Books Read: May 2006
June 3rd, 2006The Mother Tongue (nonfiction), by Bill Bryson
The Golden, by Lucius Shepard
The Living End, by Stanley Elkin
Woken Furies, by Richard K. Morgan
The Empire of Ice Cream (collection), by Jeffrey Ford
The Bryson book was kind of random, I’ll admit. It was entertaining but a little out of date, and the victim of the kind of sweeping generalizations you’d expect from a popular history of the English language.
The Golden is a vampire story with a great setting (a Gormenghastian castle) and a great plot (it’s a mystery), but Shepard’s writing is too overwrought to enjoy, and the climax drags on for far too long.
Stanley Elkin’s The Living End starts out as a humorous, satirical piece, but in its later section it becomes heavy and bizarre. It’s a meditation about life and death and the afterlife, and it’s a mess.
Woken Furies was not Morgan’s best, but it shows that Morgan has a great worldbuilding talent. I would love to read another story in this universe, but I am done with Takeshi Kovacs as a character. He’s a monster, and any depth he has as a person feels like an artificial attempt to, well, give him some depth as a person. The books would be far more effective and interesting if they were from the perspective of a less invincible, less obvious character.
Last but definitely not least, Jeff Ford’s short story collection contains some absolute gems. “Botch Town” is a sort of an anti-Dandelion Wine that at first felt very prosaic and out of place. But very quickly I found myself drawn into the inner life of the main character and the fascinating world he inhabits, and after 70 pages my only disappointment was that it was too short. The title story of the collection is another standout, and another favorite is the extremely weird and brutal story “The Beautiful Gelreesh.”