Bookpusher

It’s rare that I come across a fantasy novel that is either refreshingly new or a hell of a lot of fun, and His Majesty’s Dragon is both. The thing to note here is that this novel isn’t exactly fantasy – it’s more like alternative history. The setting is England during the Napoleonic Wars. Dragons not only exist and can talk, they are also bred and trained for battle in the Aerial Corps, with crews of a dozen men or more strapped to them in leather harnesses, like small flying warships. Novik’s world is like Patrick O’Brian’s novels, crossed with Jane Austen if she took a writing seminar from Anne McCaffrey.

The novel actually begins on a ship, as the English have taken over a French frigate that contains a dragon egg sent from China to Napoleon. The egg hatches and bonds with the ship’s captain, who has to not only learn to take care of his rapidly-growing dragon, but also has to adjust from the strict protocol-laden world of the Royal Navy to the more freewheeling yet understaffed Aerial Corps. Master and Commander dragon fight against Napoleon’s dragons in thrilling aerial battles, including thwarting an invasion plot.

The whole thing might sound a little goofy, but Novik completely nails everything, with a matter-of-fact tone that gets the speech and details of the period just right. The characters are solid, likeable, and above all, believable. Each dragon has their own personality and relationship with their crew. The end result is a completely enchanting read, so much so that in parts I wanted to stand up and cheer on the characters. The novel is the first in a series, with books two and three already out and a fourth on the way.  Do not miss this series.

(If you need any more reason to catch on to this series, director Peter Jackson has dipped into his own pocket and bought the movie rights.  If you thought the Battle of Helm’s Deep was thrilling cinema, I can’t freaking wait to see Jackson tackle squadrons of flying dragons fighting over Dover.)

I’ve been tagged by my drinking buddy Josh (happy birthday!) over at Goblin in the Library: a list of five things you (probably) don’t know about me.

1.) I was the lead in two plays while a senior in high school. I played the Clark Kent/Superman role in a play called Captain Fantastic- a role that required me to wear a spandex orange and yellow outfit, which didn’t give me any issues about my body, oh  no - and then I played Felix Unger in the Odd Couple alongside my best friend at the time, who played Oscar Madison.

2.) I’ve had my writing published. My friends and I scraped together some money and wrote, drew, and published our own comic books. Unfortunately, it was right in the middle of the Great Comics Glut of 1993, so our revolutionary takeover of the industry lasted all of three issues, primarily because our comics weren’t polybagged with five alternate metallic laser-etched holographic covers. (People who collected comics in the 1990s will get the joke.) I also got to go to the Chicago Comicon as a creator and see Neil Gaiman, so it was all totally worth it.

3.) I’m a loyal NPR listener but HATE HATE HATE Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion.

4.) I grind my teeth and have to wear a hard plastic nightguard in my mouth when I sleep. I’ll spit it out in the middle of the night and my wife has to act as cornerman, putting it back in.

5.) Favorite book: The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler.

As always, I have to limit my list to the flicks this year I’ve seen, until such time that some organization sees fit to send me to screen films for free. (If any such organization is out there reading this, please note that I’m fairly cheap and am overwhelmingly respectful of deadlines.)

Anyway. The best:

5.) Casino Royale: just like last year’s Batman Begins rescued the franchise from utter silliness, Casino Royale took Bond from the brink of cartoonish irrelevance and injected some realism, excitement, and fun back into him. Instead of some sissy tuxedo-wearing fop, Daniel Craig looks like he could actually kill someone with his bare hands. The year’s best action flick.

4.) Thank You for Smoking: dammit, this is why we need more black comedies in the movies. Here was 2006’s best: a whip-smart, satirical look at a tobacco lobbyist who’s tasked to pay off the Marlboro Man who has lung cancer. Brilliantly done – good novel, too. Makes the maximum use of the always-underrated Aaron Eckhart. Oh, and the movie features Katie Holmes, right before the Scientology programming set in.

3.) Babel: this year’s Crash. If you liked that movie, you’ll like this one, too; it just sucks that Oprah didn’t get behind this one. Maybe if Terrence Howard would have gotten involved. An ensemble effort that shows us how difficult it is to communicate with each other, especially with the boundaries of borders, culture, and physical ability. Babel will tear your heart out. No other movie in 2006 affected me like this one did.

2.) Little Miss Sunshine: the most fun at the movies I had this year. I want to hurl hard, sharp things at my tv everytime I see the commercials for the DVD that gives the ending away.

1.) Brick: a mashup of Dashiell Hammet and Sarah Dessen? The Third Man meets Heathers? A combination of Touch of Evil and That’s So Raven? I can’t properly define this one for you, you’ll just have to see it for yourself. A concept – an old-school film noir set in modern-day high school – that’s so perfect and simple, I’m surprised that some screenwriter hasn’t thought of this before. An excellent story, dialogue sharper than the edge of a katana, and amazing performances from a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings. The next generation might not be completely wasted after all.

Went to see the film “Eragon” last night. Wasn’t bad, really. Certainly not as bad as the 14% or so it’s currently getting over at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not bad, but the problem is that it certainly isn’t good.

The film didn’t work for me not because it ripped off “Star Wars” -which it shamelessly does - or that it’s an unapologetic sword ‘n sorcery film that happened to come out after “Lord of the Rings” set the standard so incredibly high. ”Eragon” doesn’t work for me simply because the film was all icing and no cake.

Let me back up. Everyone likes cake, right? If you ask a child what they like best about a piece of cake, they’ll immediately say they like the icing. It’s sweet, creamy, colorful, and it’s the first thing you see when you see a cake. Hardly any kid will mention anything about what’s below the icing: the eggs, salt, flour, yeast. Yet those are the most important ingredients in the cake - they’re the things that make the cake actually happen. But they’re hidden, underneath, and not easily visible. Also, it’s not as fun or as colorful or as tasty as the icing, but without it, there’s no cake.

Same thing happens in movies. When you ask someone what they liked best about such-and-such movie, they’ll mention the big special-effects shots, the thrilling climax, or the moment when the leads finally kiss. The icing parts. But what a movie needs to be really successful are the hidden scenes and the little moments between characters. Movies need character development, strong and compelling relationships between those characters, a steady narrative, and a plot that sucks you in. Without those motivations, the high points of the movie mean nothing, reduced to technical exercises in filmmaking. “Eragon” wants to rush through the essential building blocks and get to the “cool!” parts. But the problem is when they do come, those moments aren’t special. The film feels rushed and incomplete and edited.

“Eragon” works best when you think of it as a children’s movie, and I can imagine the audience of the books digging it, but there’s no shot for a crossover appeal of a “LOTR” or “Narnia”, which is what the studio intended. The story’s your basic ‘farmer kid from the boonies is the Last Hope, rescues the princess, and leads the rebellion against the Evil King’. Jeremy Irons does a great job doing the Obi-Wan Kenobi bit, and John Malkovich and Robert Carlyle chew acres of scenery as the magic-wielding bad guys. The fx is good and the film has the look of a big-budget fantasy flick, but without the eggs, flour, and the rest of it, it’s all just icing.

The latest in Connelly’s long line of detective novels featuring Harry Bosch, Echo Park- like all other Harry Bosch novels – is a police procedural as if written by Raymond Chandler. Sure, you have the almost stereotypical grizzled lone-wolf LA police detective who takes a last shot at One Case He Couldn’t Solve, but Connelly plugs into the romance of the LA detective and makes Bosch – and the reader – care about what’s going on to such an extent that solving the case becomes a life-and-death issue of honor and morality. Connelly, a former crime reporter, gives a fascinating look at the day-to-day grind of the detective, and after last year’s excellent Lincoln Lawyer, which was a defense attorney procedural (if there exists such a thing in crime fiction) Connelly proves that he’s still one of the best writers on the bestseller lists.

In Echo Park, Bosch, who a tunnel rat as a young man in Vietnam, is 60 years old and is starting to look backwards at his life. One case in particular still haunts him – a young woman who was murdered in a parking garage but not with enough evidence or witnesses to narrow down suspects. A lucky traffic stop in the neighborhood of Echo Park nabs a serial killer with a van full of body parts who confesses to Harry’s old case, and Bosch is drawn in to a highly political investigation: an Assistant DA sees the case as a path to the big time and one of Bosch’s old departmental enemies is running for a seat on the city council. The familiar LA refrain of corruption and cover-ups begin and Bosch has to sort through it all and do the right thing. Which isn’t always the legal thing, which is one of the thing that makes the character so fun. (Harry Bosch would totally eat Dennis Franz’s NYPD Blue detective’s lunch.)

I’ve been a Connelly fan for a long time and am constantly amazed how how this guy never seems to have a bad book in him – as with many authors with a long series to their name, you expect the quality to go up and down as you sense the writer getting bored with what the public wants. Not Connelly, who is about as consistently good a writer as I’ve ever read. Pick this one up.

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson is one of those books I really should have waited for the library to acquire, but I loved Larson’s Devil in the White City so much I broke down and bought it. Glad I did. Even though Thunderstruck didn’t achieve the heights that Devil did, it was only because Devil was a such a breakthrough; it would be like trying to replicate the Beatles or Citizen Kane.(By the way, have I hyped Devil in the White City enough? Okay, I’ll stop. I admit I have a serious bookcrush on this title. If Devil in the White City were a girl in a bar I’d be buying it drinks all night long, laughing at all its boring stories, and trying to get its number. Anyway.)Thunderstruck takes two stories that happen at roughly the same time, taking contemporary accounts from direct sources like court transcripts and newspaper articles, and interweaves them into a narrative that reads like fiction. The first story is Marconi’s invention of the radio in 1895 and his early attempts at convincing people to use it; the second is a 1910 murder that galvanized London. Larson takes these two stories and unfolds them, slowly and meaningfully, until both tales are going at full steam and off of a sudden they intersect, and Larson’s vision – and the vision of the book – finally unveils itself.

After doing all that enthusiastic frothing at the mouth over Andrew Klavan’s Bishop and Weiss mysteries a month or so ago, I have to admit that I just couldn’t finish his latest, Damnation Street. After a hundred pages, it went back on the library shelf. The book had the same qualities I liked in the first two – neo-noir atmosphere, fatally flawed heroes, hookers with hearts of gold, corrupt cops, and outstanding acts of badassery, but this time around it wasn’t the same. Something unidentifiable was missing. Everything that I liked about the first two books was here, but it didn’t fit together right. It was like ordering your favorite meal at a restaurant and it tastes awful, even though it has the same ingredients, same chef, cooked at the same temperature, same everything, but for some reason it just didn’t jell. Instead of threatening, the unstoppable serial killer was merely cliché. The hooker with a heart of gold was whiny and annoying. The acts of badassery came off like little more than elements in a twelve-year-old’s playground fantasy. The whole thing had the feel of a bad Steven Segal flick.

Every author is entitled to a pass now and then if a book isn’t up to snuff, and Klavan’s certainly earned his, but yeah. I violently disliked this one.

Done! Finally, finally done. No more school, at least until January.

The last weekend of 803 was a mess. Most of the work we had to do was of the small group variety, and because of the Thanksgiving holiday, everyone – including me – drug their feet and waited until the very last minute. So last weekend was a flurry of hurried writing, snarking back and forth at each other, and general ass-covering, however I think we pulled it all together well and ended up with one of the better presentations in the class on how the role of librarianship will change with a fully digital library. I know, I know – exciting stuff, right? Anyway, it’s all done now, so I get to sit back and recover for the next few weeks before the next batch of classes begins.

To help manage the stress, I’ve been reading, so I have a TON of reviews to work on for y’all. Erik Larson’s follow-up to the absolutely sublime kick-yourself-if-you-haven’t-already-read-this Devil in the White City, Michael Connelly’s new entry in the Harry Bosch detective series, the latest Bishop and Weiss mystery from Andrew Klavan, and maybe even a fantasy novel or two, because I haven’t read any decent fantasy in what seems like forever.

It’s good to be back.