The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


While stuck in an unexpected layover, picked up the Book that Everyone's Talking 'Bout (applause). Here's the good and the bad.



Bad: Katniss is a bit of a Mary Sue -- everyone loves her, she's good at everything. The science fiction elements are too soft and plot devicey: I get that Katniss is a kid and to her the tech will seem amazing and beyond her comprehension, but still. As an example of something that I found particularly lazy: the little parachuting gifts that her trainer would send while she was competing in the games. This allowed Collins to artificially do a few things: move along the so obviously telegraphed love triangle between Peeta, Katniss, and Gale by having K&P make out; introduce challenges to keep the story going and not have Katniss overwhelm the game competitors, then easily resolve the challenges that so that Katniss never suffers TOO much.



Neutral: Basically a reworking of "Battle Royale"



Good: Doesn't shy away from serious emotions and serious violence, which I think is good; don't sugar coat or dumb things down for kids. Always nice to see a powerful young girl protagonist who doesn't wilt in favor of her boyfriend. Lots of action, good pacing, quick read. Solid, enjoyable writing.



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The Neutronium Alchemist by Peter F. Hamilton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The second epic part of Hamilton's epic-length epic about an epic war in an epic science fiction future. Did I mention that it's epic? Because it is pretty epic. Perhaps too much so. Hamilton's space opera is filled with larger than life characters, dramatic escapes, technicolor explosions, super-future tech -- described in plenty of loving technobabble -- and plots within plots within plots.

(Spoilers follow)

Among the multiple plotlines, the central story is the rise of various factions of the Possessed across the human universe. The most powerful and threatening is led by a returned Al Capone, who is able to rally his fellow returning dead into a formidable interplanetary organization. A fascinating concept, although Capone's dialogue can be, at times, reeeeeeally cheesy -- one of the downfalls of Hamilton's writing. Complexities multiply in this volume as Dr. Mzu begins her search for the deadly Alchemist, pursued by multiple competing factions (including the Possessed), the returned spirit of Fletcher Christian pursues satanist Dexter Quinn in an attempt to atone for his past misdeeds, the Kiint reveal their own past contact with the Beyond, and an entirely new, mysterious group of seemingly immortal beings emerge in the conflict with the Possessed. Fun, big, bold, and a bit ridiculous.



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Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reminiscent of works such as Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" or Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." A novella of multiple perspectives, fantasies, transforming identities, past and present. During the Interregnum, a foundling named Jordan sets sail to explore the world, discover new fruits, find love, find himself; back in England, his adopted mother -- an impossibly massive creature known only as the Dog-Woman -- brutalizes hypocritical Puritans and longs for the presence of her son, the only person with whom she has ever shared love. The book is airy, fantastical, often confusing in its blurring of reality, fantasy, internal and external worlds; it starts to fall apart, I think, when a modern story is juxtaposed with the historical fiction. Perhaps others will find the mixture of these two stories more compelling, but for me, it caused the work to teeter over the edge: it had been barely held together by the threads of dream logic and imagination, but the temporal disjunction just made it a bit too frayed for me. Still, a beautiful, poetic work for the most part.



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When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wouldn't call it "great literature," but Yalom's novel is a smart, engaging read. Yalom's alternative history posits a meeting between Josef Breuer -- one of the fathers of psychoanalysis and a mentor of Sigmund Freud -- and a young Friedrich Nietzsche. The dialogue can be clunky at times, often coming across as two intellectuals philosophizing to one other rather than two human beings talking, but Yalom has a firm grasp of Nietzsche's thought -- firm enough that he can critique its extremes and flaws while still admiring its scope, audacity, and insight. Readers more familiar than I with clinical psychoanalytic technique will probably also find the discussions between doctor and patient fascinating for their exploration of the tensions, limits, and benefits of the "talking cure"; for me, they were compelling, but I simply don't have the expertise to parse out some of the subtext. Overall very enjoyable, thoughtful, and compelling.



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Some Questions I would like to ask various people involved with Doctor Who

To anyone involved with the first Doctor (William Hartnell) and the early years of the show: During your time, so many "firsts" were established: the first companions, the first appearance of the Daleks, the first historical story, the first return of a previous villain, etc. And so many characteristic images or narrative tropes were established: the Doctor in an apparently deadly spot cliffhanger, the unseen monster attacks someone on camera, etc. These things have all become part of the grammar of the show. What other sorts of lasting impacts do you think you or your period had on the show? What do you see now and say, "That's pure Bill Hartnell" or "That's straight out of Episode 1.4" etc?

To anyone who played a companion:
What other Doctors do you think would make for an interesting pairing with you? And I don't mean as actors, but I mean as characters: which incarnation of the Doctor besides the one(s) you served with would be an interesting counterpart for your companion? (I'd ask the same question of the Doctors re: companions)

To Stephen Moffat and/or Russel T. Davies:
Over its long original run, Doctor Who went through so many versions and tones. What eras do you think are particularly influential for your vision of the show? I'm thinking of the Sylvester McCoy/Andrew Cartmel years as particularly important for the style of the new Who, do you think that's the case?

To anyone involved in the show, but particularly the Doctors:
In those episodes where the Doctor meets past (or future) incarnations of himself, he never seems to much care for them. Why do you think that is? Do you think any particular Doctors would get along remarkably well or poorly, and why?

To Stephen Moffat:
Speaking of Doctors meeting themselves, the old series had a few fairly celebrated occurrences of just that. On the new series, there have been a few teases of the same (the Next Doctor, the Impossible Astronaut) as well as the brief cameo of Peter Davison in a short. Do you think you'll ever do any full-blown Doctor cross-overs? If not, why do you think they don't fit with the new series? If so, what do you think they add to the show, and would you want to combine Old & New series Doctors, just one or the other, or what?

To Stephen Moffat:
You've said that you plan to keep the Daleks off-screen for a while, as their threat becomes diminished when the Doctor beats them handily on a regular basis. Besides simply keeping them off the air, what other ways do you think are useful for keeping the threat of villains palpable, for keeping the tension alive?

To Stephen Moffat and/or Russel T. Davies:
How do you manage the tension between Doctor Who as an ongoing serial with an indefinite (perhaps non-existent?) end-date, something that in a sense requires a return to status quo every week, a minimizing of changes
and Doctor Who as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, that has to develop and go somewhere or else will become stale? Do you feel more of an obligation to change the Doctor and his world or to expand it and keep the series alive for as long as possible?

To anyone involved with the show:
What are the most threatening villains of the series, and why?

I had some others, but I can't remember them now.

Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film by Madhavi Menon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really 3.5 stars. A more thorough (and even-handed) review from me is forthcoming on Shaksper.net, so I thought I'd make just a few overall comments and mention the things that really bothered me about this book.



Menon is clearly very intelligent, and her work is very theoretically sophisticated. Her argument about the problems with the way scholars "do history" is significant and timely. BUT... at times her desire to differentiate herself from what she calls "heterohistory" results in her obscuring or even contradicting her argument. Her primary argument is that scholarship that assumes a paradigm of difference distorts/obscures its subject in many ways; how ironic, then, that she is so insistent about how different her work is -- to the extent that she distorts/obscures some potentially interesting ideas. This is, though, only natural when one attempts to do something as ambitious as Menon does in this book.



The other thing that bugged me about the book were the rather pretentious lines Menon sprinkled throughout the work. Sometimes intended to be humorous, other times as poetic statements that encapsulated her ideas, they were usually both annoying and off-topic. A few of the most egregious examples:



1) In her chapter on Venus and Adonis and teleology: 'In such a realm, we would stop having successful sex. Or, perhaps, more unhistorically, we would have sex endlessly.' She'd just written about how the poem is essentially devoid of sex/sexual completion (but not desire), but, OK, whatever.



2) In her chapter on Titus Andronicus and origins (which is, I think, the best chapter, besides the introduction): "Shakespeare does not deprive Ovid of a tongue. Instead, he mingles his juices with that of the Roman to produce a melange of tastes that homohistory finds delectable." This is just pretentious. Probably should have gone the way of that old chestnut (Hemingway's?) about always deleting your favorite sentence from your work.



3) In her chapter on Shakespeare in Love and authenticity: "Shakespeare in Love suggests that the sanitary and historical act of giving face is always stained by the messy and unhistorical scene of giving head." Um, what? This is really, really lame, and the oral sex metaphor has nothing to do with (and never otherwise appears, as far as I noticed) in the chapter.



That said, the introduction was pretty great and will be useful to anyone interested in sexuality/desire, Shakespeare, and historiography.



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Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Some Spoilers follow...



The second volume in Frank Herbert's original Dune series. This one finds us 12 years after the end of Dune. The Jihad that Paul Muad'Dib Atreides had feared has been unleashed upon the Imperial Galaxy, leaving over 6 billion dead. Paul himself has ascended to near-divine status, ruling through a theocracy that reveres him as a quasi-god, his mother as a sort of Virgin Mary, and his Sister Alia as an almost demonic force of nature. At the same time, the ecological changes begun by Pardot & Liet-Kynes have been accelerated, starting the generations-long transformation of Arrakis from desert wasteland to water-rich world. As Paul struggles to find a way out the present-future his prescient visions have created, various forces in his imperium -- the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, disillusioned Fremen, and the newly introduced Bene Tleilax -- are working against him, trying to assassinate him and end the Atreides reign.



Much like Dune before it, Dune Messiah is all about plots, counter-plots, counter-counter-plots, bluffs, double-bluffs, trickery, scheming... you name it. When I first read it in high school -- over 15 years ago -- I didn't like it as much as Dune. I still find it somewhat inferior to the first book (whereas a number of reviews I've read recently actually prefer it to the first), but I appreciated it much more this time around. The tighter focus on Paul humanizes him for the readers at the same time as he is de-humanized in the world around him. His story is far more tragic in this volume; in Dune, he had been a boy coming to grips with an awesome power, struggling against monstrous forces and trying to take control of his future. In Messiah, we see that in struggling to control his future, he has trapped himself in it. Paul's story here is a story of a "great man" who doesn't move history so much as become just another tool in history's passage. The story offers us a fascinating insight into what it means to be a "messiah": a human being forced to become inhuman, looking for a moment when he can slip out of the mantle that has been placed on his shoulders. Most intriguingly, the messiah is only partially aware of the world he is meant to usher in. He knows his actions lead somewhere, but he cannot or will not see it fully.



All this makes for some rather opaque storytelling at times. The book is about mystery, as Paul's prescience is challenged by the muddying prophecies of others with a limited ability to see -- and therefore create -- the future. Each eye sees something else, but only part of the big picture. As readers, we read these competing visions, but only at the climax of the book do they begin to come together. Even then, we have the birth of the Children of Dune (the title/subject of the next volume) Leto II and Ghanima, and the hint at a grander vision beyond even Paul's Jihad and religious Empire. This can be frustrating at times -- one of the reasons why I found the book less appealing when I first read it -- but it is fundamental to what the story is about.



As for the things that bothered me, some of them still do. First is the introduction of the Bene Tleilax. They are thrust into the story without much explanation, but at the same time there isn't a whole lot of "mystery" about them -- it is as though you are just to know who they are. They do become more important in later books, but its a little confusing at first, as you feel like you've missed something from the first book. But more annoying than their sudden importance to the Dune universe is the revelation by one of the Tleilaxu that they had created a Kwisatch Haderach before -- the superbeing that had been the goal of the Bene Gesserit breeding program. A line casually tossed off by one of the Tleilaxu, this really undercuts the sense of Paul's importance and uniqueness. More importantly, though, it makes the Kwisatch Haderach seem less like an evolutionary leap in humankind and more like a science experiment. It also makes the Bene Gesserit look like idiots -- they've spent thousands of years breeding an superbeing, but the Tleilaxu somehow engineered one years before, and that one committed suicide? It really undermines the whole concept.



I was also somewhat bothered by the importance of the resurrected Duncan Idaho. In Dune, Idaho had largely been on the periphery. He rarely interacted with Paul, from what I remember, and died rather early in Paul's journey protecting him and his mother. Noble warrior and all, but a side character. He is reintroduced in this novel as a ghola, a resurrected body created by the aforementioned Tleilaxu. All of a sudden, he is Paul's closest companion. And Idaho continues to be central to the story through the next few novels. Not a big deal, but given how taken Paul is with Duncan you'd think he would have thought about him occasionally inbetween his death early in Dune and his return midway through Messiah. But, I guess Herbert wanted to bring back someone from Paul's past, and Idaho made sense, even if the lines between Paul's past with Idaho and his reaction to him in Messiah are thinly drawn.



So, overall, a very good book. Not quite as good as Dune, and I think the weakest of the first 4 (which are, in a sense, the "first part" of the Dune Saga, with Heretics & Chapterhouse being the "second part"). But still exciting and enjoyable. One thing, though: you can read Dune and stop there, but once you get to Dune Messiah, you're in the middle of a fairly continuous story that runs through God Emperor, the 4th book. So, be ready to invest a good bit of time.



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