Sanford Greenberg – Hello Darkness, My Old Friend (audio) – Memoir
Confucius – The Analects (translated by James Legge) – Philosophy
Travis Baldacre – Legends and Lattes – Fantasy
Lina Rather – Sisters of the Forsaken Stars – SF
P. Djeli Clark – A Master of Djinn – Steampunk/Detective
Something spoilers this way comes. I’m assuming you’ve all seen the movie and aren’t reading this for trenchant commentary on something you’re unfamiliar with. I also know that there are far more important things to be writing about today. (June 24, 2022 is a date that will go down in history as the day that US democracy definitively died. I do hope we can resurrect it, but in the meantime, I’m writing about Star Wars.)
George Lucas’ Attack of the Clones (2002) is definitely an improvement on The Phantom Menace. The characters are better defined, the story is more coherent, and the arc of the story mostly makes sense. I remember being excited about the title because there’s the one scene in A New Hope where Luke says to Obi-Wan, ‘You fought in the Clone Wars?’ It’s a phrase that everyone who saw the movie before the prequels wondered about.
I was keenest to watch this one because it’s where we meet Boba Fett. I remembered, watching Book of Boba Fett that we meet him as a child, and that his father is associated with the Republic’s clone army. The entire army are growth-accelerated clones of Jango Fett and Boba Fett is his unaccelerated son. Boba Fett in the Disney+ series is played by the same actor who played Jango.
And who’s idea was it to name the planet that’s been erased from the Republic’s database of star systems Kamino? As in, it was unreal until Obi-Wan visited and the we had Real Kamino.
I’m sure I also have something to say about the person who gave Obi-Wan the lead on Kamino. A a too-small tank top-wearing short order cook in a railcar diner with a droid waitress like some kind of sci-fi version of American Graffiti. Oh. Wait. Lucas is still carrying that, isn’t he. Gracious.
There are two parallel plot lines running through Attack of the Clones. One is finding who is behind a plot to kill Senator Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman, still acting head and shoulders above the rest of the cast). The other is the developing love story between Anakin and Padme. The love story seems creepy and weird and invasive. Anakin’s love is, however, obviously reciprocated, despite the dangers to all concerned, which Padme recognizes and Anakin rejects. I had to look up what the differences in their ages are supposed to be. Anakin is nine in Episode I and Padme (an elected queen, note) is 14. The elapsed time between the two films is supposed to be about ten years, so love between a 24 and a 19 year old isn’t too far-fetched.
The plot lines converge on a planet where a droid army is being constructed. Obi-Wan has followed the Fetts there from Kamino and Padme and Anakin go there from Tatooine. If I understand correctly, both the droid army and the clone army are products of a long-range plan set in motion by Darth Sidious (aka Chancellor Palpatine, later The Emperor). The clones were commissioned ten years before, theoretically by a Jedi knight who is long dead.
The convergence on this planet produces two fantastic scenes where the heroes are in definite danger and the only reason we know they survive is because they’re the heroes. In the droid factory, Padme ends up in a giant stone bowl soon to be filled with molten metal. It’s proper Saturday serial action. And Anakin ends up on an assembly line with one arm drilled into a piece of sheet metal and barely able to avoid big cutting things. This is the kind of knuckle-biting tension missing from The Phantom Menace.
As they get out of that part alive, they end up captured and chained in a giant arena, to be torn apart by giant alien creatures in a properly Roman style execution. And that tension is back again. And while this sequence might be as long as the pod race in Episode I, it serves a purpose – we see the relationships between Jango, Count Dooku (another lousy Lucas name – he seems chock full of them), and the Trade Federation leaders, as they all watch for the senator and the Jedi knights to be torn apart.
All in all, this one was quite entertaining. Possibly the best of the three prequels. In much the same way that Empire Strikes Back stomps on episodes IV and VI, it’s a bridge that the filmmakers use to stretch out the characters and let the story breathe a little bit.
I want to also point out all of Natalie Portman’s excellent costumes, of which she sports about a dozen in the course of the film. I thought maybe there might have been an Oscar nomination in that category, but it looks like the film’s only nod that year was for effects, and it lost out to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (which, to be fair, had excellent effects as well).
Last year I signed up for Audible for the sole purpose of listening to the new audio version of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. And I enjoyed it greatly, even though it comprised only a small portion of the 75-issue comic that ran between 1989 and 1996. I think there must have been a selection process to determine whether there was sufficient interest to cover the whole thing. The first release included Morpheus’ first trip into hell, the brutal Collectors episode, Calliope, Facade, The Dream of a Thousand Cats, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But wait! What about Orpheus, Augustus, and The World’s End? Well, fast forward to a few months ago when Audible released Sandman Act II.
Ah, there we find some more of my beloved favourite stories. It seems like they’re working around to doing the whole thing. Eventually. In Act II, we meet Orpheus (in the French Revolution-set Thermidor – Where do you hide a severed head?) and having met his mother in Act I.
In general, they’re doing a good job of telling the essential stories – there are so many characters and there’s so much rich storytelling in Gaiman’s original material (not to mention in Gaiman’s own source material, which includes Shakespeare, Greek mythology, science, fiction, and the mythologies that make up a lot of history) that planning this out required a lot of choices regarding order and the transition from illustrated storytelling to audio. When the original run of Gaiman’s Sandman concluded in 1996, it was obvious that its conclusions had been in mind from very nearly the beginning (this remains a spoiler-free zone, note). Almost everyone we meet has a role.
My main issue, has to do with that very transition. When you read a graphic novel, there’s no reason to describe all the characters – we can see them. What we get in the audio drama is a lot more exposition than perhaps the story needs. We know what Dream and Death, Desire and Despair look like from their first descriptions. There’s no need, usually, to repeat. And it’s okay for the listener to fill things in that are left out of the text. These stories are especially strong and, mellifluous as Gaiman’s voice is, this kind of exposition could have been trimmed in favour of more showing. (I’ll note that being familiar with the source material, I can picture a lot of the story based in the original illustrations. I do wonder what listeners coming to this without the prior experience think.)
Having finished the last couple chapters (The Hunt, Soft Places, The Parliament of Rooks, and Ramadan), I’m overall very pleased with the production values, the acting, and the script. My gripes regarding exposition are minor. I think a lot depends on the story. I didn’t feel the descriptions were problematic or overtaking the stories as the audiobook progressed.
It’s interesting how the people working on this have balanced the overarching story with pieces that are one-offs in context. The framing of Three Septembers, for example, provide some background on the conflict between Dream and Desire. The last four stories are all self-contained, but provide more context about who Dream is. Weirdly, Act II’s centerpiece, A Game of You, only has a couple of scenes with Dream at the very end. And it can be hard to see how it fits into the greater narrative. (In this moment it comes to me that it bears a structural affinity to The Hound of the Baskervilles in which Sherlock Holmes only shows up at the very end.)
In considering the stories not yet shared in audiobook form, I wonder if a forthcoming Act III or Act IV will cover The World’s End which had some insanely good artwork and at least two wordless two-page spreads that will be hard to describe. As the series progressed, the art got more and more interesting (and even the earliest issues weren’t slouching in this department). This might also be why the audio exposition is so detailed sometimes.
In any event, I definitely recommend it, whether you’ve read the graphic novels or not.
It’s been another interesting year, bookwise. More audio books, for some reason. I subscribed to Audible last year for the sole purpose of hearing the audio drama of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (Act 2 of which I’m enjoying as I write). More such stuff made itself known, and this year, best beloved turned me on to Heisenbook, a podcast with books of many different kinds.
I’ve been interested in reading the Narnia books, but wasn’t sure I had the patience. Was happy to find them on Heisenbook, but even with that availability (and Patrick Stewart narrating), I haven’t managed The Last Battle. I’ve been thinking a blog entry on the series might be in order, but I’m not sure I have anything new to say on the matter.
Audio (narrators in parentheses)
John Scalzi – Lock In (Wil Wheaton)
C.S. Lewis – The Magician’s Nephew (Kenneth Branagh)
C.S. Lewis – The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Michael York)
C.S. Lewis – The Horse and His Boy (Alex Jennings)
C.S. Lewis – Prince Caspian (Lynn Redgrave)
C.S. Lewis – The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Derek Jacobi)
C.S. Lewis – The Silver Chair (Jeremy Northam)
BRIAN BLESSED – ABSOLUTE PANDEMONIUM (BRIAN BLESSED) (If you’re familiar with Mr. Blessed, you’ll understand why that’s in caps. If you’re not familiar, this might be a good start, but so is Flash Gordon.)
Frank Herbert – Dune (Multiple actors. Nicely done, but couldn’t get into Dune Messiah, which is a mess. I’ve read the original six books enough times that I can skip it.)
Rob Halford – Confess (Rob Halford, lead singer of the mighty Judas Priest narrating his own memoir. Fascinating story.)
Neil Gaiman – The Sandman – Act II (Radio dramatization – many actors, Gaiman himself does the narration)
Books
SF – Ben Bova – End of Exile (I’d read the other two books of the Exiles trilogy before January 1. Did not hold up from my reading as a teenager, for a variety of reasons, most having to do with racism and sexism.)
Fantasy – Seanan McGuire – Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children #2)
SF – Mary Robinson Koval – Articulated Restraint (Lady Astronaut adjacent novella)
Dystopian YA – Rachel Churcher – Finding Fire (short stories that wrap up the excellent Battle Ground series. (She’s a dear friend and I’ve been a beta reader since she wrote the first book. I hope my input added to its excellence, but I do have a bias.)
SF – Cat Valente – Space Opera (Eurovision meets Battle Royale in space. If that combo appeals to you, get it now. You’ll get it.)
Short stories / Humour – Damon Runyon – Furthermore
Fantasy – Seanan McGuire – Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)
Historical fiction / Detective (Unknown author) – Everything Is In Order (read this to assist the editor who wanted some sensitivity feedback. Nazi Germany set hard-boiled detective novel. I enjoyed it and hope it gets published one of these days.)
Fantasy – Neon Yang – Descent of Monsters (Tensorate series #3)
Drama – Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest
SF – Octavia Butler – The Wild Seed (Patternmaster series #1)
Fantasy – Neon Yang – Ascent to Godhead (Tensorate series #4) (This quartet requires more concentration than I gave it and a reread is definitely in order.)
SF – Becky Chambers – The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers series #4) This is the one with the galaxy’s very best discussion of cheese. Great book, too.
YA Fantasy – Norton Juster – The Phantom Tollbooth (I reread this every few years, and Juster’s passing was the nudge to pull it down again.)
SF – Octavia Butler – Mind of My Mind (Patternmaster series #2)
SF – Nino Cipri – Finna (LitenVerse #1)
SF – Arkady Martine – A Memory Called Empire (OMG, I love this book and will reread it soon in advance of reading the sequel.)
YA Fantasy – L. Frank Baum – The Wizard of Oz (Not sure what the impetus was – something about wanting to see how color was used in the original text. Enjoyable, but I couldn’t get into the next one in the series)
SF – Nino Cipri – Defekt (LitenVerse #2)
SF – Charlie Jane Anders – Victories Greater Than Death (Gorgeous story of adolescence, found family, and fantastic space aliens and a sequel is coming soon.
Literary Fiction – Isaac Bashevis Singer – Enemies: A Love Story (I read this for a book club. Enjoyed it, but it’s really weird.)
Fantasy – Nghi Vo – Empress of Salt and Fortune (Singing Hills cycle #1)
Fantasy – Nghi Vo – When Tiger Came Down The Mountain (Singing Hills cycle #2 – Goodreads suggests two more are coming!)
Fantasy – Seanan McGuire – Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)
Fantasy – Katherine Campbell – Love, Treachery, and Other Terrors (debut fantasy with faeries, contested thrones, sibling relations – good stuff)
Fantasy – Storm Constantine – Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit (a reread from many years back about which I had a thing or two to say)
Short Humour – Damon Runyon – Take It Easy (more short stories)
Fantasy – Seanan McGuire – Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children #6)
Fantasy – Emily Tesh – Silver in the Wood
Fantasy – Emily Tesh – The Drowned Country
Fantasy – Jordan Ifueko – Raybearer (really good)
Fantasy – Terry Pratchett – Small Gods (reread)
Travel – Vita Sackville-West – Passenger to Teheran (I knew that Vita had been a prolific writer, and this memoir of a 1926 journey to visit her husband in the diplomatic was 99p, so I grabbed it. At one point she talks of stopping in Baghdad to visit Gertrude Bell. I had no idea who Bell was, but that’s started me down another rabbit hole.)
Fiction – Leonard Woolf – Stories of the East
Fantasy / Detective – Cassandra Khan – Hammers On Bone
Detective – Ann Cleeves – Telling Tales (cool female detective a friend introduced me to – another rabbit hole as there are eight other Vera Stanhope novels and about 30 other books Cleeves has written.)
Travel? – Gertrude Bell – The Arab War (Why not jump in the deep end – these are secret dispatches sent to British Intelligence from the Middle East during World War 1. Fascinating stuff.)
Poetry – Federico Garcia Lorca – Gypsy Ballads (We visited Granada on our vacation and was keen to visit a place or two associated with his life and to read some of his poetry. His reputation is well earned.)
Fantasy – Ursula K. Le Guin – Always Coming Home (When I was in college, a roommate who’d grown up in Washington state waxed eloquent about this book and told me about the cassette made of music described in it that was sold with the first printing. A year or two ago, that music was released on Bandcamp. I wanted to read the book before listening to the music, but I found the book such hard going, that I haven’t listened yet. Beautiful, but as half anthropological treatise and half disconnected stories (or tangentially connected stories), it wasn’t the easy thing I’d been hoping for.
Essays – William Gibson – Distrust That Particular Flavor (Collected essays and other short pieces. Fascinating dip into his brain. Different than his fiction, but not by that much.)
SF – Nnedi Okorafor – Lagoon (African futurism with aliens and Nigerian politics and quite different from the Binti stories (my only other dive into Dr. Okorafor’s work – looking forward to more.)
Steampunk – P. Djèlí Clark – A Dead Djinn in Cairo and 41. M. P. Djeli Clark – The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Steampunk Cairo with supernatural creatures and crazy science – definitely looking forward to reading more of Clark’s work.
YA – Lauren Shippen – The Infinite Noise (Really lovely queer high school romance with touch of the supernatural for added interest.)
Fantasy – Jordan Ifueko – Redemptor (sequel to Raybearer. Very good stuff.)
Poetry – Avrom Sutzkever – The Full Pomegranate (dual language Yiddish/English anthology of Sutzkever’s poetry)
Fiction – Clayton Barbeau – Dante and Gentucca (Clayton’s son Mark is an old friend of mine who once managed a band called M-1 Alternative. M-1’s third album was called The Little Threshing Floor. A couple of years ago I was in Tuscany and reading The Commedia when I came across the titular phrase. In that moment I also recalled that there was a quote in Italian on the CD booklet from same. So I pinged Mark and asked him what he recalled. One thing he recalled is that his father had written a novel about Dante and sent me this small-press published section. I started reading it at the time and picked it up again this week.)
Poetic Fiction / Travelogue – Federico Garcia Lorca – Sketches of Spain (lovely volume that does what it says on the tin. Lorca traveled through his native country and provides beautiful looks at the churches and neighbourhoods, embracing the beauty and the ugliness where he finds them, sometimes in the same place. My favourite section is the one on Granada’s Albaicin sector which I visited recently. It’s rather gentrified from the time of Lorca’s writing when it was poor, mostly Moorish, and freckled with brothels.
Fantasy – Nnedi Okorafor – Binti (reread – Dr Okorafor tweeted adamantly that the Binti stories were not YA, so I had a conversation with a friend who writes YA about the definition, and I’m pretty sure the first Binti story, at least, fits pretty squarely into YA. This doesn’t lessen a magnificent story’s brilliance. I’m not sure why the author is so firm on it not being.)
Almanac – Sandi Toksvig – Toksvig’s Almanac (Written during the first phase of the pandemic, I received it off my wish list last year for Xmas. It’s been loo reading ever since. Fantastic looks at famous, should-have-been-famous, and infamous women through the ages. Recommended.)
Fantasy / Pulp – Kameron Hurley – Apocalypse Nyx (Not sure how I came to this one – Hurley has written several books about bounty hunter Nyx and her interestingly integrated team of misfits on a planet torn by war and This collection, I think, serves as some of the back stories to those novels. These stories are very much in the pulp tradition (Lester Dent would recognize the debt owed to Doc Savage’s team), but with a lot more alcohol, drugs, sex, and nihilism. Recommended.
Short Stories – Salomea Perl – The Canvas and Other Stories (Dual language Yiddish/English – These recently translated stories of life in the Polish shtetl at the turn of the last century are as incisive and beautiful as the stories in Dubliners. ‘Potki With the Eyebrows’, the last story, gave me the epiphanic shivers.)
Fantasy – Nnedi Okorafor – Binti: Home (reread)
Science – Stephen Hawking – A Brief History of Time (I picked up this copy a few years ago after seeing The Theory of Everything. It’s been loo reading all year, and I finally plowed through the last couple of chapters in a rush.)
In progress:
Gertrude Bell – The Desert and the Sown (Travels in Palestine and Syria)
Jonas Jonasson – The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (reread as I picked up a couple of Jonasson’s other books whilst on holiday.)
Katherine Campbell – The Canadian Nights (an amusing take on The Arabian Nights)
The Infinite Noise is a slightly supernatural queer YA something that includes romance, but mostly not. I don’t read a lot of YA, so I’m not sure how to characterize it. The story follows two neurodivergent high school boys. Caleb is an empath – he can be overwhelmed by the emotions of others. He’s also on the football team. Adam suffers depression and is one of the stars of the debate team.
One thing that grabbed me about this book was the alternating first person narratives. Caleb and Adam are very different but have an endearing quality to their differentness. Adam’s depression has been known to lead to self-harm – it’s nice to read of a boy in this position because this is thought to be mostly a girl’s issue. We meet Caleb before a fight he has after which he blacks out. The fight is the impetus to put him in therapy. There are no spoilers in that – we learn these things about both boys in the first couple of chapters.
Note that this is released as a ‘Bright Sessions Novel’, Dr. Bright being Caleb’s therapist. I’m not sure how I came to this book – my guess is that it was a Tor.com freebie, but it might have been some other special offer. That said, it wasn’t until I read the afterward that I learned that The Bright Sessions started out as an audio drama podcast. This gives the book (and its place in a series that has two more books, both of which have different protagonists) more sense. Because the voices came out of audio drama, they had to be unique. Shippen succeeds admirably in bringing these differences to the page.
I also love the fact that the main characters are queer and that their varieties of neurodivergence are normalized in the context of the story. The parents are concerned, but their concerns are mostly for the health and safety of their kids, not any kind of homophobia.
Even the bully doesn’t have an issue with the fact that the two main characters are dating. It’s a little utopic, but I love how Shippen normalizes the nature of queer love – the focus on all the things they’re dealing with (including all the heavy emotions of the protagonists’ internal states, the emotions of just being adolescent, and some schoolyard violence) isn’t compounded by the fact that they’re queer. The queerness is simply adjacent. But the parents, who are most definitely issue-laden, are cool with the fact that their sons are boys in love.
As the story progresses, what we experience is a courtship and burgeoning relationship that captures adolescent angst about these things in a way that feels especially accurate. It certainly brought to mind the ups and downs of my own adolescence, in a bittersweet way.
The trick with stories like this, comprised of first-person internal monologues, is that you have to want to be in the characters’ heads, even when they don’t want to be in their own heads. It’s a feat to make that emotional rollercoaster attractive and inviting and Shippen makes it work.
I really like Caleb and Adam, so I’m not sure how I’ll feel about the other books in the series. I’m curious about the original audio drama that gave birth to the stories. A couple of episodes of The Bright Sessions are waiting on my phone.
Joe Jots 