Random Thoughts

This was published in 2005, but I apparently bought this in 2013 — at The Strand! I think this was after I stopped my subscription to the magazine, but apparently this format was irresistible to me.

As it is to this day. Some of the “mail” in this package is just bizarre fun, like this flyer for sown-together clothes.

They really commit to the gag — all the stuff is mail addressed to Maria Vasquez.

And one of the best pieces here is this “letter” by Peter Ferry, which turns out to be an excerpt from a novel that was published in 2009, and I’ve now bought it because the excerpt is really intriguing.

(That’s the problem with reading — you end up buying more stuff.)

Most of the pieces are in a literary magazine that Vasquez subscribes to, “Unfamiliar, A Twice-Monthly Magazine of Literary Fiction”. Which feels like cheating, but whatevs.

And man, 2005 was a different era. Do you remember the human shields who went to Iraq to try to stop Americans from bombing infrastructure? I’d forgotten.

The best thing in “Unfamiliar” is “The Sno-Cone Cart” by Rebecca Curtis, who has only released one short story collection, apparently.

Anyway, all the text pieces are much stronger than I remembered McSweeney’s having… perhaps I misremember why I stopped reading it? Hm. I should sample another of the (several) unread issues I have here (most of which are published in more traditional formats).

McSweeney’s #17 (2005) edited by Dave Eggers (buy new, buy used, 3.71 on Goodreads)

The first half of this book has poems from most of her previous collections…

… and I skipped that half, because I’ve already read them. Yes, OK, sure, perhaps I’m a teensy bit fanboyish about Le Guin?

Anyway, the last half of the book is poetry written in the years before 2010, and I’ve been reading them over the last week. It’s pretty good? Many of them are about dying… but some are about cats! So it’s not all depressing.

But mostly depressing, and very apt for 2025, really.

After reading the book, I wondered whether there were any books of hers that I had missed, and there’s indeed a couple more poetry collections, which I’ve now ordered. And also a collected edition of all the Earthsea novels and short stories (illustrated by Charles Vess)! So I snapped that up, too, because it’s been a while since I’ve read those books.

Finding My Elegy (2012) by Ursula K. Le Guin (buy new, buy used, 4.03 on Goodreads)

I’ve read most of Miéville’s books, and they’re a bit hit or miss. He’s a talented writer on a sentence by sentence basis, and that’s sometimes a problem: He gets so enthusiastic about how good he is that he has a tendency to go on and on, conjuring forth an exciting miasmatic milieu just by insisting on it. That worked really well in Perdito Street Station, where we were in a very alien city, but this one is in London.

And it’s a really exciting read! It’s propulsive and interesting and scary and fun. Lots of plot twists I didn’t see coming. Nine thumbs up.

But: Spoilers ahead! And you shouldn’t read the rest of this if you ever intend on reading the book, which you should if you like Miéville and haven’t yet.

But! It has also more than a whiff of just being ridiculous. We’re talking London, right, and not some imaginary fantastic city, so Miéville have to big up current cultural phenomena like drum and bass and raves into something magical and mysterious, and it’s like *lifts eyebrow*. Especially since this was published past the tail end of jungle as a cultural phenomenon… But it’s also things that make a nerd go “well, echshully”, like rats being so dirty, and there’s pages and pages and pages about how filthy rats are, and presumably everybody these days know that rats are pretty clean mammals, as mammals go — so the protagonist not cleaning himself for weeks because he’s now “a rat” is like… what. There’s also the inherent ridiculousness of the Big Villain — I was thinking “surely not, that would be too risible” and then it turned out that it was. And! The Big Final Showdown had exactly the same problem as the first season of Jessica Jones had — and the Supervillain’s power is basically identical: 1) Why not invest in ear plugs, and 2) why not get a gun. Or a knife. Or anything! Don’t just go in with nothing else than your naked hands to take him out!

What I’m saying is is that this book doesn’t just require you to suspend your disbelief a bit, but put it on hold for the entirety of the book. If you start to think about anything that’s happening, you can’t help yourself (and I’m speaking on behalf of everybody) starting smirking and chuckling, and that’s not the effect Miéville was after.

I think! I may be wrong!

But I thoroughly liked reading this book, and I’d put it above a bunch of other Miéville books.

King Rat (1998) by China Miéville (buy new, buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)

Barnes wrote some moderately entertaining space opera books back in the day, but this is book two in a post-apocalyptic series. I bought the two first books in 2012, but I only read the first, and I wasn’t quite sure why.

But reading this now, it’s kinda coming back to me: The book is competently written, with dozens of characters we flit between, and it mostly keeps things moving along. Politically, it’s somewhat grating (Barnes apparently took a right wing turn at some point?), but it’s not too bad.

The main problem is that the characters have no character. Or rather, they’re the exact same character with dozens of names, so it’s a bit of a chore to remember who’s supposed to be who. And the longer “philosophical” discussions about what’s going on are tedious.

So I ditched it after 55 pages. I did slightly wonder where all this was going, and whether the solution to the mystery of what’s behind the apocalypse was the one that I thought was obvious from the start… and it turns out that it is, but is apparently only revealed during the last ten pages of the next (and final) book. And Barnes planned on doing many more books in the series, but his publisher, Ace, thought they sucked (I’m reading between the pixels), so there weren’t.

Oh, and Barnes hasn’t published anything after that book?

Daybreak Zero (2011) by John Barnes (buy used, 3.59 on Goodreads)