Joe Haldeman's Forever War

Somewhat in the line of Redshift Rendezvous, but much better. The Forever War is fairly techy sci-fi, much the plot being driven by a serious consideration of the role of time dilation in interstellar warfare.

The protagonist, William Mandella, a would-be physicist, is drafted into the army in 1997 under the "Elite Conscription Act." Earth's best and brightest are being sent out on nightmarish deep-space missions to combat their mysterious new enemies, the Taurons. They can travel long distances using newly discovered portal-type planets that, when approached at relativistic speeds, allow nearly instantaneous travel between portals. The acceleration and deceleration involved, however, results in a Rip van Winkle effect for Mandella and his comrades: while mere weeks or months pass for them, decades or centuries go by on Earth.

Mandella's life in the army is an unsentimental imagining of what deep space war might actually be like, complete with the chaos, ill-informed decisions, pointless loss of life, trickery, low morale, and general confusion that have probably attended every war in history. The vast majority of the troops survive for half a battle or less. Mandella, surviving more from luck than any exceptional talent, finds himself thrown together with an ever-changing (ever more futuristic) case of characters and hurtled into a future that becomes more and more incomprehensible and alienating. I was impressed by the attention to details like (drastic) changes in sexual mores and pronunciation of words. Military technology also changes at a fantastic rate (relative to Mandella's subjective time elapsed), which makes fun reading for people (like me) who enjoy reading about wonderful new toys and technologies. These things are described rather vaguely, of course, but that makes sense in context--Mandella's career as a scientist was cut short long ago; he became a soldier (steadily promoted up through the ranks) who was there to use the tools, not understand them.

I will not spoil the ending but just say that it was very satisfying, happier and stranger than one could possibly have imagined at any time during the course of the book. A great read, and totally mesmerizing.

Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books

I like this series. This isn't to say that I love it. But I like it enough to keep reading it. It's billed as Harry Potter for adults. There's a little of that, a kind of alternate possible world in which a lot of history happened differently and a lot of the ordinary laws of science don't work in quite the same way. There's a certain nonchalance about the weirdness that makes it much more fun.

On the other hand, there's this strange, insular literary-ness. One of the conceits of the book is that in this alternate England, literature is a matter of life and death, or at least of great political and economic import. The series is set in the 1980s, which makes it pre-internet, if the internet could even be envisioned in this alternate world. Indeed, one way of thinking about the importance that literature assumes in the story is to think of it as being the social analogue to the internet in our world. This is amusing except when it's not. Sometimes it's cool, but sometimes degenerates into pomo snobbery or worse, pomo derivativeness. I don't think someone would have all that much fun with The Eyre Affair if they hadn't read Jane Eyre. (I have, though, so it's hard to tell for sure.) Maybe they would. It's just--well--lots of in-jokes.

On the up side, there are some genuinely interesting characters and efforts at character development. The heroine, Thursday Next, achieves an appealingly androgynous toughness a lot of the time. She works for the special operations, literature division. This job--authenticating, detecting fraud and tampering, etc.--is more important than you might think in a world where books are much more important than they are in ours. Her ambivalence toward her past military service and her love life are both quite human and nicely drawn. Other characters are punning caricatures. Sometimes that's fun and sometimes annoying.

Lost in a Good Book introduces a further dimension (as if an alternate history and time-traveling shennanigans weren't enough--then again, maybe they weren't), in which fictional characters have their own literary police force, protecting the integrity of books from those who would interfere with it (rogue fictional characters, or real people who, like Thursday, have learned to cross the book-boundary but don't have her upright morals).

Again, in this sequel, some of the gimmicks were really funny (like the amusingly simple test for excess coincidence). Others fell somewhat flatter. These books are not the kind of page-turner that will keep you up reading all night, but they are interesting enough to pull out of your bag and read while standing up in a crowded train, or to keep you from getting bored in those in-between moments when there isn't enough time to do anything serious but too much time to just sit around. It's actually a pretty good balance, at least for me. I'll probably be reading the next one.

John Crowley's The Evening Land

I got this book for Christmas, and it turned out to be a reasonably good travel book, easy to pick up and put down, not especially demanding. As an adolescent I was much enamored of Crowley's Little, Big. (I'm not sure if I would like it as much if I read it again as an adult.) Evening Land doesn't quite measure up to my memories of Little, Big, but certainly has something in common with it--juxtaposition of American modernity and Romantic-era Europe. Codes and mysteries. Dark secrets.

The novel has a post-modern sort of structure. It evolves on two main levels. First, there is a story purporting to be the long-undiscovered text of Lord Byron's novel, together with annotations made by the daughter he (Byron) never knew. Second, there is a record e-mail correspondence among a variety of people, revealing in epistolary form the discovery of the novel as a cooperative venture between the main character, Smith, and the father she never knew. Sometimes the e-mail parts are quite touching; I especially like the "voice" of Smith's lover Tess, a mathematician with little regard for punctuation. A lot of it is irritating. It succeeds quite well in capturing the genre of e-mail, but that's in fact not a good thing. It's easy to read but occasionally a bit cringe-inducing. One of the main problems is that the characters spend a lot of time scratching their heads over a mystery that the reader solves long before they do...

As for Byron's novel itself, it is not wholly convincing as an early 19th century text, but that in fact may be a good thing. It is just alien enough stylistically to play the part, even if it probably wouldn't fool any Byron scholars. (It purports to do so, or rather to "convince," in the correspondence plot). There are numerous figural parallels between the characters in the Byron story (both his fiction and his biography) and the modern persons. These would be interesting except that the Byronic characters are so grand and consequential, that what's at stake in the e-mail plot just seems so trivial and hard to care about.

All the same, but book was thought-provoking, and had a lot of careful research about Byron's life, which was interesting in itself.

John Stith's Red Shift Rendezvous

Couldn't find the cover image that was on the edition I read. This one's infinitely cheesier. That being said, it was an extremely cheesy book. The cover image doesn't do it much of an injustice. The premise is that there are levels of hyperspace where the speed of light is much slower than it is in our normal space. The eponymous space ship, the Redshift, travels at a level of hyperspace where the speed of light is something like ten miles per hour, so if you sprint you can exceed it. This slightly improbable but extremely entertaining premise makes for a pretty fun read... but only as long as the story is actually taking place on the ship. Once the speed of light gets back to normal, the story drops off quite a lot. Weird cults, clumsy psychologizing, and predictable romance just can't compete with cool science effects.

For anyone who's studied special relativity, it's an especially fun thought experiment (just skim the on-the-planet part). While reading I was constantly reminded of my dad's physics exams. (My dad is a now-retired physics professor.) To make the math more manageable, he used to set the speed of light at 100 mph, and Lincoln Continentals equipped with stopwatches figured "large" in many of the problems. I'm not sure whether the author of Redshift, Stith, accounts adequately for mass increase, or whether he just left it out for convenience's sake. A good question for dad next time I see him!!

Robert Parker's Now & Then

After my tremendous summer reading binge, my pleasure reading has tapered off quite a lot. It's amazing that a person can be so busy without even having a job. I still do my best to read books that people have lent to Pocket of Bolts, however. Now & Then was one of those. It was a fun book. Tough good guys manage to figure out and entrap very tough and clever bad guy. In this case: private detective and his psychiatrist girlfriend together with a rotating cast of amusing toughs... versus liar and identity-thief radical lefty intellectual crypto-terrorist.

The dialogue is spare and witty, the plot fast-moving. On the other hand, the "good guy" character development was pretty flat and lazy. Motifs (such as the "long ago adultery" theme) were hit hard and heavy-handedly. Also, everyone was quite cavalier about death. Still, really fun reading. A nice break from all the work!

Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man

I was totally fascinated by this book. Norah Vincent, a masculine looking lesbian with big feet, decides to glue on some stubble and become a man for a year or more. She's not a transvestite; she just wants to know what men do when women aren't around. Her explorations in a variety of all-male contexts are fascinating. The idea of the project bears a certain resemblance to Nickeled and Dimed, but the deception feels more dangerous, and the eventual revelation of her true identity (when/if she makes it) is far more unsettling to her informants. The deception is difficult for her emotionally and identity-wise, and its psychological effect on her is clearly profound. Her account is honest and intimate.

What it all adds up to is that being a man is REALLY difficult, not just for her but for the men she interacts with as well. She makes much of how difficult it is for them to let their guard down, but they do let their guard down with her to the extent that she surely learns more as a man than she would have as a woman. Actually, another of the most revealing parts of the book is her attempts to date women as a man. She is shocked by how poorly she/he is treated, how intense and contradictory women's demands on men can be. Since she has dated women as a woman, her perspective on that is particularly interesting.

If I have an objection to the book, it's that her sample set, while interesting, is not representative of, say, the men in my acquaintance. It's hard to know for whom her generalizations hold true. Class seems a really important factor as well. Another difficulty with the book is that she doesn't seem like someone who has experienced a deep, meaningful, sexual relationship with a man. She talks about the severely limited emotional range that men are allowed to have, and the difficulties her informants have in their often-troubled relationships, how they feel both resentment and protectiveness toward the women in their lives. This is surely true for everyman some of the time and for some men all of the time, but when a heterosexual relationship is working well, I get the sense that it can provide an outlet for and shelter from at least some of the intensely difficult experiences she describes. (Presumably male homosexual relationships have the same potential, but I'm not qualified to comment.) In short, maybe most men have it as hard as she perceives they do, but perhaps the picture is a little darker than it should be nonetheless.

Pocket of Bolts, who was actually the one to buy the book, promises to read it soon and tell me what he thinks about her experience and conclusions--whether he thinks it holds true to his experience--so perhaps I'll post an update then. Certainly I'll be very interested to know.

The Secret Life of Bees

I really enjoyed this book quite a lot. Like Extremely Loud, it's the story of a childhood gone awry due to guilt and the death of a parent. The plucky inventiveness of the heroine Lily is of a much more aggressive type than that of little Oskar. Another way of looking at it is the contrast between the way an adolescent girl's way of dealing with life and a pre-adolescent boy. Lily, a young white girl in mid-60s South Carolina, escapes from her hateful father and rescues the only person who has ever loved her, her black nanny Rosaleen.

The book's great achievement is its refusal to idealize either Lily or Rosaleen. Lily may take a stand against racism--even a dramatic one--but race is a not an issue she has wholly sorted out in her own heart. As for Rosaleen, Lily often finds her frustrating, infuriating, even grotesque.

As for the place they end up, a bee farm to which Lily is led only by the mysterious image of a black Madonna, it is a mysterious and multi-leveled world of three troubled but loving sisters who have invented their own religion and live together all mixed up with beekeeping and bananas, a cello, a wailing wall, an old ship's figurehead, and the tragic sadness of the song "Oh Susannah." Lily, dragging Rosaleen with her, descends on them with no explanation but the most transparent tissue of lies, yet they accept her into their home and lives. It is both frustrating and fascinating to watch Lily being reborn through the insights and experiences she has there. The process is not without resistance from her worse nature, and the friction and trouble and difficulty of it all, the constant tension of racial difference, the imperfections of everyone and of the world, keep the book from being saccharine and sentimental. You don't always like Lily, or the other characters, but you certainly always find her believable!