China Mieville - The City & The City

Mieville has always had a thing for patchwork cities. I first encountered the author years ago with the strange and wonderful Perdido Street Station, which I highly recommend. That novel was a masterpiece of imagination, set in a politically fractured steampunk metropolis. Its two sequels were entertaining but lackluster, and Mievelle fell off of my radar.

The City & The City, which shared the 2010 Hugo with Bacigalupi's vastly inferior The Windup Girl, is a detective novel set in the absurd divided city of Beszel and Ul Qoma, located somewhere in a post-Soviet Eastern Europe. I don't want to say too much about the nature of the relationship between the two cities, as the gradual unfolding of this relationship in the early part of the novel produces a somewhat maddening sense of disorientation that I found to be fairly masterful on the part of Mieville. For this same reason, I would recommend that one avoid reading too much about the book before diving into it.

The setting itself is something of a literary-theoretical thought experiment taken to an absurd extreme; this is self-conscious, as Foucault and Baudrillard are referenced by a character in the text (although I think the conceit is more due to Deleuze). Which is to say: this book is ambitious, in a way that (especially with the noir trappings) reminds me of nothing more than Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, to which this book is clearly indebted. And Mieville, somehow, pulls it off, producing a novel that's both a technical masterpiece and lot of fun.

edit: As a sidenote, you can understand the thematic structure of this novel in terms of Greimas' semiotic square, which is a bit like a two-dimensional dialectic and a really powerful analytic tool in general.

When the Thrill is Gone

Walter Mosley writes vivid mysteries and crime stories, usually set in LA, but sometimes elsewhere, as this one, which is set in New York City. Many of the stories have a noir feel and all feature very sharp urban dialog that's a pleasure to read. The subtext of all the stories is race relations, embodied in the action, rather than described. This one, in the Leonard McGill series, was not my favorite (I have most enjoyed the books featuring Easy Rawlins or Fearless Jones) but still had wonderful moments of human interaction. Any Mosley is a pleasure!

Dorothy Sayers!

Recently read two excellent mysteries by Dorothy Sayers, Wrong Body and Unnatural Death. I enjoyed the first, but thought the second was really great. I appreciate the wit (and silliness) of Lord Peter Wimsey (whom the prominent critic Edmund Wilson described as "...a dreadful stock English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey"). Oh well.

Sayers (Wikipedia says she preferred the pronunciation "Sares" to "Say-ers") led a very interesting life, with accomplishments in many fields. Her mysteries, usually featuring Wimsey or the smart and independent Harriet Vane, are clever and urbane, with interesting plots, often featuring specialty information on subjects such as medical practice, or "change ringing" ("...the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns called "changes". It differs from many other forms of campanology in that no attempt is made to produce a conventional melody" - thanks Wikipedia!), or advertising (Sayers worked, very successfully, for many years at an advertising firm that later became Ogilvy and Mather).

Sayers was precocious and learned - her father, chaplain at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, began teaching her Latin at age 6, and she studied modern languages and medieval literature at Oxford, eventually becoming one of the first women to receive a degree there. Sayers considered her best work to be the well-regarded translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Edmund Wilson, HA!

The Otterbury Incident

This delightful and entertaining story is written by Cecil Day Lewis, who held the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University and was Poet Laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972. (His son is the actor Daniel Day Lewis). This was his only children's book; it's been out of print for some time (I had a used copy sent from England. Interested? I'll loan it to you!) and came to my attention via Hayao Miyazaki's List of 50 Recommended Books for Children, which is now available via an Amazon List. It's a believable "mystery", with much whimsy and humor. Wonderful!

William Gibson's Count Zero

Count Zero, although at times confusing, is another Gibson masterpiece. The world he envisions is Tolstoyan in its richness, fullness, and complexity. He is strikingly creative and his vision of the near (although technologically distant) future is dark, grimy, and dangerous without being oppressingly alarmist. Gibson's characters ring true and his literary grasp is impressive, and far improved from Neuromancer - he convincingly weaves together multiple narratives to reveal a complex and fascinating picture of cyberspace and its potential. In this work, Bobby, aka Count Zero, is an aspiring cyber cowboy (or "hotdogger") who gets swept up in the veiled machinations of an incomprehensibly wealthy entity named Virek. ("Entity" because Virek's body is a pool of molecules in an enormous vat, and he "lives" in the matrix.) The story follows Virek's attempts to locate the maker of mysteriously haunting collage boxes through various hitmen and an art collector. The book's themes, largely introduced in Neuromancer, include AI, systems theory, the synthesis of man and machine, and the spatial nature of cyberspace. The religious potential of the matrix is also fruitfully explored. A real page-turner and a must-read!

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History

Kay Thompson

I heard the author interviewed on NPR, who said Kay Thompson (well-known as the author of the Eloise books) was not widely appreciated for her impressive influence on singing styles and singers of the 40's and 50's. She was vocal coach and mentor for Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minelli, Andy Williams and countless others. And she created a nightclub act that was widely regarded as one of the best ever. She also had substantial impact on fashion shows. She was a true eccentric, extremely talented, and not all that nice a person. This book is fun to read, with all kinds of insider info and show-biz gossip - but it wasn't exactly gripping. Let me know if you want it, and I'll give it to you for Christmas! Otherwise, the library gets it.

Raymond Chandler

Just finished The Library of America's Chandler Stories and Early Novels, which included 13 "Pulp Stories" and 3 novels, including The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The High Window. The stories, particularly, were wonderful - sure, there is lots of vivid tough-guy talk, but also great plotting, amusing dialog and tangled mysteries unwound by Philip Marlowe (or, in some stories, Mallory or Malvern), who has a code of honor but is still tough and wise enough to see through the lies and cheap ambitions.
One discovery - there's lots of humor in these stories! Fascinating and immensely readable. I grew up in LA - was it really like this?
(Art from Steve Weissman)