Books I've Been Reading Lately

I didn’t write a Saturday Note last week because I went out of town, and I figured there wasn’t much point as I didn’t even know if I’d have time to post one if I wrote it. But don’t worry, this week, we’re going to briefly talk about some books I’ve been reading!

And if I haven’t done it already, someone remind me to post an article on ImpishIdea.

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What the Hell Did I Just Read? by David Wong

I ended up liking John Dies at the End much more than I expected, so I picked up the sequel This Book is Full of Spiders shortly afterward. Thing is that I didn’t like that one as much. So it was a while before I picked up the third one, encouragingly titled What the Hell Did I Just Read?. And I liked it, although the ending was a bit more Andromeda Strain-y than I would have preferred.

The thing that makes these books stand out to me is that they’re plainly horror, but they’re also plainly comedy. The events that go on in the books are horrific, and thinking too much about them makes one want to hide under the blankets and never come out; this book, for instance, starts the Plot with children being taken from their parents by a sort of being that appears differently depending on who is looking at it.

But all of this is filtered through our narrator, Dave, who is so tired of life and all of this supernatural crap in this small town that his cynical view makes a lot of it sound ridiculous. And then there’s his best friend John, who cannot take anything seriously. John is the buffoon who makes light of every situation, but he’s not useless, as he often comes up with a lot of the solutions to their problems and is such a fun guy that he’s likable throughout.

This installment in the series contains large portions from the points of view of John and Dave’s girlfriend Amy, and the series benefits from that, especially because this one takes a closer look at Dave’s own issues and how harmful his outlook can be on life. It gives the series a lot more self-awareness.

Also there’s this creature called BATMANTIS??? and that’s pretty cool.

Greek Mythology Comics by George O’Connor

I remember when theses first came out and I didn’t really get into them, because I didn’t really dig the art style at that time. But they’ve grown on me since then, and so I’m starting a sincere effort to read more of them, in no small part because I’ve also been on a slight Greek mythology kick in the past few months (this might be due to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey or by my re-read of Percy Jackson and the Olympians).

The comics, each one focusing on a different Olympian, retells Greek myths in interesting and creative ways. The book on Apollo, for instance, is a series of shorter stories told by the nine Muses. The Hades story is actually mostly about Persephone, but through that story you learn more about Hades and what he’s like. I don’t think any of them push things too much out of the box for what you’ll expect in these stories; there aren’t any huge creative differences like in 100 Days of Night. But they’re different enough to stand out.

What I also love about these comics is that at the end of each on there’s a list of annotations on the comic, talking about the influences and ideas he was working with and some of the mythological in-jokes he included. There’s also a list of citations for his sources from Greek myth, so that you can look into his research.

Age of Unreason by Gregory Keyes

I have been let down by a couple of the Enlightenment Era fiction books I’ve picked up, but this series is a complete joy and I’m rather frustrated the library system doesn’t have the third book in the sequence.

The story is a bit like this: Sir Isaac Newton’s scientific advancements shake Europe and lead to a boom in technology. The twist, of course, is that in this timeline, Newton’s discoveries are not what we think of as science, but as alchemy, and so their science looks more like what we’d think of as a fusion between science and magic. And then one of Newton’s apprentices defects and offers to make King Louis XIV (who has had an extended lifespan in this universe because of alchemical shenanigans) a weapon with which to destroy London.

Our story, set in the early 1700’s, then gives us two major protagonists: Adrienne, a lady in the French court who is highly educated in the alchemy of the day, but pretends to be a ditz because that’s what’s expected of her; and a young Benjamin Franklin, whose own curiosity in the sciences gets him accidentally wrapped up in the Plot of the novel.

What makes this series work, I think, is that it’s runs on Rule of Cool. The climax of the second book involves Peter the Great of Russia leading an armada of airships to go conquer Venice. There are so many completely ludicrous scenarios, like young Franklin meeting Blackbeard, that work because the setting is such that it feels almost natural. It’s got a lot of historical in-jokes, like Ex-Libris and Quicksilver, but this is actually fun rather than beating you over the head with minutiae.

Also the series takes some twists that I absolutely did not expect in the slightest, and I have to give it credit for that. 

One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus

I’d been reading more teen books recently and I thought I’d give this a shot. It’s The Breakfast Club, but with MURDER. Five kids who are different high school stereotypes (the Jock, the Ditz, the Smart Girl, the Bad Boy, the Nerd) all end up in detention for something they didn’t do, but then whoops! The nerd dies. It’s a murder, and now it looks like one of the other four did it! 

[Honestly, it felt a bit like how I imagine Pretty Little Liars goes, only having seen the ads for Pretty Little Liars.]

This book is very good at delivering twists, but there comes a point at which it just felt tedious, especially because almost all of those twists are chapter or section-ending reveals. The next part would then pick up some time later, so that we don’t see the immediate fallout of the plot twist. So like, one chapter towards the end where the main four compare notes about everything that’s happened, and it ends with implicating a side character in the murder, but then we skip to the next day and we’re told how the others react to this news rather than the conversation immediately afterward. It felt like the author wanted to do a lot of drama, but didn’t quite know how to follow through on all those twists.

There are also plenty of plot and character beats that you’ve probably come to expect and won’t surprise you at all. Some of the twists, yeah, but other things like, “Hey, the Jock has a bit of a rough home life because his father’s expectations of sports stardom are always hanging over his head” is something that wasn’t new when High School Musical came out, and of course the Bookish Good Girl ends up falling in love with the Bad Boy. 

If you like teen drama or CW shows, then maybe you’ll like this. I thought it was okay, but it didn’t blow my mind or make me want to rush out and buy the sequel (which is about a different set of kids anyway).

Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo by Ben Costa and James Parks

I know I said I wasn’t doing the music thing anymore, but this came with its own songs.

I sort of expected this to be a little funny comic about a skeleton and his goop friend. Instead it’s this amusing but also weirdly touching and remarkably sad story about finding out where you come from. The book’s like this: Rickety is a skeleton working in an evil organization that’s structured remarkably like a soul-crushing corporation. He’s not good at his job because he likes singing more than actually doing anything evil, or even cleaning up the torture dungeons. So he’s fired, along with his best friend Goo, a blob of… goo, that only Rickety understands. He becomes a wandering stitch, or a minstrel.

He decides that he’s going to find out where he came from, because he can’t remember. And he’s the only skeleton anyone’s ever heard of that can speak and isn’t a mindless slave to a necromancer. All he knows is that when he sleeps there’s this song that plays in his head, “The Road to Epoli,” and he feels like he needs to find this place that may or may not even exist anymore.

The stories are fun, but they’re also somber in tone; Rickety’s dreams are always paired with verses from the song, and they’re in black and white. Yeah, the characters mostly act silly, and the character design evokes the idea this is a bit of goofy fantasy parody. But lurking under it all there’s something almost sinister. The villain corporations all over the world of Eem are a satire of evil organizations in fantasy, but the fact is… they’re still a bunch of villain corporations that run the world.

And in the middle of all this chaos, there’s this single skeleton and his goop friend, wandering around to the tune of a half-forgotten song, trying to figure out what happened that left the world in the state it is.

It’s very good, and it’s almost a crime that it’s not more well-known.

Wings of Fire by Tui T. Sutherland

You ever hear how the Warriors cat series was really intense? Well this is like that, but with dragons. Set in the continent of Pyrrhia, a land in which there are several tribes of dragons, a war has broken out between dragons over the succession of the Sandwing throne: three sisters who each think she should be queen after the death of their mother. Different tribes side with different potential queens. And then the mysterious isolationist Nightwings issue a prophecy: that there will be five dragonets born that will end the war, choose the rightful queen, and bring peace to the world.

So a group called the Talons of Peace hopes to raise the Dragonets of Prophecy in order to stop the war. Thing is, some dragons don’t want the war stopped. And also, the Talons of Peace suck at their job. The prophecy seemingly goes wrong at every turn, and the dragonets decide to break free from living in a cave their entire lives. And then they get captured. Like, a lot.

It’s a children’s series, I guess, but it’s awfully dark considering that fact. And by ‘dark’ I mean there are bits of horrific violence. Right in the prologue we have one of the Talons of Peace getting gored through the face and thrown off a mountain. The first book also has a dragon that gets its face melted off. And the war that’s been raging means that all the dragon tribes are essentially living in a dystopia, a war-torn land where their monarchs care more about gaining power and land for themselves than helping their subjects.

Still, it’s a series that’s about dragons, and just about dragons. There are humans in the series, but they carry such a minor role. It’s relieving to read a dragon fantasy series that is only about dragons, not dragons as they relate to humans or elves or anything. It’s just dragons! And they FIGHT! And isn’t that what we want in fantasy?

Newbury and Hobbes by George Mann

I’d seen these books in the library for a while, so I started reading them. It’s a steampunk science-fiction series, set in an alternate Victorian London. Newbury is an agent of Queen Victoria tasked with handling special cases and requests; his newly-appointed assistant, Veronica Hobbes, helps him solve those cases. They’re mostly fun little steampunk stories, though I don’t think any of the stuff in the books is really that out there from any other steampunk setting you’ll see.

The main problem I had with the series was that it tries to tease the idea of the two leads being in a relationship, and I just don’t see it? I don’t see much chemistry between them, and I can’t really see what they like about each other, especially since it’s established pretty early on that Newbury is obsessed with the occult (for Reasons) and that he’s an opium addict. Neither of these are things that Hobbes is okay with, but she finds herself falling in love with him because… I dunno, Plot.

If you’re into steampunk, take a look, but otherwise it’s fine to skip these.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Fantastic, glorious, beautiful, wonderful, radiant. I loved this book. Go read this book.

Set in a post-apocalyptic America, the three sections of the novel center around a monastery that has dedicated itself to preserving lost knowledge about science and technology until the world is ready to fully understand what these things were. The history of the world is cyclical; it’s not until the second Renaissance that the people of the world are really able to begin to understand this technology, and even then, they mostly want to use it to justify their own grabs for power.

There is a lot in this book about technology and science, and how that relates to religion. What is knowledge for? Who is it for? How do we misuse knowledge? How do we know when we’re ready for knowledge? And this was a book that actually did something interesting with religion in a post-apocalyptic setting other than “Here’s an evil cult!” that you see pop up so often in the same genre (and every other genre…).

There’s also something very cool about the idea of history being a cycle. When the world has already ended, history starts again much like it did after the fall of the Roman Empire, with several different factions duking it out and the only commonality between different countries being the Church. And as the end of the last world isn’t fully understood, the people in the post-apocalyptic landscape start unintentionally talking about the truth of what happened into a type of mythology, one that fits rather well with the stories of ancient Biblical civilizations quite well.

And through it all there’s this mysterious figure who may or may not be Saint Leibowitz, observing all that happens around the monastery of his own order.

It’s thoughtful, it’s strange, and it’s a really cool science-fiction novel that’s not quite like any other I’ve read.

Delilah Dirk by Tony Cliff

She’s a sword-fighting English adventuress! He’s a failed Janissary officer! Together, they FIGHT CR--well no, they don’t fight crime, but they do go on adventures throughout Europe and Asia Minor.

The story goeth like this: Selim is a Janissary who interrogates Delilah Dirk, an adventurer who has tried to sneak into the Sultan’s palace. Through some unfortunate circumstances, the Sultan thinks they’re working together, so when she escapes he has to go with her to avoid execution. Unfortunately, he’s not much of a fighter (but he makes great tea!), so he’s not the usual sort of backup that she would like on her excursions. The two end up being a rather complimentary pair, as she’s able to help him get out of his comfort zone, while he helps rein in her more… aggressive habits and impulses.

They’re historical fiction, though they do tend to lean towards the fantastical (Dirk travels around in a flying boat, for starters). There’s a lot of adventuring around; one story involves travelling around Turkey, while another is about searching for the ruins of a long lost civilization that’s long been considered a myth. 

These are fun, and they’re not too serious. If you want a really cool action comic that’s a joy to read, these might be your jam. Also the two leads are definitely more shippable than the ones in Newbury and Hobbes.

On American Pop Culture in Other Countries' Fiction

I finished reading Halo: The Fall of Reach in Barnes and Noble, which is a bit different than the usual stuff I read, I think, but I’ve gotten a bit more into Halo recently and so I thought it might be good to read that book. I’ve also been re-reading The Ship of the Dead, the last Magnus Chase book, and while I still don’t think it’s Riordan’s best work, I actually think I like it better this time around? That may change by the time I get to the end though.

I’m still really annoyed by Kill the Farm Boy, but I’m not furious anymore, so that’s an improvement I guess.

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On American Pop Culture in Other Countries' Fiction

I began watching Ministerio del Tiempo (that’s Ministry of Time) on Netflix pretty much as soon as it popped up, though I’ve been going very slowly because I don’t get through television shows very quickly. That’s changing now, because the sister is also watching the series now, and she watches much faster than I do and I have a psychological need to stay ahead of her on this.

Anyhow, the show tells the story of the Spanish Ministry of Time, a secret government organization that sprouted up to protect history through time travel. The time travelling works through these special doors called the Doors of Time, each of which lead to a different point in Spanish history. The Ministry is dedicated to making sure no one screws up history or finds out about the Doors of Time. To this end, they recruit people from all over history; their sketch artist, for instance, is renowned Spanish painter Diego Velazquez.

Of course many of the characters are from modern day, or closer to the modern day, or spend a lot of time in the modern day. And of course, dealing with history and with time travel, there are quite a few pop culture references. And quite a few of them are allusions to American media, something that is somewhat surprising.

So for instance, there is an episode concerning a specific door that works differently than the others, in that it’s always stuck on a particular day. And so when the patrol’s mission fails, and they keep going back to the beginning of the day and keep failing over and over again until they get it right. Julian, the protagonist from modern day, compares the whole thing to Groundhog Day, which confuses his coworkers Amelia (from the late 1800’s) and Alonso (from the 1500’s) that have no way of having ever seen this movie.

Or in the second season, one of the characters is a disgraced detective from the 80’s who goes by his nickname Pacino, on account of how he sort of looks like the actor Al Pacino and he’s a massive fan of the actor and is sort of a cowboy cop. Again, no one from the past understands this.

And I think something that we Americans sort of don’t realize is just how much American entertainment dominates world media. Yes, the show has references to Spanish pop culture too--to soccer, to reality shows, game shows, and in the first episode more than one person compare Alonso to Captain Alatriste. But the vast majority of the allusions to fictional media, especially science fiction media, are to American movies and shows.

It reminds me a little of the anecdote in The Kite Runner in which the protagonists are huge fans of John Wayne movies growing up, and then are astonished to realize that John Wayne doesn’t speak their language at all, but that his movies are dubbed for foreign audiences. Which seems like a ‘duh’ but if you’re a small child that might not occur to you. It took me a while to realize that a lot of the anime and video game media I consumed wasn’t actually originally dubbed in English, after all, which is why I imagine lip-synching dubbed animated material is so important, so as to not break that illusion. 

[squints] I got kind of side-tracked, but here’s the point I was making, I think: do not underestimate how much of a chokehold American entertainment has on global media. There are actual laws on the books in France about the ratio of French movies to American movies a theater is required to have, in order to make sure that there is at least more of a chance for French films to compete with American ones. When I TA’d for a film professor, when the Italian film festival rolled into town an Italian director who told us that his film, which was a smaller-budget drama, had to compete with Jurassic World in the theater.

I’ve talked a lot about how when you’re writing another culture, you should do homework so that the characters feel like they’re part of that culture, and doing otherwise feels wrong. For instance, the ancient Irish Druid in The Iron Druid Chronicles has all of Shakespeare’s plays memorized, but he apparently doesn’t have any care for the history of Irish literature at all. Characters from a culture should be well-acquainted with that culture if you want them to feel genuine.

But when talking about the modern day, we cannot dodge the fact that we Americans are sort of the big kids on the block in pop culture. We’re the ones shipping the big budget blockbusters all over the world, and so everyone around the world knows exactly what movies are big and what they’re about. Sure they might be released at a different time in other countries, but if they’re big enough they’re released there.

One of the problems with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (other than that Alan Moore decided that Harry Potter was a school shooter) was that it still clung rather tightly to British popular culture, ignoring anything that wasn’t British. Which was fine for a story set mostly in London in the last 1800’s, as the original was, but this one was across the 20th century and beyond, and ends in 2009, and yet British popular culture is the only one that matters in the League universe.

“But what about foreign films in the US! Those get Oscar nominations all the time! And all that British media!” Yeah, when’s the last time you watched a film in a different language with a friend? Unless you’re a hipster, probably not too often. And maybe the BBC’s gained some international acclaim, sure, but nowhere near as much outside of the English-speaking world, especially because I don’t know if historical dramas centering around English history or literature are really the sorts of things people care about in China. Or even France. 

Time travel dramas set in modern Spain obviously reference American sci-fi movies that deal with similar themes. Likewise, a story set in modern Mexico would obviously have characters who know something about American media. I’m not suggesting that writers have to throw pop culture references at the page all the time; Lord knows I’m against that. But where it makes sense, and it fits with the characters and story, it’s not bad. Because the American entertainment industry is a massive juggernaut that shouldn’t be underestimated when discussing its influence on people around the world.

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How to Humor

When I started writing this, I was halfway through Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne. Yes, Kevin Hearne wrote The Iron Druid Chronicles and I’m not too fond of that, but I thought since he is now writing a serious book series, and because of this one being written with a co-author, that maybe I’d like this one better.

It’s not encouraging though, what I’ve gone through so far. It inspired this essay.

But on the bright(ish) side, I started my re-read of Wheel of Time and I’m halfway through The Eye of the World and enjoying it immensely. Hopefully I’ll get through the whole series this time.

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How to Humor

Humor is surprisingly difficult to get down correctly for some people.

A book being funny is not the same thing as a book having jokes. This is painfully clear to me as I read Kill the Farm Boy. The novel is meant to be a parody of fantasy and fairy tale, yet it hits you with the blunt force of a brick and feels just as pleasant. There are jokes, yes, and some of them are even funny; but this humor is overthrown by the constant barrage of jokes being thrown at you. Everyone is constantly throwing quips, and characters are constantly doing things that don’t make sense.

“But wait, isn’t Terry Pratchett like that? And you love Terry Pratchett!” Well no, dear reader, he’s not like that. Because there are a lot of jokes, yes, but the entire text isn’t made up of jokes. Almost all of it is humorous, but it’s not about jokes. Much of what makes Pratchett’s Discworld hilarious is by drawing parallels to our world. 

The people in those books do weird things all the time, but they make sense. They’re not out of nowhere. They’re exaggerations of real-world people, the kinds we meet every day. So yeah, you’re not likely to meet Stanley, a guy obsessed with pins, like Moist does in Going Postal; but chances are you’ve met someone who is just as obsessed with collecting something or another, and discovered that there’s a whole world of collecting this one thing that you never knew about, nor did you ever want to know about.

And to be fair, Kill the Farm Boy does have some moments like that. There’s a scene with a troll writer who is basically the stereotype of the pretentious writer guy, who is so convinced of his literary genius (think the Guy In Your MFA Twitter account and you’re on the right track), but these moments are fleeting under a hail of really stupid jokes. There are pop culture jokes, there are parody jokes, there are constant streams of dialogue that seemingly never end, and there’s a lot of weird crude humor. And worse, there are characters arcs that go nowhere and there are plots that are wholesale dropped without fanfare.

[It’s also a bit infuriating, because the author’s note at the end was like, “We decided to do this book because the fantasy genre is such this weird white male power fantasy!” as if this book has done anything great for representation in the genre. It hasn’t. Just skip it.]

This is not how you do comedy, and it’s certainly not how you do parody. If you’re going to lampoon something, you need to understand why this thing worked for a lot of people in the first place. Really good comedy isn’t just taking something you think might be a bit silly and filling with jokes; it’s making observations about how absurd it is. It’s about subverting expectations. And there are jokes, yes, but that’s not all, and it’s not as important as making characters identifiable enough that we care about what they say.

I think I’ve said something similar in talking about my issues with Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. To be sure, that book is not made up entirely of jokes, but there are times when jokes are just thrown at the reader and they’re not very funny because, well, they don’t say anything about the characters or the world. Heimdall being obsessed with his phone and taking selfies, or Thor being obsessed with watching television on his hammer--those are jokes, but they’re not particularly funny because they’re just… there. They don’t mean anything. 

And so they’re not funny. Opening one of the chapters of Kill the Farm Boy is a bit about the Dark Lord Toby and how he’s trying to get a hedgehog to breed with a turtle to make a suitable familiar for himself. This joke then drags out through the rest of the chapter despite it being more disturbing than funny the first time. Jokes are like this in that book. 

Here’s my advice when writing comedy: run it by a test audience. And not just one or two people; go for at least five or six. Ask them if the humor matches what’s going on, or if it’s the kind of humor that won’t get stale in a week. Yeah, maybe your humor will at first seem derivative of your favorite comedic writers, but you’ll find a voice that’s at least better than just spewing half-baked jokes at the audience.

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