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What books are you reading?
The writing is lean and effective, using minimal language to establish characters, locations, facts, memories, emotions. Even so, the English translation that I am reading clocks in at 564 pages, a challenging read for my library's three-week checkout schedule. The story is a classic Japanese tale in a modern setting, about an existential clash between duty and honor. 120 pages in, this has been a sour read, as the hero is undermined and overwhelmed at every turn, though he continues to display grit and resourcefulness. In some respects, this feels more like a workplace drama than a cop story, which makes it almost universally relatable. I am hanging in there because Yokoyama has made me care about this character, and I am hoping against odds that everything ends well.
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Here's a sample of dialogue, between two drug cartel members who have worked together for many years:
"Raul, I have gotten you a room at the hotel I am staying at with an open-ended stay period. I did not know how long you would be here, so I set it up to accommodate your flexible schedule," Jorge stated politely, "Is this okay, Amigo?"
"Yes, quite fine Jorge. My plan is to get to the bottom of this quickly per your father's orders. Jorge, you should know your father is not handling this very well, and I totally sympathize with his loss, but he is not the same these days. So it is very important that I find the person who did this and eliminate them as quickly as possible, Raul spoke in a non-expressive way.
Bad punctuation, awkward phrasing, and really stiff, almost inhuman dialogue. I might not be able to finish this book, even with just 140 pages to go.
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I'm currently struggling through Naomi Novik's A DEADLY EDUCATION. I really liked her Temeraire books (although they got a bit repetitive for me). But this is just a slog. It's her spin on the "boarding school for magical kids" genre, and I don't know what the deal is with it. Boring characters, the school is apparently horrifically deadly ALL THE TIME -- like every day, demons are pouring through the woodwork in the cafeteria and eating kids -- and no one can figure out how to do anything about it.
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- Virabhadra
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Now I am reading Prefecture D, a collection of novellas by Hideo Yokoyama set in the same police precinct as Six Four. The first story, Season of Shadows, was compelling despite the fact that the protagonist works in human resources and is struggling to get an old police officer to retire. A police captain abused his authority in order to bilk a landscaper, so HR needs to shuffle people around in the organization to take away his authority without tipping off the press that the captain did something wrong. Unfortunately, the elaborate plan requires an elderly but highly respected police official to gracefully retire. He refuses to retire, so the HR guy starts digging to find out why. The answer to this little mystery is interesting, and the resolution is unsettling but satisfactory. If this story was told by an American, there would have been a car chase and a shootout, but this story ends in a quiet suicide.
As in Six Four, Season of Shadows is a very Japanese story. Duty, honor, loyalty, pride, and obsession are all crucial motivations for the characters, and interesting things happen when those values collide. I look forward to reading the other three novellas, and I hope that Yokoyama manages to sneak in at least one character or reference to show some actual overlap with Six Four. Yokoyama was a reporter for many years, and it seems likely that he covered the police beat, and probably spent many evenings buying drinks for cops in hopes of getting stories. Yokoyama became a novelist after he had a heart attack while working for 72 consecutive hours without sleeping. His protagonists display a similar level of dogged determination, but I hope that Yokoyama has adopted a more comfortable pace to his work.
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A real treat. I'll be getting more from the author for sure.
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About halfway through the book I began to think how crazy and borderline arrogant it was for Disney to throw out all this Extended Universe stuff. They're rushing half-baked stories through to series trying, and generally failing, to reinvent the wheel when they have a trove of excellent, well-thought material on hand they could adapt. It's crazy.
That Disney doesn't have an Andor-style Thrawn series in the works is mad to me.
With its two main stories split between action-style episodic adventures and another of political manoeuvring and cunning with both connecting into a grander arc and with the added bonus of a male and a female protagonist respectively, it's absolutely bonkers that they're ignoring it in favour of churning out the dross they are.
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- BillyBobThwarton
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Still, I'd prefer a straight-up adaptation of his story instead of having him guesting in another character's story. The book's so good and Thrawn so interesting that it still feels like a waste.
Hopefully, it leads to a Thrawn series. t'd be cool to see a story set inside the Empire that has little to do with Jedi and lightsabers.
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Odd footnote of my own: Mark Danielewski has a sister named Anne who used play music as Poe. I am a big fan of her first album, Hello, which came out in 1995. I look forward to giving her second album Haunted (2000) a try soon, despite the creepy angle of incorporating vocal samples from her deceased father. Poe used to edit Mark's writing, and helped him get House of Leaves published. Her own promising career got derailed for a decade by record company machinations, and we never got a third album.
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From my mid-teens through my 20s, I bought a lot of books. I was a compulsive reader, and I sometimes enjoyed re-reading my favorite books, so I bought them. My friends thought that I was being foolish, that I could just check books out from the library, but I think they just resented the many boxes of books to handle every time I moved. In the long run, buying great books when I was young paid off. Books in a book case are a respectable way to decorate your living space, and all those favorite books did get re-read at least twice over the years. The books were free entertainment and comfort in times of unemployment or illness. And it turns out that libraries don't necessarily keep every single book in stock over the years. Books that pass through many hands tend to wear out over time, and libraries apparently will replace them with newer books by newer authors unless maybe a given book is a classic.
At some point during my last two moves, one of my book boxes went missing. I'm not entirely sure what all was in the box, but it did include several of my Harlan Ellison books, including Strange Wine, Deathbird Stories, and Stalking the Nightmare. That last was a particular favorite of mine, because it included my favorite modern fairy tale and an entertaining essay, The 3 Most Important Things in Life, which you can read here:
harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm
Maybe 15 years ago, I made friends with an interesting married couple. The wife is goth and the husband is punk, though they are now middle-aged and two of their three kids are adults. I knew the wife was into science-fiction and horror because we sometimes talked books, but I only recently learned that the husband is a big Harlan Ellison fan who hasn't read Stalking the Nightmare. His birthday is this Saturday, so I was hoping to give him Stalking the Nightmare, ideally after re-reading a few favorite stories. But after an extensive search, I was certain that it was in the box of books that went missing.
None of the bookstores near me have a copy, either new or used. In fact, it seems that Stalking the Nightmare has gone out of print. Some online booksellers have used copies, but only one was willing to deliver fast enough to get here before my friend's birthday. I placed my order, and then they responded with a partial refund on shipping because they actually can't get it to me sooner than next week. I decided to keep that order going, so I could have my own copy at some point. But I am still hoping to pick up a copy for my friend before Saturday. Fortunately, there are two great genre fiction bookstores about 10 miles from me, and they are probably the two most likely bookstores in the state to carry Harlan Ellison books. But crime has gotten worse in Minneapolis in recent years, and there is a labor shortage, so both stores close at 6 PM every day of the week. So I will roll the dice on Saturday and hopefully come up with a copy before the party at 7 PM.
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