While we are reading a lot of poetry in WR 222, which is not usually on my reading list, it had me thinking about what I do normally read, what is typically my reading tastes, and what I’ve read over the last few months. Here then, as best I can remember, is what I’ve read in the last three months:
For the last few days I’ve re-readd Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson and The Olympians” series and the follow-up “The Heroes of Olympus” series, though I am only up to book four of the later. I started re-reading them because book five had come out and I had never gotten to reading book four and couldn’t entirely remember how the story had gone. They are not the best young adult fiction I’ve read (Lloyd Alexander’s “The Chronicles of Prydain” would be that) nor are they the best written (J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books are even more impressive technically when you re-read them and realize the levels of foreshadowing and multiple levels of narrative that stretches across the series) but Riordan still writes a very enjoyable series and presents some very interesting, very human, very amusing takes on Greek and Roman mythological figures. Sadly, I do not expect the books to stand up over time, partly because of the number of pop culture references that show up in the series (I do not expect twenty years from now that twelve-year olds will understand references to “The Walking Dead” for example).
Max Brook’s “World War Z” got read, re-read, and re-read again during the summer. While the movie bearing the same name was a disappointingly forgettable summer action flick, the book is a rather unique literary creation. I don’t quite know how to describe it, it isn’t exactly an epistolary novel but that is about as close as I can think of to describe it. The novel consists of a very light framework, the unnamed narrator explaining what the following is, and then tells the story of a zombie apocalypse in the format of interviews with survivors. It does, far more than any other zombie themed book or movie has in years, return the zombie genre back to what it was in “Night of the Living Dead”, ultimately a story about people and how they cope. It is impressive both in terms of how it captures a wide cross-section of humanity, and the way it believably develops and depicts the crisis, but also in the relatively unique way that it delivers the narrative. During the summer term, the draft of a novel I wrote for the Genre Fiction class took inspiration from the format and style of this novel.
The best non-fiction book I’ve read for a while was Anthony Doerr’s “Four Seasons in Rome”. It was assigned reading for the summer study-abroad trip, but after I got a few pages into it I would have kept reading even if it hadn’t been assigned. I already wrote about it twice (one & two), but the book is a memoir about Doerr’s personal experience spending a year in Rome on a writing fellowship with his wife had their newborn twins. The way he described Rome, the language he used in talking about the city, and the personal way it affected him and his writing, all made for a very powerful and very interesting work of creative non-fiction. Especially as I was reading it just before heading to Rome myself. I recently picked up his first short story collection, ‘The Shell Collector”, just to read more of his style of prose.
I’ve only gotten a few pages into “The Republic of Thieves” by Scott Lynch. It is a fantasy novel starring a thief and con-man known as Locke Lamora. The third book in a series, the first of which was “The Lies of Locke Lamora”, I’ve been waiting for it to come out in paperback for a while. It was delayed for several years after the second book in the series came out, from what I understand part of that was due to changes in the authors life. While I can’t give an opinion of the third book yet, I will say that the first one was the literary equivalent of an excellent heist movie. Fast-paced, jumping around in time, with an unreliable narrator who is pulling a con on the reader from page one, it was the sort of book that you have a hard time setting down because it never slows down. It manages to keep from getting monotonous with changes of perspective, and jumps in time to reveal backstory and history, but the simple and direct prose style keeps the story flowing along and keeping you from realizing how late you are staying up reading it. I don’t think that style worked as well with the second book, “Red Seas Under Red Skies” partly because the reader was already inoculated against it after the first book, if you know the narrator is unreliable you start out not trusting them and the “reveal” at the end of the con is just not as satisfying an experience if you come into the story expecting it.
While Joe Abercrombie basically redefined “grimdark” fantasy with his “The First Law” trilogy, I find that as much as I enjoyed that series I prefer Richard K Morgan’s “A Land Fit For Heroes” series. Both of them are atypical fantasy stories, with atypical heroes. The first hero you meet in Abercrombie’s series begins by loosing a fight, tumbling off a cliff to be presumed dead by his friends, and then staggering back to his abandoned camp with his first concern being finding footwear and then a cooking pot. Realistic, brutal, and entirely not in the typical trope of heroic victories or noble deeds. Morgan’s hero begins in a graveyard, a former hero grown older and turned into something of a tourist attraction in a crappy small town on the edge of nowhere, rusty in combat, and then called upon by his mother to find a relative sold into slavery and only reluctantly recruited at that because he is gay which is a near intolerable crime in their society. Neither hero fits the typical archetype of young, dashing, spotless, heroic, or unsoiled. Both are seedy, brutal people who are pragmatic and ruthless in their pursuit of getting the job done. Both exist in worlds that are imperfect, not because of an implacable evil on the horizon but because the world is full of humans and humanity is more monstrous than the monsters are.
That is just a rough list, off of the top of my head. I also read pulp westerns over the summer (“Slocum” or “Longarm” or “Gunsmith” serial ones), romance novels (by Courtney Milan, Stephanie Laurens, and Mina Shay), other young adult books (re-read some Tamora Pierce and Zilpha Kenley Snyder), some non-fiction (still working through “Tangled Routes” and “The Green Studies Reader”), and many more that I am sure to be forgetting (pretty sure a new Jim Butcher or Charles Stross book came out sometime not too far back that I devoured in an evening).