Nethermore

I briefly met Daniel Abraham along with Tobias Buckell at the 2005 World Fantasy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin. Both were two new authors for Tor books. Their first novels were yet to be released. However the beautiful covers of their books adorned the wall at the Tor party, and there sitting beneath one of them were the two authors, chatting with party goers and just generally enjoying themselves. Both seemed like really down-to-earth guys.

At WorldCon in Anaheim, I attended a kaffeklatsch with Jim Frenkel, the Tor editor responsible for bringing Terry Goodkind to press. Jim couldn’t recommend Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer highly enough.

A Shadow in Summer has one of the best prologues I’ve ever read, reminding me of some of Orson Scott Card’s strong early works. It stands alone as a story in and of itself. Read this prologue if you happen to have a little time in a bookstore. I’m only sorry that the relationships and emotion of the prologue never returned full circle to affect the climax of the book all that much. Although there are a few tie-ins, the ending didn’t build enough on the prologue. This was somewhat disappointing because there was so much opportunity for the beginning to strengthen and amplify the ending.

The inciting moment of the book happens near the middle, and the rest of the book is about what the different characters do in reaction to what happens. The weakness to this plot form was not in the structure itself, but in the handling of the defining moment. Abraham didn’t draw enough dots for this reader to connect everything until the characters started discussing what happened, and even then, things remained a little bit nebulous.

Character motivations seemed at times trite, as if Abraham developed roles instead of characters. Some of their reasons for doing things felt more like they were forced on the characters rather than being outgrowths of their own character. Nevertheless, there are some hard choices that characters have to make in this book and some actions and motivations that were very painful and believable. These things left me still thinking about the book days after I had finished it. I especially loved reading about the witty and conniving andat Seedless.

As far as content, there’s more drama than action–and that’s the brilliance of the narrative, that it held my attention without being boring. Also the world is well-crafted and immersive, with a strong eastern feel. It’s good. It’s a strong first novel. And it’s worth reading.

Many of you know I’m beefing up on my knowledge of the history of New York City. So I was pleased to find out that Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, published a book last year about the history of New York City, as seen through the oyster.

This book works great as a quick overview of the history of the city. When the Dutch arrived, the Indians were already harvesting and eating the oysters in the estuaries and rivers surrounding Manhattan. The natives piled up big heaps of oyster shells, called oyster middens, created wampum from the shells by drilling holes in them and hanging them from string, and even covered their dead in the shells.

I don’t know if Kurlansky intended this, but I gained a greater appreciation for American culture after reading the book. For the first time, I was able to see the roots of many of the American traditions and practices that are known the world over. Many people think Americans are uncultured cowboys who eat too much. This book uncovers the roots of these cultural descriptions.

Through the course of the book, I saw how New York City changed from a frontier town to one of the greatest cities on the planet. At first, NYC emulated European culture and cooking, trying to prove to the world that she could hold her own as a city. But as time progressed, the roles began a flip flop. Soon it was the French and British who were trying to emulate many of the traditions and recipes of the New Yorkers.

Speaking of recipes, Kurlansky’s penchant for antiquated recipes on how to cook oysters was the least interesting part of the book for me. Maybe it’s because I’m really not interested in reading instruction manuals or cookbooks for pleasure. But if I were researching how oysters were prepared and eaten through the ages, this book would have plenty of interesting tidbits. Truth to tell, I skipped most of these. However, I guess it really wouldn’t be a Kurlansky book without them.

Overall, this book was very enjoyable, a good read, and very recommended. Incidentally, it provided several small historical details that I was able to include in my latest short story. The long bibliography in the back has already provided more books for me to research, including a book published in the 1920s called The Gangs of New York.

I just finished Shadow of the Giant, which I’d been planning on reading for over a year now but didn’t get around to until a co-worker loaned me the audio book.

Shadow of the Giant is the fourth and last book in Orson Scott Card’s “Bean” books, a four-book series that begins with Ender’s Shadow, a parallel book that happens simultaneously with Ender’s Game. Rumor has it that there is another book in the works, tentatively titled Shadows in Flight, which will pick up at the end of Children of the Mind (Ender #4) and tie the Ender series and the Bean series together.

First of all, this is not a bad book, especially in audio form. Card’s easy-to-read style lends itself well to reading it out loud, and the actors hired for the performance are top notch.

The only reader I didn’t like was used for Petra’s viewpoint—however, I don’t know in this case if it was the actress herself, the reading of the character, or Petra’s character that grated on my nerves. Petra seems overly whiny, and since she is the character that bolts this last book together, the novel feels overly sappy. Several times I felt an emotional response equal to what was happening in the book. This is okay. What irritated me was that the emotional responses came in Petra’s viewpoint. This speaks of Card’s ability in writing since I didn’t care much for Petra at all, but I was still involved emotionally with the story.

The main story arc involves the members of Ender’s jeesh who are left behind to deal with a post-Formic-war earth. Each nation who “owns” a former battle schooler has put these war heroes to work in setting up plans for conquering and domination. Shadow of the Giant is the story of how Peter Wiggin and the Ministry of Colonization use the battle schoolers to create a world government called the Free Peoples of Earth, with the Hegemon as its figurehead.

The politics in the book are largely believable and interesting. The drawback in the book, again, is Petra and Bean’s storyline as they scour the earth for their missing test-tube babies. While somewhat interesting, this storyline left me feeling as if the characters were over-reacting in most instances.

Readers familiar with the Ender books will recognize throwbacks to the final chapters of Ender’s Game and Card’s interstitial short story, “Investment Councilor,” which takes place in between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, and chronicles the origins of the A.I. named Jane and her first contact with Ender Wiggin.

Fans of the Bean books will enjoy Shadow of the Giant. It’s fast-paced, interesting, and written in Card’s characteristic sparse and enjoyable style. There’s not a lot of meat to the book, however, and it left me wishing I had spent that time re-reading Card’s better books like Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow.

***Spoiler Warning: I’ve tried to keep from spoiling surprises in the following review. However, in discussion of the story, there may still be spoilers. Read at your own risk.***

I spent Thursday evening watching The DaVinci Code with a friend of mine who really enjoyed the book and the movie. She suggested I update the blog more often so she’ll have something to do at work. This one’s for you.

I’ve been trying to figure out which I liked better: the movie or the book. Usually I can tell hands down which version of a story I like more (usually the book) but in the case of The DaVinci Code, I’d have to say that the book and the movie were both similarly entertaining. The movie didn’t suffer from the book’s biggest flaws, and vice versa. In other words, the book is better because the movie was made, and the movie is better having previously read the book.

In my opinion, the biggest flaw of the book was Brown’s methods of manipulating the reader by hiding the truth of certain plot elements. Most-appalling among these tricks was his use of viewpoint characters. Later in the book, you discover that two of his viewpoint characters are actually the same person. If an author can pull this off without the reader feeling jerked around, then it’s a successful technique indeed.

I felt like Brown was toying with me. I rarely get mad at authors, but this genuinely ticked me off. As I reader, I like feeling smart. I like guessing 90% of the twists and then being surprised by the other 10%. Brown’s trick made me feel dumb because I had considered what he might be doing with the viewpoints but dismissed it offhand with the naïve thought, “No self-respecting writer would do that.” Well, Brown did it.

Despite that, I still enjoyed the book.

And the movie fixed that problem with the viewpoints, mostly because of the way film as a medium works. They never showed the villain from his own viewpoint until the moment that it’s revealed the viewer who the villain is.

For some, the big-budget documentary-style infodumps about the Crusades and the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail might make this movie seem a little long and boring. For those of us who like documentaries, the information comes across in a fun and entertaining way. I enjoyed these historical asides as much as I enjoyed them in the book. However, the amount of info given in the movie made me wonder if the viewer who has not also read the book might get confused about particular points of the plot. I don’t know any other way the filmmaker’s could’ve gotten across this information without making the movie even longer.

The filmmakers did a great job of speeding up the action to match movie pacing. Brown’s books have good pacing anyway, but there was one scene in particular that was way too long in the book. Langdon and Neveu are escaping the Louvre. In the book, the pair take several scenes to escape, in the which they discuss history and symbolism. In the movie, the escape it achieved in one well-placed cut. Brilliant.

There were a few other places where the book was trimmed, if not so well as the scene just mentioned. However, in each case I could see why the filmmaker’s chose to do what they did, and the cuts didn’t bother me too much.

The flaw of the book that was perpetuated in the movie was the Setups and Payoffs of the treasure hunt. The keys to the scavenger hunt were reliant upon knowledge that the characters have but that the readers may have never seen before in their lives.

For example, when Robert Langdon looks at the numbers scrawled on the floor of the Louvre, he says, “Oh my gosh, she’s right! It’s the Fibonacci sequence!” Am I as a reader/viewer supposed to hit my head and say, “Duh! Why didn’t I see that earlier?”

Most satisfying payoffs come when the reader realizes that they didn’t see the solution earlier, but—having now seen the solution—can look back and see all the steps leading up to it. Maybe Brown’s use of information never before revealed is a staple of the thriller genre, in which I’m not widely read.

The movie’s Bishop Aringarosa had simplified—and more powerful—motives. In addition, the screenwriters created a better motive for Bezu Fache, which was a lot more realistic and engaging than the paper-thin motives attributed to him in the book.

On this point, I began to notice that most of the liars and hypocrites and villains in the movie had been twisted by corrupt forms of religion to become the monsters that they were. It’s this kind of self-serving portrayal of religious people that sheds bad light on those people who believe but are not fanatical in their belief.

Granted, religion misused will—and has—twisted individuals to commit terrible crimes. The Crusades and suicide bombers are two extreme examples. But it seems that Hollywood thinks that religion is the only thing that can twist a person, turning a blind eye to the things that will twist you more quickly and more surely—like the misuse of wealth, power, and fame. Fanaticism can turn anything into a “religion” that will corrupt. The ideology of Hitler and other leaders shows that the twisting can be any belief, not just religious. And our own political climate right now shows that a belief and faith in one political party or another is equally as scary and wrong as the religious zealots who commit crimes in the name of their gods.

I did like that—contrary to their relationship in the book—Langdon and Teabing provided great foils for one another. Teabing fell on the side of Christ being an ordinary man. Langdon wanted to keep the possibility open that Christ was more than just a man. This little exchange of opinions helped balance the movie out in showing two sides of the religious conflict.

But Langdon’s own opinions in the move provide evidence that even if the secret of the Holy Grail were revealed to the world, it wouldn’t have the earth-shattering, Catholic-crushing consequences suggested by the “history” presented. A religion that has revered Christ as a God for almost 2000 years isn’t going to be easily swayed by a bunch of historical documents. And even if it was, it wouldn’t be as instantaneous as the movie suggests. Scientists and scholars would have to translate and catalogue and dissect and postulate for decades, and they would never come to a consensus. Every historian would have a different opinion and different pieces of the documents to support their own claims.

Look at the Dead Sea scrolls. They were discovered over 50 years ago, and scientists are still debating about their significance.

But in pontificating about these questions, I’m ignoring things of deeper and more-lasting significance.

For examples, the locales in the movie—down to the Louvre bathroom—were just as I imagined them while reading the book, probably because I’m somewhat familiar with most of the locations Brown chose. And Roslin in Scotland—now that’s a place I could live out the rest of my days.

The best part of the movie was the jump scene. You’ll know it when you get there. It left me breathless. I’ve never unintentionally gasp-grunted in during movie because I was surprised. But my breath was short, and my heart racing after this little bit of film trickery. I loved it. Best jump scene I’ve ever experienced.