December 2010
27 posts
In our Saturday post about the California... →
Apparently only good enough for runner-up as Regret the Error’s Correction of the Year.
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megan abbott, the song is you
“This wasn’t all true, but it was true enough. Maybe. Hop couldn’t untangle his motives. There was something about covering his own tracks — tracks he thought he’d long ago covered. And sure, there was something else.” Abbott puts her protagonist in a nice situation here: simultaneously covering up a bad thing that’s happened (or, rather, protecting the...
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bacigalupi continued
“We should all be windups by now. It’s easier to build a person impervious to blister rust than to protect an earlier version of the human creature. A generation from now, we could be well-suited for our new environment. Your children could be beneficiaries. Yet you people refuse to adapt. You cling to some idea of a humanity that evolved in concert with your environment over...
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bacigalupi continued
“‘I’ve had many different lives. I was a boy, and a muay thai champion, and a father, and a white shirt.’ He glances down at the folds of his novice’s clothes. ‘A monk, even.’”
While I’m in no position to comment on Bacigalupi’s understanding of Thai Buddhism (and will in fact fall behind Niall Harrison’s larger argument about...
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paolo bacigalupi, the windup girl
“When the door opens, they kneel in a wave, all of them performing khrabs of abasement, triple bows to the patron who keeps them housed, the one man in Krung Thep who willingly shoulders the burden of them, who provides a measure of safety from the red machetes of the Malays and the black batons of the white shirts.”
In contrast to Kraken, this is full-on speculative fiction, an...
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mengestu continued
“When I was afraid the story was moving too slowly, I moved the narrative back into the heart of the port town. I filled its streets and harbor as best I could with a sense of mystery and danger not unlike the type that could be found in old black-and-white movies with raincoat-clad men in foreign settings, or even in more contemporary accounts of Africa that never shied away from reveling...
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mengestu continued
“When one of my students wanted to know what I did before I began teaching at the academy, I told him that I had spent years working in a coal mine and had the blackened lungs to prove it. To another I was the captain of a Japanese trawler, and then a few days later a pimp and hustler. The more outlandish my responses were, the more my students wanted to know the truth, which had been the...
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dinaw mengestu, how to read the air
“At the time I hadn’t given much thought to what I was saying. I had returned home and I had found Angela sitting at the table, buried in work but still worried about where I was, and I had thought it almost miraculous that such a thing should occur. Nothing in my life up to that point had quite prepared me for that, neither my parents nor the handful of lovers I had had before then....
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By 12:30 the steady flow of emergency cases (SEE... →
June Casagrande begins “to do the detailed, extensive line-editing [Stieg] Larsson’s work requires.”
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mieville continued
“These revelations into a paradigm of recusant science, so the goddamn universe itself was up for grabs, were part of the most awesome shift in vision Billy had ever had. But the awe had been the greatest when he had not understood at all. The more they were clarified, the more the kitsch of the norms disappointed him.”
But of course, despite the richness of the themes and the...
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mieville continued
“‘Whether you agree with the bloody predicates or not, Constable Collingswood, you should consider the possiblity that faith might be a way of thinking more rigorously than the woolly bullshit of most atheists. It’s not an intellectual mistake.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘It’s a way of thinking about all sorts of other things, as well as itself. The Virgin...
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“You hear all the time, Billy told Dane — and how good it was for him to be...”
– China Mieville, Kraken | Del Rey 06.29.10
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mieville continued
“Of course, they’re all over, gods are. Theurgic vermin, those once worshipped or still worshipped in secret, those half worshipped, those feared and resented, petty divinities: they infect everybloodywhere. The ecosystems of godhead are fecund, because there’s nothing and nowhere that can’t generate the awe on which they graze. But just because there are cockroaches...
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china mieville, kraken
“The police arrived at last, coming in a stampy gang.”
“Stampy” is followed in the next sentence by “benthic.” A few lines later, Billy the hero finds himself “standing by the lack,” that is, the space where a stolen object used to be. By the end of the chapter, “a twirl of rubbishy wind was gusting around some klaggy-looking squirrel on a...
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énard continued
“… in La Risiera in Trieste I passed a group of high school students on a field trip, in the middle of the barracks near the crematorium they were very busy murmuring sweet nothings to each other, furtively smoking, elbowing each other, under the severe gaze of an emotional history teacher, here so many people have suffered, she said, and this sentence had no meaning for them, or so...
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mathias énard, zone
“I climb into the trans-Italian express that must have been the zenith of progress and technology ten years ago for its doors were automatic and it went faster than 200 kilometers per hour in a straight line on a good day and today, a little closer to the end of the world, it’s just a train: the same goes for all things like trains and cars, embraces, faces, bodies their speed their...
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kim continued
“You know the plays that are on extended runs, for ten or twenty years? You’re like those actors who have been in the play for so long that they don’t remember who they were before the play. You live that same role every night, no matter how you live during the day. So then you find yourself confused, since the Ki-yong at night has more continuity than the Ki-yong during the day....
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kim continued
“That’s only a temporary solution. The last war was all about fire. Pyongyang went back to the stone age because of American bombs. After that was the era of earth. We picked up our shovels and erected cities. Through the Chollima Movement, we built a republic as good as any other. Now it’s the era of water. Water appears placid from the outside but there’s actually a very...
These are the reasons, too, why a bad thriller or... →
There are a couple of points that Edward Docx makes here, of varying degrees of accuracy: he points out that Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown are not particularly good at what they do; he posits a distinction between literary and genre fiction based on constraint (“even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the...
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kim continued
“In truth, all the information gathered by spies is already out in the open. Spying is similar to clipping newspaper articles. The quality of information culled by spies isn’t any better or worse than that. Information covers the sky in a black mass, like migratory birds in early winter. No, Ki-yong thinks, that is too menacing an image.”
And Kim also touches on the quotidian...
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kim young-ha, your republic is calling you
“Ki-yong knew what ennui was, but this was the first time he personally observed it. At home, it was an abstract idea batted about when criticizing capitalism. Of course, there was ennui back home, too. But in a socialist society it was closer to boredom.”
The setup is interesting: Ki-yong is a North Korean sleeper agent, secure in his belief that his masters have forgotten about him...
To put it in different terms, we are living a... →
Haruki Murakami, in the IHT, on the not-strictly-realist novel in an unreal world.
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carlin romano, ed., philadelphia noir
“When he’d first escaped from the Youth Study Center up on Henry, he’d spent three days hiding at the movie house at the end of Main Street in Manayunk just going from theater to theater and there was always some scene where a guy is about to take on the bad guys, or just lost his wife, or his best friend, or his dog or something, and the music that’s supposed to make you...
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Indeed it is to read beyond the writer’s authority... →
Joseph Mackin, a reviewer and now a novelist, in the New York Journal of Books, on the role of the reviewer and his or her relationship to books reviewed. While it’s easy enough to nitpick (his choice not to consider, or even mention, the author’s and reviewer’s relationship in the marketplace), good reviewing (especially now) deserves a good-faith defense.
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lehane continued
“The two guys with the Weimaraners did note that Amanda looked a little like the girl in the Twilight movies, if not in the hair and the cheekbones, then in the nose and the forehead and the close-set eyes, but then they got into an argument over whether said actress was a Kristen or a Kirsten, and I wandered over to the middle-aged woman before it devolved into a Team Edward vs. Team Jacob...
