Book Review: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #12 of 2016:

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

This was really great classic sci-fi: exploring outlandish dilemmas that nevertheless resonate with their philosophical implications. The main character in this book has dreams that can reshape reality according to his subconscious desires, so he’s desperate to make them stop. (In the first such dream he relates, he was annoyed by an aunt who had come to visit, and his dream made her have died in a car crash six years ago.) He goes to a psychiatrist to try to stop the dreams, but the shrink decides to use the power for good instead, and he gives the man hypnotic suggestions about what to dream to fix the world’s problems. But of course, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and their society gets more and more dystopian as the novel progresses.

I really liked this book, and I think it did a great job of showing the struggle any functionally-omnipotent being would face in trying to make things better. In one version of the novel’s reality, an attempt to resolve racial conflict makes everyone on earth grey, and a biracial character gets wiped from reality entirely because there’s no way someone like her could have been born without her parents having had the histories that they did. It’s a fairly short novel, but definitely one that will stick with me. Very highly recommended.

★★★★★

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Movie Review: Deadpool (2016)

Movie #4 of 2016:

Deadpool (2016)

Overall I think this was about what I was expecting. Not that that’s a bad thing! Deadpool is very funny, very violent, and very meta – an excellent adaptation of the comic character, as far as I can tell. I particularly liked the ways in which the movie skewed against the X-Men universe of which it’s technically a part. The separate Marvel Cinematic Universe has gotten a lot better at telling different kinds of stories that are nevertheless in the same continuity, but it could really use something like this that cuts so thoroughly against the grain in terms of tone. (I guess Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man get there to some extent, but it’s nothing like this Ryan Reynolds antihero blatantly ignoring the call to join the X-Men in order to pursue his own bloody vendetta. You still know those guys are going to join up to take on Thanos or whoever when the time comes.)

I’m a little wary of where Deadpool goes from here, both as its own franchise and with his inclusion in the main X-Men series, but this first movie was fantastic.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Veep, season 1

TV #9 of 2016:

Veep, season 1

Veep is another political sitcom from the same creator as The Thick of It, and the insults are nearly as inventive, but it just isn’t clicking the same way for me. I think part of the problem is that this American version of the program doesn’t really have a character like Malcolm Tucker at the center to root for. I laughed a lot, but I don’t really feel very drawn into the show just yet — which is probably for the best, because this is the only season free on Amazon Prime for now.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket

Book #11 of 2016:

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events #7)

A Series of Unfortunate Events… continues. This book was pretty similar to the ones that came before it in the series, with little forward plot movement. They’re each entertaining enough on their own, but they don’t leave me excited to grab the next one and it isn’t readily apparent why the author needed 13 books to tell this story other than that it’s a gimmicky unlucky number. I am interested in seeing how everything resolves, but I think I need to take a break from this series for now.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Bosch, season 1

TV #8 of 2016:

Bosch, season 1

This is an Amazon original series that I had never heard of before my dad recommended it to me. (It’s based on one of his favorite book series.) I’m glad he did, though. It’s a pretty solid police procedural, with a single storyline spanning the season rather than individual episodic plots. I know some people hate that format, but I don’t feel like it’s a problem especially when a whole season of a show can be binged like this. My only real complaint is that Lance Reddick is pretty much phoning it in at this point – his police chief character in this series is basically the exact same person he played in both The Wire and Fringe, and individually any of those performances is great, but it’s kind of a drain once you realize he plays all of them the same.

Anyway, if you like things like Silence of the Lambs and True Detective, you’ll probably enjoy Bosch as well. The serial killer plotline is maybe just a tad over the top, but I’ll definitely be watching the second season when it drops next month.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson

Book #10 of 2016:

The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn #6)

The fight scenes in this novel are top-notch, and it’s great to see new applications of the basic magic principles Sanderson introduced in the first Mistborn books, but the plot here is pretty thin. I love The Alloy of Law (Mistborn #4, which introduced the current setting and crop of characters), but I just don’t see where he’s going with this trilogy that’s following it. I’m also feeling kind of let down by the slow progress on the Cosmere front… Not to get too spoilery, but there’s a point here where it looks like we’re about to get substantive cross-world interaction, but then it turns out the strangers are just from a different part of Scadriel.

Anyway. A bad Brandon Sanderson book is not a bad overall book, and if you like Mistborn / the Cosmere, of course you should read this one. But I can’t shake the feeling that this whole trilogy is just a transition to introduce the concepts that are going to support the next setting in this world.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: The Good Wife, season 6

TV #7 of 2016:

The Good Wife, season 6

Okay, there’s no getting around the fact that this season of The Good Wife was a major step down from season 5. Then again, practically anything would be – I’ve heard people call TGW season 5 one of the all-time great seasons of any television show, and it’s hard to argue against that. This time around, though, the ensemble got fractured into separate storylines that didn’t converge often enough to really be satisfying, and some of those plots were just non-starters. (Cary’s trial was great, but then the character didn’t really have anything to do after it wrapped up halfway through the season. Kalinda was basically in her own show for a while there, and this season’s election plot never really felt motivated. Why is Alicia running? Why did Castro drop out? For once, it didn’t seem like the writers were interested in answering such fairly basic character questions.)

That being said, any season of The Good Wife has more than its share of great moments, and even if this was the weakest outing to date, at least the show didn’t fall completely off the rails (the way Supernatural did after its own series-high fifth season, to pick just one example). I’m moving full-steam ahead onto season 7, and since they just confirmed that will be the show’s final season, I should be able to get caught up just in time to watch the last few episodes live. Even considering the issues with season 6, this has been a phenomenal show that I’ll be sad to see leave the screen.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Book #9 of 2016:

The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks (Shannara #2)

I originally read the first dozen or so Shannara books back in middle and high school, before finally getting tired of the series. I don’t remember any of them particularly well, but I did have this vague memory that Elfstones (the second one written, now the eleventh chronologically) and Wishsong (the third / twelfth book) had been my favorites. Still, I pretty much only decided to reread this one now because MTV is adapting it as a television show.

That’s an awful lot of preamble, but I do feel like I need to qualify this book somehow. It’s not particularly good. Both this one and the original Sword of Shannara are pretty clear Lord of the Rings ripoffs. Over time author Terry Brooks fleshed his world out a lot more, but in these early stages, it was a fairly generic fantasy setting. But, you know. It was the late 70s / early 80s, and fantasy as a genre was much less developed back then. Even my favorite Stephen R. Donaldson struggled at times to escape from Tolkien’s shadow.

Elfstones itself is full of weak storytelling, but it’s been an interesting experience to read this book (as a well-read adult in 2016 rather than a kid in the early 2000s) while also watching the first few episodes of the MTV adaptation. Much like the Dragonlance books, there are definitely a lot of things in the text that didn’t bother me before but that I can’t help but notice and roll my eyes at now. And to MTV’s credit, they’ve made some smart choices in adapting some of the weaker and less original material, like its rather terrible gender politics. For instance, the book version of Amberleigh basically runs away from being a Chosen because she’s ashamed that she was selected for a traditionally masculine role, whereas on the show she fights hard to overcome a gender bias in her society and then runs away later because she has a prophetic vision of herself murdering her fellow Chosen.

Ultimately I guess I don’t really feel like defending the novel, but I’m glad I reread it before seeing most of the show just so I can view that as an adaptation instead of something standalone. I don’t recommend the book to anyone else, though.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Book #8 of 2016:

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Todd Family #1)

I normally love the premise of characters reliving moments from their lives over and over again, but this novel was just so frustrating. To start with, the rules for how each go-through differs are never made clear. Sometimes it seems like the heroine is remembering a previous lifetime, if only vaguely, and using that knowledge to sidestep disasters that she’s met before. So far, so good, although I would like it better if she had full knowledge of her earlier selves instead of just vague deja vu that doesn’t always happen.

But some of the lifetimes vary by things she clearly didn’t do any differently. Instead, some other character will behave differently in a way Ursula could never have affected, with at least one of these differences happening before her birth in that timeline. And sometimes the narrative picks up a lifetime substantially well into it, so although there are characters and events that we recognize, we have no real attachment to them because we have no clue how their life story differs from any of the ones we saw them experience before.

And there’s never any explanation of why these lifetime repeats are happening for Ursula, if that even is what’s happening. (I’m assuming based on the title of the book and the way this trope usually goes that these are true repeats, not just simultaneous branches of a splitting multiverse, but even that is far from clear. At the very least, though, the order in which the lives are presented in the narrative does seem to show some sort of vague, faltering progression of Ursula’s knowledge of her other lives. It’s a messy trendline, but it’s there.) The first chapter begins with a flashforward of her pulling a gun on Hitler, and I guess we’re supposed to assume that’s what the story is building to, but then even after she finally reaches that point, the lifetimes go on. And… I guess that’s the punchline? That the repeats weren’t building to anything after all? It’s all so bizarre: understated and ambiguous and definitely feeling more like a sour joke than any sort of thematic or narrative resolution.

And honestly… it’s all kind of boring. Ursula doesn’t really do very much in many of her lifetimes, but she also changes so much from life to life it’s hard to remember what each version of her has gone through and what she hasn’t, making it very hard to get invested in her story. The premise should easily lend itself to excitement and introspection, but mostly I was just bored, over and over again.

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Book #7 of 2016:

The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer (Last Survivors #4)

This is the fourth (and last?) book in Pfeffer’s teens-making-poor-life-decisions-in-the-apocalypse series, and it is definitely the wildest one yet. The earlier books were tightly focused on individual families struggling to survive in a time of cataclysm; this one verges on Hunger Games territory as the survivors hook up with what’s become of civilization. It was still good, though! I may have spent the first half of this book groaning at how awful certain characters are, but their growth is worth it in the end. Still, I’d recommend people start at the beginning of the series with Life As We Knew It. This one is a very different sort of story, but it wouldn’t be nearly as strong if you didn’t know the characters and what they had gone through just to reach where this book starts.

This book: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Book ranking: 1 > 2 > 4 > 3

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