The Martian Review

This week, we're looking at The Martian by Andy Weir.  This one was recommended by my friend, Tom.  I also enjoyed the movie.

When NASA's Ares 3 mission has to be evacuated due to a dust storm, astronaut Mark Watney gets separated from the team, presumed dead, and left on Mars. He has to survive with only the materials he brought with him, some ingenuity, and ~science~!

The science was front and center in this book, and I enjoyed that.  Watney goes on lengthy explanations of the math he's doing and the chemistry involved and the procedure he has to do to cut strips off a tarp.  I'm sure your mileage may vary, but I found it engaging and easy to follow, which is saying something for paragraphs getting into the nitty gritty of the calorie counts of potatoes.  It worked because it gave Watney validity.  He was a scientist explaining science.  He knew what he was talking about and I believed he was intelligent and qualified.  It also worked because his life depended on him doing the science correctly.  I was rooting for him, so I wasn't going to begrudge him talking it out.

On the other hand, the presentation was strange.  Most of Watney's story is told through his log entries where he explains what his problem is, what he's going to do about it, and later how his attempts went.  But I kept wondering about the intended audience of his log.  The tone was strange for it to be an official or scientific log.  He told jokes an explained science and downplayed his peril.  The closest thing it felt like was if Ares 3 had a YouTube channel where they told people what they were up to in a "Look how cool space is, kids!" kind of way, then Watney just kept it going even without an internet connection.  The log wasn't for future NASA astronauts who might find his site or for sending to NASA if he ever got a chance to tell them what he's been up to, because he over explained things that they would take as common knowledge.  He explains acronyms and that the hab is the tent where they live.  That's information the reader needs, but that someone from NASA would already know.  For the same reason, it didn't feel like he was talking to himself.  I think that's the most likely answer: that he was making the log not for anyone in particular, but to keep himself sane.  But the tone was so strange, I'm not sure what to make of it.

The other weird part about the log was that it sucked out most of the emotion.  All the dramatic events happened off camera and the reader is told about it later.  By then, Watney had apparently calmed enough to make a log entry and we heard the event through his analytical lens of assessing what went wrong.  The result is that Watney comes off as overly plucky in situations where it feels inappropriate.  There are very few signs of his deteriorating mental state and no signs that he fears or doubts. 

In this way, I think the log did the story a disservice.  It was able to convey loads of exposition about scientific processes and the capabilities of devices, but chopped into the emotional aspects of the story, making it less thrilling.

***

Next week we're back to our young adult roots with The Fill-in Boyfriend by Kasie West.

The Big Edit

I relieved to tell you that I started editing this week.  It was grating on me how bad it was and how I could fix it if I did this, that, and the other.  So now I'm going in and fixing things and it's like a bad note easing into tune.

Actually, I haven't fixed anything yet.  I printed off the whole thing, and now I'm going through it and making notes on what needs fixing.  Purple pen is for line edits--typos or things that should be crossed out or easy additions.  It's for things I know right this second how to fix. 

Pink is for global issues--how to deal with back story, characterization issues, relationships that need flushing out, strands I picked up then forgot.  This is where I've put the most thought as I've been writing.  It's the stuff that's been eating at me and that I'm dying to fix.  It's what I'm most excited about and what's going to take the most time.

Orange pen is for awkwardness.  When pumping out this draft, I didn't check my thesaurus or sit and glare, thinking "that's not quite the right word.  The one I want is more...angry and means...organized. Organized, but in an angry way?  What's that word?" I'd just write orangranized and move on with my life.  but now it's time to find out what that word is.  Orange is also for paragraphs that could flow better, that could have rhythm, that could scan, but are right now just a horrible mess.

Green is my proper noun color.  It's for all the places I didn't name a spell and glazed over hinting at the vast history behind the magic.  It's where I didn't name a side character or where I hate the name I gave.  Green is also known as my John Hodgman color.  John Hodgman says that "specificity is the soul of wit," which matches pretty closely with how I think about world building.  I try to do this in my writing, but I'm still working on not being too vague on this blog.

Now, what you haves to understand is it is ones of my life goals to be frenemies with John Hodgman, so whenever I talk about my John Hodgman pen, you have to imagine I'm doing it with an affected sneer. 

I should note that I have no idea why I want this.  It seems like something that would fit with my vision of the person I want to be.  It also implies that I would regularly interact with John Hodgman and we would be friends, just friends who show affection through rudeness.  We'd bicker on twitter, and write insulting blurbs for each other's books ("better than expected" "pretty good if you're into that kind of thing").  I have no idea how as to make this happen, since picking stupid fights with him on twitter with our current relationship just makes me a troll.  In my head, one day we'll meet at an important authors party (which exist in my fantasy, thanks) and we'll get into an argument over the mini quiches and how I'm not specific enough when writing blog entries.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Review

This week I read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I saved it into the "keepers" folder on my Kindle.

Harry August was born on New Year's Day 1919, lived an undistinguished life, died in 1989, and then was born New Year's Day 1919 to live his life over again with all his knowledge from his previous life in tact.  And again.  And again.  After a round of madness and denial, then a search for understanding about what's happening to him, he uses his resources to branch out.  He gets scholarships to universities, gets money from a combination of the stock market and gambling, and avoids armed conflict in World War II.  He a doctor, a physicist, a reporter, a spy.  He searches for God in all the religions of the world.  He travels.  He does drugs.  He learns dozens of languages.  He meets other people like himself, most of whom are part of the Cronus Club.  By communicating with other club members, they can send messages forward and backwards through time.  In his eleventh life, he gets a message from the future.  "The world is ending, as it always must.  But the end of the world is getting faster."

There are interesting philosophical discussions about using time travel to change history as opposed to the idea that "complexity is an excuse for inaction." There are discussions of the morality of scientific advancement and what achieving greatness is worth when the costs are measured in lives.  There's a lot said about boredom when you don't extend yourself and live in luxury, knowing what will happen and watching it without taking part.

But beyond these deeper issues, at its heart, this is a more personal story about friends who love each other and betray each other.  It turns into Spy vs. Spy as Harry tries to find his once friend Vincent, ingratiate himself with him, prove he's loyal and harmless, then stop Vincent from destroying the world once and for all.

The time travel stays interesting given there is a whole cast of characters time traveling and given the knowledge they can take back with them.  The mechanisms of sending messages across time was really novel here, and the way the Cronus Club and its members were affected and not affected by the world changing around them was interesting to see.  But the thing I liked most about this was the way Harry dealt with his life and how he used his knowledge to achieve his goals in different ways with each lifetime.  He was clever and proactive while also a bit mellowed, and his characterization and reactions felt organic given what he'd experienced.

What really clenched it for me was the moment when Harry was saved from a man torturing him for knowledge about the future by a member of the Cronus Club.  She interrupts the torture, sits down across from him, and says, 

"Now, when it's all over you will be wanting post-traumatic stress counseling, although I understand how difficult these things are to come by.  You look...fifty, maybe?  Which means you must have been born in the twenties--ghastly, so many Freudians in the twenties, so much wanting to sleep with your mother.  There's this wonderful little chap in Finchley though, very good, very understanding, no rubbish about cigars.  Failing that, I always find local priests are handy, as long as you go to them in the form of confessional.  Scares the buggery out of them sometimes too!  Now absolutely don't, don't."  She stabbed the table with her index finger, the little joint at the end bending backwards with the force of her determination.  "Don't tell yourself that just because you've been around a bit you're not in a terrible state.  You are absolutely in a terrible state, Harry dear, and the silent, noble number won't get you anywhere."

She tells him to get therapy!  Fantastic!  That is exactly what he needs to do.  I love this kind of pragmatism in a story, and I love the way mental health is treated here, like it's a given that it's important.

***

Next week: The Martian by Andy Weir

The Shining Girls

This week, I read The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.  There was a lot of hype about this book a while back, and I just now got around to reading it.

This is the story of a serial killer who discovers a way to travel through time.  He uses this new found ability to hunt down and murder "the Shining Girls," girls who radiate potential across the 20th century.  In true psycho killer style, he takes an object from each girl, leaving it behind on the next target to make a "constellation," and in the process leaving items impossibly out of time.  When Kirby survives her attack, she starts her own hunt to track him down.

The main thing that struck me about this book was how harsh it was. Even excluding the graphic, pervasive violence, the descriptions themselves are crude and bitter.  This is less sci-fi time travel shenanigans and more literary horror.

"She grins, the polka dots of her freckles drawing up into Dutch apple cheeks, revealing bright white teeth.  'Nah, Rachel says I'm not allowed to play with matches.  Not after last time.'  She has one skewed canine, slightly overlapping her incisors. And the smile more than makes up for her brackwater brown eyes, because now he can see the spark behind them."

Half the book is told from the serial killer's point of view, and he completely lacks empathy, so it makes sense for that tone to be there.  It expresses his character in nauseating clarity.  On the other hand, it makes for a rough read. 

Kirby is great.  She's a survivor, tough and snarky and desperate and reckless.  The time travel was interesting too.  It made the killer even more terrifying that he could avoid capture or identification by moving forward or back a decade.  His looping movements through time and his interactions with people and objects were neatly crafted by the author (if a little sporadic by the killer).  On the other hand, he never took advantage of the fact that he could kill at literally any time, because his craziness decided (or he was told by the magical powers that controlled the time travel) that there were rules, that certain specific times called to him.  So it ended up not being about time travel and more that time travel was there, hovering menacingly in the background.

I did like how this book was set in Chicago and felt like it was set in Chicago with characters who lived there.  A lot of books pick the most touristy of tourist spots and get the details gratingly wrong.  Maybe that was the case here, but they were the tourist spots of the 40s or the 70s and didn't bother me since my experience as someone who lives here wouldn't have a chance to rub up against those scenes and recoil that that's not how I-90 works.  It surprised me to get to the end and find a huge acknowledgements section about Beukes' research, how she visited the locations and interviewed experts.  I had assumed from reading that she just lived here (and was around since the 30s?).  So way to go on that.

This book leaves me with questions that don't have answers.  The shining girls show "potential" but it's often hard to tell how that potential could manifest itself.  Does this mean they're being killed before they can change the world, meaning there's an alternate timeline out there where these women did tremendous things?  Or is the serial killer just crazy as crazy can be and all this "shining" he senses is a grand psychotic delusion? 

Then: is this commentary on violence against women, or yet another uncomfortable book that relies on such violence?

In the end, this one was just too graphic to really enjoy.

***

Next week: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

Shift Review

I recently finished Shift, the prequel to Wool by Hough Howley.  (my review of Wool) It didn't live up to the standards set by Wool, but it was entertaining nonetheless.

Let's see if I can write this review without spoiling Wool.  It's going to be tricky.

This installment deals with the creation of the silo project and all the lies and deceit and manipulation it took to see the project started and then functioning across centuries.  Each of the three novellas that make up this volume is composed of two stories, which take place during different time periods, told simultaneously.  One will show an event mentioned in Wool, flushed out in dramatic, violent detail.  The other shows the people in charge of the silo project's functioning during times of upheaval.

It suffers the way all prequels suffer: having read the first book, we know what's going to happen.  We know the end point, so this book is just filling in the steps from point A to point B, adding some color along the way.  Even the eeriness prevalent in the first book loses some of its omnipresence since we know the outcome.  Some characters will live and some will have everything taken from them.  We know that going in.  In this way, the best of the three novellas is the first, where there is the newness of the environment of the people running the project.  (The idea of the shifts and how they create stability over the centuries is innovative and delightfully sinister, even if the drug component is an overdone trope that ends up hand-wavy and eye rollingly convenient.) There's also the fact that the past event described in the first novella is spelled out in only the vaguest of terms in Wool.  Plus there's a plot point in there that slowly comes into focus that is surprising and makes for a great moment when you pick up on it.

Where last time I was impressed with how much I cared about the characters, that wasn't so much the case this time.  In the second story there's a teenager named Mission, who is a self-absorbed emo kid who emotes all the time about how his dad doesn't understand him.  It's annoying, but it's also the point of the story: he's everything that's wrong with the world, where people turn to their own self-interests instead of banning together for the whole.  It's a well made point, but that doesn't make it fun to read.

Then in the third story, there's Jimmy, who is seventeen but acts seven.  I'd say Howley doesn't know how to write teenagers, except in the story just before, Mission, although obnoxious, was a great teenager.  The idea is that Jimmy's emotional development is halted so he acts seventeen forever.  But he doesn't even act that cognitively mature to begin with.   Things happened that made me think, "Really, Jimmy?  I know you live in a post-apocalyptic silo, but come on.  How do you not know this?"  For example he gets confused over a can of cat food even though he's familiar with domestic cats and cans of cat food obviously exist in the silo.  Compare this to in Wool, where characters showed their ignorance pretty regularly (especially with their understanding of radio waves.  It was charming), but when they did I thought, "Right.  Post-apocalyptic silo," and carried on. 

This one had some problems and lost steam from the first book.  It was still entertaining and an easy read.  Let's hope this is the sophomore slump of the trilogy and the third book picks it back up.  (I really really want the third book to be about Silo 40.  Fingers crossed.)

Let's Talk about Reading Challenges

I have returned from my holiday trip full of perilous flooding and pet drama, and I am beyond ready to be back in the thick of things.

Let's start with my writing projects.  That's right.  There are two now.  I'm easing my way back up to full speed.  I re-read my dragon story, to get myself pumped about it before taking another crack at querying.  I braced myself for hating it, which would have been completely unhelpful while trying to get excited enough to sell it.  But no.  I really liked it.  Maybe even more than the last time I looked at it.  Distance does wonders.  So does reading something that spent a year in editing. 

That went well, but now I think it was at the detriment of the Firebird draft.  I'd read a few chapters, then start writing on my draft...then slow down in my typing...then re-read what I wrote and make a face...then force myself to finish off my thought...then go back and read another chapter of the dragon story to make myself feel better.  One was so good and the other was so bad.  But the good news is that I'm done with my re-read and I can go back to writing my terrible first draft without having to deal with the comparison.

The other half of all this, of course, are my reading projects.  It's fun to call them projects.  I've singed up for the 2016 Reading Challenge on Goodreads, with the goal to read 50 books this year.  This is a low estimate for me, but my challenges here are to (A) mark that I did read things on Goodreads, which I completely forgot to do last year, and (B) review 50 books here on the blog.  So this Thursday book review schedule is going to stick around.  I'm already ahead of the game with a few reviews scheduled to go up over the next few weeks. This gives me a cushion of time during which I'm going to try a longer book.  As you may know (or may not know because I don't talk about books I don't finish) I have an embarrassingly terrible track record finishing long books.  On my Kindle, there are a bunch of unstarted novels on the first few screens, and then the last screen is full of books, the dots showing their lengths stretching the width of the screen.  Those dots are filled in and heavy to the half way point, and then stretching thin and unfulfilled, marking the moment where I'd abandoned them.  But it's a new year and in this time of wild declarations of change and growth: I can finish that whole gross backlog!  I can and I will!  I know it!

The second challenge is just fun and pointless.  It's Reading Bingo! 

More specifically, it's "Retreat's Reading Bingo Challenge 2014," which was posted along with a YA board.  (You can check out mine in progress here so you can gloat over how much better you're doing than me.)  There are other reading bingo cards out there, but this one looks the most professional, so I set out to find "Retreat's Reading Bingo Challenge 2016."  A Google search produced Penguin Random House's Romance Book Bingo, posted in April of 2015.  This card comes with the unfulfilled promise, "We’ll be featuring printable, themed Bingo cards seasonally."  Now, I should point out that seasonal reading bingo cards excite me the way monthly writing challenges excite me, in that they make me want to put together a Tumblr or a Podcast and get a bunch of people to do it with me, except I don't have the time to do that kind of thing.  So I'm bummed there's not a series of seasonal bingo cards readily available for my use.  

I then had a Google-fu breakthrough and found the "Reading Bingo Challenge 2015," which--you guessed it!--is Canadian themed!

...

At this point I decided no bingo board could ever top that and (just like Random House Canada stopped making them) I stopped looking.

Has anyone else signed up for the Goodreads challenge?  What did you set as your goal?  Does anyone else now want to do this reading bingo and all other reading bingos ever?

No One Belongs Here More Than You Review

Over the tragic winter vacation, I finished No One Belongs Here More Than You, a book of short stories by Miranda July.  This was recommended to me by my friend Eric, who now has two gold stars.

My favorite story in this collection is about a woman who teaches swimming in her kitchen since she doesn't have access to a swimming pool.  Her students lie on the floor to practice their strokes.  They put their faces in bowls of water and turn their heads to breathe.

These stories are short, but their charm is in how much they pack into that space.  July presents moments--brief, brief moments--that fit into and highlight the larger story of the characters' lives.  When Eric recommended this collection, it was in the context of having an immediate problem in a plot, situated in a larger, more chronic problem that existed before the story begins and will continue to exist after the story ends.  The immediate problem affects he chronic one, changing it or how it's viewed, solving it or making it worse.  I started to think about how this concept comes up in my writing.  I hadn't given it much conscience thought, but it's always there.  Since I started thinking more actively about it, the idea was forefront during the outlining process of the Firebird Story.  We'll see if my thinking about it makes a difference or shows itself in any visible way.  This collection exemplifies this idea.  These stories are about a single moment, but with that moment they tell about the characters more generally.  When you look back on it, the incident itself turns blurry and the more chronic issue takes center stage as what the story is about.  And she does this with such minimal discussion of the greater problem that this is an achievement. 

July conveys her characters just as quickly and colorfully.  They have quirks, character traits, odd little thoughts that add spice enough that with just one, I know the character.

"Past a certain age, they give up on the name games, which is regrettable for someone like me who loves anything that involves going around a circle and saying something about yourself.  I wish there was a class where we could just keep going around the circle, around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves."

Oh, look!  I know so much about this narrator now.  I can picture this character perfectly.  She's one of those people who are secure in their identity and how it's expressed and shared, who like talking about themselves.  One of those people that like introduction games.  Personally, I hate introduction games with a burning passion, but maybe this works so well because it's so counter to my experience.  And that's another strange thing about this collection: looking back, I don't really like any of the narrators.  They have deep flaws that I wouldn't want to read about for more than a short story, but their flaws, their selfish or lazy or uncharitable or naive thoughts are presented so honestly that I have to respect their humanity, and that I can go along with them for the short story.

These are masterfully told.  They're odd and horrifying and quirky.  Thumbs up.