I never post these on time.
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon: Writing about a Pynchon novel is a dreadful prospect. The novel is a detective story set in New York City before, during, after the September 11th attacks, with the backdrop of the dot-com bubble crash informing the story. An unassuming first chapter is followed by a second which starts with all-consuming paranoia, dumb puns and silly humor, tons of late 90s and early 00s nerd/pop culture references, and dramatic irony as the reader watches the planes creep ever closer.
This book'll get you smiling. You got characters talking about Jewish Psyducks, Beanie Baby obsessions, Quake machinima, programming language wars, the musical theme from Deus Ex, Hideo Kojma's genius, Razor scooters, search engines like AltaVista, and Britney Spears. Plenty more on the nose and semi-obscure stuff from the historical record and elsewhere as well, as well as plenty of fictional stuff that might just be real.
Pynchon wraps it all together with a love letter to New York and conspiracies all around. A bunch of ethnic language in the novel, usually Yiddish, adds flavor and strife. There's a Metaverse type of software in the novel, reminding me of
Snow Crash, and Pynchon stealing from Stephenson who was already copping Pynchon.
Of course you have the Proper Pynchonian Bits (PPB), the paragraphs that fill a page and build a world, the long sentences that seem to meander and maybe they do, and touching prose that affirms and rejects humanity. There a plenty of characters and perhaps not enough characterization. The plot goes every which way, and there are no real answers to be found.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch: With the release of the third novel in this lauded series, it was time to check out some of this “Ocean's 11 fantasy.” The novel's got good world building and interesting plot strands that converge, with some fun characters. It gets pretty dark as well, well into the meat of the novel, giving you quite a surprise with its type of brutality. A complaint I have with the novel is with the characterization. You get a few POVs in the novel, and there's barely any internal life at all to these people. The dialogue and the actions do enough to establish the character, but there's an emptiness to the characters as well. The interludes/flashbacks try and build up the main few characters, but it's done too often, usually acting poorly as exposition and motivation for the next chapter. Regardless, I'll be checking out the sequels.
The Gunslinger by Stephen King: An intriguing first line, in this series of short stories making up the first
The Dark Tower novel, draws you in. The prose is somewhat interesting at first, but I grew weary of it pretty quickly. The novel is not a great start to this series, though the final part caught my attention, so I'm intrigued and will continue.
Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, and Malcolm Jones III: My first go at Gaiman, and I like what I see so far. It's a somewhat uneven first glimpse at this series, as Gaiman admits in the afterword, but I hear wonderful things about the rest. Dream is an interesting guy, and there's some cool antagonists and partners. I enjoyed the changing types of paneling and the weird and strange artwork.
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon: My first foray into Sturgeon's work, and I'm intrigued by the great prose and his examination of humanity's foibles and real flaws, individuality, morality and tragedy. Sturgeon is thought of as one of the first literary science-fiction writers, which is made apparent by the flowing prose and focus on characters. Not much of a plot here which goes off the rails by the end, and the novel also continues my bemusement with mid-century speculative fiction's seeming obsession with telekinesis and other psychic abilities.
I'm thinking I might start
Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem tonight.
About 70% through A Feast for Crows.
I really liked these past two novels. I enjoyed the focus on characters and world building, as well as Martin upping his prose game. If you're looking for plot you'll be disappointed as theres only some in these novels, especially with things edited out due to length. There's plenty of stuff that does happen, but it's just not plot heavy.
