Some Catching up...

The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality and the Financial Crisis (2015) by Darryl Cunningham is a great book, essential reading—in graphic novel form—to understand the current political malaise in America.  It is divided into three parts.  The first gives the biography of the patron saint of selfishness, Ayn Rand (1905-1982), showing her many errors and contradictions.  The second section, “The Crash,” shows how Rand’s devotees, like Alan Greenspan and the Tea Party advocates, who follow her economic ideas but not her atheism, set up the ridiculous unregulated market, that with the attendant self-interests of Wall Street brought about the market crash of 2008.  The third section, “The Age of Selfishness,” analyzes the current financial and political world and calls for a much needed re-evaluation of where things are heading.  This is one of the best books of 2015.

The Tropes of Fantasy Fiction (2015) by Gabrielle Lissauer sounded like it would be a book I would like. The cover blurb notes that it shows how the tropes and clichés that go into making a story do not make it good or bad, but how the author applies them does.  “The book also explores the concept of text versus meta-text—that is, when the story’s world and character actions contradict the reader’s expectations based on the tropes being used.”  Alas, it does no such thing.  This book reads like an enormous blog-post, with a know-it-all blogger of limited capacity. Witness a few random quotes:  “One thousand years ago in our history, the Holy Roman Empire still existed. Europe was in the beginning of the Middle Ages, and Islam was in the midst of its Golden Age. Algebra didn’t exist yet, nor did the printing press—though movable type was on the horizon. And a great many people still thought the sun revolved around the Earth!” (page 162).  “Elves are the creatures that are found in books like Lord of the Rings and fairies are like Tinker Bell. Elves are tall, stately creature that are in tune with nature and better than people. Fairies are tiny, silly things with insect wings and also in tune with nature. They are of the natural world, whereas man is of the urban and technological world. Fairies and elves are mysterious and magical; men are mundane and must beware lest they stumble into their realms and never to be seen again.” (page 143). Nevermind that these statements are massive simplifications, inapplicable in their details to most literary productions; yet they are trotted out like pearls of wisdom. The whole book is written in this trite, patronizing tone. This book should be jettisoned into the nearest Crack of Doom. 

 

Naomi’s Room (1991) is the first novel published under the pseudonym Jonathan Aycliffe.  It is a commercial supernatural thriller, in which Charles Hillenbrand loses sight of his four year old daughter Naomi while Christmas shopping, and she is abducted and soon afterwards found mutilated. Supernatural forces that are based in their house are involved in some way, and their reawakening involves further deaths and mysteries which Charles Hillenbrand must solve.  Compelling, and interesting in parts, it nevertheless remains merely a page-turner with (as is so often the case) an unstasfying resolution. 

 

The Lost (1996) is the fifth of Jonathan Aycliffe’s supernatural novels.  Here a modern British man Michael Feraru makes a trip to Roumania and delves into his family history, reclaiming an isolated castle that his family had abandoned during World War II.  The tale is told, like Dracula, in documents—letters, journal entries, clippings. Bram Stoker did this very effectively; Jonathan Aycliffe less so. The revelation of the family secrets are anti-climactic, and the novel as a whole is much less interesting that Naomi’s Room.

 

Belin’s Hill (1997) by Catherine Fisher is a young adult novel centering on a boy Huw, who (with his sister) comes to live with his uncle’s family near Caerleon (Arthur Machen country) after his parent’s deaths. Huw himself had been in the train accident that killed his parents, and is still not really recovered.  In this new place he is both distracted and haunted by various things to do with the legend of a haunted family on Belin’s Hill.  Huw finds some Celtic stone faces, hinting at more ancient magic, but the local legend of the witch and her cursed family is also involved. Ultimately the various threads of story don’t mesh very well.    

 

Machen’s Gwent: ‘A Country Hardly to be Known’ (2015) is Catherine Fisher’s talk from the 2013 Caerleon Festival which honored the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Machen. It is an essay of strung-together quotations from Machen’s works, highlighting his comments on Gwent. Nothing really revelatory to be found here, but it’s a pleasant essay acknowledging Machen’s interests by one of his modern appreciators. 

 

Speculative Horizons (2010), edited by Patrick St. Denis, is a collection of five original stories by C.S. Friedman, Tobias S. Buckell, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Brian Ruckley, and Hal Duncan. The slickest tale is that by Modesitt, which is related to his other writings, and feels rather ephemeral on its own.  The Buckell story is promising and shows some good imagination. The Ruckley is a fantasy of a society of hunter-gatherers, and the Friedman begins as a more routine tale but it has an interesting twist at the end.  The standout of the volume is the final tale, “The Death of a Love,” in which a kind of cupid is formed when couples fall in love. Duncan explores how couples kill destroy their own loves by killing their cupids.

 

The Book of Dreams (2010), edited by Nick Gevers, is also a collection of five original stories, centering on dream adventures.  The opening story, “The Prisoners” by Robert Silverberg, is the most routine of the five. Jay Lake’s “Testaments” is the most imaginative, though its episodic nature makes it less of a story.  Jeffrey Ford’s “86 Deathdick Road” is one of those quirky modern stories that suddenly turns (unsatifyingly) surreal.  Kage Baker’s “Rex Nemorensis” mixes the dreams of a Vietnam veteran with a particular locale.  And finally, the oddest story of an odd lot, Lucius Shepard’s “Dream Burgers at the Mouth of Hell” gives a glimpse at the backward and surreal workings of Hollywood and its scriptwriters.

More Books

Fractured Fairy Tales (1997), told by A.J. Jacobs.  This is an odd production. “Fractured Fairy Tales” was an independent segment of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, which ran on American television for five seasons from 1959-64. Some ninety-one short episodes were produced, narrated by Edward Everett Horton. Just what this collection is supposed to be is not clearly defined. The authorship is credited to A.J. Jacobs, who was born in 1968, after the series had aired.  But the book is copyrighted to Ward Productions, and Jay Ward gets a kind of author blurb on the rear flap despite the (unstated) fact that he died in 1989. The book contains twenty five stories, each usually only four or five pages long, and they are much in the style of the original productions, but there are a good number of pop culture references (to “action figures,” “jazzercise,” to the zip code “90210”)  that date to the 1990s rather than the early 1960s.  Most of the stories are moderately amusing, but one misses the velvety narrative voice of Edward Everett Horton, and the simple visual style, and the familiar character voices of people like June Foray or Daws Butler. Reading these stories on their own seems like a one dimensional experience compared to the much more appealing animated episodes. 

How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial (2013), by Darryl Cunningham.  This small book, in graphic novel format, exposes the scientific illiteracy that is rampant in modern popular culture, covering eight topics in particular:  the idea that the moon landing was a hoax; that (1) homeopathy or (2) chiropracty are worthwhile medical treatment options; that vaccines cause autism; as well as taking on the supporters of fracking and the deniers of evolution, climate change, and science. 

            I can’t recommend this book enough.  It should be taught in every elementary school in the United States. Darryl Cunningham has done another similar book The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis, which I’m looking forward to reading. 

The Prince of the Aquamarines & The Invisible Prince (2015) by Louise Cavelier Levesque, translated by Ruth Berman. These two fairy tales date from the first half of the eighteenth century, during that flowering of interest in the writing of fairy tales in France.  Neither has appeared before in full in English—the second tale, “The Invisible Prince,” was included by Andrew Lang in much abridged form in The Yellow Fairy Book. They are primarily of historical interest, but it’s good to have them available, and the translator Ruth Berman does a fine job in an afterword of discussing the historical context of the two tales. 

Written in Darkness (2014) by Mark Samuels. A collection of nine new stories by Samuels, with an introduction by Reggie Oliver. Samuels first collection The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003) was a very promising debut, but it was followed by some much less interesting work (perhaps early work?), including Black Altars (2003) and the novella The Face of Twilight (2006), so that by the time Glyphotech (2008) came out I’d ceased paying attention to Samuels’s work.  The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories (2010) didn’t seem attractive either, but I thought I’d check in again when Written in Darkness came out. And I’m glad I did. This is Samuels at the top of his form, and seeing that The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories is out in an affordable trade paperback edition, I plan to try it out too.  

These Last Embers (2015) by Simon Strantzs, with wraparound cover art by Drazen Kozjan. Simon Strantzas is a Canadian author of four collections of stories, and Drazen Kozjan is a Canadian illustrator. This is the first of a series of chapbooks from a Canadian small press. Strantzas story is good, but not amongst his best; it is too short (a mere ten pages of text) to be really effective. Kozjan’s wraparound cover is outstanding. Yet the story and illustration seem mismatched in tone. Still I look forward to future chapbooks from this publisher.