A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 7-9

I think I've already covered the bases with my criticisms of A Series of Unfortunate Events so far, and so I won't repeat myself here other than to say that in this current trio of books, I'm still having trouble buying into a world filled entirely with evil or uncaring adults. I understand that young readers might be able to accept this vision of the universe (as I apparently did when I was younger), but as an adult* now, I find it a little pandering to a young audience and a little lazy on Handler's part in terms of how he keeps the Baudelaires in danger. (I could go into a longer discussion on that second point, but I'm hitting my tolerance threshold for extended discussions of Lemony Snicket.) That carry-over criticism from last time out of the way, on a more positive note, these three books are not nearly as repetitive as the past six were. In fact, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, and The Carnivorous Carnival represent a change of course for the series. Not so much so that the books are unrecognizable, of course: the Baudelaires still outsmart their way out of harm; Count Olaf adopts new, horrible disguises; Snicket begs the reader to stop reading; etc.

But this time around, as if taking a cue from the parody in my previous post, the Baudelaires finally buck up some nerve (I could point out that they're more or less forced to after they're declared murderers but let's just go ahead and give them credit), ditch Mr. Poe, and set out on their own at the end of The Vile Village, thus ending the "Baudelaires-are-stuck-with-a-new-horrible-guardian-until-Olaf-shows-up" structure that has dominated the first half of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Charging unhappily forward, the series shifts its focus (or maybe reveals, depending on how deeply Handler thought the books out when he began them) to a web of mysteries. The books are no longer just about the Baudelaires' surviving Olaf, they're about the secret history that binds together the Baudelaire parents, Count Olaf, the Baudelaires' guardians, and even Lemony Snicket himself. How well Handler pulls this secrets shtick off in the long run remains to be seen (I have vague but unpleasant memories on this front), but in these books at least, it's a smart new direction that helps liven the series up.

That's it! Nice and short, this recap was. Next time: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 10-12! I'm almost done! Yay!

*Shut up.

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 4-6

                                         
So... this project might have been a bad idea! Or at least choosing to reread A Series of Unfortunate Events might have been a bad idea! At any rate, it's six books in, and I'm getting pretty sick of this series already. Granted, I don't think these books were designed to have been consumed all in one go, but their constant repetitiveness certainly isn't helping either. The series was already starting to grate on me by the time I was skimming my way through the end of The Wide Window last week, but it's getting even worse now because I'm beginning to find the characters annoying too.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Baudelaire children are very mild-mannered. They are polite and demure, poised and virtuous; so much so that sometimes the books read a little like the child-saint hagiographies I had to read in elementary school. The Baudelaire saintliness is admirable in the way it provides young readers with good literary role models, but I am not a younger reader and these kids' passivity is starting to p. me o. (plus it's not like extreme passivity is that great in a role model either). As brash and dunderheaded as Harry Potter is, I'm starting to yearn for some of his devil-may-care attitude in these orphans because at least the boy wizard gets stuff done. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaires mostly wait around for miserable things to happen and then deal with the misery as it befalls them. Their default emotional state is a kind of glum resignation, when by all rights, it should be an almost insane rage. Time after time, the Baudelaires are ignored or cut off by some adult, and they sort of shake their heads sadly and decide it's no use to try arguing further. It's becoming unbearable for me that, even if it wouldn't do them any good, these kids don't scream and cry and plead with every fiber of their beings for someone to listen to them.

I understand that these books take place in a heightened reality in which the characters' emotions are intentionally one-note and somewhat preposterous, but that also doesn't mean that this heightened reality can't also be deeply annoying, especially over the course of thirteen books. By the time Count Olaf shows up in his sixth disguise with his sixth plot which Mr. Poe ignores for the sixth time, it's hard not to feel that perhaps by this point, the Baudelaires should quit moping and start preparing for this sort of thing in advance.

(Taking one look at their miserable new home overseen by their latest incompetent caretaker, Violet turned to her siblings and said, "Right. Enough of this. Klaus, what do you know about firearms?"

Klaus had read many books about firearms in the family library before it had burned down. "From the books I've read," he said, "I think I could explain how to construct a weapon from the items lying about this dilapidated house."

"Aboutime!" Sunny shrieked, which meant something like, "And I could put my tiny, sharp teeth to good use biting these bits of metal on the floor into bullets!"

Tying her hair up with a ribbon, Violet said, "Klaus and Sunny, with your respective researching and biting abilities, I think I could invent something to help us stop Count Olaf."

An hour later there was a knock at the door. Before the Baudelaires could even look up from their project, the door swung open to reveal a surprise most loathsome--a word here meaning "not very surprising at all because it was the horrible Count Olaf."

Wrapped from head to toe in bandages, Olaf appeared to be disguised as some sort of patient afflicted with a terrible skin disease. But even through the bandages, Olaf's nasty smile and gleaming eyes could be--

Violet shot Olaf in the face with a handgun.

"Violet!" Mr. Poe cried, approaching from the kitchen doorway. "You've just killed that poor, skin-diseased man!"

Not even bothering to respond, Klaus pulled Olaf's pant leg up to reveal the incriminating eye tattoo on Olaf's ankle. Violet dropped the homemade gun into Mr. Poe's arms with one hand and dropped the microphone she'd also invented onto the ground with the other hand. And walking side by side, the Baudelaires left behind the miserable house and their miserable lives as Sunny called back "FUUUU!" which meant something unfit to be printed here. The End.)

Parodies aside, I also feel that story-wise, things are similarly getting a little too unrealistic in this second installment of books, even within the heightened reality the Series has established. Gone more or less entirely are those dark moments of realistic violence that gave the series a sense of genuine danger. It's all derring-do and standard adventure-story peril now, or at least it is in Books 4-6. Perhaps because of the difficulty of significantly incorporating an infant into an adventure story, Sunny's storylines in particular tend to push things into a Roald Dahl level of fantasy that doesn't quite feel in keeping with the tone that's been established. In the climax of The Miserable Mill, for instance, Sunny uses her sharp teeth to engage in an actual sword fight with an adult woman. Not only did this stick out for me as unusually and disconcertingly fantastical for the Series, I also just found it difficult to imagine logistically (plus it hurt my teeth to think about, which, admittedly, might have been the intent).

On the bright (gloomy?) side, there are some signs in these books that Handler's getting a little restless too and that he's begun exploring ways to shake things up a bit. In The Miserable Mill, in which the Baudelaire children are shipped off to a lumber mill and forced to overcome Olaf's plot to hypnotize Klaus, Violet must research books in order to save her siblings while Klaus must learn to do some impromptu inventing. It's not a huge shake-up, but at least it indicates a willingness to change. In The Austere Academy, Handler reveals the first signs of a larger storyline at work in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Sent to live in a boarding school, the Baudelaires meet the Quagmire Triplets, also orphans and also future inheritors of a large fortune. Before the book's end, though, Olaf has kidnapped the Quagmires, but not before one of them yells out the notorious acronym "V.F.D." In The Ersatz Elevator, another major character comes into play for the first time in Esmé Squalor, a fashion obsessive and all-around miserable human being. Not much more is revealed in terms of what the grand plot of the series is, but this book at least makes clear that there is indeed a grand plot: the infamous V.F.D. is brought up again (although its meaning still remains unclear), and the Baudelaires discover a secret tunnel running under the city, one that leads up into where the Baudelaire home once stood.

These aren't game-changing developments, and they don't do much to diminish my existent complaints about the Series. But from these various changes and hints at a larger mystery, there's hope at least--and I do seem to recall this being at least partly true--that in the next installment of books, Handler breaks even more from established formula and tries even newer things and newer ideas in A Series of Unfortunate Events.


Next week: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 7-9! Will I enjoy these next books more than I did 4-6? Let's hope so! It's much nicer to enjoy things than to not enjoy them!

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 1-3

           

Of all the literary blockbusters of the past decade, surely one of the strangest and most surprising successes is Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Unlike its fellow children's book bestsellers, A Series of Unfortunate Events is the only series that actively campaigns to turn readers away. The books famously sell themselves via reverse psychology: the blurb on each book's back cover urges readers not to rent, purchase, or in any way read the book they're holding. It's a clever marketing gambit, and one that Daniel Handler, the man behind Lemony Snicket, claims was genuine:

I wrote a list of ingredients in the book, and warnings that [readers] shouldn't consume those ingredients. ...it honestly hadn't occurred to me that it was reverse psychology. I just thought that it was sort of an honest assessment making clear that if you were timid or easily disturbed, you could turn away.

Rereading the first three Series of Unfortunate Events books for the first time in thirteen years, what surprised me most was indeed how honest Snicket's admonitions to the reader were. Despite its whimsy and wit, both of which are in plentiful supply, A Series of Unfortunate Events takes the exploitation of its child protagonists seriously and taps into some fairly dark moments in doing so.

The Series begins appropriately enough with The Bad Beginning. The three Baudelaire children stand on the shores of Briny Beach, and we are introduced to each of them in the first of many tripartite sequences, as actions/reactions of each Baudelaire child are described in turn. Violet is the eldest and a budding young inventor. Klaus, the middle child, is an avid reader. The infant Sunny is fond of biting things with her sharp little teeth. By design, the Baudelaires are relatively static characters. They arrive onstage mature, intelligent, and virtuous, and remain so throughout the rest of the series. They are mild-mannered lead characters, and what happens to them happens not because they heroically sought it out nor because they are being punished for wrongdoing. Their misfortune is accurately described by the series' title as simply "unfortunate events." Miserable things just happen to the Baudelaires, and it's not because they need to learn a lesson or grow up.

Announcing a Thing!

After spending hours lying awake the other night thinking about how weird Redwall is, I eventually came to a realization: I would like to write about that. Not just Redwall specifically ("Are you sure you want to put 'Caretaker of redwall-abbey.geocities.com' on your resume?" -my mom), but all kinds of books I read when I was younger. I think about them a lot! They made a big impression on me! As the old saying goes, "Nothing so affects a child as a book about otters who stab each other to death."

Not yet, Outcast of Redwall! You'll get your own entry, you weirdo you!

I'm going to try to do an entry every week, and if I don't, it doesn't matter--I can just write one any time! I could even stop mid-entry and never post anything. It's like I'm not even being paid to do this.

FIRST WEEK (next week, probably): A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 1-3

   

The Map of Time

A Victorian thriller in which H.G. Wells hunts down Jack the Ripper across time and space, The Map of Time immediately invites comparison to the 1979 Malcolm McDowell film of the same premise, Time After Time. As such, hardly a review of Félix J. Palma’s newly translated novel goes by without making some mention of the similarity between book and film (this review now adding to that number). Fortunately, as quickly as The Map of Time invokes Time After Time, just as quickly does it banish it, catching us up in an expansive, original story that both revels in and subverts the tropes of time travel fiction.

The Map of Time unwinds in three, interconnected parts, each tied together by time travel and the appearance of H.G. Wells. In the first of these sections, a wealthy, young aristocrat falls hopelessly in love with a lower-class prostitute. His life shatters to pieces when he finds his lover the latest victim of Jack the Ripper, and in his grief he resolves to kill himself. Before the heartbroken man can do so, however, his cousin proposes that there might be a way to save the dead girl by traveling back in time to prevent her murder. Running concurrent to this story is that of Claire Higgins’s, a young lady struggling against the confinement of Victorian social expectations. Salvation comes for Claire in the form of a time travel expedition that’s the talk of all of London. For a fee, buyers can board Gilliam Murray’s time machine and travel to the year 2000 where automatons have overrun the earth and only a small band of humans remains to resist them. The human leader is the dashing Captain Shackleton, who captures Claire’s heart in an instant. So smitten is she, Claire resolves to sneak into the future and live her life there with the noble leader. In the book’s third section, a series of mysterious murders have Scotland Yard stumped. Not only do the murdered victims bear wounds untraceable to any known weapons, each corpse is accompanied by a fragment of prose. These messages appear nonsensical to most but hold a secret meaning for a select few.  Together, this chosen group must confront the message writer and learn an unthinkable truth.

That was as scant a summary of The Map of Time that should still provide some idea of the book’s scope and flavor, but know that Palma’s novel takes far twistier turns than I’d be willing to give away here. The fun in reading this book—besides its charming prose and exciting, interlocking storylines—lies in the way Palma snares us into one narrative and then springs on us that we’ve been reading something else entirely. Reading the book is like having rugs pulled continuously out from under your feet. While at first all the narrative trickery had me wondering if there was going to be a point to it all, when Palma finally plants the reader on firm ground in the book’s final act, he reveals a grand, coherent vision and proves he knew what he was doing all along. The pile-up of deceptions for both the characters and the reader become a reflection on the hazy line between fiction and reality and the capacity of the former to illuminate the latter. In the book’s closing scene, Palma blurs the real with the created until the two are one, indistinguishable whole. It’s a brilliant, unifying conclusion to a novel built from so many dangling strings.

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One might well be one of the nerdiest books ever written. With space battles, video games, and a plot that swerves between the real world and a virtual counterpart, the book earns comparisons with geek-friendly fare like Ender’s Game and The Matrix. But what makes Ready Player One so eminently nerdy is that unlike the fictional virtual worlds it draws from, this book’s universe comes stocked with every bit of geek culture imaginable. It’s not many a novel that sees R2-D2 as a DJ spinning New Order discs.

The year is 2044. Environmental catastrophe impends, the conglomerate IOI owns half the world, and poverty has grown so rampant that most Americans live in skyscrapers built out of piled-up RVs.  It’s a grim future but one with a catch. In Cline’s retelling, in 2012, a Steve Jobs-like billionaire game designer created a massive virtual reality game: the OASIS. For a scant fee, users could exchange their unpleasant reality for a virtual haven, and so they did. The OASIS quickly swelled up in size and function such that “the terms ‘the OASIS’ and ‘Internet’ gradually became synonymous.” By 2044, shopping, chatting, and even federally approved schooling are some of OASIS’s more utilitarian features, but for most users, the game functions more like World of Warcraft. Players send their avatars out into massive landscapes—some original, some recreated fictional universes like Star Trek’s and Firefly’s—in search of points and quests.

The most popular quest in OASIS is known as the Hunt. Hidden throughout the game by deceased creator Jack Halliday are three keys whose capture will unlock a grand prize: full control over OASIS and Halliday’s estate. Five years of intense worldwide searching have turned up nothing, and users are beginning to wonder if the contest is all a big hoax. That is, of course, until an unlikely someone finds the first key.

Wade Watts is the prototypical star of nerd-beloved pop culture: a young, orphaned male, friendless and penniless, Watts has little going for him but for his good heart and clever mind. He’s an underdog of the classic mold, one who, like Skywalker and Potter before him, finds himself swept up in sudden fame, fortune, and danger. Cline tells Ready Player One from Watts’s perspective, a narrative choice perhaps necessary to describe all the leaping back and forth the book does from one world to another but also one that provides access to Watts’s humorous internal monologue. Like many raised on a heavy pop cultural diet, Watts communicates in speech peppered with book quotes, movie quotes, and song lyrics. Dialogue between Watts and his OASIS pals abounds with allusions obvious and subtle to things like Star Wars, internet memes, and, of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If it seems improbable that the teenagers of 2044 should be so well-acquainted with 80s pop culture, their cross-generational familiarity is thanks to Halliday’s Hunt. A socially awkward computer nerd, Halliday felt more comfortable with the movies, comics, and games of his youth than with communicating with other human beings. For Halliday, the Hunt wasn’t just an eccentric way of passing down his creation to a worthy successor, it was an opportunity to rewrite the culture at large so that it shared his personal obsessions. The only way to decipher Halliday’s clues is through an obsessive knowledge of 80s pop culture and of Halliday’s enormous collected writings. There’s a narcissistic component to his cultural revisionism, seeking as it does to draw the whole world into one man’s passions, and Cline ties Halliday’s vanity to the book’s thematic interest in the problems with nostalgia and escapism. Both involve a retreat from reality into a world of personal fantasy, even and especially when there are real problems that need to be fixed.

Still, Cline understands the appeal of escapism as well as the distinctive pleasures contained within geek culture. Amassing mounds of useless trivia as Watts and his friends do might seem dull and pointless to outsiders, but Cline highlights the satisfaction and pride of possessing such encyclopedic knowledge. And although the literary community has by and large turned its nose up at video games, Ready Player One is a gushing love letter to gaming, from its pixilated origins to its increasingly immersive future. Although the book cautions about the dangers of getting sucked into a virtual world at the cost of ignoring the real one, Ready Player One is ultimately unabashedly pro-video games. I’ve never read a book that so perfectly captures the exuberance of finally beating a difficult boss or of discovering a level’s hidden secrets.

Like many plot-driven, first person narratives, Ready Player One occasionally suffers from sounding like a laundry list of subject-verb sentences. (“First I did this. Then I did this. Then I did this.”) Cline is no elegant stylist, but then again, it’s not the prose that draws us into Ready Player One. It’s Cline’s sprawling, enthusiastic love for geek culture. The absolute blast he has in melding together so many of his interests is positively infectious. I couldn’t help but geek out myself watching Cline unload every giant robot, warrior-mage, and space cowboy in his arsenal.

And what an exciting story he unloads them into. Ready Player One pumps us through its pages with the ease of an addictive video game. It’s got everything you could want from a mash note to geek culture: powerful villains, first romances, epic quests--not to mention tons and tons of fighting. Whether it’s an arcade duel or a shoot-off between spaceships, Ready Player One rarely goes a chapter without some sort of battle. The siege of a fortress toward the book’s end gathers together so many sci-fi and fantasy characters in one giant clash, it will no doubt be a legal nightmare for the inevitable film adaptation. Fun, smart, and fast-paced, Ready Player One is the best book featuring mecha-robot battles you’ll read all year.   

Deathless

In this hybrid of fantasy and history, Catherynne Valente restages Russian folklore against the rise of the Soviet Union. As the human world of Russia is radically restructured, so too is its faerie counterpart. Every magical creature—save Baba Yaga—dutifully greets its companion with “comrade.” A council of elves debates whether their house mates are living up to Stalinist standards. And an ancient dragon in the guise of an old files keeper sends hundreds to their death. In Valente’s telling, myths repeat themselves in an endless loop, sweeping up the same figures and depositing them at the same fate. There’s a kind of weary acceptance to all of Valente’s characters. Everyone is a hard drinker.

Into this world of magic struggling to understand the new Soviet regime enters Marya. Her role in the mythic cycle is as the girl who marries Koschei the Deathless, one the oldest creatures and rulers in Russia. The Tsar of Life, Koschei is locked in endless combat with his brother, the Tsar of Death. Like the rest of their country’s supernatural inhabitants, the two brothers live out the same story over and over. Koschei takes a bride, the bride betrays her husband, Koschei is killed and reborn.

Even as these figures of myth feel trapped by their fates, for Marya, the confines of inescapable destiny prove oddly liberating. Deathless tracks Marya’s progression from naïve girl awaiting a husband to the Tsar of Life’s powerful queen. As someone who’s fallen for many a girl only to have her stab him in the back, Koschei approaches Marya as a potential rebel who must be cowed into total obedience. Their early courtship sees Koschei ordering the young girl into a vow of silence, and he lays out great banquets before the poverty-stricken Marya and feeds her like a baby. Despite Koschei’s efforts, Marya possesses within her a fierce desire for autonomy, and soon she pushes back against her husband, refusing to become his pawn even as, in doing so, she becomes the pawn of fate.

Valente depicts Marya and Koschei as genuinely in love but racked with the simultaneous knowledge that their marriage will end in betrayal. Each spouse pushes against this fate, trying to bend the other into submission in a game of seduction that charges Deathless with erotic tension. One scene has Marya literally chaining her husband to the wall in a bid for sexual and relational dominance. As Marya and Koschei unwillingly plod toward their ruin, so too does Russia. The Great Famine kills not only human beings but magical ones too, and as Russia collapses into starvation and death, it seems that for the first time the mythic stories will not see another telling. At stake in Deathless is the question of Russian identity. Did the Soviet Union so fundamentally rewrite the country that the older world and its myths no longer exist?

Not if Valente has anything to say about it anyways. Deathless breathes new life not only into the world and characters of Russian folklore but into the structure those stories were passed down in. In lean, cool prose, Valente recycles folk narrative and its penchant for repetition and cycles into novel form. Individual chapters of Deathless often function as fairy tales in miniature, animated by Valente with striking imagery and a novelist’s attention to psychological detail. Ultimately, Valente finds that some myths really are deathless.

Ben's Faves: Part the Fourth

Moonwalking with Einstein

A powerful art once practiced by the world’s greatest minds. An underground society where this lost art now thrives. An international tournament where these society members compete. And a young man who stumbles into this world, overcomes his incredulity, and struggles to become a new champion.

This synopsis may sound like it belongs to a fantasy novel, but it’s actually the plot of Joshua Foer’s thrilling non-fiction Moonwalking with Einstein.

The art of memory, according to legend, began in the wake of a catastrophe. In ancient Greece, an earthquake wiped out a palace, killing everyone inside. The destruction was so total that no one could identify their loved ones’ remains. Moments before the earthquake, however, the poet Simonides had stepped outside the palace and surveying the rubble, he had a revelation: he could visualize the entire undamaged building and everyone in it. “At that moment,” Foer tells us, “the art of memory was born.”

What Simonides ostensibly did then on the fly, his successors do intentionally and only after great practice. For the memory artist, familiar walking routes and well-known buildings become mental storage houses for memories. Whatever things need be memorized—digits of pi, items on a grocery list, or lines from “The Waste Land”—are converted into a series of memorable images that are packed into the memory palace. A poker hand becomes for Foer a stroll through his palace’s hallway where Michael Jackson defecates a salmon burger and farts into a balloon.

The vulgarity of Foer’s imagery is nothing new to the art of memory. Moonwalking takes us through the art’s history, when Catholic monks conjured up lurid images to remember devotional passages. Religion and the art of memory, we learn, often intertwined throughout history, as Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists all passed down sacred teachings through memory techniques. With the advent of the printing press, however, the Golden Age of Memory came to an end as human memorization was largely replaced by what Foer calls external memories—books, newspapers, videos, and the like.

As Foer discovers, however, the art of memory isn’t quite dead yet. A group of dedicated memorizers across the globe annually pours their way through decks of cards, literary passages, and binary codes (among other things), stocking full huge memory palaces of their own creation. The memory subculture is not without its internal drama, and along the way to becoming a memorizer himself, Foer meets his fair share of foes, friends, liars, and conmen. Both Foer’s naivety in this world contrasted with his later success as well as the numerous “ordinary people” who make up the world’s top memorizers give Moonwalking with Einstein a seductive flair, suggesting that if the reader wished, he or she too could become a master memorizer. As Foer furiously memorizes his way into the final rounds of the U.S. Memory Championship, we root for his victory as if he were an underdog boxer and wonder if we too could train our memories into that kind of shape. 

Despite the personal narrative and the enticing invitation to the reader, Moonwalking is neither memoir nor self-help book. Foer the journalist ultimately presides over Foer the protagonist, guiding us through a broader exploration of memory and its meaning for humanity. We meet some individuals racked with mental disorders that leave them socially non-functional but with memories like a computer's. On the other side of the spectrum is a man like EP who cannot form any new memories and lives a life of constant forgetting. Such bizarre cases of human memory lead Foer to ponder memory's role in human identity and how such wide disparities in memory can be possible. Foer fuses together these moments of journalistic and philosophical investigation with his own immersion into the world of memory training. The end product is a work of non-fiction that manages to be as thrilling as it is intellectual.

I'm sold!  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, library, it's a book, dude, you know the deal.

My Favorite Fiction in 2010

These are my favorite fiction books that I read in the past year (not my favorite books published in 2010, although there are some of those too). Read these blurbs... before they, um, read you? That's dumb. Bad joke, Ben. You're fired.


Fiction:

The Corrections and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: Although I think a lot of people eschew Franzen's writing, I personally find it invigorating, witty, and even poetic. IMO, Franzen is basically the bees' knees in the literary world today (a statement I am hilariously unqualified to make). I am at a loss to decide which is the better of Franzen's two most recent books. While The Corrections is more comic and less flawed than Freedom, the latter is more relevant today and its bleakness about the state of affairs in America and about humanity in general is only so harsh to read because it is so convincing. Both novels are very powerful though, and you should read both of them. Immediately. Run, little birdie, go read them! (I just told you to run and then called you a bird. I guess you're an ostrich or something.)

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: The only "schoolbook" I decided to put on this list, not because I didn't enjoy anything else I read for school this year (I thought Sister Carrie was awesome enough to join the honored bees' knees ranks of The Corrections and Freedom), but mostly because I already had a sentence I wrote about this book at hand. And here is that sentence: "Beneath Little Women's thick gild of cozy Christianity and warm sentimentality, there pulses a burning core of frustrated feminine rage." Good sentence, right? True too, the book acts as a fascinating portrait of Alcott's inner frustrations and struggles with the limitations in her own life and for women in all of society.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: A dog has been stabbed with a garden fork, and an autistic boy sets out to solve the mystery of the dog's murder in the style of his literary hero Sherlock Holmes. Told in first person from the autistic boy's point-of-view, Haddon deftly avoids either sentimentalizing or trivializing his protagonist's disorder, instead giving us a character with both rich mental complexity and terrifying problems, without either of those things being contradictions.

Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue: Another tricky first-person narrative, this one from the point-of-view of a five-year-old boy who's spent his entire life in one tiny room, kept there with his mother by a psychopath the boy knows only as "Old Nick." While Room contains some of the most terrifying and suspenseful stuff I've ever read, its young protagonist's narration keeps the book from ever becoming too unbearable, and his naivety recasts his world in an almost poetic light. (In the novel's opening scene, the boy describes "waterfalling" milk into his cereal bowl.) A deeply moving novel about motherhood and the sacrifices and demands it necessitates, I highly recommend it.

Falling Man by Don DeLillo: This short novel follows the lives of a 9/11 survivor and his family as they cope with our nation's greatest modern tragedy. DeLillo plays here with time and voice, drifting in between paragraphs from one narrator to another, from years before the disaster to the weeks after. In less skilled hands, such a conceit might confuse or alienate, but in DeLillo's meditative prose, this drifting instead reflects the internal chaos and melancholy of its protagonists. The novel gradually follows its characters to 2007, showing how they, and the rest of the country, have come to internalize and cope with the events of 9/11, before concluding with a devastating first-person account of the World Trade Center's Collapse.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Oh man, you guys... I love this book. I think I want to marry it. You are cordially invited to the wedding celebration of Benjamin Joseph Baker and The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I don't know how to sell this book to you because I want you to read it but I also want you to read it knowing very little about it. You shouldn't even read the back cover, it gives too much away. Look, you like Harry Potter, right? Of course you do. This book is like that, only R-rated. Well, that's an oversimplification. It's more an author grappling with how to reconcile his childhood love for fantasy books (Narnia in particular) and his understanding that most children's fantasy is hinged on the suspension of the sort of psychological detail and realism that animate the modern novel. The Magicians basically finds a way to fuse both those things together, which is reflected not only in its construction but in the story itself too. It's a great book, and Grossman is not afraid to take his characters to some unpleasant emotional places. That ending is a gut punch.



Well, that's it. Now go out there and read, kiddos!

On the Difficulties of Post-Series Sequels

So I was bored at work today (as usual) and spent a little while typing up what I view to be the potential problems an author faces when trying to write a sequel to their epic fantasy series. The types of series I'm talking about here are specifically those with one conflict that runs throughout the series and which is seemingly concluded in the series' final book (typically the defeat of a major villain). Such series would include the Harry Potter books, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Bartimaeus Trilogy, and even Avatar: The Last Airbender, as I suppose these problems are applicable to movies and tv shows too.

Anyway, this is what I wrote earlier today, without much editing (too lazy):

The difficulty with sequels to some grand fantasy saga like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings is that the sweep of the entire series has been the journey of the main characters to destroy this evil villain and restore balance to the world. A sequel is still a story in its own right and must therefore have a conflict. Conflict necessitates a villain. The problem here is that in order for a sequel to be successful, it must have conflict. And in order for there to be conflict, there must be a villain. And no matter who that villain is, the upsurgence of a new villain essentially undermines everything that was achieved in the main series. When the thrust of your plotline has been the defeat of darkness and the restoration of balance, if some new ultimate evil villain emerges not but a few years after the defeat of the old one, then all of the actions taken by the protagonists in the original series seem futile. What was the point of all the trouble they went to if Evil Villain 2 is just going to show up a few years later? On top of this problem is the fact that a new evil villain retroactively undermines the old one. If we've spent the whole series hearing about how Voldemort or Sauron or whoever is the biggest badass around, what are we to think when some new threat turns up so soon after the defeat of the old one? "Oh, guess the first guy wasn't THE ultimate evil villain after all..."

A seeming way to rectify this problem is by writing a sequel in which, yes, there is a villain, but he's not nearly so evil as the villain fought in the main series so the evilness of the original series' ultimate villain isn't undermined. This approach, too, is problematic because a lesser villain deflates the sense of conflict in the sequel that was so critical to the main series. Epic fantasy sagas hinge on that battle of good and evil built up from book one and ending in the vanquishing of the villain in the final book. That series-spanning conflict is so necessary to the series, that a sequel, without the villain hanging over the protagonist, just won't feel like part of the same series. It will render the sequel as only an unnecessary addendum, and a lame one at that.

Another flawed resolution to the sequel problem is to dredge up the villain from the original series in an "He only seemed to be dead!" twist. Unfortunately though, like the creation of a new ultimate villain, the resurrection of the old villain still undermines everything that came before. If we've already read the final battle, with its requisite drama and self-sacrificing and ultimate defeat of the bad guy, bringing the bad guy back around for a second fight can only feel tired and self-defeating. He's already been fought and beaten before, in what was supposed to be the last battle. How lame does that battle become if it was only apparently the second-to-last Last Battle?

There is also of course the thuddingly stupid "Aw heck who needs a villain? Let's just hang out with our pals as they journey around!" approach. A novel that takes this approach quickly reveals to us that we really only enjoyed the company of the characters when they were in the midst of conflict and mystery. Although we enjoy their quibbling and joking in peace time, what we really want is drama. We want to see these characters fight, sacrifice, and struggle. When they're not in trouble, they get a little boring. Without any villain, a sequel just feels hopelessly lifeless.

Really, the only successful way to do a sequel to something like Harry Potter is to set the sequel so far in the future from the original series that it can have its own big bad guy without undermining the plight of the characters from the original series. Unfortunately, two problems arise from this solution. The first is that part of the charm of the original series was from the characters the reader came to know and enjoy the company of, and these characters won't be around in the sequel. A sequel without those original characters has the arduous task before it of creating new characters who will be constantly weighed against and judged by the old characters, and for some readers, will just never feel the same. Potentially, a character from the original series could cameo as a much older person in the new series, but I've always disliked this approach too. For me, reading about a character who always existed in my mind as a child suddenly playing the part of "the wise old man" to this new generation of protagonists always feels strangely wrong and depressing to me. The second problem that arises from setting the sequel in the future is that many series, Harry Potter being a prime example, are set in the present. Setting the sequel in the future might thus actually entail the author's having to write about the future future. As in the sequel would have to be set potentially decades after the time in which the book was being written, like 2020 or something. A fantasy novel would thus be turned into a science fiction novel. (Actually come to think of it, Harry Potter might have a neat little trick to potentially sidestep this problem, if ever J.K. Rowling wrote a sequel series: Harry Potter is technically set in the 90s. If Rowling waited long enough, she might be able to have put enough distance between the original Harry series and the new one that would allow for the creation of a new ultimate villain.)

In conclusion, when a series sets out with a limited structure in mind and centers its conflict around the defeat of one major villain, any follow-up sequel to this series risks either undermining everything that came before it or just paling in comparison.