a PG-13 rating, but is still sufficiently violent to feel gritty.

Good world creation, good sci-fi. I’m looking forward to his next novel, The Drowned Cities.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Sharp Objects is the first of Mrs. Flynn’s novels I read. It’s also probably her best, in my opinion. Sharp Objects tells the tale of a Chicago reporter to returns to her Midwestern small-town girlhood home to write a story on the death of two young girls. Returning home, she quickly gets caught up in the small-town madness infecting the town.

Flynn uses language effectively, often choosing just the right word to convey her sordid meaning and misanthropic portrait of… everyone. (She is particularly hard on women; the attention-seeking collection of weak-willed evil creatures, and a few of the scenes which fill this novel make the writer come across as a bit of a misogynist. Were she male, I would have lumped her in with the likes of Al Goldstein.) The world she presents is unsettling, dimly reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk in its grimy post-industrial, post-modern dysfunction.

The mystery itself is compelling, but unfortunately, the plot quite runs away from the novel and ends up being nearly ridiculous at points. It turns out, from my perspective, this is pretty much a common thread throughout all three of her novels; the actually events that occur end up being so ridiculously unbelievable and out of character that the novel falls apart.

Still, I found Sharp Objects an interesting enough first novel that I was eager to read her followup, Dark Places. 

Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Lindqvist writes atmospheric, moody, and mildly cerebral horror set in Sweden. After his excellent work, Let the Right One In, I was eager to read more. I read Harbor in early summer, mostly while sitting beside the ocean in a place where the population has exactly the kind of abusive loving relationship with the sea that the residents of “The Harbor” enjoy.

The remote village of wherever in Sweden sits on an isolated island, far from the bustle of Stockholm. The residents are mostly fisherman, Coast Guard, lighthouse keepers, or smugglers, all of whom make their living from the sea in one way or another. And it seems that the sea is extracting a toll for its bounty…

The characters are less sordid than those in Let the Right One In, but no less tragic, brokedown shells. The writing is breezy, even in translation, though I cannot recall anything particularly inspired in Lindqvist’s language.

I like the Swedish darkness and the superb way in which Lindqvist uses setting to establish a consistent tone and theme. I’m eager to read more of what he writes, and I need to remember to ask my new friend, The Viking, about how Swedes perceive his work. 

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

What a delightful surprise! Zafón has resurrected the gothic mystery, and brought all the darkness and mystery of Barcelona together in a fine debut novel. The Shadow of the Wind may plod a bit at first, but once Daniel, Julian Carax, Fermin, and the rest get going, the novel’s four-hundred odd pages fly by. It’s all here, from illicit romance, evil policemen, leather masks, trapdoors, foggy nights, sinister hunchbacks, beautiful women, and more than a few verbal high-jinx.

Perhaps my favorite of the novels I read in 2012. Highly recommended. 

The Crowdfunding Bible by Scott Steinberg

The Crowdfunding Bible by Scott Steinberg

Quick little overview of the Crowdsourcing scene circa summer 2012. This might be interesting to you if you are trying to find a way to get funding for a small software or creative project. I am uncertain if there is a print version of this book; the copy I read was a .pdf.  

Procession of the Dead by Darren Shaw

Procession of the Dead by Darren Shaw

Procession of the Dead is a surreal novel of strange criminality set in a fictional version of Mexico City. A young man is introduced to the underworld and becomes a puppet of The Cardinal, who runs the city. People surrounding the Cardinal start disappearing, as if they had never existed. A strange and flawless killer begins stalking the young man, and he has a few weird sexual encounters. Then stuff gets a good bit stranger and more metaphysical.

Procession of the Dead was a strange, corruption-flavored snack, which I quite enjoyed over a few nights on the beaches of South Texas. Had I not followed it so quickly with the far more masterfully done Shadow of the Wind, I would probably have more glowing words for Procession. A fine book, but not overly memorable. 

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Winter’s Bone is a pitch perfect bit of rural noir set against the backdrop of the meth-cooking hillbillies of the Appalachian mountains. A young woman must go in search of her father, in an effort to prove that he is dead, so the bank doesn’t foreclose on her family home. Alone the way she visits an ever expanding web of distant relations, all of whom are secretive, slightly scary, and live out their lives by a different code than most of modern North America.

The language is tight, sparse, with highly believable dialog. A movie of the same name won several awards, I believe. While it was beautifully directed and very well acted, Mr. Woodrell deserves the lion’s share of the credit; Winter’s Bone is a superb piece of work. 

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

What does the Night Know? I can barely remember… This little piece of popcorn was amusing, and I tore through it in about 48 hours of planes and hotel rooms.

Oh yes! The Night Knows that a killer’s spirit is possessing people and seeking to recreate a series of brutal serial murders. It’s also trying to get back at the detective who put an end to its original kill spree a few decades before.

Koontz writes a tight airport-bookstore horror novel. His style is sufficiently USA Today to be readable, and none of the shadows he summons linger long enough for the following night to recall them. 

Starhammer by Christopher Rowley

Starhammer by Christopher Rowley

I’m told that Starhammer is the basis for the Halo mythos. Luckily, Jason Jones and the Bungie team managed to go far, far beyond their original inspiration when crafting their sci-fi epic franchise. For while Halo is a tale of heroism and military fetishism in a galactic struggle against various alien races, Starhammer is not.

Instead, Rowley gives us a strange, highly dated bit of intergalactic sci-fi in which a race of sexually sadistic blue people hold dominion over the human race. One guy, and… a girl… and… a prophet type…. and some other people find some artifacts that lead them to an ancient spaceship, which takes them to some dustball planet where they activate… The Starhammer!

Worlds are smashed, wicked blue alien genocide ensues. The whole affair is a messy and occasionally perverse bit of “fight the man” science fiction, in which humans are the good guys.

Perhaps if I’d read this several decades ago, or as a much younger man, I’d have been sufficiently titillated by the “Rape Room” and sufficiently riled up and eager to fight aliens that I would have been inspired by this one. Maybe then I would have created a majestic science-fiction franchise and would be worth a bazillion dollars.

As it is was, I found Starhammer uninspired and almost indistinguishable from the hundreds of other .99 paperback sci-fi novels that crowed the shelves at Half Price Books, hearkening back to a particular subgenre of early eighties pulp.

The Dust Man's Birthday Party

Happy Halloween. Here's the result of the "1000 word scary story in 1 hour" challenge that Dr. Stout and I enjoyed on a dark and stormy Halloween night in Burnaby in 2012.

The Dust Man’s Birthday Party

The Tall Man hid behind the boiler for almost a week. He wanted to wait until the four year old’s birthday party had come and gone. The family could talk of little else on their last Sunday alive. They had invited two cousins. The mom couldn’t stand the cousins. She and the Dad argued loudly about it just outside the closet where the Tall Man hid. The mom thought one of the cousins had stolen something the last time they had visited. The Dad, sounding tired, just pleaded with his wife to be nice to his sister and her kids. The Tall Man got the sense that they were really squabbling about something else. But he didn’t care. They would both die either way. Then the Dad wouldn’t be tired anymore.

The Tall Man wasn’t tired at all. He slept during the day, and walked around the house at night while the family was asleep. Sometimes he watched the two little ones in their beds. One night he listened at the door of the parent’s bedroom while they had quiet sex, then tiptoed away when he heard the mom get up and go to the bathroom.

He listened to the birthday party through the walls. With only a week to go before Samhain, it sounded as if some of the visiting children had dressed up in costume. He could hear them running around the house, playing a game of hide and seek. It was a game he remembered from his childhood. He was very good at hiding.

At one point, he had a moment of concern, when he thought he might be forced into action. He hard children’s footsteps running, and the door to the boiler room opened, letting in a blinding light. He had not seen true daylight in months, preferring to operate by night. He caught a glimpse of a boy in a pointy hat. The shaft of light stabbed his eyes and he willed himself further back into the recesses of the closet. He heard the child pull the door shut, and he listened to the sound of the little boy breathing hard, trying to hide.

The Tall Man tried to remain perfectly still in the back of the closet, just a few feet from the boy. He knew he could reach out and wrap his long fingers around the child’s neck. But there were too many people in the house. He tried to hold his breath and imagine himself invisible in the darkness. The dust behind the hot water heater seemed to settle into his lungs.

He thought about dust, and about how he’d heard that it was mostly made up of shed human skin that had already died and been sluffed off by the body. He wondered how much of the dead skin in his nose belonged to the Mom, and how much to the Dad.

The idea of her skin inside his mouth and nose was exciting, and the Tall Man knew he wouldn’t be able to contain himself much longer. Then the boy would be dead, and he would have to prepare to fight whoever came looking.

Suddenly the child threw the door open and ran out into the hallway, shouting for his playmates. The Tall Man reached out a long arm and pulled the closet door closed. It snicked shut with a satisfying sound, and he let out a long breath.

The party continued, and he heard the sound of children and adults singing to a cake. He didn’t like the burning candles he could imagine on the cake. Fire scared him.

The children applauded and made noise for a while, then the house slowly grew more quiet as the guests left. The family put the children to bed while the Tall Man hid in the closet. Then the parents talked in low voices. Gradually their discussion grew louder and more heated. He heard the mom hiss something at the Dad. Then he heard the sound of a door slamming.

The birthday boy’s feet pattered up the hallway, past the closet, and the Tall Man heard a tentative knock on the parent’s bedroom door. The child asked something with a sniffle, in a whiney voice, and was admitted to the room.

The Tall Man listened gleefully to the sound of the Mom’s voice, telling the child he should go back to his own room. The father’s comments were little more than a bass rumble. He and the Mom argued for a moment, then she acquiesced. The birthday boy squealed a sound of delight, and the Tall Man heard bedsprings creak. 

From the hot-water heater closet, he listened, and squeezed his fist tight in rage. The child had been given permission to sleep in bed with his parents! The ritual couldn’t be enjoyed if the family were all together. The Tall Man needed to visit each bedroom individually, tiptoeing from one bedside to the next, and saving the Mom for last. He shook with anger. They were ruining his plan!

Gradually he unclenched his fists and let out a long, slow breath. He could be patient. He was better at hiding than anyone, and he could take his time.

The Tall Man ran his finger across the back of the boiler, gathering dust on his fingertip. He raised it to his mouth and tasted the dead skin on his tongue. He could be patient. There was always tomorrow night.

Stylized by Mark Garvey

Stylized by Mark Garvey

If you’re the particular type of Word Nerd who is into Strunk and White, then you’d love this book. It fits on a shelf where it can rub elbows with Annie Fadiman’s Ex Libris, and Winchester’s TheProfessor and the Madman; for this is the detailed history of the creation of The Elements of Style.

Mr. Garvey’s love for the source material shines through, and his admiration for E.B. White (author of Charlotte’s Web and about a million New Yorker articles) is clear. He peppers the history of the book with interesting biographical snippets on White and his former professor and friend, William Strunk. Along the way, we get a variety of opinions on The Elements from various famous  (and not so famous) writers, like Frank McCord and Elmore Leonard.

Weighing in at only 200 pages, Stylized is still twice as long as the work that inspired it, but Garvey keeps it airy and fresh. I don’t know if his reverence for these two dead masters of modern style and language usage will win many new converts to their efforts, but if you already count yourself among their devotees, and the history of reference books is of interest to you then you’ll likely be delighted. 

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

When it comes to Chuck Palahniuk, I’m like an abused spouse. I’ll swear I’m done buying his crap, and then I'll be _________ if I don't myself walking out of a bookstore with a copy of his newest in hardback.

I read Damned in one sitting, in a bar. It tells the tale of a pre-teen who has landed herself in hell. It’s vulgar, clever, irreverent, and features Palanhiuk’s usual linguistic styling. (In this case, the trope is a recurring reference to sexually active girls as “Slutty McSluterson” or “Trashy vonTrollope” or similar.)

Chuck P’s eye for certain details of upper middle class ennui are still good, and he’s still smart. I’ll give him that. The notion of the “Lake of Spilled Seed” that has grown to take over ever larger hectares in Hell at a radically increased rate since the dawn of the internet is probably the cleverest bit in Damned.

There. Now I’ve ruined the punchline for you, so, unlike me, you don’t have to keep going back to this abuser and giving him your attention and your money. You deserve better. 

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick

Mr. Mitnick, and his ghost writer, William Simon, take about 300 pages to warn you of the dangers of “social engineering” attacks. For those of you who weren’t raised on a Commodore 64 and an unhealthy infatuation with the alt2600 and Phrack scene, “social engineering” is a hacker’s way of talking about persuasion and confidence based attacks on a security edifice. So, for example, if I call your secretary, and convince her that we’re supposed to meet to play golf later, and she should give me your private cell phone number, that’s a social engineering attack. She shouldn’t give out your cell phone number, but I persuaded her to. Hack accomplished.

Kevin Mitnick was a notorious hacker and phone phreaker in the nineties. He gives about a hundred different examples here of the types of confidence hacks that can be pulled off, all without really ever touching a keyboard. While the book is written from the perspective of someone who hopes to help make you able to better secure your life, your business, your department, etc. one cannot help but have the feeling that Mr. Mitnick is really still on the side of the perpetrators; The Art of Deception reads as much like a “how-to” manual for con games and would-be social engineers as anything else. It goes on a shelf next to the Poor Man’s James Bond, The Negotiation Toolkit, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and a guide to lock-picking.  

Mockingjay by Susanne Collins

By book three, of The Hunger Games, the Districts are in all out rebellion against the Capital. Collins stays true to her genre fiction roots here and gives us a properly dystopic (if shallow) political analysis.

Unlike the grand finale of the Twilight series (to which Hunger Games is often unfairly compared), this is not a bloodless resolution in which everyone walks away happy.

I enjoyed all three of these books, though the style and characters are both presented at a fourteen year old level. It is surprising and strange that mainstream tween fiction will also likely be the best (and most popular) dystopian sci-fi of the first decade of our brave new century. 

Catching Fire by Susanne Collins

In the second book of The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins introduces us to the broader struggle between the impoverished Districts and the capital, whole malice and selfish largesse are embodied by the eeeeevil President Snow (and a cast of hairdressers, costumers, and the like.)

We get another round in the arena, and the Kat/Peter/Gale love triangle continues to exude dissonance without ever getting steamy. 

 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games is now such a phenomena now that it hardly needs introduction. Katness is cool, if wooden heroine, and the first novel managed to really engage me in her struggles.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the novels is that they present, initially, as tween fiction. And on some level, they remain that way, by dint of sex or profanity. In fact though, this trilogy is pretty straight dystopian fiction.

And yes, we all know that there was a Japanese film called Battle Royale in which kids on an island kill each other. No, this is not just a remake of that, nerd trolls.   

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

High fantasy is cool. Fantasy this high is a little hard to take.

The Gardens of the Moon is book one of the “Mazalan Books of the Fallen” series, which is ten books long. And unlike most fantasy series, it is actually complete! (Jar Jar Martin and Robert Jordan, I’m glaring at you both.) So based on a lackluster recommendation from LT, I decided to give it a try.

The reign of the Empress is in decline. Assorted ancient demons, demi-gods, and other mega-powerful beings are involved in some complex scheming to… bring about or prevent the end of this dynasty, or some such. A few different unlikeable characters skulk around the kingdom unleashing Yu-Gi-Oh level magic powers against one another.

I wanted to like the whole affair, and some of the sequences involving troupes of flying assassins, their summoned minions, and high wizardry were pretty cool. But ultimately, I didn’t like any of the characters, or identify with this collection of Level 50 Immortals and their power struggle enough care enough to proceed past this volume. 

I first promised to get all the links to the Books widget on the side working in May of 2005.

They now all work! Turns out the way Blogger deals with permalinks is a bit wonky. It took three full hours to get all 281 reviews linked properly, but the page should be a lot more usable now. I recognize this is the digital equivalent of rearranging the sock drawer, but hopefully the occasional high school student will now be able to use the page more effectively to plagiarize something for a book review.

At least five new books posted tonight, I promise!

Has it really been more than half a year since I've posted. Terrible behavior, can't be tolerated. Life keeps getting faster and more interesting. Lots of interesting changes coming up. Still writing and reading lots. New chapter in a textbook on Game Analytics coming out soon. And, I just noticed that I've still never actually posted a review or my thoughts on Social Game Design & Monetization which I wrote with the terrific aid of BC and published with Focal Press around the turn of the year. I think this page is also long overdue for some usability layout and cleanup. Since the Dr. is away this weekend, perhaps I'll dedicate a little time to this project. First though, the rest of tonight on TheEndOfTheWorld. -tf

The White Rose by Glen Cook
In his conclusion to the Black Company trilogy, we get to watch the epic showdown between the White Rose and the Lady, and the awakening of the Dominator. The Black company is caught in the fat middle of all of this, and unfortunately, a lot of what happens doesn’t make much sense.

Cook’s writing is downright wooden at points (“To be seen was the Limper.”) The action is muddy (though the windwhales and mantas are cool) and the framework story by which Croaker gets manuscripts periodically from mysterious strangers just feels like the contrivance that it is.

I enjoyed the Chronicles of the Black Company, though the White Rose is certainly the weakest of the three novels.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

What if you could go back in time and prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

I read Stephen King’s newest novel on a great 4 days trip to Whistler with LT & Wilvis. In between ski runs and watching the snow bunnies dance, I enjoying an epic 900 pages of classic King, in which he returns to his favorite haunts (Derry) and favorite decades (fifties and sixties) to spin the yarn of a time travelling school teacher on a weighty mission to prevent the moment when everything went wrong for the baby boomers.

As with all of King’s later novels, he meanders and fills pages with side plots and observations that add reams of texture without particularly addressing the primary story. But as always, it’s a delightful journey. There’s plenty of the horrific here, though the novel is not an According to Hoyle horror novel per se.

A few time travel clichés rear their heads, but in the main, King is able to keep the focus on observations about how things have changed in the last 50 years, give us a little bit of JFK trivia, and give us at least two or three characters we can invest in.

A fun ride.

Shadows Linger by Glen Cook

In Shadows Linger, Cook gives us further chronicles of the Black Company, though at first, we start far from them, in a little town where evil is growing. Croaker and the boys arrive and get entangled in events they cannot initially comprehend. The book starts slow, focused on deadbeats we don’t much care about, but by the conclusion, it’s been a great ride, with a few particularly cool ideas. (The mechanics of the Black Castle are particularly noteworthy.)

The Guardians by Andrew Pyper

Mr. Pyper writes a decent, if somewhat predictable psychological thriller / ghost story set in a small Canadian town. Four members of a boys’ hockey team get involved in the disappearance of a local teacher, and their lives are forever changed by their exposure to the supernatural, and the eeevil that lurks within the hearts of men. The first quarter of the book borrows heavily from Stephen King’s IT, in which the return of evil summons back a far-flung collection of adults to their childhood home. The back half of the book wallows in a predictable resurgence of the events of the past and the troubles an adult has facing up to the deeds of his childhood and the misspent years since. Structurally, the book also mimics IT; even chapters are set in the present, odd chapters set in the past.

The setup to the big surprise is so wrapped up in the hammer-heavy themes of the book (you never know who might be evil!) that the conclusory chapters feel plodding in their obviousness. Also, the sex is dry and boneless.

Still, the book moves quickly, and some of the imagery is decent. Overall, I give it a C+.

The Black Company by Glen Cook
I’ve been aware of Mr. Cook’s Black Company for a long, time, but had never had the occasion to investigate. As part of a Fall that I wanted to be focused on reacquainting myself with fantasy and RPGs (DarkSouls!), I picked up a new copy of the first three books in the saga of the Black Company, entitled Chronicles of the Black Company. Glad I did.

Simply put, Mr. Cook writes what feels a lot like a Vietnam war novel in a fantasy wrapper. A company of soldiers plot and fight and laze their way through a morally black universe in which subterfuge, misdirection, and the fog of war constantly obscure the real meaning or significance of most events.

Our narrator, Croaker, is also the company physician, and the current chronicler of the Black Company’s history. He’s a soldier, a normal guy (at least at first), and he plays cards, lounges, shirks work, and generally does everything we’d expect from a soldier. Even his language is closer to that of a grunt stationed outside of Saigon than an an Authurian legend; no “thees” or “thous” here. Descriptions of events are terse; combat is seldom play-by-play. Instead, the company crosses weeks in the eyeblink of a paragraph.

The battle at the Stair is a particularly cool moment… The Taken are a neat idea, well executed, and Croaker is a fun narrator. I enjoyed The Black Company, and look forward to reading more of their Chronicles.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley
The “Lit Club” splinter cell of the Heights Alkies Book Club started with this little nugget; my fault, I’ll admit. The book got love from NPR. I cannot for my life understand why. In a crowded supernatural romance marketplace, Sunshine fails to shine through the fog. Hell, even Stephanie Meyers managed to write a more engaging story based around a main character who can barely emote.

Sunshine is a baker, and the daughter of a wizard. And she gets kidnapped by vampires, and is rescued by the not-very-originally named Constantine. And then she bakes more. And then there are some demony secret police types. And then she her biker-wizard boyfriend do it. And then she and Constantine assault the vampire fortress. The end.

Sorry, Lit Club. I’ll pick better next time.

Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman
Styled somewhat in the style of Led Zeppelin’s final album, Chuck Closterman IV treads the same turf as his other works: fast-paced, clever pop culture analysis. The book is divided into three sections: Things That Are True, Things That May Be True, and Things That Are Not True.

Klosterman definitely improved as his career advanced and he matured; there is a pronounced delta between Klosterman IV and, say, Eating the Dinosaur, written some years later. Still though, Chuck Klosterman IV was entertaining, but by this point, I’d grown a little weary of the shtick, and the pop-culture references had started to feel more like an exhumation than a fresh look at (semi-) current events. So I elected to move on rather than read Klosterman’s earliest book, Fargo Rock City. However, I would like to make my esteem for Mr. Klosterman clear here: He writes a great essay.

Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

More Klosterman from a few years earlier, Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs deals primarily with television, sports, and music. It’s all in a similar vein to Eating the Dinosaur, though without the clever mashup structure.

If overly clever, not-at-all-reverent essays on pop culture are your thing, and you don’t mind subject matter which is fast becoming dated, you’ll be delighted by Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs.

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

Turns out, Chuck Klosterman is smart, funny, and occasionally insightful. Eating the Dinosaur is a collection of essays on pop culture and interviews with the type of vapid celebrities that little the late-night talk-show pop culture landscape like worms on the sidewalk after a rain. Except the essays are brilliant, and they are woven together in twos, sections from each essay, which are seemingly unrelated, chopped and screwed under the banner of an interview. And the awesome magician’s trick that Klosterman pulls off is to have the disparate parts all combine by the end of each chapter to have some broader significance, relationship, or commentary.

I read Eating the Dinosaur in one sitting on an airplane from Texas to Seattle, and immediately visited a Half Price Books there in Redmond, where I picked up two more Klosterman books.

Highly recommended.

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Awesome dark and twisted Scandinavian vampire fiction. The novel is considerably more depraved than the film, and offers a bit more insight into the world of Oscar and his deadly lady love. Lindqvist sets a sustained tone of urban blight and despair in a snowswept hell. None of the characters are more than a deep shade of moral grey, and most of them tend towards the dark black. Even our hero appears to be a budding serial killer.

The book is fast, twisted, and generally, some of the most interesting horror I’ve read in quite some time. Nice work, Mr. Lindqvist.

A Dance of Dragons by George RR Martin

What to say about George RR Martin’s megaselling franchise? Fifteen years ago, only us geeks read fantasy novels, and with a few noteable exceptions, very few of those were filled with the kind of foul language and sexual-sadism that permeates Mr. Martin’s world. Now, HBO has picked up (and done a fine job) of televising the first book of a Game of Thrones, and everyone from the nerd fringe at Dragon’s Lair, to the cute little pixie lawyerette in The Professor’s graduating class seem obsessed with the World of Westros. So what on earth to say about this book that hasn’t already been said?

Let’s start by suggesting that Mr. Martin’s narrative seems to be running away from him. So much time in A Dance of Dragons is spent with minor characters about whom no one seems to care. We’re forced to slog through endless pages of court intrigue amongst men with colored beards whose names read like fantasy clichés (Renak, Hizdahr, and Skahaz? Really?) The book only barely manages to narrow the focus of the ever-expanding cast of characters, and resolution of any kind still seems thousands and thousands of pages away.

These complaints aside, there are some fun action sequences here. Dragons, ship–fights, etc. And some of those characters you love are revisited, and have interesting things happen to them. Jon Snow and Aria Stark make an appearance. That wicked little incestuous queen Circe receives some measure of just dessert, and things finally start to happen in the North.

If you’re already this far into the series, grab and enjoy, since you know you will anyway. If you’ve not already started these, then you either live under a stone, or you know already that violent, dark fantasy isn’t your thing. As for me? I’ll be awaiting the next novel in the Song of Fire and Ice, and eagerly awaiting HBO’s next season of Game of Thrones. It’s far from art, but it’s still fun.

Rogue Island by Bruce deSilva

Rogue Island was the second (of two so far) books that we read as part of our “literature club” (so named just to give it a tongue in cheek distinction from the girls only alkie club to which a few of our members also belong.) Unfortunately, Rogue Island got us off to a bad start, which we’ve not yet recovered from.

On the shitty little Island of Rhode, in the town of Providence, assorted corrupt scumbuckets perform misdeeds. Our anti-hero newspaperman walks these dirty streets, checking noir detective clichés off deSilva’s list, looking for an arsonist. He gets double crossed, finds a little love, etc. etc.

All of this retread turf would be more interesting if I felt that deSilva were somehow offering a new look at a fifty year old formula, or a more interesting insight into the fading days of print journalism; but we get neither. The plot and pacing also get a tad wonky towards the end of the novel, when our hero runs off to nowhere in particular to wait out a few key events, which happen off screen. Then, just to further shred any sympathy we might have had for the broken-hearted narrator, he goes and gets with some random waitress.

I applaud DeSilva’s interest in the detective/noir space, and would probably read his next work, but ultimately, Rogue Island never took me anywhere I hadn’t already been, which made it feel forty years too late to really qualify as even a footnote to the genre.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

La Carre’s famous spy works more or less defined the genre, way back before there was a Tom Clancy. His world is one of double crosses, complicated setups, midnight meetings, cold and drizzly nights in cities which have been renamed, and exist in a binary continuum on either side of an Iron Curtain. It’s a curiously dated time now, when simple things like cel phone calls or using a credit card were either impossible or far more complicated. As a result, a lot of the intrigue is almost a tad difficult to get one’s head around; the simple solutions we’ve taken for granted don’t work, yet the world still vaguely looks and talks like ours.

In the Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a once intrepid agent is forced to go back across the line one more time. It’s an unpleasant world of intrigue, where no one’s motives are what they seem, and where even the conditions for victory seem unclear; I suppose it’s a bit like the cold war itself in that way.

This is a short book, and a fast one, and I’d recommend that anyone interested in the early days of spycraft and spy fiction go through it. But do so now, because in another twenty years, when even the politics are largely forgotten, this book isn’t going to make much sense anymore.

The Devotions of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Interesting if somewhat slow detective novel based in Japan. A young woman and her daughter end up killing her abusive ex-husband. The brilliant mathematician next door helps her to dispose of the body. Detectives investigate, with the assistance of a brilliant physicist who was once a collegue of the mathematician. The investigation ends up being a chess game between the two brilliant men. The tale is an exploration of the lengths to which devotion will drive some people, and flirts with some mathematical/philosophical principals. Its prose is straightforward and unadorned, never gets in the way but is also without any particular elegance. I’m willing to chalk this up to the version I read being an English translation. The characters are fairly wooden and shallow; they’re almost cardboard cutouts really. The tenacious detective. The brilliant physicist. The socially awkward mathematician. Swallowed this one in an single sitting on a transatlantic back from Ireland with the Professor. Was my least favorite of the books I read on the trip.

Little Brother by Cory Doctrow

Little Brother is a fun, adolescent romp through the basics of modern computer security. In Little Brother, some teenaged hackers in San Francisco use a networked of hacked Xboxes to fight an invasion of overzealous Homeland Security goons who are turning the Bay area into a surveillance happy police-state. Sound corny, as if it’s meant for thirteen year old boys? It is.

Little Brother is likely the second or third geekiest book I’ve ever read. But, it does give you a pretty good overview of some basic computer and network security philosophies and techniques. There’s some ‘netspeak dialog (“Being at school on a Friday was teh suck.”) in case you missed out on the wholesale assault on the English language that forums and icanhascheezeburger have mounted. The hero quotes Kerouac to his girlfriend. But then he does get laid, so that’s good I guess.

Fun, silly, highly juvenile “fight the man” romp around the Bay Area through the eyes of an adolescent hacker.

Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
Wanted to read this one before we got to Dublin, since it takes place there and was written by an Irishman. The bleak, foggy, depressed, alcoholic city of secrets described herein didn’t much match the sunny, lively, cheerful, media-obsessed, alcoholic city I saw this week.

April disappears. Her friend Phoebe goes to Quirk, her (Phoebe’s) father, who is a coroner, and who is just finishing a stint in rehab for his alcoholism. Quirk, his buddy the detective, and a few other 1950’s Dubliners explore the fast-living world of April and her friends in an effort to find out what may have become of her. As a period piece that paints a picture of Dublin, Elegy might be pretty good. It certainly hits a sustained tone of bleakness, while keeping the overall level of sordid up nicely.

I was two-thirds of the way through before I realized this book is actually the third in a series of novels about Quirk. Luckily, my ignorance to the occasionally referenced grim previous events didn’t really impact my enjoyment of the book much.

Nothing remarkable about the writing, though I will remember the Irish alcoholic crime-solving coroner, if not the specifics of what exactly happened to April Latimer that bleak year in Dublin.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl is inventive “Calorie-punk” sci-fi set in futuristic Bangkok a few hundred years after the “contraction” that came about in global trade as a result of us running out of hydrocarbons, and a series of corporate germ-warfare based around genetically modified foods. Edgy, fascinating world that lushly envelops a story that gets tripped up by its own plotting on occasion.

The language is solid, the characters are generally interesting, though only the Yellow Card and the Windup Girl stand out as memorable. The plot gets tangled in a study of regime change politics in Thailand, which is interesting, but can’t help as feel a little bit beside the point.
Still, this is certainly the best sci-fi I’ve read in a decade or more.

The Homing by John Saul

An evil misogynist serial killer etymologist raises a crop of killer bees who infect the residents of a local town. There’s a little bit of subtext about how a small town is like a hive mind. A plucky cop is involved, as is a mother of two trying to start a new life…

Worth slightly less than the $2 I paid for it at Half-Price.

Caught by Harlan Corbin

A guy is busted trying to meet up with an underage girl he met on the internet. Other assorted complex social dramas associated with crimes unfold. Things aren’t as they seem. Supposedly you’ll be thrilled, but really, it’ll be like snacking on Pringles while on the plane.

Horns by Joe Hill
You wake up in the morning and there are horns growing out of your head. In fact, you seem to be turning into a demon in general, and are able to coax the innermost wicked thoughts out of everyone you meet. People think you killed your girlfriend, and life goes downhill from there.

Horns is one part The Metamorphisis and one part comedic romp (“Devil in a blue dress” and almost every other demonic play-on-words you can imagine make an appearance.) Hill clearly has a good time with his second book. Though it’s a tad uneven, and the pacing stutters a bit, it’s a decent followup to 20th Century Ghosts. In particular, the letter from dead girl to our horny hero sticks in my mind as a poignant bit of sap, and the novel’s resolution is mildly satisfying.

A Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
“Rothfuss dazzles with his second installment!” – Tim Fields, theWORD.

Patrick Rothfuss continues the adventures of Kvothe, bartender, musician, lover, sorcerer in this rambunctious, thoughtful second novel. While there are a few structural issues with the book — cases where the story appeared to have nearly gotten away from him, and had to be reeled in using particularly crude mechanics – the sequel to the Name of the Wind is even better than the first. Rothfuss feels more sure in his tone, and the adventure, violence, love, and general fantasy of the deal are all more pronounced.

There’s a lot to love in this book, and I cannot wait for the third, which will likely be called The Shape of the World, since the phrase appears repeatedly in reference to future events.

The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar

Often mentioned by people who liked The Four Hour Work Week, or Vagabonding, I’d been meaning to read the Monk and the Riddle for a few years now. It’s business philosophy at its heart, though far less philosophical than the title might lead you to believe. In a rambling collection of Silicon Valley anecdotes, bookended by a couple of glimpses into various world travels Randy has enjoyed, Mr. Komisar advances the popular cliché that “It’s not the destination that matters, but the journey.” He digresses from this central theme for the majority of the book to name drop and wag about the ways of the Silicon Valley VC crowd, using a case study in misguided entrepreneurial spirit (Funerals.com) as an object lesson in why just chasing money isn’t likely to be very successful. At its best moments, the book discusses the difference between management (execution) and leadership (vision), and meanders around the importance of an inspiring vision to galvanize a company to greatness.

Interesting book, but somehow a lot less insightful or motivational than I expected, given the praise it has received. Had I just already learned all this through high-tech osmosis over the last decade?

Goes on the shelf between Tim Ferris and Jack Welsh, but isn’t as good as either.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

This book got a lot of praise around release. It was billed as a sort of modern Flowers for Algernon, which I suppose it was. An old man suffering from deep dementia is given a second chance to make things right when a young woman and an experimental drug give him a few week stay of senility. He finds the lost treasure, gets the girl, and brings justice to a murder victim to whom is he related.

The language is good, bordering on superb, particularly in the first half of the book. Mosley’s portrait of “PityPapa” is caring and does a good job of conveying the sense of frustrated befuddlement and fear that goes along with old age and the ravages of diseases like Alzheimer’s. (I suspect.) This is a topic that figures profoundly in my own life, and indeed, in the lives of so many in the first world now; we are all caretakers of the elderly, and many of us destined to become ancient doddering shells, like Ptolemy.

What most of us will not ever get is the old man’s fantasy come true: No super drug will give your mind back, nor restore the mind of that vacant eyed shambler who was once someone you loved. You will not get to right wrongs, and you will almost assuredly not discover a lost treasure that will ease the days of your family. No nubile young beauty will give you her love, and any peace you get before the end of your days will be the grey purgatory of apathetic forgetfulness.

So while I quite appreciated Mosley’s writing, the plotting of the book ended up making me feel cheated; like the author had to resort to cheap tricks to give me an improbable adventure tale, instead of the portrait of aging and mental vacancy to which so many are heir.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a well written book, but I wish that Mosley had possessed the courage to look into the yawning abyss of mental decay and report back more accurately what I believe he saw.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Four stories. One in which a man kills his wife in 1922 and tells us about it later. Another in which a writer is brutally raped and gets revenge. A third of a man who wishes the ills of his world onto his best friend. A fourth in which the wife of a serial killer discovers the awful truth…The first and the last of these are the best two.

I enjoy Stephen King, and have devoured almost everything he has written so for me, these stories were a treat. But if you’re not a fan, or are just getting started, there are at least ten other books of his I’d recommend first.

Where There is No Doctor by David Werner, Jane Maxwell and Carol Thuman

Rawles, the survivalist, highly recommended that every household keep a copy of Where There is No Doctor around as a guide to how to perform the most common types of medicine and hojw to diagnose ailments when, um, there is no doctor available.

I read through this book in the summer of 2011 as part of my continuing James Bond training. It’s a wonderful volume, which explains in simple language and diagrams how to prevent, diagnose, and treat a wide array of maladies and medical situations in less than ideal conditions. Need to deliver a child? Splint a broken bone? Treat diphtheria? Keep your village free from hookworms? It’s all here!

Highly recommended for any section of a library dealing with how to address extreme situations. If this were Fallout, reading this book would give you +1 to the Doctor skill.

Merry Post-Christmas! It's time for a new and mighty update. As a matter of fact, I expect to give you several over the next few days. It's a sacred duty to myself to not let one year morph into the next without having jotted down a review, however paltry, for each book I've read that year, and getting it posted here for my imaginary army of readers.

A quick personal update, as well, something akin to drawing a line on the wall to measure a kid's height: I'm living in Houston still, with the Professor. We've found a nice little enclave called The Heights, where we reside in a cool modernist tower just a few blocks walk from several bars and restaurants. More importantly, we live less than a mile from our good friends The Senator and Dr. KMK. In fact, tonight we'll be having dinner and wine with them while we have an "Organize the Library" party -- to move their collection into the wonderful new library room they've built. I'm still working as a director at Certain Affinity, a fun boutique game development shop in Austin. My family in Austin is all doing well; as strange and fun as ever.

I've written three books in the last three years. Two cover topics in game development and are published by Focal Press. The third is an unpublished horror novel set in a decaying city on the bayou... And I know that one of my New Year's resolutions will be to write another in 2012. I've promised myself it'll be fiction, probably fantasy.

DSM-IV

David Foster Wallace so loves the DSM that I decided I needed to break down and get a copy. Thanks to the wonders of Amazon’s used book sales, this is easily done. The DSM (in case you’re not a reference book fetishist) is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition). If you are going to be diagnosed with some form of mental or emotional malady in the Western world, it’s described herein. Because many of these terms and diagnoses are tossed around willy-nilly in the modern post-therapy world, we’re quite familiar as a culture with depression, PTSD, bipolarity, and various forms of addiction and dependence. For these well known disorders, its fascinating to read clinical descriptions of what the terms really mean. (Turns out we use them pretty haphazardly in everyday life.) And then there are all of the other more arcane disorders, from Pica (eating dirt and other inappropriate things) to paraphilia (sexual compulsions associated with some atypical objects.)

I’ll admit that I’ve not finished reading the entire book. It’s about a thousand pages of reference, frequently cross-referenced against diagnostic code lists, and other similar disorders. But for all that, it is a surprisingly readable reference work. Those who would never consider sitting down and reading the OED might be surprised to find that the DSM presents mental and emotional disorders in readable, interesting, bite-sized chunks. It’s the perfect gift for the budding novelist, psychology grad student, or hypochondriac bookworm in your life. Which gives me an idea…

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace


I’d started a writing project this summer in which I wanted to tell a collection of tales of short relationships between a man and a number of different women. Maybe this was a way of capturing the fantasy of various girls I wish I’d gotten to know better earlier in life. Or maybe it’s just a subject that is interesting. But because I wanted a fantasy or supernatural angle, I wanted to make at least one of them a witch, maybe more. Not a mysoginist “all women are evil” witches, but instead a way of sort of celebrating the mysterious and magical diversity of various feminine personalities. (Though I did want to include at least one bit of serious darkness – if you’ve ever done much dating, you’ve got a story or two to be sure – and not all witches are about love spells and pet kittens.) Carried away with my own cleverness, I decided to title the collection Brief Interviews with Supposedly Fun Witches I’ll Never Do Again in a sort of homage to one of our postmodern masters.

This little project led me to reopen David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a collection of spliced together short fiction relayed as interviews with people who are, as the title suggests, generally not very nice in one way or another. I was reminded of how enchanting DFW’s linguistic hi-jinx and chicanery can be to word worms like me, and in short, what a dazzling writer he could be at times.

Since the men here are not named, but instead identified only by subject or case ID information and a location, and since the stories are arrayed in an order designed to slowly ratchet up the hideous, rather than grouped by subject, part of the puzzle is figuring out who is who here.

Even after more than a decade and a helluva lot of zeitgeist, Brief Interviews holds up quite well. DFW was a master of the craft, albeit it not for everyone. His self indulgence and focus on relationships and the nuances of self-absorption read like paeans from a pre 9/11 world. He regularly loses sight of the forest of the narrative, and can be found climbing the tree of some particular metafictional angle or footnote. But none of this obscures the obvious (and now somewhat over-celebrated) brilliance, of a man who loves language, has terrific gifts with construction, and sees many things clearly.

Proofing process finished for Social Game Design -- now it's off to the printers, and will be availible on Amazon and store shelves by the end of the year!

Two more reviews! Hot, fresh, kinda messy, and late-night. Just like you like 'em!

The Kraken by China Mieville

Ummm, Lumm, Dumm indeed. Mieville is smart, erudite, wacky, and has great skills with language. But this is much more Pynchon than Perdido Street. In London, cults with strange magics vie for control of sacred artifacts. There’s a stolen picked squid corpse involved. But it’s all a bit silly and the main character was too much of a clueless Hitch-hiker’s Guide castoff to be that interesting. The darkness, the blood, the beating heart of awesome that infected New Cruzoban and rode distant rails as part of the Iron Council just isn’t to be found in weirdo cult London.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

A fine tale of adventure and camaraderie during the Siege of Leningrad. City of Thieves is fun, poignant, a little sexy and a little sad. Our hero and his tough, handsome, outgoing friend go on an epic quest for eggs in the midst of the war. I quite enjoyed this one, and I’ll do you the favor of not giving away anything else.

Crimson Alliance Gone Gold!
The Senator's Birthday!!
Tomorrow, a 30 year old Weezel!!!

Decline and Fall by Gibbons.

What a weekend! :)

-tf

Inspiring day at Blizzard. Reminded me of why I got into this business.

Can't believe it's been 7 months. Yikes!

But luckily, the book readin' continues, and I've got some fun reviews all set to share!

Unfortunately, (or fortunately) I'm fat in the middle of another new book project right now; one with some rather insane deadlines. So it may be a few weeks still.

But rest assured -- these two goals I vow:

1) I'll get 2011's books all posted before the end of the year. I've not yet missed a book (I think) or a year since I started this thing, and this won't be the first. We're closing in on 10 years before too long -- wanna make sure they're good!

2) I'll get the broken index on the side fixed, so the links to reviews actually work right.

In the meantime, as a teaser, some of the interesting stuff I've read and need to post about:

City of Thieves
The Kraken
Where There is No Doctor
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (again)
Full Dark, No Stars
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
The Monk and the Riddle
A Wise Man's Fear
Horns
Caught
The Windup Girl
Elegy for April
Little Brother
The Devotions of Suspect X
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Rogue Island

But for now... Work needs my attention, and The Professor is telling me it's bed time, and I still owe my publisher another 15k words in about a week, so...

Until later,
-tf

23 new book reviews added!

Now off to New Orleans for NYE!

Love,
-tf

Agents, Editors, and You by Michelle Howry

A useful, if somewhat dated introduction to the world of literary agents, publishing houses and the like. I need to get up to speed on the business side of publishing. While I’ve one published book, my understanding is that the non-fiction side of things works a little different. And from what various people who might be in-the-know tell me, having been published on the non-fiction side isn’t likely to help me any.

Editors, Agents, and You consists of ten chapters. Do you need an Agent? (Yes.) How do I find the right Agent? (Internet, go to conferences, write them.) How do I approach an Agent? (With a well crafted query letter.) What does an agent actually do? (Contact publishers on your behalf, help with negotiations, take part of the money.) And so on.

First, I need to find another book on the topic written after the advent of the internet age. Second, I need to generally read a few more books, blogs, etc. on the topic.

But mostly I think I just need to reach out to a bunch of agents to see if anyone is interested in representing me for my newest book: The Arc!

Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker

Eternal novel; vintage Barker. A fun look at old Hollywood’s romance with itself. Should have (and could have) ended five times before it did.

What happens is: In an old and evil monastery in Transylvania in the nineteen twenties, the rich consort of a Hollywood starlet purchases a tile fresco which has been driving monks mad for centuries. Because, see, the devil’s wife inspired the fresco (or something like that.) The starlet installs the fresco in her mansion in the Hollywood Canyons, and then throws orgies for the who’s-who of Hollywood, in which they are allowed to taste the immortality offered by the world within the fresco.

Cut to the modern day, in which a soulless Tom Cruise type gets bad (and unnecessary) plastic surjury to appease his vanity. He then moves into Coldheart Canyon to recover, and awakens the ghosts within. Evil and naughtyness ensue.

This is classic Barker stuff – good if you like his brand of brutality and depravity, but certainly not as good as many of his other works. If you are even slightly squeamish about sexual perversion, you might want to steer clear.

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

Short story collection in which a number of tales feature aging and sickness as themes. There are a few good stories here, a few stinkers-- the one about the port-a-potty comes to mind—and a few that are standard King fare. I always enjoy his readability and the straightforwardness with which he approaches storytelling.

The World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes

Written in 1989, The World in 10½ Chapters is a fun little bit of intellectualized masturbation from a bygone era. Far too clever for its own good and erratically unpredictable, the book cavorts between various musings on the tale of Noah’s Arc, some tongue in cheek legal satire dealing /with the trial of a woodworm in sixteenth century France, and some authorially intrusive diatribes on love and heaven. It all adds up to… a playful romp without a lot of real coherence.