96 dB

The Laundry Files is quickly becoming my favorite sci/fi universe. The combination of computer geekery, theorem-based magic, James Bond-esque spy gadgets, Lovecraftian aliens, and hopeless bureaucracy is intoxicatingly fun, and Stross is very good at keeping things moving without ever getting predictable.

I enjoyed the heck out of The Fuller Memorandum. I liked it a lot better than The Jennifer Morgue, and it even edges out The Atrocity Archives to become my favorite entry in the series. It probably wouldn't work well as a standalone book, because it is jammed full of references to the first two books and the two excellent short-stories "Down on the Farm" and "Overtime" (both stories can be found for free online).

Great stuff!

This book consists almost entirely of transcribed (but unedited) tapes made by Lipsky, a Rolling Stone reporter, on a road trip with David Foster Wallace during the Infinite Jest reading tour. On the plus side, DFW is amazingly articulate, and his transcribed speech makes for better reading than many authors' written output. However, on the downside, there is no structure to the narrative. The result is a meandering mess and is probably of interest only to diehard DFW fans or readers curious about obscure literary authors dealing with sudden fame.

There are small pieces scattered throughout that are worthwhile. For example, in a rare bit of authorial contribution, Lipsky's explanation of DFW's suicide in the introduction makes sense to me, and it makes me very sad. Having read this, I'm rather interested to see if, 15 years after first reading it, Infinite Jest holds up for me on a reread, especially now that I know more about DFW himself.

This second volume of the Promethea comic is edgier than the first — for example, it adds a transexual element and an extended episode of tantric sex. The final chapter is an extremely clever rendering of the history of the universe through the structure of the tarot deck. I didn't love reading it, but I was blown away by the execution.

I'm not really that into the Buffy Season 8 comics, but I'm continuing to read them as they are collected in graphic-novel form. This entry is a bit better than some of the recent ones, but it still doesn't hold a candle to the television show.

A promising start.

I am a fan of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, so I expected to enjoy his take on the vampire novel.

Fevre Dream is set on the Mississippi river just before the Civil War, where an out-of-luck steamboat captain meets an odd stranger (a vampire) who makes him an offer he can't refuse. The novel follows their unlikely partnership over the next few years. Martin's vampires are a fairly run-of-the-mill mashup of various mythologies — they drink human blood and they live essentially forever, but sunlight burns them badly rather than immediately killing them, and religious artifacts have no effect on them.

The premise is good, and the arc is okay, but the plotting and storytelling are a little uneven. The end result is a minor work — enjoyable but not great.

I split reading this between my iPad and the hardcover edition. A touchscreen ebook reader is the ideal way to read David Foster Wallace, because definitions to the many words you don't quite know are only a fingerpress away, and navigating the footnotes (up to three layers deep) is so much easier with a "back" button. On the down side, the collection's final essay, "Host", is missing from the ebook because it relies on quirky (actually, rather annoying) formatting for the footnotes. So readers of the ebook are missing out on about 20% of the content. Yikes.

Anyway, I enjoyed several of these essays quite a lot. "The View From Mrs. Thompson's" is an insightful reflection on 9/11. The title essay, "Consider the Lobster" is an amusing and engaging exploration of the ethics of killing sentient creatures for food. "Up, Simba" yields insight into politics and the campaign trail via examples from McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. And the aforementioned "Host" reveals a lot about conservative talk radio without being judgmental.

It's a shame that there won't be any more essays from DFW. He is missed.

The sixth entry in A Series of Unfortunate Events is just as formulaic as the first five, but it's a winning formula. The laws of physics are stretched a bit further in this entry, but in amusing ways. We are given a glimpse of a connection between Lemony Snicket's beloved Beatrice and the Baudelaires' guardian, which deepens the overall mystery.

I wish the overall arc would move a bit more quickly, but this series is keeping Kevin's interest quite well.

Oh, and I laughed out loud at the Crying of Lot #49 reference.

I enjoyed the premise and the first fifty pages of Kraken quite a lot, but most of the middle of the novel is a mess of too many characters and viewpoints, wild abuses of the English language, and shaggy-dog plotting. The end ties things up as well as it can, but I was left cold. I was also frustrated that so many of the "rules" of the Kraken universe are revealed so late in the book. It isn't quite deus ex machina, but it's not satisfying.

China Mieville has a brilliantly warped imagination, and he put it good effect in Perdido Street Station and The Scar, but he falls short here. Of all his novels, Kraken is closest to Un Lun Dun in style, but what worked in a young-adult novel is a little too juvenile in an adult entry.

Also, in the same way Mieville overused the word "palimpsest" in Perdido Street Station, the overworked word here is "penumbra".

I quite enjoyed Cloud Atlas when I read it a few years ago, and I had been meaning to check out another of David Mitchell's novels. I'm glad that I've finally done so, and I'll certainly be going back for more.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is almost a straight historical novel. The action occurs in Dejima — a tiny port near Nagasaki, Japan — starting in 1799. It is a star-crossed love story, centered on the titular de Zoet (a Dutch clerk trying to make his fortune in trade with the Japanese) and Miss Aibagawa (the unmarried midwife he falls in love with). The viewpoint shifts from chapter to chapter, and the first clue to the viewpoint is the style of the date in the chapter heading (this took me a long time to figure out).

On a microscopic level, Mitchell succeeds at creating a "historical" dialogue style that feels old but isn't hard to read, with separate styles for Japanese speaking Dutch and vice versa, as well as Dutch speaking English and vice versa. On a more macro scale, the novel dips slightly into speculative fiction territory with some action revolving around an abbot who may be six hundred years old, but the setting and the primary characters are the focus, so it can easily be read as straight historical fiction. The main story arc is satisfying, though many questions remain about the abbot. I have heard that Mitchell may be planning to expand this novel into a trilogy, which would be welcomed.