By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What stayed with me most about The Last Picture Show was how much was going on beneath the usual image of small-town life in the early 1950s. For a novel published in 1966, it is remarkably open about sexual tension, infidelity, prostitution, loneliness, cruelty, and even bestiality. So much of it is presented matter-of-factly, as simply part of life in this rural Texas town. There was more meat there than the sanitized version of the period or of rural America that people often imagine. The novel is a coming-of-age story, and in that way it reminded me of books like The Outsiders and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . The contexts are different, but they all involve young people grappling with the dirty realities of the world and trying to make sense of lives in which there is not always much to grab onto. That is especially true in Thalia. High school sports become a form of meaning-making, even though they are often bad at it. People gather at the pool ha...

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes I didn't expect BattleAxe to hit this hard again. This was my third or fourth time through Sara Douglass's BattleAxe . I first read it in the summer of 1995, when it came out in Australia, and while it wasn't the book that turned me on to reading, it was absolutely the book that turned me on to fantasy. I'd always been into fantasy on film, but fantasy fiction had didn't really grabbed me as much. I remember slogging through The Lord of the Rings and finding it kind of dull or at least not something that pulled me in. And then here was this 600-plus-page book that I flew through in two weeks. I'd never read a book that big before, never mind a book that big in two weeks. I got pulled along in this really lovely way. I became deeply interested in this new world of characters, and just plain fascinated by what Sara Douglass was doing. This is not the first time that I've mentioned Sara Douglass and her work here.  Years ...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work. Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness.  The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia.  He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He i...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis  Borges’ “ The Library of Babel ” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno , and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “ Time Enough at Last. ” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible. Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape.  It feels lik...

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix My rating: 4 of 5 stars Hendrix's novel is an intriguing romp through slasher films of the 1980s-1990s seen through the eyes of the final girls (the "girls" that survived the slashers). It's decades later and they run a closed support group, processing everything that has happened to them (the incidents themselves and also, the media circus that continues to haunt them).  But now, a slasher has arrived on the scene and is attempting to pick off the women one by one. Lynnette, an outsider, even among the "final" women is the only one who can see it coming but none of the others seem willing to believe her--and it doesn't help that she was largely discredited when her computer was hacked, the others find out that she's possibly betrayed them.  It's a fun narrative that keeps you guessing about who is the slasher, who is the prey, and how it is all going to end....

Billy Summers by Stephen King My rating: 3 of 5 stars King delivers a new novel that diverges from his traditional realm of horror and supernatural and into a tale of suspense and crime.  Within that, King also flexes his literary chops in ways that are both familiar and enjoyable.  The story, as King reminds readers throughout, is the typical "last gig" crime story wherein hitman, Billy Summers, is set to do a final kill before disappearing forever.  And just like every other story, this one does not go as planned.  Summers is set up to take out a hitman while pretending to be a writer in a nowhere town but Summers keeps getting the sense that nothing is on the up and up and so plans accordingly to avoid ending up in a ditch.  The tale is a bit of cat and mouse, with Summers sometimes the cat and sometimes the mouse.  It's an enjoyable tale for anyone who likes thrillers or King in general.  What's interestin...

Everyman by M Shelly Conner My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book has a flavor of Toni Morrison though with brevity and style that reminds me of Alice Walker (more Meridian than The Color Purple ).  It also has a particularly interesting vibe when thinking about the story in the context of the last few years as well as the rise of DNA tracking.  Eve Mann is trying to find her roots, particularly her mother, Mercy. Raised by her aunt, Ann Man in the North in the 1960s and early 1970s, she has never been able to get from her the truth about her mom and much of her family. At 22, she sets off on a pilgrimage to go to the town in Georgia named, Ideal. The story is so very little about Eve going to find her family and more about the stories and experiences that led Eve to arrive there.  Conner weaves together these different threads into a tapestry that captures the power of racism, naming, and kin. It's definitely the kind of story that one finds the...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes A few months ago, there was a call for short-short stories (500 words or less) from New_ Public that explore technology and society in some interesting way. A short-short that I had written in the previous year came immediately to mind.  Well, I found out last week that it would be featured and accompanied with some art to capture the story in some way.  It was published on Sunday, October 31 (fairly appropriately given the story) and I figured I would share it here for your enjoyment as well. Your Future Destination My future arrived on a Thursday. Future Destination knew when and where I needed to go. Silicon Valley showered it with accolades as the second coming of the wheel or rather, the second coming of the FAANG; after all, the wheel yielded to gravity, but anticipated auto arrival (A³ in tech lingo talk) yielded to unspoken human desire; the profit possibilities were infinite. They scooped up business, municipal, state, and federal d...

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan My rating: 2 of 5 stars Mr. Penumbera's 24-hour bookstore is clearly not your average bookstore. It may not even be your average "weird" bookstore but Clay Jannon needs a job after he's hit hard by the Great Recession of the late 2000s and Mr. Penumbra is hiring. He soon discovers the bookstore does not sell many books but there are a series of odd customers who show up and request books from a special collection. The itch to understand why pulls at Jannon until he begins to scratch and scratch and scratch. Before longe, he's stumbling into a strange society of book-seekers who are attempting to find a secret code that may lead to immortality and has been around for hundreds of years. Jannon has realized that he might know how to hack the code and relies upon a band of misfit but highly successful friends to solve the mystery. As a story, the novel is fun and goofy and h...

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint My rating: 4 of 5 stars Ariadne of Greek mythology, the daughter who betrayed her father and helped Theseus find his way through the labyrinth and kill the minotaur (her brother), gains a rich and layered narrative through the skillful prose of Jennifer Saint. But it is not just Ariadne's story but her sister, Phaedra as well and Saint weaves a story to which both the readers and the two protagonists discover the ways in which the Gods and the men acted with all egos and little consideration for others. The result is that women inevitably suffered; particularly, those women who resisted the status quo. Indeed, Saint reminds readers of Ariadne's family line which includes women such as Medea and other women who were seen as subversive. In this retelling, Ariadne and Phaedra both regal their stories through their own points of view, trying to find strength and power in the situations they find themselves in: Phaedra unwilling...

From "Superman" to Man by J.A. Rogers My rating: 4 of 5 stars Rogers' fictional polemic explores and deconstructs the racism that pervades the United States. The story focuses largely on a conversation between Dixon, a Black porter on a train, and the white Southern racist legislator as the legislator attempts to argue the "nature" of Black inferiority. Over the course of several days, the conversations wind and turn with him throwing up argument after argument. But whether a strawperson of sociology, biology, psychology, economics, culture, religion, etc, they all crumble against Dixon's ample intelligence and research. While Dixon is a fictional character, the research he calls upon is real, relying on scientists, philosophers, political thinkers, and many others both of the time and from centuries past. That's what is most striking about this book from 1917--the height of Jim Crow--that Rogers has such a systematic ...

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez My rating: 4 of 5 stars Everyone in the town knew that Vicario brothers planned to kill Santiago Nasar in the morning. They weren't hesitant to tell everyone and the word-of-mouth traveled across the town in the span of hours.  Yet, in Nasar's morning venture to the town center and to the dock to witness the cardinal give his blessing on the town (from the boat), people largely were incapable of telling and protecting Nasar from the brutal death that awaited him.  Marquez's story unravels through an unnamed narrator who has returned to the town twenty-seven years later to investigate and explain why it was that Nasar dies. The narrative shifts in non-chronological order with each chapter, taking the reader from the Nasar's final walk to the mission embraced by the Vicario brothers to kill him and their efforts to get someone to stop them from committing the act to how the town reacted in the short...

Estimated Reading Time: minutes So 2020 as a year, it goes without saying, has been abysmal on too many levels to count.  But one area that it hasn't (at least for me) is in the realm of reading.  We know that I love to read (if you don't know that and you've been reading this blog, then you clearly haven't been reading this blog!).   The last few years I skipped on my best reads of the year but managed to get to it in time this year.   Of course, the challenge here is that there are so many great books to choose from.  I gave myself a goal of reading 250 books and I met my goal ( you can see the full list here )--and even passed it to land on 270 books for 2020.  So I promised myself that I would not go for more than 30 for my list, which was hard but still managed it.  You'll find I broke them into three distinct areas, which made sense once I went through the list.   Rather than give you paragraph reviews (many of them are revie...

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker My rating: 3 of 5 stars Barker recenters the narrative of the Trojan War around a crucial but often under-valued character: Briseis, the woman turned slave captured and given over to Achilles as a reward for his accomplishments. Thus, readers get a bird's eye view of the events of The Iliad and beyond, while presenting the often silenced voice of the characters of the story. While stories have often been told about the noble women whose lives interweave with the Trojan War, we hear almost nothing from the slaves who were taken and traded throughout. Briseis's story is one of falling from nobility into slavery as she becomes a pawn for the egos of Achilles and Agamemnon. While she is used as a pawn, she is passive and that is the beauty of Barker's work. She gives us a richer world of experience, relationships, and struggles that Briseis must navigate with the Trojan War as background noise. Overall, I enjoyed Barker...

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor My rating: 5 of 5 stars Conceived in violence, born of love, and raised in a mixture of exile and community, Onyesonwu must find her way in a world that rejects her kind (ewu--people born from the two groups/races) within this post-apocalyptic afro-futurist novel. Like Okorafor's other novels, readers slip very quickly into this story with Onyesonwu's first-person narrative that shifts times sometimes to fill in the past but largely moves forward from the day when she begins to realize that she has magical abilities to her confrontation with her father and her fate. The story follows Onyesonwu as she finds a formidable partner, a group of friends, and learns much about her magical abilities, the complex nature of the world, and what it means to be truly powerful. However, also like Okorafor's other novels, it's more than just a singular story. Okorafor interweaves stories about the relationships between lovers, amongst...

Supernova Era by Liu Cixin My rating: 4 of 5 stars While I don't have a sense of how Cixin is judged within China, there's much about him that reminds me of Isaac Asimov in terms of thinking about big history--but he does it so much better than Asimov.  This book offers a fascinating glimpse into an Earth where a freak accident has lead to adults dying and children needing to steer human life on Earth.  While the adults were around, they did what they could do to prepare the youth but really couldn't anticipate all the ways it could go egregiously wrong.  After the demise of adults, children enter the Supernova Era (named for the supernova start that blasted radiation that had a catastrophic impact on adults), a time where they must figure out how to go forward.  What's fascinating about this tale is the ways it both reflects the worst and the best of humanity--evoking (and sometimes invoking) previous tales like Lord of the Flies but also showing t...

The Absolute at Large by Karel Čapek My rating: 3 of 5 stars Capek's novel lands as an interesting thought experiment that falls a little bit flat in its execution; it's satire but not entirely satisfying.  This makes sense given that it was his first novel.  It doesn't have the finesse that comes with R.U.R. and from what I understand, is not as nearly as compelling as War of the Newts.  Yet, it's a curious and fun novel all the same.  The story focuses on the creation of a machine (the karburator) that is able to produce nearly infinite energy from a very limited amount of matter.  It's set to revolutionize the world except that it has one significant side effect.  When it abstracts the energy, it also puts out something else--a spiritual essence (the absolute).  This absolute just hovers in the areas wherein the karburator is working and instantly inspires the people with an overwhelming sense of the spiritual. They experience a sp...