Day 34: Distant Star by Joe Ducie

Ducie’s work is a cocktail mix of the best elements of fantasy, both classic and contemporary. A debut author, Joe Ducie, concocts his merry story like a bartender would mix me my tequila and pineapple juice: fast, sweet, sexy, and strong. Both the descriptive factors and the characters taste familiarly of the Dark Tower and the Dresden Files. This is a tale of love lost, redemption unfound, the schemes men make for power, and the remaking and unmaking of worlds. It’s a descent into madness and chaos, and it’s a helluva ride.

Stiff by Mary Roach

“Stiff” is a macabre, compelling, witty investigation of the postmortem. For such a small book, Roach covers a broad scope of accumulated knowledge regarding our dead-selves, its history, and purpose. She treats taboo topics with a sensitive hand and the intense, painstaking attention to detail apparent in the exposition easily lends her major authority on the topic. Mary Roach aims to shed light on the achievements and involvement of cadavers in scientific advancement. With two-thousand years of history to sift through, she manages to highlight the most significant (and most unique) examples with a deftness and awareness that is amazing.
 

Roach approaches life and death and the strange topics that most would find distasteful with a light touch and a humorous voice. Her little sidebar footnotes are terrific and often funny to read. Throughout the book, she sprinkles her opinions and confusions and own ideas, giving the prose a distinctly living taste. But never is Roach disrespectful to the cadavers or those who donate their bodies, which I think is an important factor that makes this book popular.

I love reading nonfiction literature. It is a breadth of knowledge that is as valuable to human imagination as great fiction. I was skeptical when I first decided to open “Stiff.” A book about cadavers isn’t my regular cup of tea, but I’ve come to realize that what we need is to step out of our comfort zones once and a while. I think we’d all be a little mildly, delightfully surprised at what find. For example, I pleasantly learned that cadavers had a hand in testing the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, in France’s first guillotines, heart transplants, solving the mystery of the TWA Flight 800, and the first blood transfusions. In their silent, unassuming, and unpretentious way, cadavers have been working to make life better for those left behind.

Book Review: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

It is astonishing to realize that science fiction consisted of a relative humble portion of Isaac Asimov’s ouevre. While most of his time was spent on nonfiction work, his contributions to science fiction proved so monumental that there is not a single science-fiction writer today who has not been influenced, in some way, by Asimov’s writing. His intellectual and engaging fiction has produced some of the finest short stories and novels in the genre, in classics such as “The Last Question” and “Nightfall”. But his seminal work is the top-of-the-pyramid, groundbreaking, and famous “Foundation Trilogy”. He is to SF what Tolkien is for Fantasy.

“Foundation” is an entertaining piece of sociopolitical SF in the backdrop of a space opera. This book is the foundation of SF for the past six decades. Asimov’s prose is clear and concise, without any room for ambiguity or vain style. Asimov’s words, though pared down and stripped of subtext, are not any less true or beautiful or witty.

Set thousands of years in the future, after humanity has colonized millions of planets in our galaxy, “Foundation” introduces the Galactic Empire is in its waning years. One man on the capital planet of Trantor, Hari Seldon, predicts the cataclysmic and chaotic decline and fall of the Empire. Seldon has developed the science of psychohistory, which aims to calculate the behaviour of mass populations over the course of events using, among other things, socioeconomic trends. Seldon has predetermined not only the demise of the Empire, but that thirty millennia of barbarism will follow, unless his organization, the Foundation, is able to finish its gargantuan mission of cataloguing and preserving all accumulated human knowledge and history. The act would serve to lessen an inevitable thirty-thousand years to a mere thousand.

Asimov portrays the epic grandeur of the galaxy through the unyielding arc of time and history. Individual lives are ineffectual, though not inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things.  Throughout the stories, there is a pervading sense of ‘greater good’ or ‘the bigger picture’. There is only one recurring character in each of the five tales: the Foundation. It stands in the background, an entity both mysterious and arresting; a godlike presence that shaped religion and ruled a city. The story of the Foundation is portrayed through the periodic snippets of human life throughout the growth of the First Foundation from an indefensible, dependent, colony in the backwaters of the outskirts of a great empire to a massive political juggernaut with commercial and technological prowess. The central characters: Hari Seldon, Gaal Dornick, Salvor Hardin, Linmar Ponyets, and Hober Mallow are seen in flashes as their importance and contribution to the longevity of the Foundation is waxes and wanes.Asimov has an arresting flair for conjuring up a methodical, articulate, and complex history. In the battle for free will over determinism, Asimov’s “Foundation” falls securely into the side of the determinists. Psychology and economic trends and the insurmountable turn of time dominate the short stories with a sense of inevitability. But it the tone of the story is far from pessimistic. There is only ever the slightest indication that they should lose hope, or that individual lives are meaningless. As one character says, “Seldon’s laws help those who help themselves.” Asimov appears to advocate forging a better future through the sole and collective action of the present.Unquestionably, “Foundation” is an intellectual treat that tends to emphasis the background scenes as opposed to the ones that illustrate more action. Most of the book is exposition and dialogues between characters in a meeting over smokes. The third story, The Mayors, provides the most exciting, and arguably cleverest, climactic confrontation in the book. It is a scene between Mayor Hardin and Prince Regent Wienis. Hardin, in a stroke of brilliance, has manipulated events to stave off a rival political party’s attempt to impeach him and end the threat posed by the Four Kingdoms.“Foundation” is a significant to the genre in more ways than the ideas it challenged us with. It is the culmination of science fiction into a literature encompassing reason and ideas. It reinvigorated the genre and turned it into a platform of higher ideals and concepts. “Foundation” steered it away from the pulp swamp creatures. It did for science fiction what “Spiderman” (2002) did for superhero movies, or in particular, what Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” (2005) reboot did for the franchise. Asimov gives us excellent characters, complex sociopolitics, and a good story that never wanes.

Book Review: FreakAngels Vol. 1 by Warren Ellis

Originally a free webcomic that was released every Friday, this collects the first 24 issues. Twelve children were born in England at exactly the same moment. They exhibit psychic abilities at varying degrees. Six years ago, the world ended in an undisclosed cataclysm that has left civilization in ruins. Now, at 23, they try to piece together their lives in Whitechapel, maybe the last real settlement in flooded London. They are the self-proclaimed Freakangels, the councilors and protectors of Whitechapel. Of the original twelve, only eleven remain.

This opening arc begins with a girl named Alice walking into Whitechapel, wielding a shotgun, and crying out for the Freakangels. When they detox her of the subliminal junk in her brain, Alice serves as a placeholder for the readers. Her tour of steampunk Whitechapel is our introduction to this strange, new world. She may even be a reference to “Alice in Wonderland”. She certainly left behind normalcy and entered a very different world.

Warren Ellis is a clever writer who allows the reader to glimpse fragments of the plot. He alludes to the developing backstory, unravels lengthy exchanges depicting the interpersonal relationship among his large ensemble of characters. The best asset of “FreakAngels” is the brilliant dialogue. Ellis has a masterful touch for regional accents; the characters are distinguished by variances in speeches: KK, for example, is bemused and snarky, while Luke sounds bitter and indifferent. The British overtones are thick in the air and the dry humor punctuates the punk teens’ exchanges.

Paul Duffield is a fantastic artist. The purple eyes, the scenic landscape, the authoritative command of colors really bring out the somber atmosphere of post-apocalyptic Whitechapel.

This is a neat achievement in webcomic publishing. Ellis is consistent in his prominent intellectualism and unbridled vulgarity. The sociocultural themes are apparent throughout the story. Despite the steampunk motifs (Victorian-style corsets, stunning inventiveness), the essence of the story more inclined towards the post-apocalyptic field, as it charts the progress of rebuilding and redemption.

Book Review: When Patty Went to College by Jean Webster

                                                

Jean Webster published her first novel, “When Patty Went to College” in 1903. Like her uncontestably more famous “Daddy Long Legs” (1912), her debut novel was based on her life and experiences in a women’s college. The book is a collection of loosely connecting stories about Patty Wyatt’s senior year, beginning with her first day in her new dorm and ending a few weeks before graduation. As “Daddy Long Legs” introduced me to Jean Webster’s body of writing, I admit it was rather difficult not to draw comparisons between the two novels, and particularly, between Judy Abbott and Patty Wyatt.

Patty Wyatt could have been a politician had she been born in a more modern time. She can be described as charismatic and imperturbable, carefree and creative, lazy and intelligent, fun-loving and reckless. Throughout the book, in spite of Patty’s misadventures, clever antics, and pranks on her fellow classmates to entertain herself, she is well liked by her friends and faculty. As Cathy Fair tells her in the denouement to the final story, “I’ve always liked you, Patty,—everybody does,—but I don’t believe I’ve ever appreciated you, and I’m glad to find it out before we leave college.” She can be a trifle judgmental, cuts church, and can hardly be moved to study more than she absolutely has to, and yet, whenever Patty is confronted between the right choice and the easy way out, she displays a strong sense of morality and honesty in spite of the consequences. I like her character. Patty is easygoing and yet proactive; you just know that if she were the recipient of an anonymous benefactor to study at college, she wouldn’t be inclined to send monthly letters to her mysterious figure. No, Patty Wyatt would have tracked him down and pulled aside the curtains to reveal Jervis Pendelton before her first letter even arrived in his mailbox. Judy’s story is one sprawling adventure spread over her collection of chronicling letters; Patty’s story is a collection of all these tiny adventures that compose one book. I wonder if she drank coffee.

The book lacked cohesion in its narrative. Each story was a snapshot of life from the beginning to end of her last year in college and yet I couldn’t help but feel like it was missing a unifying theme or oscillating purpose. Some of the stories concentrated on Patty’s dilemmas involving owning up to her faults and confessing; these pieces connected in their purpose of showing Patty’s gradual maturity.

In context, the relatively heavy-handed moralizing in some of Patty’s tales is to be expected. This was a novel written in the early 20^th century for children and adolescents. It could have been far worst. Traces of Webster’s first-wave feminism shine through and are as strong as they are in her later writing. She explores contemporary issues such as women’s rights, women’s education, socialism, and gender roles with an air of a bygone era’s lightheartedness. On the whole, I would classify this as lighter than “Daddy” or “Dear Enemy,” which I find to be Webster’s most serious endeavor. I liked this novel on its own merit. The glimpse into life of a bygone time and place, into the world that Jean Webster occupied for years, was worth the read.

Book Review: The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis displays his engaging and captivating stream of consciousness writing. He speaks through the thoughts of varied characters in a college where self-absorbed, bohemian students find themselves in more parties than classrooms, and sex and drugs run rampant. “The Rules of Attraction” offers a dark and satirical take on the upper-middle-class college student culture. Set in the fictional college town of Camden, New Hampshire, the novel is narrated in first-person by the sexually students, in particular, revolving around three: Paul, Sean, and Lauren. The novel begins and ends in mid-sentence, giving the impression that there is really no beginning and end to the story. The reader was just there for the ride, passing like a tourist through Camden and glancing sideways into their lives.

“The Rules of Attraction” is fundamentally a story that studies the rules of attraction that exist between affluent students in a college town. Plot is unnecessary. The traditional aspects of stories are accessories. The important stuff is in the questions that are asked: Who will you hook up with tonight? What are you going to wear at the party? How do you get laid here? Who do we need to see to get drugs? Through satire and dark comedy, Ellis portrays the corruption of youth and the discrepancy between reality and fiction. This exaggerated and distorted manner in showcasing campus life hones the reader’s awareness to these particular realities.

The portrait of campus life for these students is heavily aided by the shifting first-person which illustrates the varying priorities that are juggled throughout the year and paints events from multiple angles. The reader’s interpretation is an essential part of understanding the story. Paul’s narratives focus on his sexual encounters with Sean, while Sean leaves them out entirely in his, leaving the actuality of their occurrence ambiguous. These uncertain passages give weight to the novel and force the readers to perceive the development of the characters.

Bret Easton Ellis does a fantastic job in displaying a segment of society that perhaps many readers are not a part of, if they even knew existed. He creates characters that are selfish, nihilistic, world-weary, experimental, callous, and narcissistic. He does it without batting an eye. They are interesting to watch and study, but I don’t think I’d invite them over for dinner.

                                                

Day 33: Misery Loves Comedy by Ivan Brunetti

This case study of schizophrenia and psychosis collects Ivan Brunetti’s first three issues of the brilliant comic book series Schizo, as well as a agglomeration of miscellaneous musings and writings from over a decade. Brunetti’s self-caricature is intriguing realistic, in all its foibles and flaws: he is paranoid, deluded, graphically scatological, self-loathing, and violently depressed. But behind Brunetti’s fascinating nihilism, is a study of the darkest corners of human nature and an exploration of that selfish, brutish side of ourselves that we shudder to inspect closely.

Day 32: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

For a thriller writer, “The Book of Lost Things” presents a major step in a different, though not altogether unpleasant, direction. Connelly explores the story of a boy during World War 2 who experiences an adventure not unlike Carroll’s Alice. Connelly’s take on classic fairy tales and giving them a new perspective was one of the most positive aspects of the narrative. The ending is beautifully, and unexpectedly, bittersweet and touching. Overall, it is a wonderful coming-of-age book with a bend towards the nostalgic past.

Day 31: The Art of War by Sun Tzu

This ancient and informative text is as essential to classical warfare as it is to modern business. Sun Tzu’s great textbook is a series of profound advice. Their greatest asset is how applicable and malleable his rules and advice are given the context and circumstance. It is a truly captivating work and a look into the minds that dominated the craft of war.

Day 30: Y: The Last Man - Book One by Brian K. Vaughn

Several words to describe Vaughn’s work would be: clever, political, wry, variably pessimistic and optimistic, well-written, and fast-paced. The dystopian future where all living things with a Y chromosome die in the same exact instant (except for one man and his monkey) is a truly fascinatingly concept that is explored intelligently. I applaud the writer for handling the political and social fallout realistically. The first arc depicts Yorick’s travels with Agent 355 and Dr. Mann to reach her lab in California and develop a means of cloning males for the human species to survive. Their long journey across America’s chaotic landscape culminates in a climactic confrontation in a small settlement in Ohio between Yorick and his sister, wherein they find one another fearsomely changed by the event that changed the world. 

Day 29: Animal Farm by George Orwell

A political satire that every high school student must have studied in their English class. I must have been one of the few that actually enjoyed this vital work of contemporary culture. George Orwell’s classic work is an allegory and satire of the Russian Revolution, a biased and yet informative paradigm that illustrates how boundless hope and potential can disintegrate into tyranny. The bold struggle of the animals against the oppression of Mr. Jones in his Farm forges the Animal Farm, founded on the notion that All Animals Are Created Equal. But when the pigs re-establish an elite class over the masses, betraying their faithful followers, all realise the dark significance of the tacked-on postscript that Some Animals Are More Equal than Others. If you didn’t study this phenomenal work in high school, it’s never too late to read it now.

Day 28: Die Trying by Lee Child

The second thrilling novel chronicling Lee Child’s epic ass-kicking hitchhiker: Jack Reacher. “Die Trying” finds Reacher, along with a woman whom he helps carry her dry cleaning, kidnapped right off the sidewalk and thrown into the back of a van. As he studies his increasingly dire situation, he tries to understand just who the woman he was kidnapped with is, against the backdrop of terroristic devastation waiting to happen. This was the second Child book I picked up and remains one of my favourites.

Day 27: Grimms Fairy Tales (Folio Society)

Perhaps the greatest collection of fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm has provided fodder for my imagination for years. The unforgettable opening of “once upon a time” will bring you back to the timeless realm of knights and princesses, goblins and giants, wizards and witches. The adventures are all here – they will fall in love, seek wealth, and scheme for power, revealing through the fantastical and magical, very fundamental and human truths about ourselves. What was originally a staple of Western culture is now a treasured collection of tales around the world. Grimms’ best fables includes such classics as “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “Hansel and Grethel,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “and “The Frog Prince,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”