J.K. Rowling, Scholastic, 2007.

So, based upon
my predictions, I probably only got a C+ in Divination. Which is just as well.

Rowling managed to pull off a mostly satisfactory ending to the series. This last book abandons the leisurely pace of the previous two, and kicks into high gear right off. It accelerates from there.

I enjoyed the resolution to the Snape Question, which I thought was at least plausible within the framework that was set up. The tying up of the loose ends with regards to Horicruxes was satisfying. The body count was about what I expected, although Rowling toyed with us in a few cases. The disposition of Dobby and Kreacher and the house elves worked well, and felt like the groundwork had been well laid over the course of the previous books. The whole kerfuffle with the Elder Wand and how it plays out, on the other hand, is a little out of left field. We didn’t have much background from previous books to help with that.

I find that I have some dissatisfaction in retrospect; things that didn’t bother me while I was reading the book feel unsettled later. Some of the deaths were kept emotionally distant, or even rushed over — Harry sees bodies laid out on tables, and that’s pretty much it. Obviously, he’s got other issues at hand, but we don’t ever come back to experience any of the feelings. I would have liked the story to come closer to full circle with the Durstleys. But my strongest objections both involve scenes in train stations: the expository segment in the latter part of the Battle of Hogwarts didn’t feel right to me. We needed the information, but the circumstances felt forced. Again, I understand why the other train station scene was necessary, but the thought it generated more than any was “damn, what a bunch of breeders!”

Perhaps I’ll do what Karl’s doing, and re-read the whole series. If I do, I’ll write more, and probably with much less vague avoidance of spoilers.

Budd Schulberg, Vintage Books, 1990 (originally published 1941)

The story of obnoxious, hyper-competitive, and ambitious Sammy Glick(stein)’s rise from child of the tenements to the head of a major Hollywood studio is a familiar one. Glick embodies the entitled, egotism that we see everywhere, the ends-justify-the-means machinations, and the casual disregard for everyone unless they can be used for advancement.

The tale of Glick’s rise is interwoven the explosive growth of the studio system, along with the early development of the Screenwriter’s Guild. It’s a quick, engaging novel, filled with betrayals, triumphs, and backstabbery. The characters are familiar too, we’ve all dealt with Glicks and their victims, whether on campus or in a corporation.

The copy I read (thanks Karl!) contains not only the novel of What Makes Sammy Run?, but the two short stories from which the novel evolved, as well as an afterword written by Schulberg in 1989. The short stories are interesting views into how the novel was developed, but the afterword is even more revealing. Schulberg writes of the surprise of the book’s success, how it was simultaneously attacked as being Communist and being counter-revolutionary, and how it led him to a fist-fight with John Wayne on the beaches of Puerto Vallerta. He talks about his alienation from the Communist party, and offers a defense for his role as a friendly witness for the House Committee on Unamerican Activity.

Most poignantly, he writes of Sammy Glick’s evolution from a repugnant character to a role model in the forty some odd years since publication (or rather, how our American attitudes have shifted). He cites various late Reagan-era examples of how America has become a nation of entitled, self-important Glicks and Glickettes. He ends with the dire warning that the Sammy of the 21st century may end up making the Sammy of the 20th look like an eagle scout.

Viriconium by M. John Harrison, 2005, Bantam Books.

Consider a vast triangle. At one vertex stands one of the better authors of “great quest” science fiction or fantasy, perhaps J.R.R. Tolkien, or maybe Dan Simmons after a degree in Art History. At the next vertex, stands Mervyn Peake, with his cast of grotesques and desperate characters in their fantastic, crumbling, and endless decaying stronghold. The last vertex is simultaneously occupied by Angela Carter and Samuel R. Delaney, although they coexist in orthogonal dimensions, and are only vaguely aware of one another (via nebulous signs, strange dreams, and through the oddly resonant rituals that the villagers observe).

Somewhere near the center of this triangle lies Harrison’s sprawling poisoned wastelands, ruins, and evershifting city of Viriconium with its heros, artists, murderers and thieves.

The copy I read (thanks Peter!) comprises the three Viriconium novels The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, and In Viriconium, and a collection of short stories. The collection has several distinct voices, and could conceivably have been written by different writers about a common thematic place. Characters show up in one story, and reappear in another — but are they the same person? Is it the cyclic nature of history we’re seeing? Are we in parallel universes? Places seem more constant than people (excluding perhaps Cellur the Birdmaker), although even places seem to shift location between stories.

Viriconium takes a few tropes of science fiction and fantasy, and weaves them in new and unexpected ways. Evidently, the ordering of the books and stories varies by edition, however in this copy, the tale starts in The Pastel City with what appears a fantasy setting which quickly reveals itself to be a distant post-apocalyptic science fiction world. From there, it evolves into a nearly opaque, disturbing, profound, and often absurd exploration of the nature of reality/realities in A Storm of Wings, and winds up with an equally absurd delving into courtly politics, artistic cliques, disease, and hooligan god-children in In Viriconium. In the short stories, many of these themes, places, and characters are revisited. Some are like fairy-tales, telling of people dealing with their destinies (e.g., “The Lamia & Lord Cromis”) others are tiny windows into a presumptively vast historical sweep (e.g., “Lords of Misrule”), while still others illustrate of village life and rituals in the shadow of a great city or ruminate on the significance of art.

Unfortunately, these few adjectives do the stories themselves no justice.

Harrison’s writing conveys a very strong sense of place, and is some of the more geological writing I’ve read. You can’t help but get a feel for the physical structure of the land, mutable as it is. The city of Viriconium too is imbued with a great presence, if not geography, and everything — city, land, society — is rich with barely imagined or imaginable history.

Harrison also has an exceptional vocabulary. I found myself consulting the dictionary on many pages, and discovering words like baize, catafalque, cinereous, costermonger, etiolate, gamboge, hispid, lazar, nacreous, osier, peneplain, phthisis, planish, saveloy, sempiternal, serac, and whin.

Laurence Sterne, 1759-1769. Read as a Gutenberg Project e-book, downloaded via manybooks.net.

I once had a co-worker (hi, Bob!), for whom completing an anecdote or telling a full story was an impossible task. Each new detail necessitated a digression, from which several tangents emerged, and so on, ad infinitum. We used to torment him by interrupting with nerdy / computer-science cries of “Pop the stack, Bob! Heap overflow!”

This is also the main thematic joke of Tristram Shandy, where, in telling us his life story, Tristram fills up three volumes getting up to his own birth, and then never really gets back to his own story with the exception of a mixed-up journey across France much later in his life. Life and Opinions is light on the life, and heavy on the opinions. We learn about his theories of many things, we overhear many conversations about religious, political, and military philosophy, and witness events reminiscent of Rabelais, but we’re too busy with these diversions to get much of his personal story.

Tristram has more to offer, though, than its (sometimes tiresome) tangents. Tristram’s amusing comments to the critics stand out, as do his grandiose opinions of his own literary prowess and techniques. However, overall, it’s the characters of Uncle Toby and his interactions with Tristram’s father Walter that make the work. Both men are peculiar, outrageous, and yet oddly believable, and their interactions can be surprisingly touching.

As with many of the older works I’ve read, Tristram suffers somewhat from what I call
Shakespeare/Bible Copycat Syndrome (in which a work so widely imitated and quoted that the original seems clichéd).

In what should give hope to those of us who are getting older and accomplishing less than we’d hoped, Sterne started writing this humorous, meandering tale when he was 45. Nine volumes and ten years later, he’d completed one of the great works of English humor. So there’s still hope for us.

You Can’t Win, by Jack Black, 1926, reprinted by Nabat Press, 2000.

This is an interesting, conflicted, tripartite book. It’s an autobiography of a hobo and burglar, a jailbird, and a reform activist. The book starts as a good-natured telling of how Black left home, and became a hobo. We follow him as he gets caught up in the seamier side of life away from home, and how, ostensibly, through misunderstandings, he came to fall fully on the wrong side of the law. The arc continues through opium addiction, prison, abuse, and ends in reform and moral outrage.

The first part of the telling is a light, almost romantic adventure. The young man goes off, has adventures in the city, then starts to ride the rails. Sure, there’s danger, there’s police and railyard bulls to avoid, there’s even sudden death from shifting cargo, but the telling is almost with the exuberance of youth. Black encounters other hobos, who welcome him into the family, teach him the argot, and start showing him the ropes.

From here, the tale darkens. Black apprentices himself out to be a burglar, and the situations get more perilous. Friends get killed; Black gets into and out of prison. Still, the tale is rip-roaring adventure: now a member of the brotherhood of thieves, Black introduces us to a cast of wild characters. He describes to us the great hobo gatherings, with their camaraderie and drunken abandon. He details many hair-raising exploits of burglary and safe breaking.

The latter part of the book involves a lot more prison, betrayal, and drug addiction. It still has elaborate capers of theft and jailbreak, but now Black has suffered under the system. Authority is now beating him down, and he responds with wantonness and violence. In the end, there is kindness and reform.

The book is particularly intriguing in the shift of tone throughout the book. There is definite pride in the exploits, even if the words condemn his actions. The latter parts of the book are quite bitter, and the emotions are contradictory — Black blames the cruel neglect and abuse of society for making him into a monster, yet he also happily admits that he never had any interest in becoming part of society or behaving in a way that society would accept. This is what makes the book more than just a personal journey or a thriller; we experience the world from Black’s perspective, seeing hypocrisies in both the society with which he’s in conflict, and in his antisocial lifestyle.