Short Book Reviews #3
A Practical Guide to The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Fiction
A Practical Guide to Evil series
by ErraticErratica
(A web serial that completed a few years ago. One of the funniest and most genre-loving and genre-subverting works of fantasy I’ve ever read.)
This may be my single favorite series of all time.
It’s long (seven books, about three million words total, or three times as long as the Harry Potter series).
Imagine a world where tropes possess the same kind of truth as physical law: where a cackling villain always fails at the end when the hero beats them, where pulling a sword from a stone literally gives you the right to rule a country.
Welcome to Calernia, the continent on which The Practical Guide is set.
Of course, all these tropes tend towards a single result: the heroes win, and the villains lose. It doesn’t matter how clever the villain was, how powerful or how prepared. The heroes always win and live happily ever after, and the villains always curse them as they fail.
In A Practical Guide to Evil, the villains have noticed this, and they are not happy about it. They’ve learned. They’ve adapted.
And our plucky YA protagonist, orphan Catherine Foundling, has thrown in her lot with them, because an Evil ruler is at least better than an incompetent one.
Contains: Undead suicide goats, an orc who continuously loses limbs, the creation of the Noble House of Lesser Footrest, a sullen wench, and an extremely thirsty bisexual main character.
Monk and Robot series
by Becky Chambers
(A couple short little sci-fi novels about a monk in a solarpunk, post-industrial world that I found because a reader quoted a passage of it to me.)
Sibling Dex isn’t satisfied with their life as a member of the priesthood of Alallae, God of Small Comforts, so they become a travelling tea monk, going from town to town with a tea cart and offering a kind ear (and tea) to strangers. When they find themselves still yearning for the wilderness, they travel out beyond civilization, only to meet a robot descendant of humanity’s factory age.
Dex and the Robot talk about life and meaning and purpose, finding common ground in their respective quests as they travel together.
Contains: lots of solar panels, quiet conversations in the midst of searching for what one thinks will give one’s life meaning, and a quiet sense of comfort in the everyday.
Starport
by George R. R. Martin and Raya Golden
(A graphic novel about a near-future Chicago in which aliens have arrived and set up a starport.)
As far as worldbuilding goes, Starport is pretty on-point. There are lots of aliens, and they all come with their own culture, language, look, etc. The graphic novel doesn’t spend a lot of time on exposition and it doesn’t need to; it just drops you right in the middle of things and gets going.
An alien envoy is murdered, and it’s the Chicago PD’s responsibility to find the murderer, as they navigate the alien cultures they’re suddenly living next to. The cops in the department fill out a stereotypical police department nicely: there’s the captain who’s too old for this shit, the enthusiastic new guy, the hard-ass woman, and so on.
If you’re a fan of sci-fi graphic novels, you could do a lot worse than Starport. You could do a lot better, too.
Contains: Hundreds of people named Buddy, the honor of the violet Nhar, sexy discretion shots, that one cop no one wants to be partnered with, and probably some social commentary that went over my head.
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
(A novel about the ‘lost generation’ between World Wars 1 and 2. Honestly pretty boring, although I think that might be the point.)
Jake is a journalist living as an American expat in Europe between the world wars. He drinks a lot and has a lot of coffee and has some friends and they go fishing and watch a bullfight and nothing much changes or happens and there’s a sense of malaise that none of them can shake.
There, now you don’t have to read the novel.
More seriously, the first third of the book was just boring; it only picked up once they got to the bullfighting and the fiesta, and even then there wasn’t really a plot or even a point to any of it. Stuff just happened, the characters reacted to it, and then they carried on the next day.
Also, Hemingway is allergic to syllables. I was paying attention, and I only spotted a single five-syllable word in the entire story, and it was a compound word. I think it might have been ‘underprovisioned’, but I’m not sure.
Contains: so much drinking, British slang, animal cruelty in the form of bullfighting and fishing, and plenty of slurs about black people and Jews you’re not allowed to use any more.
The Pearl
by John Steinbeck
Based on a Mexican folktale, The Pearl tells the story of Kino, his wife Juana, and their baby Coyotito. It was a gripping morality tale of greed, desperation, and the lengths a person will go to for riches and family.
Kino is a pearl-diver on the Mexican coast, and one day discovers the Pearl of the World - the largest and most beautiful pearl anyone’s ever seen. It represents wealth, safety, security, and a future for his family - notably, Kino dreams of his son growing up knowing how to read.
But everyone wants the pearl, and they’re willing to go to monstrous lengths to get it. People hound Kino and his family. There’s violence. The pearl-buyers collude to cheat Kino out of the pearl, forming a monopoly when they should be in competition. Danger lurks all around them. Jealousy and envy and greed follow the pearl like remoras, attaching themselves to Kino and his family and refusing to let go. Hope for a better life wars with fear at the depths humans will sink to in pursuit of it.
I found The Pearl to be every inch a classic, and a quick read at less than 100 pages.
Contains: The Song of the Family, copious references that made me think of the One Ring, a scorpion sting, the dark side of human nature, violence, death, a compelling portrayal of someone who isn’t stupid but isn’t literate either.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
(To briefly address the elephant in the room, yes, Gaiman got cancelled recently. He appears to have behaved quite badly, although I have far from a complete understanding of his actions. However, as a friend remarked in conversation recently, there’s no rule that says that bad people can’t create good art. I got this book from the library.)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is an incredible book. Really. It does that thing, the one thing everyone agrees that art should do even if no one can agree on what art is, exactly, which is: make you Feel Things.
A middle-aged man, back in the town he grew up in for a funeral, wanders down to the end of the lane, where a pond resides at the old Hempstock farm that his childhood friend Lettie called an Ocean. There he remembers, for what feels like the first time, what happened when he was 7 - the creatures from beyond reality that intruded on his childhood and the sacrifices made to send them away.
The novel captures what it’s like to be a child in a way that few stories can: the limitations, the fears, the helplessness, but also the bravery and meaning-making that children do when confronted with the unknown. It’s sad and scary and wondrous and occasionally heartwarming but always, always honest, vivid in its imagery and beautiful in its prose.
Contains: cute kitties, violence against children, creatures from beyond this reality, old people, parents not getting it, a child not getting it, suicide, being afraid of the dark, and an Ocean in a bucket.
Kill Or Be Killed
by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
(A graphic novel series about a maybe-mentally-ill grad student who starts a vigilante killing spree.)
I didn’t know what to expect going into this, except that it seemed interesting and the art looked good.
It wound up being perhaps the best graphic novel series I’ve read since Sandman. Not as good as that, certainly, but damn good nonetheless.
Dylan is a troubled grad student, somewhat obsessed with how evil and unjust the world is, and a failed suicide attempt triggers something within him. Driven by a literal demon - or at least his hallucination of a literal demon - he decides to purge the world of evil, one kill at a time.
The series is grounded throughout, with realistic characters, good dialogue, musings on philosophy and the world, self-aware narration, and low-key gorgeous art. It explores themes of morality, mental illness, and justice with nuance and grace.
My only caveat is that Dylan very much buys into the ‘the world is crap and people are evil’ meme, in ways where he’s factually wrong (like most people who buy into the meme, he thinks things along the lines of ‘greedy corporations are ruining the environment’, without ever actually doing any research or reading the IPCC reports).
In any case, if you’re looking for a graphic novel with a gripping story and complex themes with gorgeous artwork, I’d highly recommend this one.
Contains: lots of violence, sex, drugs, swearing, mental illness, rants about how the world is terrible, mentions of pedophilia and child abuse. Most of my ‘contains’ segments are sarcastic, and meant as something of a joke; this one is serious.
Nonfiction
The World According To Star Wars
by Cass Sunstein
(A reasonably-sized beginner-level exploration of a variety of topics, from constitutional law to biases to morality, using the star wars movies as a framing device. Suffers somewhat from having been written before episode IX came out.)
Cass Sunstein’s expertise is in constitutional law and the heuristics and biases literature, and here he uses Star Wars to discuss those topics, along with others ranging from social movements and how popularity works to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth.
It didn’t really have much to teach me, but I’ve read other books on similar topics. Perhaps the one big thing it emphasized was how unlikely Star Wars was to become such a huge part of our culture, in foresight. Very few people predicted its popularity; most were convinced it was weird nonsense.
In terms of talking about Star Wars, the book does a decent job, although it’s much kinder to the Sequel trilogy than I’m inclined to be.
Contains: opining on fathers and sons, many tales from the life of George Lucas, and many comparisons involving the force and various world religions.
The Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D
by David Kushner and Koren Shadmi (Illustrator)
(A nonfiction graphic novel about the invention and impact of Dungeons and Dragons. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a game based on cooperative storytelling where one person creates a setting and the players create characters in that setting.)
I learned a lot from this quick read - it’s a small window into a part of popular culture, combined with a story about a company and the people that founded it.
Dungeons and Dragons grew out of old war games, scenarios where history buffs and game nerds would re-fight the battles of the American Civil War with figurines and paper and rulesets. Gygax, along with a few other key figures, reimagined the games from being about soldiers and cavalry to being about individuals and changed the setting from historical to fantastical.
The company that Gygax started, TSR, was originally successful but couldn’t keep up following D&D’s slew of competitors and imitators, becoming known more for suing other companies than creating works of its own. It was eventually bought by Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic: The Gathering.
The tale is another in the line of more famous stories like the founding of Facebook or Apple, where founders and the people around them started out friends and became enemies as large amounts of money and fame became involved.
The graphic novel also touches on the satanic panic of the 1980s, where a bunch of dumb people thought D&D was somehow evil for stupid reasons. Stranger Things, the Netflix show, also shows some of this.
All in all, it was a quick and informative read that substantially updated me towards favoring the utility of graphic novels as a nonfiction format.
Contains: explanations of nerd culture, the interaction between roleplaying games and computer games, and some questionably-illustrated dragons.
Yes, Please!
by Amy Poehler
(This is Poehler’s memoir, written circa 2014. She’s the actress who played Leslie Knope on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation. I picked it up at a used bookstore based on a friend’s recommendation.)
Amy Poehler is someone who, while not exactly being an A-list movie star, is most definitely a Hollywood staple. She was on SNL for a while, had her own hit sitcom, and appeared in multiple movies.
Her memoir, Yes, Please! is not spectacularly well-written. Poehler is very good at comedy but not exactly literary; she uses a lot of short, choppy sentences and generally writes like the words are crawling out of her brain onto the page.
That being said, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. You get to here about her improv days as a part of the UCB, which really underline just how much work goes into a career. Poehler is about as successful as it gets for a comedic actor in Hollywood, and that success came from genuine hard work and more than a little luck. She put in the time doing shows on a shoestring budget; she was not an instant star.
Poehler also talks a lot about her childhood and her children, which I found less interesting. Her experiences as a woman, both in Hollywood and in general, were much more engaging to me, as well as (of course) all the little celebrity anecdotes.
All in all, if you’re familiar with her work and curious about the person behind it, you might find the book worth your time. It’s an honest account of a person and a career, and Poehler doesn’t hold back from showing you that she’s a regular human being, warts and all.
Contains: Pictures of Poehler as a child, sex advice, tales from a starving artist about a shitty New York apartment, references to how great Will Arnett is, and not getting the pudding.