I have been reading more of those paper things with all the pages. Some of them have pictures and some just have words.
THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is one of my biggest influences on my own work, but I realized last year that I've neglected her two most renowned works. When I was inhaling as much SF and fantasy as I could between the ages of 10 and 16, I had no problem with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert or Zelazny, but I just wasn't mature enough to appreciate Le Guin's SF work. Not enough swords and rayguns, I guess; the Le Guin stuff I read in those days was written for children, although I feel confident in saying that it's still more mature than the majority of Big Person Fantasy that is published today.
Like THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (to which this book can be seen as a very remote prequel), Le Guin has constructed THE DISPOSSESSED in the same careful way that a scientist designs an experiment. The book is structured in a way that will not only explore her themes, but to try to draw conclusions about them. Not only that, the structure of the book itself actually demonstrates the core of the book: the conflict between the linear and the circular. But that's not something you'll even notice unless you look for it, the book is so beautifully written and populated with such interesting characters. In this book Le Guin explores both politics and physics; a plausibly-functioning society of anarchists as well as the nature of time. No surprise that it won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and a nomination for the John W Campbell.
CHEWING ON TINFOIL, Joe Ollmann
A collection of short stories written and illustrated by Hoe Ollmann, ranging from the excellent to the competent.Aside from one entertaining divergence into magic realism, these are realist stories int he mode that comics people describe as 'slice-of-life'. Most of them are fictional, rather than than autobiographical, which surprised and pleased me. Ollmann's style is veyr prosey, but he does an excellent writing some very different characters, of different ethnicities, in different North American settings: a punker kid on a strawberry farm, an African-Canadian artist on a trip to hook up with a high school crush, a Jewish man who is 'favoured' with direct attention from the Divine. These stories these are all cleverly told and very well realized. The more autobio stuff (the amount of autobiography varies amongst stories, according to Ollmann's notes in the back) is generally a bit weaker tan the fiction, but it's well worth your time.
CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, Warren Ellis
This novel contains most of what you expect from Warren: tough punky girls, a protagonist who is unhealthy and damaged and yet still manages dish out his share of brutality, a slightly shocked obsession with outrageous sex acts, a fetish for wireless communication devices, and a number of digressive monologues from various degenerate bit players. The twin influences of Hunter S. Thompson and William Gibson hang heavily on this road-trip-with-aeroplanes story, but there's no mistaking it as anything but Ellis' work. While at times I wished Warren had made more than a token effort to make these American characters sound American, there is something hypnotic about the stylized Ellis-patter and I know that I, like many other long-time Ellis readers, employ rhythms myself.
CITY AND THE CITY, China Mieville
It's pretty much impossible to talk about this book without spoilers--although I've tried to keep the spoiling to one major point-- so the rest of this review is under the cut.
( Cut for spoilers )BLANKETS by Craig Thompson
I finally got around to reading Thompson's massive and massively-acclaimed autobio comics opus. The art is beautiful and the story moves along briskly for all its size, only dragging in one or two places. But I didn't care much for the teen-angst/first love story. A wonderful bit of storytelling but not a wonderful story, Thompson's deftness kept me reading to the end even though I lost interest in what was happening about halfway through. I can see what the hype was about, but it's not my thing.
Next reviewtime: THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN and plenty more.
-- JF
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