Recent reading
Dec. 25th, 2005 12:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperSo since I've been really blocked lately with getting any of my own words written, I've been getting caught up on reading other people's words. Some of this has been clearing out the last of the Kathleen Ann Goonans on my To Read shelf; the rest of it has been inspired by liking the new King Kong so much, even the re-read of the Elizabeth Peters novel.
I am disappointed to report that I didn't like Light Music by Kathleen Ann Goonan at all. I wanted to. As I have previously posted, I did like both Queen City Jazz and Crescent City Rhapsody, but the conclusion to her Nanotech Cycle just left me cold.
The biggest reason for this is that a problem I'd noticed in Mississippi Blues came back in this book in full force, and worse: the tendency to have her characters go on and on and on and on at each other talking about things that should have been shown to us in the action of the plot. In this book, it was compounded by her characters engaging in full-throttle pseudoscientific pontification, so it wasn't even interesting dialogue. Two of the characters I liked from Crescent City Rhapsody were especially guilty of this, under the excuse that they'd spent several decades in the now-domed city of Los Angeles, whose inhabitants have all been transformed into... well, the series never quite comes out and says what, exactly. But one is led to believe that their consciousnesses are all uploaded into some sort of artificial system, and that it is possible for any given consciousness to create physical copies of themselves.
Which is what happened to Zeb and Ra out of Crescent City Rhapsody. Apparently they lost something along the way, because they were pale imitations of themselves in the previous story and seemed to serve no real purpose in this plot except to pontificate at each other as to what they thought was going on. VERY ANNOYING.
For the rest, none of the other characters, whether ones that we'd seen before or ones who were new to this story, really did much for me either. There were interesting concepts of characterization there, but none of them ever really seemed to go anywhere. For that matter, neither did the plot. I get that one of the big points of the book was humanity evolving into a new stage of existence, but there was never any real sense of why the heck this was happening. The big mystery of the series, what the Signal is and why it's been bombarding Earth, is never answered. Instead, we're left with the core characters being on the brink of launching into space to go find the Signal's origin, which, I might add, we don't ever get to see. We're just left with this spreading phenomenon of people turning into... beings of light.
How very Trek. And not what I was hoping for with this book. Sigh.
Elizabeth Peters' The Camelot Caper was, as I mentioned above, a re-read. It's not one of my favorites of hers, though it does have three distinctions that make it stand out in my mind. One, it features the only appearance of John Tregarth outside the Vicky Bliss novels, which pulls it into the same continuity as that series as well as the Amelia Peabodies. (I have a theory that all of the Elizabeth Peters books might be in the same continuity, but I don't know for sure.) Two, it's almost farcical in tone, which is unusual for Peters' work. Three, it's one of the examples of her habit of making her heroes or heroines not necessarily cookie-cutter beautiful; in fact, in this book she makes a recurring point of mentioning the size of the hero's nose.
Which brings me to why I had to re-read this book immediately after seeing the new King Kong: after I saw the movie, I thought, "Holy crap. Adrien Brody. HE is the hero of that novel!" ;) Re-reading it with that particular casting choice in mind was very entertaining indeed.
Still, there are a few reasons why this doesn't really score high on my radar of favorite Elizabeth Peters books.
Her earlier works, at least those which are supposed to be set in the "current day", have a problem with being dated. Most of the time this doesn't bother me, because her engaging characters and plots help make up for it, and I just flip the mental switch from "set in current-day but badly dated" to "period piece". But in this particular book there are bits and pieces of this that aren't quite smoothly written, just enough to jar. I mean, the heroine actually used the words "cool, man" in dialogue, for example. Even allowing for the time frame in which the book was written, I had a hard time believing anybody could say that without irony. ;)
Also, this particular edition of the book was really badly copyedited. I caught several typos, and more than one occurrence of a place where a properly spelled but clearly wrong word was used instead of the right word. For example, a use of "King Author" when what was clearly meant was "King Arthur". Oops. So that kept throwing me out of the story.
All in all it's a pretty forgettable read; I'd forgotten pretty much the entire plot, and all I had retained about it was that the hero had a big nose and that John from the Vicky Bliss novels was in it. It's not a bad story per se, just pretty forgettable. Elizabeth Peters has done better, both under this name and as Barbara Michaels. And while you do see several familiar traits of John's in this book, he's a lot more entertaining over in the Vicky Bliss stories.
Matthew Costello's The Island of the Skull is billed as the "official prequel" to the storyline of the new Kong movie, so because I really liked that version of the story, I went ahead and picked this book up.
It follows three separate plot threads involving the filmmaker Carl Denham, the young actress Ann Darrow, and the ex-Navy diver Sam Kelly, who was not in the movie (or, for that matter, the original 1933 version), but who turned out to have the most interesting stuff happen to him in this plot. From my writer perspective, I was curious as to how this book would handle following all three of these characters, just because the events of the movie require that none of them ever actually meet. By and large it did jump back and forth between the characters in a fairly coherent way, though early on I did have some quibbles with the points at which the jumps happened, as well as the lengths of various chapters. Those were minor quibbles, though.
I intended to read it back to back with the novelization of the actual movie, thinking it'd be fun to plow straight through both books and get a "one big story" experience. I wound up having to read them in reverse order, which was also kind of fun just because of seeing how events that are alluded to in the movie fall together.
There was some fun stuff with Carl Denham, his film crew guys, and the crew of the Venture. (Yay, hot captain Englehorn!) Mostly, it involves telling about how the camera guy Herb lost part of his leg, and how Denham weaselled financing for his jungle picture out of his backers, and established the friendships between Carl and Englehorn as well as Carl and Jack.
If you know the events of the movie, this book gives a kind of fun sense of doom about to smack Carl and Ann upside the head. Sometimes it's in a good way, since Jack Driscoll does appear in a few scenes and both he and Ann angst about whether they'll ever fall in love; I found myself grinning at that since I did of course know what was coming with their romance. (I was vaguely disappointed, though, that we got no sign of Ann being hooked on Jack's plays yet. Seeing her discover one of those and getting goopy over his writing would have been kind of neat, since she's established as already clearly enamored of his work at the beginning of the movie.)
The other stuff about Ann wasn't quite as coherent. We see her going down to Atlantic City for a job on the boardwalk there, doing--of all things--riding on the back of a horse diving into the ocean as part of an act to draw the crowds. There's a genuinely touching bit at the end regarding the fate of the horse, who takes well to her. And there's a mildly interesting side plot involving Ann having a brush with gangsters, but it didn't get nearly as interesting as it should have. Mostly, reading her parts of the book, I read just closely enough to mark what was going on and hastened on to the next bits involving Sam Kelly, and what happened to him on Skull Island--definitely the most interesting part of the story.
Sam and his young friend Tommy sign on to a pearl diving boat that travels into the Indian Ocean, and in the waters off Skull Island, once Tommy is killed, things go to hell. The ship is attacked by a water-going dino, and they have to land on the island to look for wood to repair breaches to the hull. Where, of course, things continue to go to hell. We never see Kong, but we do hear him roaring. And the men of Sam's ship do find out about him in passing, thanks to a native girl who also proves an interesting character--who stands out as one of the intended sacrifices to Kong, who decides "fuck this" and greases up her arms to get out of the ropes when her people tried to give her to the ape. She runs like hell into the jungle, and eventually runs into the men from Sam's ship. She and Sam barely have enough time to establish a rapport, though, before everybody except Sam is killed. Sniff!
Sam winds up becoming the creator of the map we see in Denham's possession, though, in the movie--and the castaway mentioned in passing as picked up by a Norwegian captain, who then dies a few hours after he's found. Again, sniff. But this brings the sense of impending doom back around to Denham, because we do see him getting hold of the map, and the first gleams of his obsession start taking hold as at the same time Ann makes her way back up to New York to join the vaudeville show we see her in at the beginning of the film.
The one jarring note was a couple of scenes about a German scientist coming to America, towards the very end of the book. This guy is apparently in there only to convey the idea that he's discovered a specimen from Skull Island and he's going to try to alert the U.S. government about it--but he's told that the U.S. government is not exactly in the mood to be interested, what with the Depression going on and all. So he winds up being there mostly to pose the question to the reader of whether this place of modern-day dinosaurs will in fact ever be discovered. We do of course know that it will be. But those scenes felt unnecessary, because that point got made quite clearly by the three main plotlines all coming together.
All in all, not bad for what it is, a media tie-in novel. And it was an enjoyable addendum to the movie storyline. Recommended if you're in the mood for something lightweight to rip through!
And now I come to the actual novelization of the Kong movie, as written by Christopher Golden. As with Island of the Skull, this wasn't bad for what it is, i.e., a media tie-in novel. By and large it was pretty much the same version of the story we see in the film, with some exceptions; as often happens with tie-in books, one gets a clear impression that the novel was based on an earlier version of the script. Here are the notable changes I can think of:
There's quite a bit with a Chinese member of the crew, who I'm not remembering from the film, but who seems to be a close friend of Andy Serkis' character Lumpy. He spends quite a bit of time enthusing about his fascination with Charles Atlas' "become a man in seven days" program--which, I realize as I write this, must of course be the same thing that Frank N. Furter sings about in Rocky Horror. Hee. Anyway, the poor schmoo is of course doomed to die, but he provides a bit of side character development we don't get in the film.
On Skull Island, there's no sign of Bruce Baxter actually leading a rescue party back to Jack and the others from the ship. Englehorn brings the party of his own accord. And the entire insect sequence where Jack and the others have to be rescued to begin with plays out differently in general.
There is no Monkey Slidey scene in New York. Sniff!
The details of Jack's swiping the cab in New York and hassling Kong with it are a bit different; the bit that stood out the most for me is that in the movie, you see Kong actually grab the cab and flip it around, and Jack is jostled and knocked out by the impact. In the book, he actually comes around a blind corner and crashes the cab. The book's version is less interesting, and I can see why having Kong whap the cab made it into the filming draft. Heh.
By and large it was competent writing, though nothing spectacular. It was a decent rendering of a movie script, I'd say. The description was very sparse all throughout; hardly any of the characters got even basic description done on them, for example. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing per se, as perfectly good writing can be done with description that sparse, but in my particular case I tend to like at least a bit of basic description done on people to help me imagine them.
I may at some point soon buy the recently released editions of the original version of this story, just to compare them. But in this particular instance, I'd definitely recommend the movie over the novelization, because the visuals and the acting are what really sold this story for me, and the novelization just didn't capture that same flavor. Oh well!
I am disappointed to report that I didn't like Light Music by Kathleen Ann Goonan at all. I wanted to. As I have previously posted, I did like both Queen City Jazz and Crescent City Rhapsody, but the conclusion to her Nanotech Cycle just left me cold.
The biggest reason for this is that a problem I'd noticed in Mississippi Blues came back in this book in full force, and worse: the tendency to have her characters go on and on and on and on at each other talking about things that should have been shown to us in the action of the plot. In this book, it was compounded by her characters engaging in full-throttle pseudoscientific pontification, so it wasn't even interesting dialogue. Two of the characters I liked from Crescent City Rhapsody were especially guilty of this, under the excuse that they'd spent several decades in the now-domed city of Los Angeles, whose inhabitants have all been transformed into... well, the series never quite comes out and says what, exactly. But one is led to believe that their consciousnesses are all uploaded into some sort of artificial system, and that it is possible for any given consciousness to create physical copies of themselves.
Which is what happened to Zeb and Ra out of Crescent City Rhapsody. Apparently they lost something along the way, because they were pale imitations of themselves in the previous story and seemed to serve no real purpose in this plot except to pontificate at each other as to what they thought was going on. VERY ANNOYING.
For the rest, none of the other characters, whether ones that we'd seen before or ones who were new to this story, really did much for me either. There were interesting concepts of characterization there, but none of them ever really seemed to go anywhere. For that matter, neither did the plot. I get that one of the big points of the book was humanity evolving into a new stage of existence, but there was never any real sense of why the heck this was happening. The big mystery of the series, what the Signal is and why it's been bombarding Earth, is never answered. Instead, we're left with the core characters being on the brink of launching into space to go find the Signal's origin, which, I might add, we don't ever get to see. We're just left with this spreading phenomenon of people turning into... beings of light.
How very Trek. And not what I was hoping for with this book. Sigh.
Elizabeth Peters' The Camelot Caper was, as I mentioned above, a re-read. It's not one of my favorites of hers, though it does have three distinctions that make it stand out in my mind. One, it features the only appearance of John Tregarth outside the Vicky Bliss novels, which pulls it into the same continuity as that series as well as the Amelia Peabodies. (I have a theory that all of the Elizabeth Peters books might be in the same continuity, but I don't know for sure.) Two, it's almost farcical in tone, which is unusual for Peters' work. Three, it's one of the examples of her habit of making her heroes or heroines not necessarily cookie-cutter beautiful; in fact, in this book she makes a recurring point of mentioning the size of the hero's nose.
Which brings me to why I had to re-read this book immediately after seeing the new King Kong: after I saw the movie, I thought, "Holy crap. Adrien Brody. HE is the hero of that novel!" ;) Re-reading it with that particular casting choice in mind was very entertaining indeed.
Still, there are a few reasons why this doesn't really score high on my radar of favorite Elizabeth Peters books.
Her earlier works, at least those which are supposed to be set in the "current day", have a problem with being dated. Most of the time this doesn't bother me, because her engaging characters and plots help make up for it, and I just flip the mental switch from "set in current-day but badly dated" to "period piece". But in this particular book there are bits and pieces of this that aren't quite smoothly written, just enough to jar. I mean, the heroine actually used the words "cool, man" in dialogue, for example. Even allowing for the time frame in which the book was written, I had a hard time believing anybody could say that without irony. ;)
Also, this particular edition of the book was really badly copyedited. I caught several typos, and more than one occurrence of a place where a properly spelled but clearly wrong word was used instead of the right word. For example, a use of "King Author" when what was clearly meant was "King Arthur". Oops. So that kept throwing me out of the story.
All in all it's a pretty forgettable read; I'd forgotten pretty much the entire plot, and all I had retained about it was that the hero had a big nose and that John from the Vicky Bliss novels was in it. It's not a bad story per se, just pretty forgettable. Elizabeth Peters has done better, both under this name and as Barbara Michaels. And while you do see several familiar traits of John's in this book, he's a lot more entertaining over in the Vicky Bliss stories.
Matthew Costello's The Island of the Skull is billed as the "official prequel" to the storyline of the new Kong movie, so because I really liked that version of the story, I went ahead and picked this book up.
It follows three separate plot threads involving the filmmaker Carl Denham, the young actress Ann Darrow, and the ex-Navy diver Sam Kelly, who was not in the movie (or, for that matter, the original 1933 version), but who turned out to have the most interesting stuff happen to him in this plot. From my writer perspective, I was curious as to how this book would handle following all three of these characters, just because the events of the movie require that none of them ever actually meet. By and large it did jump back and forth between the characters in a fairly coherent way, though early on I did have some quibbles with the points at which the jumps happened, as well as the lengths of various chapters. Those were minor quibbles, though.
I intended to read it back to back with the novelization of the actual movie, thinking it'd be fun to plow straight through both books and get a "one big story" experience. I wound up having to read them in reverse order, which was also kind of fun just because of seeing how events that are alluded to in the movie fall together.
There was some fun stuff with Carl Denham, his film crew guys, and the crew of the Venture. (Yay, hot captain Englehorn!) Mostly, it involves telling about how the camera guy Herb lost part of his leg, and how Denham weaselled financing for his jungle picture out of his backers, and established the friendships between Carl and Englehorn as well as Carl and Jack.
If you know the events of the movie, this book gives a kind of fun sense of doom about to smack Carl and Ann upside the head. Sometimes it's in a good way, since Jack Driscoll does appear in a few scenes and both he and Ann angst about whether they'll ever fall in love; I found myself grinning at that since I did of course know what was coming with their romance. (I was vaguely disappointed, though, that we got no sign of Ann being hooked on Jack's plays yet. Seeing her discover one of those and getting goopy over his writing would have been kind of neat, since she's established as already clearly enamored of his work at the beginning of the movie.)
The other stuff about Ann wasn't quite as coherent. We see her going down to Atlantic City for a job on the boardwalk there, doing--of all things--riding on the back of a horse diving into the ocean as part of an act to draw the crowds. There's a genuinely touching bit at the end regarding the fate of the horse, who takes well to her. And there's a mildly interesting side plot involving Ann having a brush with gangsters, but it didn't get nearly as interesting as it should have. Mostly, reading her parts of the book, I read just closely enough to mark what was going on and hastened on to the next bits involving Sam Kelly, and what happened to him on Skull Island--definitely the most interesting part of the story.
Sam and his young friend Tommy sign on to a pearl diving boat that travels into the Indian Ocean, and in the waters off Skull Island, once Tommy is killed, things go to hell. The ship is attacked by a water-going dino, and they have to land on the island to look for wood to repair breaches to the hull. Where, of course, things continue to go to hell. We never see Kong, but we do hear him roaring. And the men of Sam's ship do find out about him in passing, thanks to a native girl who also proves an interesting character--who stands out as one of the intended sacrifices to Kong, who decides "fuck this" and greases up her arms to get out of the ropes when her people tried to give her to the ape. She runs like hell into the jungle, and eventually runs into the men from Sam's ship. She and Sam barely have enough time to establish a rapport, though, before everybody except Sam is killed. Sniff!
Sam winds up becoming the creator of the map we see in Denham's possession, though, in the movie--and the castaway mentioned in passing as picked up by a Norwegian captain, who then dies a few hours after he's found. Again, sniff. But this brings the sense of impending doom back around to Denham, because we do see him getting hold of the map, and the first gleams of his obsession start taking hold as at the same time Ann makes her way back up to New York to join the vaudeville show we see her in at the beginning of the film.
The one jarring note was a couple of scenes about a German scientist coming to America, towards the very end of the book. This guy is apparently in there only to convey the idea that he's discovered a specimen from Skull Island and he's going to try to alert the U.S. government about it--but he's told that the U.S. government is not exactly in the mood to be interested, what with the Depression going on and all. So he winds up being there mostly to pose the question to the reader of whether this place of modern-day dinosaurs will in fact ever be discovered. We do of course know that it will be. But those scenes felt unnecessary, because that point got made quite clearly by the three main plotlines all coming together.
All in all, not bad for what it is, a media tie-in novel. And it was an enjoyable addendum to the movie storyline. Recommended if you're in the mood for something lightweight to rip through!
And now I come to the actual novelization of the Kong movie, as written by Christopher Golden. As with Island of the Skull, this wasn't bad for what it is, i.e., a media tie-in novel. By and large it was pretty much the same version of the story we see in the film, with some exceptions; as often happens with tie-in books, one gets a clear impression that the novel was based on an earlier version of the script. Here are the notable changes I can think of:
There's quite a bit with a Chinese member of the crew, who I'm not remembering from the film, but who seems to be a close friend of Andy Serkis' character Lumpy. He spends quite a bit of time enthusing about his fascination with Charles Atlas' "become a man in seven days" program--which, I realize as I write this, must of course be the same thing that Frank N. Furter sings about in Rocky Horror. Hee. Anyway, the poor schmoo is of course doomed to die, but he provides a bit of side character development we don't get in the film.
On Skull Island, there's no sign of Bruce Baxter actually leading a rescue party back to Jack and the others from the ship. Englehorn brings the party of his own accord. And the entire insect sequence where Jack and the others have to be rescued to begin with plays out differently in general.
There is no Monkey Slidey scene in New York. Sniff!
The details of Jack's swiping the cab in New York and hassling Kong with it are a bit different; the bit that stood out the most for me is that in the movie, you see Kong actually grab the cab and flip it around, and Jack is jostled and knocked out by the impact. In the book, he actually comes around a blind corner and crashes the cab. The book's version is less interesting, and I can see why having Kong whap the cab made it into the filming draft. Heh.
By and large it was competent writing, though nothing spectacular. It was a decent rendering of a movie script, I'd say. The description was very sparse all throughout; hardly any of the characters got even basic description done on them, for example. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing per se, as perfectly good writing can be done with description that sparse, but in my particular case I tend to like at least a bit of basic description done on people to help me imagine them.
I may at some point soon buy the recently released editions of the original version of this story, just to compare them. But in this particular instance, I'd definitely recommend the movie over the novelization, because the visuals and the acting are what really sold this story for me, and the novelization just didn't capture that same flavor. Oh well!
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-25 06:59 pm (UTC)I'm a Peters/Michaels fanatic. Good review. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-12-25 07:10 pm (UTC)Heh, actually, I meant that I was envisioning Adrien Brody as David Randall, the hero and love interest. It's the nose. ;) Sorry if I wasn't clear on that!
However, yeah, I could absolutely see him playing John too. I'm certain he has the acting chops for it, though he doesn't physically match the description of John in either The Camelot Caper or any of the Vicky Bliss books. Who I usually imagine for John is Ralph Fiennes; Ralph's a closer physical match and he's also got the acting chops to pull off John's snarky, stylish elegance.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-27 11:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-27 05:32 pm (UTC)