Much ado has been made over the current “vampire trend” and its potential longevity. People are curious: why and how have vampires become so popular? What has caused them to capture the fancy of the mainstream public after years of being appreciated mainly by fans of the horror genre? The answer to that question lies in the slow move from terror to sympathy that people have made over the past few decades, due in large part to the efforts of many authors, screenwriters, directors, and other artists.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, vampires were the bad guys. Remember those days? Dracula bending menacingly over a delirious Lucy Westenra; Kurt Barlow and his servant Mr. Straker slowly bringing the town of Salem’s Lot to ruin; Keifer Sutherland and his cronies menacing Corey Haim’s family … vampires were nearly always portrayed as voracious, evil killers …

If you’re interested in reading the rest, you can find it at Reading with a Bite. I think it’s a pretty solid essay, and of course I get to plug my book, The Blood That Bonds, as well! Thanks very much to Lindsay for the opportunity.

Oh, and the control to turn off the music that starts when the site loads is over on the right, a little bit down the page. ;)

]]> http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/09/29/the-blood-that-bonds-is-live/feed/ 0 http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/08/04/books-j-k-rowlings-harry-potter-and-the-goblet-of-fire/ http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/08/04/books-j-k-rowlings-harry-potter-and-the-goblet-of-fire/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:30:31 +0000 chris http://www.cerebraldebris.com/?p=1386 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling really begins to embrace the darker tone that she first begins to explore in the Prisoner of Azkaban, and the result is a book that I found more engrossing than any of the first three. I like a little darkness, and I like that Rowling is unafraid to show that Harry exists in a dangerous world where people, both good and bad, are in possession of powers that can be extremely physically punishing to those at the receiving end.

Rowling continues to expand her compelling cast of characters, introducing new students both from within Hogwarts and from two other schools of wizarding, as well as several members of the Ministry of Magic. Two other new characters of note include the highly enjoyable “Mad-eye” Mooney, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, and the highly obnoxious Rita Skeeter, an invasive journalist who’s not above making up large chunks of her stories.

We also get to hear from many old favorites, not the least of which being Potters’ inseparable friends Ron and Hermione, although the former proves at least semi-separable for a while as he battles with jealousy over Harry’s constant position in the limelight.

All of this is nice, but kind of expected by now. What’s impressive though is the deft way in which Rowling wraps many of these characters’ stories together and ties them into the central Goblet of Fire storyline. In this storyline, we learn that (as is par for the course), someone is trying to kill Harry. The assumption of course is that his premature entry into the extremely dangerous Tri-Wizard competition was orchestrated to accomplish this goal, and in a way it was … but not how Harry or anyone around him expects.

The book culminates with a confrontation that results in the first “on-screen” death of a character in Rowling’s universe and sets up some extremely important threads that will carry through the rest of the titles. It’s also the first book in the series to end with no indication of who won the house cup (or if it was even given out given the tragic circumstances of the Tri-Wizard competition), and no indication of who won the quiddich cup. I thought it was nice and realistic that these issues – so seemingly important in the earlier books – have taken a back seat to the life and death concerns that Rowling is introducing into the books.

I think this is the best of the Harry Potter books that I’ve read so far, and I’m looking forward to Order of the Phoenix.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really didn’t expect that it’d be so easy to find a book that’s even more depressing, startling, and at times outright uncomfortable than Requiem for a Dream, but all one really has to do is look to Selby’s earlier work, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Selby’s novel – itself more a series of novellas featuring related characters – is populated with drug-addled drag queens, prostitutes, thugs, and a particular union organizer who is an awful man in nearly every respect. That you end up feeling sympathy for nearly all of these characters, even said union organizer, is a testament to Selby’s remarkable ability to invest his characters with realism and humanity. These are deeply flawed people, all, but they’re still people, each with their own set of wants, needs, and dreams.

As in Requiem for a Dream, Selby’s writing style is light on punctuation and grammar, near stream-of-consciousness, and at times extremely difficult to read (the scenes near the end of one drag queen’s night out with “the girls” are borderline incoherent … an intentional effect). This makes it a bit tough to get into the book at first, but once your brain adapts, reading becomes pretty easy.

It’s easy to understand why this book caused so much controversy when it was released in the sixties. It contains enough sex, drugs, and profanity to ruffle many feathers today. That said, it never felt to me like Selby was trying to be exploitative. Rather, he was trying to paint an accurate picture of the kind of underworld that forms in cities, and was particularly prevalent in New York through much of the second half of the twentieth century. He brings you into these peoples lives and, without sentiment or sensationalism, shows you the world that they live in.

In all, I found the book engrossing and at times moving. These are not people you want to spend time with, and often not people you can identify with, but they are nonetheless human, each with their own tragedies, big and small. Like no other author I’ve ever read, Selby is able to express this without ever stating it outright, and for that his work demands respect and attention, no matter how vile its subject matter sometimes becomes.

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My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m going to go ahead and guess that my review of Twilight is going to sway neither the book’s legion of fans, nor its serious detractors. In all honesty, I’m kind of torn about reviewing the book at all. Its first-person protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl, and the book is very clearly angled at girls in their early-to-mid teens. I am a thirty-two year-old man, and thus am not exactly what one would call the target demographic.

I read the book because my wife advised me to, because I am author who is trying to get his vampire novel published, and she rightly figured that it couldn’t hurt to check out the book, and see what it does well. There ARE things that it does well, despite what some negative reviews might say. There are also many things that didn’t work for me, but may be right for the target audience. Then there are a few things that I think it does legitimately poorly … we’ll get to those.

So. What I liked:

I think — and again, I was never a girl, so I can’t be sure — that it does a good job of expressing the all-consuming strength of a young woman’s first love. Bella’s absolute obsession with Edward is driven home over and over (to the point of tedium for me). Less well-explained is why Edward feels so strongly for her, other than that she smells good, but you still at least get a strong sense of his desire both to love her and to chomp down on her neck, which creates some fun dramatic tension.

I also liked that each vampire had a special little power of their own, something they brought with them from their human lives. I thought the book got stronger as it went along, with the last sixty pages or so of the book, not counting the epilogue, being legitimately exciting and fun to read.

What I didn’t like:

The first 350 pages of the book are nearly a straight teen romance novel, and the first 100 pages or so are brutal even accepting that fact. There’s absolutely nothing happening, action-wise. Bella comes off as bitchy and unlikable. The writing is stilted and hasn’t yet found any sort of voice other than said bitchiness (few sentences have anything resembling stylistic flair). Again, this improves as the book goes on, almost as if Meyer is becoming more comfortable with her characters and the world she’s creating.

I also felt that Edward was too perfect. I realize the novel is more a romance than it is anything else, and this is a common approach to romance novels, but it makes him a less-likable character because basically his only flaw is that he can’t accept that he’s in love and just deal with it. I don’t mind him being gorgeous, or powerful, or intelligent, or charming, or witty, or sensual, or telepathic, or even some combination of these things, but all of them together create a character so flawless he’s hard to relate to.

The epilogue is hard to believe. I find it midly improbable that Bella’s dad would be easily forgiving of either She or Edward after what he had to go through. Also, Bella returns right back to being oblivious and kind of bitchy, as if she’s learned essentially nothing from her experience. I was hoping for a bit of character growth for both of the leads, but there’s little to be seen.

Overall, I think the book does a decent if unspectacular job of conveying a fairly typical first love story with a rather important twist. The last sixty pages or so, where the real meat of the action is, are better than the rest of the book. I have no plans to read the other three in the series, so I went ahead and read their synopses on the internet, and doing so basically reconfirmed that I’m not interested enough to read more. It seems, though, like Meyer understands her audience and has put together a series which they clearly enjoy.

If you’re old enough to drink — and not an aspiring author of vampire novels who likes to keep abreast of what’s happening in that genre — Twilight’s not terrible … but it’s probably not the right book for you.

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My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

While not quite as brimming with homoerotic undertones as the first in the series, Throne of Jade nonetheless presents the reader with plenty of repressed man-dragon love to go along with a few aerial battles, a murder plot, and an interesting encounter with a sea serpent. Also, there are some Chinese people.

Ok, that’s a bit of a glib summary, but I’ve never been a huge fan of spending my entire review giving plot details. It’s worth noting, however, that the book is somewhat less action-oriented than the first. It spends a good deal of time focusing on the infuriating nature of diplomatic relations with wildly disparate cultures, and does some interesting and applicable pontificating on the treatment of dragons and its comparison to the slave trade. Some of the latter is spelled out a little too obviously, especially near the end, but one doesn’t typically read fantasy series for their subtle political metaphor.

Novik seems to have done her research on the era she’s set her books in, and the story is peppered with references to the actual politics of the time, including England’s struggle to establish strong diplomatic ties with China, and to prevent the French from doing the same. The slavery comparison is also tied nicely into the book as the dragon Temeraire and his captain Will Laurence travel to China and witness the level of freedom given to Chinese dragons, comparing it against the treatment of European breeds.

I enjoyed the book enough to give it three stars, although I thought the first one was better. I found the sea voyage section of Throne of Jade a bit interminable, and I was surprised by how little of the book was actually set in China (well less than one third). I did enjoy the further revelations about dragon breeding and the interesting ways in which Novik interweaves dragons into every-day Chinese life. I found myself wishing that more of the book had been set in China, not so much because of the foreign setting as because I’m interested in the back-story and breed specifics of Novik’s dragons, and it’s in China that the most information about them is known.

Overall the book is an interesting, if somewhat less action-oriented, successor to the first novel. It’s a good “airplane novel” with a unique setting, solid plotting, and enjoyable dialog. I look forward to picking up the third installment in the series.

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My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like many Americans, I saw the movie version of Let the Right One In before reading the book, and enjoyed it quite a bit. This led me to pursue the book and, as is almost always the case for me, I liked it even more than the film. For the most part, I think the film made good cuts, and it retains the overall plot/theme very well, but it’s hard to put as much depth into a two hour movie as one can put into a five-hundred page book.

Many of the more minor characters (and one central one – Hakan) are much more fleshed out than they were in the film. There are more sub-plots and we learn a great deal more about Eli’s past, though great chunks of it are still left in the dark. We also learn the full truth about Eli’s sexuality and some rather disturbing information about the vampire mechanism works (turns out there’s good reason to destroy the heart).

I’ve read a great many vampire novels and short stories in my life, and this is one of the better ones. It finds interesting twists on old legends and presents us with believable, morally ambiguous characters. No one in this book is exactly good, or exactly evil. They’re all flawed, like real humans, and like real humans, they’re all trying to survive.

Two things kept this from being a five-star book for me. First, while I thought it was enjoyable and extremely readable (I tore through it over the course of two days), I found it in some ways less moving than the film. This was probably due in part to the film’s two child leads, who were incredible, but also partly because of the other reason I knocked off a star: the book seems to fizzle at the end just a bit. Things are wrapped up a little too quickly, especially amongst some of the minor characters. Additionally, there seems to be less of a sense of love between Oskar and Eli than there was in the film, which I felt was important in establishing why the story ends as it does.

Overall, though, a very enjoyable book. Lindqvist’s book is more interesting, more atmospheric, and more original than the vast majority of commercial vampire fiction. Give it a read.

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My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hubert Selbey Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream is a hard book to read … not due so much to its sensitive subject matter, which is frankly riveting, as to Selby’s unconventional, stream-of-consciousness prose. The guy barely believes in basic punctuation marks, let alone quotes, paragraph breaks, or dialog attribution. It takes a while to get into it.

Once you do, however, you’re rewarded with one of the more honest (and bleak) looks at addiction and the downward spiral it causes in people’s lives. This is not simply a book about junkies, or about people who have no options in life and thus turn to drugs. Selby’s characters are young, enterprising … some are well-educated, cultured, experienced. By no means do they all fit into the stereotypical expectations one might have of a heavy drug user. Yet all of them find themselves inevitably pulled into similar situations.

I’d seen the movie version before reading the novel, which certainly reduces the suspense while reading the book. However, my main complaint with the film was that I didn’t feel like it spent enough time letting us get to know and like the characters, which in turn made the downward spiral less powerful than it could’ve been. This is much less a problem with the book — Selby spends a good deal of time on characterization, and it helps keep the novel interesting and compelling throughout.

I strongly recommend Requiem for a Dream. It may be disturbing to some, but you’re not going to find a better depiction of dangers of substance abuse and addiction.

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My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
One has to remind one’s self, while reading the Harry Potter series, that they’re meant for children in the 10 – 14 range, give or take, and not for a married guy in his early thirties who’s simultaneously reading Hubert Selby’s “Requiem for a Dream” …

In other words, while I enjoyed the third Harry Potter book, it was hard not to notice that it’s a little bit shallow in comparison to some other works out there. Yes, the series is beginning to get a little darker, and the character development a little more complex (although certain characters like Malfoy and even Hermione are still pretty thin — Rowling seems to enjoy fleshing out her professors more than her students), but it’s still a light read, and it’s still mostly about Harry being great almost despite himself.

I enjoyed the new Professor Lupin character and I liked Rowling’s use of the rat, Scabbers, as a more central character than anyone might have suspected. She’s also very good at giving hints early and having them pay off late, which is tougher to do consistently in writing than one might think — you have to tread the fine line between giving away too much and not making the hint memorable enough so that at the end of the book you have the reader going “oh yeah!”

Couple minor quibbles: I had a hard time getting in to the book initially because it felt like a carbon copy of the beginning of the first two. Harry’s miserable, the Dursleys are jackasses, and then something crazy goes down which ends with him making his way to Hogwart’s for the year. Then there’s some quidditch. Then Gryffindor wins the house cup again. As I said to my wife last night: if they win for a fourth time in the next book, I’m going to be annoyed. When is Ravenclaw going to get their due? Hell, when is Hufflepuffle (who I constantly want to call Jigglypuff … god help me) even going to get MENTIONED? The latter are like the retarded cousins of the Harry Potter world – bumbling and well-meaning but largely ignored. It’s all Gryffindor and Slytherin, with an occasional Ravenclaw love interest who doesn’t even get any dialog.

I was very excited when it seemed briefly like Harry might spend the summer with someone else – I won’t mention who for fear of ’spoiling’ a book that’s been out for five years – but that possibility is rapidly yanked away. Alas, it means we’ll get another opening with the Dursleys.

When Rowling puts her mind to it, she spins a nifty mystery tale, and at the core that’s basically what each of the Potter books has been so far. They just take a while to get rolling. I’m interested in the series enough to continue with it, but am hoping that in book four she finds a way to do something a little more interesting at the beginning, so I can get wrapped up in the story right away.

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My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ray Kurzweil has been accused by some as being incredibly optimistic in his vision for the future of humanity and the computer’s that we’ve created. His predictions, however, have an uncanny way of coming to pass, at least in large part. Spiritual Machines was written in 1999 and speaks of the advances that computers will make in the twenty-first century.

Now, a decade later, it is possible to look at the first of Kurzweil’s predictions, helpfully listed out in a chapter labeled “2009″ and evaluate them. He missed the mark, badly, on a few things — we’ve not yet reached a point where most books are consumed electronically, nor do we interface with out computers mostly through voice — but he is more often right than wrong, and even when the predictions fall short, it’s usually in a way that leaves the reader saying “well, not YET” … these things will come, they’ve just been a little slower in getting here than predicted.

Kurzweil is an unapologetic transhumanist – a person who believes that mankind can and should continue the evolutionary process through voluntarily seeking to “upgrade” his own body via technology. Whether this is done by re-engineering cells, creating remedies to sickness at the DNA level, inventing nanobots, or digitizing the human conscience and moving it to a machine reality seems to matter less to Kurzweil than that we continue to pursue all evolutionary options. Indeed, he would likely argue that we not only must force this self-evolution, but that we are incapable of NOT doing it. Even should our machines rise up, Terminator-like, and destroy us all, Kurzweil would still view this only as another evolutionary process. After all, was it not Homo Sapiens’ superior intelligence and technology which allowed us to beat out the other human variants, such as the neanderthal?

The Age of Spiritual Machines is an absolutely fascinating book even if you think Kurzweil’s a crackpot. I don’t. I share the belief that he’s an optimist, and that some of the predictions he makes won’t come fully to pass, or happen as quickly. Still, I feel that he is able to look at the future with an unflinching eye and, drawing from a wide variety of reputable sources (the footnotes in the book are so voluminous that they take up an entire chapter unto themselves), make many compelling statements about what humankind’s ever-advancing technological capabilities may bring.

This was by a wide margin the best book I’ve read so far this year, and one of the best of the last several years.

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