Some quick reading notes

On November 19, 2016November 19, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

Yesterday’s post was about how I read The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu and it was great and everyone should read it.

Since then I’ve read two novellas, Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson. Both are heavily Lovecraft-inflected and they were both amazing.

Last night I started reading Cherie Priest’s The Family Plot and I had to force myself to put it down after reading the first third or so. I may very well finish it tonight, despite having had an insanely long day at work and being very tired.

The reading is good this time of year, apparently.

As promised:

On October 18, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work4 Comments

The monstrosity:

It is permanently stuck in the reclined position, perhaps eight to ten inches higher off the floor than it should be for no clear reason, and coated in a horrifying oily substance that I refuse to attempt to clean off.

$10 OBO. Hell, OAO.

In which pods are cast

On October 15, 2016October 15, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews2 Comments

Got home from an 11-hour shift at work and my five-year-old promptly punched me in the balls, if you’re wondering how my day went.

Based on the recommendations of a couple of you in the last thread where I talked about audiobooks, I’ve listened to the first six episodes of the first season of Welcome to Night Vale. I’ve also downloaded several other things and haven’t gotten around to them yet, so there will be more on this later.

This will be one of those reviews that is entirely negative and then ends with “…but I’m still listening,” by the way, so brace yourself.

So. Yeah. Welcome to Night Vale is a roughly 25-minute, twice-monthly podcast that just released their 96th episode today, so they’ve been around a while. I’ve listened to their first six, so it’s entirely possible that in the intervening nearly four years they’ve gotten better at the things I’m complaining about. The premise is actually pretty cool: the idea is that it’s a news broadcast on community radio in a town that is constantly beset with weird, supernatural/alien/Lovecraftian happenings. There’s a musical interlude each episode (introduced, oddly, with “and now, the weather”) by what seems to be entirely indie artists that I’ve never heard of and is generally pretty uniformly satisfying. Look up “Jerusalem” by Dan Bern on the iTunes store if you’re curious.

Here’s the problem: at least early on, Welcome to Night Vale feels like it was written by a talented high school student. It is– and I hope this makes sense to some of you, and I’m going to try and write it as clearly as I can– not good, but it is close to good in a very specific way that means that it might actually be more tolerable if it were simply bad. In other words, there’s potential all over this thing, only right now it’s too damn clever for its own good. The authors think that long sentences and repetition of long phrases are really really funny, for example, only they’re not– in fact, they’re really predictable. I was able to anticipate a whole lot of lines in the first few episodes word-for-word despite never having heard them before, for example. Overwrought descriptions are also a common, massively overused trope.

Sounds bad, right? But I listened to the first five episodes over the last couple of days, and then on the way home instead of listening to something else I downloaded number six. I may jump ahead a couple of years tomorrow– there’s not an overarching narrative that I’ve noticed yet, so I doubt I’m missing anything really– and see if they’ve learned from experience at all. After that, we’ll move on to something else. We’ll see how it goes.

#REVIEW: STRANGER THINGS

On August 19, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television6 Comments

1*I_bnDm83n90965m3KxL5wQ.jpeg Let’s not bury the lede here: if you haven’t already inhaled the 8 episodes of Stranger Things that Netflix made available a month or so ago, you owe it to yourself to do it right now. I’ve watched enough Netflix original series to confidently state it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. It’s worth paying for Netflix all by itself. Sign yourself up for a month and consider the $8 or whatever they charge a rental fee for this one show. It’s well worth it. This goes double if you are just past or nearing 40 years of age and you associate the 1980s with your childhood in any way.

I don’t even know where to start, guys. Stranger Things is roughly what would happen if Stephen King and Steven Spielberg had a TV-show baby together and then Wes Craven and Robert Englund raised that baby together, but only after having a custody battle with Gary Gygax and deciding that he could have the kid every third weekend of the month. I have nearly nothing bad to say about it other than that there is a little romance subplot that might maybe be a tiny bit unnecessary. Maybe. I dunno. And I occasionally felt like the kid on the left in the picture below had some unclear motivations for some of the things he did. That’s it.

Let’s start with the cast:

I don’t know who any of these actors are. In fact, other than Winona Ryder, who plays the mother of the missing boy that kicks off the mystery of the entire series, I can’t name a single actor in the series. They’re all unknowns, at least to me, and in all honesty it had been enough time since I’d seen Winona Ryder in anything (and she disappears completely enough into her character) that if her name hadn’t been in the opening credits I wouldn’t have recognized her either.

The kids– all four of them, but most particularly the young lady who plays Eleven (on the right) and the tubby kid in the hat in the middle– are magnificent. The adults are great. The older teenagers are great. And Ryder turns in the performance of her career.

I won’t get too far into the plot. A young boy goes missing, and a young girl with mysterious powers escapes from a Gubmint Facility in a small town in Indiana. She ends up taking refuge with the friends of the missing kid, and hilarious and/or horrifying hijinks ensue. The show has mysteries wrapped in mysteries, and they don’t bother to solve all of them by the end of the series (in fact, they introduce two more prominent ones in the show’s last few minutes) but the resolutions they do provide are satisfying as hell. By the halfway point it was clear that there were a number of ways for this show to End Wrong; I’m happy to say it didn’t. I don’t know for sure that there’s a second season coming, but I sure as hell hope there is. And, weirdly, even if they never answer a few of the show’s questions and it’s a one-shot season? That’s okay. They earned the right to end the show on a bit of a cliffhanger (sort of) if they wanted to. Ending with some things for the fanbase to keep talking about after the season is a good thing.

Another thing: at eight episodes, this thing is perfectly paced. I feel like even a thirteen-episode season would have felt padded out, and at eight they’ve trimmed all the fat they might need to out of their narrative and it feels like every episode contributes meaningfully to the overall arc of the show. The show’s a masterclass in direction and pacing, folks.

I can’t wait to see what everyone involved in this show does next, honestly. Do what you need to do to see it.

#Review: M.R. Carey’s THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

On July 29, 2016July 29, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

This has been, in general, a pretty goddamn good year for reading. I’ve been trying to aggressively diversify the authors I’m reading; my goal is that at the end of the year 75% of my books will have been by women and/or people of color, and so far just under half of the books I’ve read this year have been by authors that I’d not previously read anything by. So I’ve been doing a lot of “Let’s read this person’s best book!” so far this year, which leads to a lot of good books.

What I haven’t really had is a book that’s fucking blown me away to the point where I was recommending it to everyone I know. That only happens a few times a year, obviously. Well, I’ve got my first one for 2016, and it’s M.R. Carey’s THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS.

Carey isn’t quite a new author to me, as he’s got a long and storied history as a writer of comic books, but this is the first of his novels that I’ve read. And, to be honest, this is where reviewing it gets difficult, as it’s the type of book that I feel like you want to go into knowing as little as humanly possible about beforehand. There’s a movie coming; I happened to chance upon the trailer, which caught my interest immediately, and then saw two or three positive references to the book in the same day and ordered it immediately. I cannot wait to see this story on the big screen. Hunt down the trailer if you want to, but I’d prefer you just take my word on it and go in blind.

What can I tell you? Well, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS takes what has, lately, become somewhat of a worn-out genre and immediately makes it fresh again by putting a twist on it that as far as I can tell I haven’t seen anywhere at all. And the twist makes the setting horrific as hell; the book got under my skin immediately and stayed there, and I read the whole 400+ page novel in two or three big gulps, staying up later than I wanted to on more than one occasion because I couldn’t put it down. The book is fast-paced and action-packed, and once it gets its setting in place it doesn’t slow down for a second until the ending, which is as bleak and haunting and exactly what it needed to be as anything I’ve read in years. This is the type of book that could easily have been ruined by the wrong ending, so it’s good Carey found the right one.

So, yeah. I’m not going to tell you too much about this book, or why you should read it, other than it’s awesome and horrifying and you should take my damn word on it.

But you should. Because I say so. And it’ll be worth the surprises. Don’t even read the blurb on the back. Just go buy this and read it right now. It’s the best damn book I’ve read this year. Trust me.

Primaries and a quick book #review

On May 17, 2016May 17, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reviews3 Comments

white-privilege-350.gif.png Two primaries today, Kentucky and Oregon. Both states are 88% white, therefore Sanders will win both. I’ve seen a couple of reports of a poll out of Oregon that shows Clinton in the lead but I can’t actually find it anywhere and the reports were on Twitter and didn’t include links. I came across an article on NPR this morning that discusses whiteness in our politics in an interesting way, but while it talks about the astonishing reluctance of most mainstream punditry to even mention racism in connection with Trump’s support, there’s nary a word of the 85% rule.

(Oh, and also: there’s nothing from keeping Trump’s supporters from being both idiots and racists. Half the problems Republicans see with this country literally do not exist. There is plenty of room for these people to be stupid and racist at the same time.)

But anyway.

51czyF4FFRL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg I finished Tananarive Due’s My Soul to Keep yesterday, a book I read in three big gulps over just a couple of days. It’s the first book of her four-book African Immortals series, and I think it’s probably the most unapologetic horror novel I’ve read in quite some time. It’s further evidence that “horror” isn’t really a genre on its own anymore so much as something that infiltrates other genres; the book is equal parts paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and horror, and Due’s writing appears to be what would happen if Anne Rice and Stephen King wrote a book together.

That’s a compliment.

The book I read before this one was Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, and I wrote a rare Goodreads review for it to explain my star-rating. Samatar is a gorgeous writer; her prose is something I couldn’t equal if my life depended on it, but the story in Olondria kind of left me cold. Due’s prose is much less flowery and lyrical than Samatar’s is (I could have written My Soul to Keep, which sounds like shade but isn’t; I just think Tananarive Due and I are similar writers) but it’s in service of a much stronger story, one that got in my head and fucked with me something fierce while I was reading it. As a reader I’m much more likely to respond to strong story and utilitarian writing than I am lyrical writing and a serviceable story– I am, myself, a pretty utilitarian author. As such I loved the hell out of My Soul to Keep and only enjoyed Stranger in Olondria. You may feel free to adjust the amount of salt you take with my review if your own preferences are different.

I continue to believe that “no more than 25% books by white dudes” was a great way to structure my reading this year, by the way. I would never have found this book had I not gone looking for it. Feel free to check out my Goodreads shelves if you want to see some of the other books I’ve read this year.

In which somebody knows the answer to this

On January 19, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy7 Comments

This question is a bit too long for Twitter, and I’m not prepared for the torrent of mockery I’ll receive if I put it on Facebook, so quickie blog post it is:

There used to be (it may still be around; I kinda doubt it) a website where you’d be paired up with some random yahoo on their webcam, and you yourself would be some random yahoo on your webcam, and you could chat with that person or click and be sent on to the next random yahoo. My recollection was that the site was about half thirteen-year-old girls having slumber parties and half masturbating old men who were hoping to con those thirteen-year-olds into taking their shirts off. There was no chatting; only horror.

This predated both Snapchat and Tinder by a good margin– I want to say I lived in Chicago during its heyday, which would put it in the early-mid 2000s– but you can see how it might have informed both of those services. In fact I’m pretty sure it was mostly pre-smartphone, since it relied upon having a webcam.

I cannot construct a Google search that helps me, and I can’t remember the name of the site. Just don’t ask me why I want to know; I just remembered it existed last night and for some reason it still bugs me that I can’t recall the name.