Words and Coffee

For the silver anniversary of my Coffee Break series I thought I would share some links that I particularly enjoyed this week. Check ‘em out. If they don’t move you, check your pulse, you may be paranormal.

Vivian Maier

At BronxBanterBlog.com is a fantastic post about photography. It’s a baseball blog at heart, but so much more. Host Alex Belth has a keen eye for stuff far outside the lines of the old ball diamond. Like this:

Every once in a while something comes along that is so unbearably tremendous that I can’t help but feel rejuvenated, filled with enthusiasm and faith in the world. Like this story about the guy who found a treasure and is now sharing it with the world.

Bat Segundo interviews Paolo Bacigalupi – I very much enjoyed this podcast. Bacigalupi’s candid answers provided a nice glimpse into his writing process. Here’s a taste:

It’s almost all improvisation, actually. Very little is planned out. There’s a detail that I have in my bank. And I use it. And you’re always acquiring material, whether that’s from visiting your in-laws or whether that’s from reading a novel.

Over at Largehearted Boy, Jeff VanderMeer talks about a music play list that would best accompany his story collection, The Third Bear – There are also links to some free PDF downloads for a story from the book, “The Quickening”,  and reviews of the book.

It’s somewhere between elegy/dirge and celebration, chronicling the strange moments that occur more often than we want to believe. At base, it’s a collection that’s about the search for something beyond what we know…

And finally, over at More Red Ink, editor Marty Halpern discusses many things, but the thing that caught my eye was this post on how flexible e-paper reminded Marty of Paul di Filippo. I include this because I just discovered di Filippo through Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s Steampunk anthology and just downloaded a StarShipSofa podcast because he was in it.

From Marty’s blog (It’s Marty quoting Harlan Ellison talking about di Filippo):

My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There’s three-quarters of a novel. No, these things are not to be finished by other writers, no matter how good they are. It could be Paul Di Filippo, who is just about the best writer in America, as far as I’m concerned.

See, now you’re smarter.

This list I am about to roll out is not about books published in 2010, but books that I read in 2010 and enjoyed. Unfortunately I am neither a book reviewer who receives the latest SF and Fantasy titles (on second thought, I don’t think I could manage to review with the intensity and frequency those guys do. They have my utmost respect), nor am I loaded down with disposable income. I receive most of my books as gifts for birthdays, Father’s Day, Christmas, Flag Day, etc.

In most cases, I’ve provided a link to either the publisher, a bookseller, or the author’s page. As a bonus, if you click on the cover of each book, it’ll take you into a magic world of chocolate waterfalls and phantasmagorical nightmares, or, rather,  a review of the book.

Perdido Street Station – China Mieville

This was my intro to Mr. Mieville and I have to say that even though I read it almost 12 months ago, the images still stick with me. Mieville drives home some points overly much, but, if anything, adds a bit of charm to the whole thing. This is fantasy clad in weird science fictional robes. I may just have to read it again soon.

The Passage – Justin Cronin

This honker of a book justified the hype that came with  it. Dude raked in over 4 million clams before he had even finished the first book (three book deal and movie rights purchased by Ridley Scott). I literally couldn’t put it down. Have you ever showered with 750 pages of book in your hand? I didn’t think so. Read this and you’ll know what I mean.

Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake

This is a late entry. I just finished it a few days ago and am into the next title, Gormenghast. In truth, it was a slow burn, but after Peake sets the table, it’s a smorgasbord of satisfying strangeness. The climax in particular is haunting. What I first thought was dense prose became easy reading. It reminded me of Dickens only more interesting.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

This one also starts a little slow, but holy moly, the book almost caught on fire I was turning the pages so fast. I managed to finish it in record time and then wrapped in a curtain and rolled it around on the floor.  There are things that might turn off some readers, but any story that demands you finish gets my respect.

The Windup Girl – Paolo Bacigalupi

I wrote a post on this not long after I finished it. If nothing else, Bacigalupi’s conception of our world in a post-oil era is stunning. But The Windup Girl is so much more than that. I look forward to reading it again.

The Anubis Gates – Tim Powers

After reading The Difference Engine, I was leery of jumping into this one. Turns out that fear was unnecessary. Powers weaves a potent tale of time travel that starts you out in the dark and gradually draws back the shades. By the end, I was nodding my head and smiling. Very satisfying.

Finch – Jeff VanderMeer

Every time I look at the cover of Finch, I get a little giddy. The whole presentation of the story is superb, from the staccato pulp noir prose to the world-building to the tone. If you like your fiction off-center and a lot weird, this is one for you. If you’re allergic to fungus, get an allergy shot first.

The City and the City – China Mieville

China Mieville almost made this list thrice, but in the end, I did not include The Scar although I enjoyed it very much. I did include The City and The City because of how utterly different it is from Perdido Street Station. Where Perdido Street Station is steeped in Lovecraftian weirdness, The City is much more subtle. It is a police procedural, but like Finch, there is a fantastic element to it that revolves around two cities whose edges overlap in some strange extradimensional way.

The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe

I include the whole series here because you have to read all four books or you’ll be left wondering, “WTF did I just read?” if you don’t (you might still think that after reading all four books, but at least there’s closure). Gene Wolfe has a way with words. Like Mervyn Peake, once you get into the swing of things, these books read at a nice pace. The way Wolfe weaves everything together is perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the series. Get your dying earth on with Severian (the protag). Can’t remember which author said it, but after they read this series they thought, “I didn’t know you could write fantasy like that.”

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Stark, moving, horrific at times, haunting at others. Frankly, any of the Cormac McCarthy books I read this year could be on this list (All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and this one). The man knows how to turn a phrase for maximum effect and he has a knack for cutting to the heart of so many of the things we think about every day.  If you have children, it’s even better.

There you have it. If you haven’t some of these, check ‘em out. Hope your 2011 is filled with words, whether you are reading or writing.

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Paolo Bacigalupi reveals the secrets of his success: Voodoo and liquor. Just kidding, but he does provide insights into where he gets his story ideas and what he wants his stories to do. Bacigalupi also reads from two of his short stories. It’s about an hour, but it’s well worth the viewing.

For what it’s worth, I was glad I hung in there until the end to hear Bacigalupi’s take on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  Basically he said that we’re all indignant at BP’s failure, but that we were just going to burn that same oil and pollute the air through our tailpipe instead of coating the Gulf Coast with crude oil.

The Windup Girl is unlike anything I've read - in a good way.

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I had never read any of Paolo Bacigalupi’s short stories before I delved into The Windup Girl.

I want to now.

I’d seen The Windup Girl on all kinds of lists last fall, but never really looked at the cover. The title didn’t appeal to me overly much. This spring, my brother hooked me up with a copy of Bacigalupi’s latest and suddenly I was compelled to finish up Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun in order to get into The Windup Girl.

I think the cover had a lot to do with it: blimps hovering above a Bangkok in the near future in the background juxtaposed with robed figures leading a huge tusked elephant down a street filled with bazaar tents and colored flags, a scene from 50 or 100 years ago. There are other touches, too, many of which hide in the haze and shadows. They give the book a dystopian kind of vibe, a sense that the world has regressed or in a state of entropy.

The cover was not a pretty wrapper hiding something less-than inside. If anything, the cover was merely a harbinger the tale within.

On the back are the customary blurbs from other authors, which I usually take with a grain of salt. But there was one blurb that caught my eye:

“I hate this guy. All of a sudden he comes out of nowher, writing liek a weird angel, and winning awarrds, and knocking us old pros out of the box with stories about stuff we hadn’t gotten around to thinking up yet. (Like that stupid bio dog!) Plus he’s young and good looking. Luckily, he has an unpronounceable name.”

Terry Bisson, author of Numbers Don’t Lie and Greetings

Mr. Bisson’s words intrigued me.

I usually begin books with trepidation, fearing that I’ll become too conscious of the author’s writing or not engage with the story. Or worse yet, become engaged and find out that the rest of the story doesn’t live up to the beginning  (I’m currently 100 pages into The Name of the Wind and I’m still not sure). I should mention that I didn’t read the jacket flap either. I like to let books surprise me.

I became too engrossed in the story to notice anything else. Bacigalupi’s writing slides along, leaving only the story at the surface. As a writer, I’m intrigued by the way Bacigalupi didn’t let me slip out of the story. There were times when I’d pick up the book and begin looking for writerly things and then I’d find myself ten pages deeper into the story.

There are concepts that Bacigalupi includes in this story that may give you pause, but  Bacigalupi uses them to explore themes regarding human nature, personal psychology, politics and so on.

I won’t do a plot synopsis, but I will tell you that the cast of characters are all people who make you root for them while they do things that make you cringe. It reminds me a little of George RR Martin’s ability to draw gray characters, reminding us that we have a bit of the hero in us, but also the hideous monster as well. The stories of these characters intertwine and twist in ways you don’t expect at times (in a good way).

I think the thing I enjoyed the most was Bacigalupi’s Bangkok. I’ve never been to Thailand so I have no frame of reference, but even if he had set his story on another planet, the setting would have enveloped me.  Bangkok is a city holding back the ocean long after New York, Rangoon, Mumbai and New Orleans have all succumbed to rising ocean waters (presumably to the melting of the polar ice caps).

The country is run on brute force of engineered elephants (megadonts) and people, composted methane, limited coal and ‘kink-springs’, springs that are designed to store energy and to be use as engines (think watch springs but bigger and more powerful). It’s hot as hell and there’s no AC.

Government agencies do their best to regulate the influence of foreign business interests in their city for it is their isolation that has kept the Thai Kingdom from succumbing to the pressures of global trade. In this world, it is the global nature of the economy, genetic modifications/engineering and the distribution of those “advances” that has put the world in a bad way. Thailand’s seedbank is coveted by the agribusiness giants as a way to capitalize on the havoc they have already wreaked.

Throw on top of these things some good old fashioned internal politics and you’ve got tension in buckets with plenty to spare.

The titular character, Emiko, becomes the central figure in the story if only because she is the thread that binds the other stories. One review has a problem with Emiko’s character, but I don’t feel like it detracted from the story at all. Another review complains that Emiko is primarily acted upon, but she is, after all, created to serve and be obedient. Besides, when she does act – look out.

Like any book, The Windup Girl cannot be all things to all people. If you like a compelling story with unobtrusive prose, you should check this out.