Books I read in 2010 -- part 1

Frankly I've forgotten a lot of them, but here are a few I noted at the time - with brief reviews if I did one. Asterisks indicate freebies I got from the office, if you're wondering why on earth I acquired them.

Elmore Leonard, The Big Bounce  - "it's okay". 

The Bronte Project by Sarah Vandever 
This was something my wife picked up in a liquidation sale some time last year, and from the jacket and blurb is ostensibly chick-lit. It's pretty good, although suffers from the staginess of a lot of chick lit, and suffers further from the fact that it probably isn't really chick lit, so the target audience might not like it that much. Hard to say which genre market you would pitch it at, though, so from a marketing standpoint it makes a reasonable amount of sense.

The characters were a bit arch for me, but I liked it enough to finish. The plot, about a Bronte scholar left behind in New York by a long-term boyfriend, is a modern American satire type thing, sort of Tom Wolfe lite. She ends up travelling to Italy to sleep in a bed that gives you prophetic dreams. Very odd, in that it's hard to know what kind of book it's supposed to be, but some entertaining bits here and there. 


White Noise by Don de Lillo 
I'd put it aside halfway through and the break has done me good. I'm now through the "Toxic Airborne Event" section and into the bit about the the drug that suppresses fear of death.
Some may argue this is even more heavy-handed than The Bronte Project, but Don de Lillo can get away with that kind of thing. Just as you're about to consciously register the artifice, he distracts you with a Lebanese wedding party on the back of a tank, or similar. Actually, White Noise isn't as good as his later work like Underworldor even MAO II, but it's still very good. 


Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett 
A more interesting scenario that some of the recent Discworld books such as Monstrous Regiment, but overall rather blah. Stylistically, this needed a few more go-rounds in editing. There are a lot of places where characters repeat themselves -- in one instance, it really seems as if the writer did two versions of an exchange and then forgot to delete one of them.
The characters are OK but the whole book is more heavy-handed and didactic than usual. Too much telling, not enough showing. Granted, Pratchett has never been exactly Hemingway when it comes to character through action, but still.
Readable though not much fun. 


State of Change by Patrick Hudson
(Downloadably free at: http://stateofchangebypatrickhudson.blogspot.com/)

An SF celeb memoir in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis if he did science fiction. Actually, Ellis would go a bit heavier on the violence, probably. Not going into gory detail was, I think, the right decision in State of change, since what makes the protagonist compelling is that he's so callous - he doesn't dwell on the occasional (and they are occasional) bursts of random violence, because he just doesn't care.

This side of the character, Arlo Makepeace Dylan (I wrote that name from memory, a good sign) works well and works several good reverses and emotional moments.

The pacing works well, particularly because what the Big Event is (the transfer of the human mind into digital form) gets posted up early on, but until the end you don't know how or, more importantly, why it happens. What seems to be a throwaway joke character turns out to be more important, too.

It's not perfect, though. Patrick described parts of the novel as 'youthful', and I can see what he means. There are a fair few bits that get overexplained, a common trait of the worldbuilder. Dylan is bored by the news going on about the breakup of the US, yet we still get to hear details -- it would have been better to scrap this. Dylan finds it boring, the US is an irrelevance (this trope in itself is a bit overdone nowadays, even), and skipping over the fate of the US in the text would prove it.

In the same way, something "all seems so quaint now" -- we then spend a paragraph or two on the wonders of modern life. We don't need this. If the alternative seems amazing, then the original can't really be that quaint, yet.
Of course it later turns out that Dylan is bluffing a bit here, but it's something of a false note.

Other good bits:
- the satire and the straight-out gags are funny
- the technology and the questions about it are handled well
- the ending is pleasantly ambiguous, although not in the sense that you don't know what happened
- the fashion notes are perfect

If anything, I think it needed to be longer. We need more time to see Dylan's natural milieu before he starts dismantling it. But as it is, it's certainly worth a read.