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Piling On – June 2009

114 Space (Jason Vance)

I done good. I bought only two books this month. I won a third book via a contest. I read five books off my pile. I am officially at -2 for the month of June.

Also, I pulled a number of books off my shelf and put them in a box to be given away. I needed to be a little more ruthless in culling my book collection. So into the box went some books I liked but shouldn’t have been must-keep-for-all-time. More books will go into this box over the next couple of months.

As I did last year, I will be soliciting donations to the A.L.S. Association in memory of my mother, Dorinda Bender, who died from A.L.S. last October. I will send a book to anyone who donates $20 or more via the web page I will set up for the A.L.S.A. Walk to Defeat A.L.S.

On to this month’s acquisitions… So few I’m not even going to use a list. First book I bought was Akashic Books’ Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert. I liked Colbert’s Jake Rossiter series, and I liked Delhi Noir from the publisher. The second book I bought up just hours before the end of the month. That was The New Space Opera 2 (they shoulda called it The Newer Space Opera dammit!) edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. My third physical book acquisition came via a contest Harper Studio had on Twitter; I won Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of previously unpublished essays by Mark Twain.

In non-acquisitions: I checked out, read, and returned Daniel Farber’s Lincoln’s Constitution from the Seattle Public Library. And I downloaded Stephen Piziks’ In the Company of Mind from his web site.

My shelf space actually increased this month! That’s only happened one month in the last couple of years.

Image 114 Space by Jason Vance used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

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By King Rat
— 2 July 2009 at 1:15 am

Superpowers / David J. Schwartz

Cover of Superpowers (Norm Breyfogle/Si Scott)
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Another Wiscon dealer room purchase. This time I bought the book at the Small Beer Press table, even though the book isn’t published by Small Beer Press. Manning the booth was David Schwartz himself, though I didn’t realize it until I came back to pick up my purchase later. I guess he got to sell his book in return for slave labor.

Superpowers was nominated for a Nebula, and deservedly so, though it didn’t win. It’s a realistic take on superheroes, focusing on the personal. In the story, having super abilities isn’t a boon. The five main characters were all richly conceived. I disagree with some reviewers who took issue with the number and quality of secondary characters. I thought they added quite a bit to the story. Unlike a lot of superhero fiction, the conflict is primarily that of self-doubt and that doubt is not caused by facing a nemesis. It’s also a pretty quick read.

Charlie and Jack invite their downstairs neighbors, fellow University of Wisconsin Madison students Caroline, Harriet and Mary Beth, to a party. The vague purpose is to get laid, but a flash of light in the sky gives all of them superpowers. The young people wake up the next morning and discover their new abilities. Charlie can hear people’s thoughts, Jack has superspeed, Mary Beth has strength, Harriet can turn invisible, and Caroline can fly.

When I was in elementary school, I used to make-believe I had super-vision. Walking to school along 3rd Avenue in what is now Shoreline, I convinced myself I could see details on 195th Street all the way from Richmond Beach Road a half mile to the south. Oh, how I wanted superhuman abilities! What could be bad about having powers?

The students in Superpowers struggle to cope, even from the beginning. In addition, to standard learning my powers difficulties, all have different ideas on what to do with them. For instance, Caroline tries to hide her flying from her fellow superfriends, even. She likes the solitude and serenity she gets floating above the Earth. She has to be dragged into the nascent crime-fighting group, the All-Stars.

The biggest issue for all of them are their secret identities. They want to maintain real lives while also being superheroes. A conspiracy is pretty hard to maintain though. People such as family members, co-workers, roommates, and a campus underground newspaper all start to figure it out. I liked following the interactions between the All-Stars and others.

The students are all pretty normal middle-class type people. That’s not too out of place for something set in Madison, Wisconsin, but it does make them all seem fairly similar. Personality-wise, they aren’t. But in terms of their situations, they feel sort of cookie-cutter. I do wish there were a little more diversity in their economic classes, or their family background, or even the languages they spoke. Several secondary characters have different backgrounds. One of my favorite interactions was between Caroline and a man she thinks is trying to kill himself. Turns out he’s José the dishwasher at the restaurant where she works and hasn’t noticed him before. Hispanic servants just blend in when you are white and self-involved like Caroline. The interactions with these characters of different backgrounds sparked the most interesting developments. I’d love to see what Schwartz could do if he made that the focus of a novel, because I think he’d do a really good job with it.

Anyhow, for a fairly small investment of time because it’s an easy read, it’s a fairly substantial story.

A few other blogged reviews:

Title: Superpowers
Author: David J. Schwartz
Cover creator: Norm Breyfogle (illustrator) / Si Scott (title designer)
Imprint / publisher: Vintage UK
Format: Paperback
Length: 376 p.
Publication date: June 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-099-51610-1
Subject: College students — Fiction
Subject: Heroes — Fiction

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By King Rat
— 29 June 2009 at 1:46 am

The Shadow Speaker / Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

Cover of The Shadow Speaker (Elizabeth Clark/Luca Trovato/Colin Samuels)
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I really liked Nnedi Okorafor’s Zahrah the Windseeker, and seeing Nnedi Okorafor on a couple of panels at Wiscon made me like her even more. I’d be hard-pressed to think of someone more positive than her. So I picked up The Shadow Speaker at the dealer room.

The Shadow Speaker has a lot in common with Zahrah the Windseeker: a setting that appears in both books, a young female protagonist learning her new powers, male supporting cast, and similarly creative fantastic creatures. All of that was awesome! What wasn’t awesome was the disjointed hero quest plot. Zahrah had to save her friend. Ejii has to save five extra-dimensional worlds from war. Along the way she encounters seemingly random obstacles that seem to be there only to introduce Ejii to her traveling companions. I was disappointed overall.

Ejimofor Ejii Ugabe is a shadow speaker living in magical Kwàmfà in West Africa in 2070. The Great Change, a nuclear war semi-aborted by interfering technology released by a peace group, released magic as a more powerful force than technology. Some people fear meta-humans such as flying wind-seekers and extra-sensory shadow speakers because of superstition and some view them as normal.

The semi-mythical Jaa has ruled Kwàmfà for a few years. She’d established the town and then gone away. During Jaa’s time away, Ejii’s father ruled the village in manner similar to current day Islamic countries, hard and discriminating, before Jaa returned and summarily executed Ejii’s father. Time has passed though, and Jaa heads to a great peace conference in Ginen across the desert and through a dimensional portal. Ejii, no lover of her own father, follows and hopes to join Jaa because the shadows have told her she must go to prevent the war.

The strength of the book is the creativity Okorafor used to create creatures and situations. She included giant sentient sandstorms, talking camels, ostrich-like birds that will carry women but not men, and more.

Ejii is a solid main character, particularly for a girl. She isn’t a cookie cutter stereotype that seems to plague a lot of young adult female characters. She’s smart but not super-brainy. Mostly respectful when she deals with others. Sometimes resourceful, but able to let others such as her fellow school-age shadow speakers help her. In short, I like her. Her traveling companion Dikéogu treats her as an equal or sometimes as his better. He’s charmingly stubborn.

Stubbornness seems to be a prominent characteristic for every character though. In addition, the adults all seem to have a streak of knee-jerk in them that felt extremely false to me. I might not have noticed if it weren’t combined with the mundane plotting.

And that’s the Achilles heel for the book, the plotting. As Ejii journeys, she periodically encounters obstacles, resolves them, and moves on. Episodic is the mold for a hero quest, of course. In this case, each obstacle, whether it’s a group of man-eating cats, a sandstorm, a magician, or a hotel desk clerk, follows a very predictable path and then goes away and Ejii continues her journey. They don’t build on each other, excepting the lesson Ejii learns from each builds on previous lessons. But the events themselves usually just leave Ejii back on her journey having learned her lesson but having advanced no further in her actual quest.

I think lots of people, possibly including the young adults at which the book is targeted, won’t have that reaction to the plot because they will be enjoying the scenery. So I hesitate to unrecommend it. For me though, it was very middle of the road.

Some other blogged reviews:

Title: The Shadow Speaker
Author: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Cover creator: Elizabeth H. Clark (designer) / Luca Trovato and Colin Samuels (photographers)
Imprint / publisher: Jump at the Sun / Disney Hyperion
Format: Paperback
Length: 336 p.
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-142310036-2
Subject: Adventure and adventurers — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Adventure and adventurers — Fiction
Subject: Fantasy
Subject: Sahara — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Africa — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Sahara — Fiction
Subject: Africa — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.O4157 Sh 2007

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By King Rat
— 27 June 2009 at 12:15 am

Lincoln’s Constitution / Daniel Farber

Cover of Lincoln's Constitution
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I read Geoffrey Stone’s Perilous Times a couple of years ago. Daniel Farber’s Lincoln’s Consitution has a similar focus, but covers only the Civil War rather than the entirety of the history of civil liberties during troubled times. In addition to examining whether the Lincoln administration’s curtailment of civil liberties during the Civil War was constitutional, Farber also looks at the question of secession and use of military force against the south. Farber’s conclusion is that most of Lincoln’s actions were constitutional.

For the most part, Farber’s analysis was understandable to this non-lawyer. Irrespective of his personal views on the proper framework for constitutional analysis, Farber looks at each of the situations under several of the analytical paradigms currently advocated: originalism, textualism, and that of the constitution as a living document. The book is somewhat dismissive of textualism, at least as practiced today. The drafters didn’t nit-pick every word or phrase for exactness, so such analysis done today isn’t very valid according to his writing. His greatest focus is on analyzing in terms of what the framers and the country originally understood the document to mean. One big caveat though is that even then many of the clauses were ambiguous, by design or by inattention. Farber writes that we shouldn’t ascribe detailed meaning to the framers when it didn’t necessarily exist at the time.

As to the question of secession, Farber writes that under all but the most radical of interpretations, the south did not have the right to secede. The union was meant to be perpetual; no clauses for secession were included. Under standard rules of contracts, entering into one has to be universal, but unless the terms for abrogating it are written into it, other parties must approve a release. So unless the south got the permission from the entire country, it could not secede from the U.S. or de-ratify the constitution. He also dismisses a right of revolution as the south had not endured any indignities from the U.S. or the north. In fact, until Lincoln’s election is had exercised a great deal of control over U.S. policy. At best, international law and norms meant the south could enter into negotiations to secede. It did not. It unilaterally seceded and then started the war by firing on Fort Sumter.

James Buchanan, the president prior to Lincoln, came to the conclusion that while the South had no right to secede, under the Constitution he could not use the military to stop them absent a congressional declaration of war. So he did nothing. Lincoln, and Farber in retrospect, disagreed. To them, the south clearly had started insurrection, which gave the President the right to defend the U.S.

Civil liberties were more questionable though. Lincoln ignored a writ of habeas corpus, summarily arrested opponents, and shuttered newspapers critical of the war. Not all actions did he take himself. Some were attempted by his subordinates, but Lincoln usually supported those actions after the fact, at least publicly. In some cases these might have been legal, such as the preventive arrest of southern sympathizers. Others, such as the shuttering of newspapers critical of the war probably were not. Most of the time Lincoln was pretty careful to not abuse his authority.

One nice thing Farber did in summation was to look at Lincoln’s evolving theory of the rule of law, which was his ostensible reason for prosecuting the war. While he was against slavery, he was fine with a decades long slow death for the practice. He fought the war to preserve the rule of law and to preserve the United States. But his ideas for what that meant changed over his lifetime.

Having read Perilous Times, I thought the chapters on civil liberties were somewhat redundant to my earlier reading. However, I learned some things from his examination of secession and the sources of the theory of the unitary executive. (He doesn’t embrace that theory.)

Interesting, but not really enough a-ha moments to rate it as a must-read. A worthy read, definitely.

One blogged review:

Title: Lincoln’s Constitution
Author: Daniel Farber
Imprint / publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 200 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-226-23793-1
Subject: Lincoln, Abraham — 1809 – 1865 — Views on the Constitution
Subject: United States — Politics and government — 1861-1865
Subject: Constitutional history — United States
LC classification: E457.2.F216 2003

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By King Rat
— 19 June 2009 at 6:19 pm

All She Was Worth / Miyuki Miyabe

Cover of All She Was Worth (Glen Allison)
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Going beyond explication of investigation, Miyuki Miyabe’s All She Was Worth also mixed in a good amount of characterization with its crime fiction plotting. It’s a little slow in the first half, but the pacing picks up quite a bit in the second. I didn’t care much for the anti-consumerism anti-credit diatribes, even though I agree with them philosophically. I think they could have been shortened resulting in a better paced book. Miyabe’s multi-layered characters were the strong point of the book.

All She Was Worth has a different vibe than most of the crime fiction I’ve read, but not really all that different. The investigator is unfailingly polite, though he employs a few psychological tricks that give him more control than the politeness gives him haplessness. The book’s setting is Japan, primarily Tokyo. The differences in the laws and cultural norms between Japan as told by Miyabe and the U.S. really are pretty minimal. A woman is treated as part of a man’s family and working women have expectations placed on them by their employers that we don’t see here. In the context of this novel, the differences are so few that any U.S. mystery reader will feel at home.

Shunsuke Honma is the detective, injured and on leave. A relative, Jun Kurisaka, comes to him seeking Honma’s help to find his fiance who has skipped town. Shoko Sekine disappeared after the relative decided to get her a credit card. A five year old bankruptcy prevented the application from succeeding. It’s initially baffling as to why she ran, but it quickly becomes apparent that Shoko Sekine is not the original person named Shoko Sekine. The fiance has assumed someone else’s name. We have a mystery, not just where she is, but who she really is and why and how she became Shoko Sekine.

The book is constructed to comment on the debt and consumer culture. In fact, one whole chapter is a minor character’s explication of Japan’s debt and credit industry, how regular people get themselves into trouble, and how bankruptcy works. I think the early part of the book overfocused on this and was slow as a result. I’ve seen several summaries that make the motive for the crime one of consumer culture. It didn’t appear that way to me. It was a complicating factor to the investigation, as the real Shoko Sekine got herself into debt and the revelation of bankruptcy is what caused the impostor to run, and there are some cascading effects of that knowledge. Obviously I see the motive as something else, but this is a spoiler free review so I won’t say what. I’m glad consumerism wasn’t the motive, however. It made the criminal much less crass and much more real in my mind.

I can’t think of one character I didn’t like in context of the story. Some are people I would hate in real life, of course. The investigating team, initially just Honma, slowly grows as more people get sucked in: a fellow detective, a high school mate with an unrequited crush, and even Honma’s pre-teen son. I had problems tracking who was who in the ever increasingly sizable cast, but only because of their number. Even those who the reader sees only in glimpses are characters with multiple facets. One scene just after the man with the unrequited crush asserts he will join the investigation stands out. Honma has a conversation with the man’s wife, who is hurt over her husband’s still strong feelings for Shoko long after Shoko has passed out of his life. Nevertheless, she assents to him going on his quest. She barely makes an appearance and yet her character is far more than one dimensional. Even the real Shoko Sekine leaves her personality behind her, rather than just a trail of evidence of her life. The reader gets to know what she was like and what her family was like, all through revelations from people she knew.

One thing was very different than every other crime fiction novel I’ve read. Most have a short wrap-up at the end. A kind of unwinding that says what happened or didn’t happen to the criminal, possibly something that transitions the investigator on to the next book. Miyabe’s ending occurs right at the climax. Scooby-doo pulls the mask off the monster to reveal the caretaker, and we go to credits. (Obviously, this is not Scooby-doo, and no mask gets pulled off. Again, no spoilers so I pulled my example from something else.) I’m sure it’s not that unusual, but it’s very different from the stuff I’ve read and refreshing. I might get annoyed if all my mysteries ended that way.

I liked the book enough that I’ll read more from Miyabe.

Other blogged reviews:

Title: All She Was Worth (火車)
Author: Miyuke Miyabe (宮部みゆき)
Translator: Alfred Birnbaum
Cover creator: Glen Allison (photographer) / Mark R. Robinson (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin
Format: Paperback
Length: 296 p.
Publication date: 1999 (originally 1992)
ISBN-10: 0-395-96658-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-395-96658-7
Subject: Japan — Fiction

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By King Rat
— 15 June 2009 at 5:24 pm