My newest McSweeney's column is now live, where I talk a little bit about one particular bookshelf at Barnes and Noble. Here's a little preview:

I think about this shelf a lot. Sometimes I just stand in the store and wonder who all of these women are. There must be some special contingent of them out there, some unique modeling subgroup that continually dons turn of the century clothing and stares wistfully off into the distance. I wish I could talk to one. I have so many questions.2 Surely there are not enough of these books made for the models to earn a living off of them. So what else do they do, when they are between covers? Do they also sell lace gloves, or let their hair down occasionally for a Land’s End catalog? Do they have an ongoing, bitter rivalry with the milk-skinned, red-lipped army of brunettes that leer out of the vampire romance novels two shelves over? Do the two groups have crazy brawls at modeling conventions, Anchorman-style, aiming only at legs and torsos to avoid damaging each other’s faces? Or are they, perhaps, actually the same group of women, just done up in different colors?

Read the rest at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

If you're still waiting for the sequel to The Towers, don't worry. I'm diligently working on it in between baseball games.

Book review in one tweet

A vengeful AI in a human body stalks the ruler of the galaxy and gets sort of confused about gender, life, and self. Also, she sings a lot.

Favorite quote

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

Review

I'm having trouble deciding what to talk about here, and I suspect this is mostly because the book itself has a hard time deciding what it's trying to say. (And possibly because I'm devoting approximately 90% of my brain power to getting ready for baseball season. And by "getting ready" I mean "buying beer"). It's not so much that the book is unclear, but rather that it says so many different things, it's difficult to know which thread to follow. There are at least three major themes:

Theme 1 - The social construction of gender

Breq, the main character, is an artificial intelligence stuck in a human body, and "she" has a difficult time understanding gender, mostly because the social indicators of gender--clothing, hair length, patterns of movement, demeanor, etc--change so frequently from planet to planet and culture to culture. As a result, Breq refers to everyone as "she" in her internal dialogue, even when you as a reader know that the character is male. It's a choice that will probably seem like a gimmick to some people, but eventually it ceases to matter. I stopped trying to figure out who was who fairly quickly, mostly because I was too lazy to actually reread sections hunting for clues. But also because it ended up not really making much of a difference.

Theme 2 - The multiplicity of self

As the story progresses, you find out that Breq was once a massive warship named Justice of Toren, used by an empire known as the Radch to conquer most of humanity. Her main weapon is actually not really a weapon at all, but an army of walking human corpses or "ancillaries" that are essentially extensions of Justice of Toren's consciousness. She controls all of their actions, sees everything they see, and generally kills a lot of people with them. She is them, in other words, and they are her. They make up her sense of self. This is probably the most creative thing about the book, since it allows for multiple points of view while still using the first person.

It also allows Leckie to think through the different ways that we often feel at war with ourselves, the conflicting feelings and motivations that drive our actions. This point is laid on a little thick at times, but it was still the most interesting part of the book for me.

Theme 3 - The illusion of free will

There's a constant tension in the book about whether individual actions have any meaning and, indeed, whether in a universe of such complexity and size, we are even in control of our own actions. Perhaps everything we have ever done was already determined from the moment the universe was created, our brains are no different than machines, free will is simply an illusion, etc -- all of that fun Intro to Philosophy stuff that annoys some people (like my wife) and fascinates others (like me). Breq, of course, is an artificial intelligence, programmed to obey, and thus seemingly without free will. And yet, she often seems to have more free will than of any of the humans, or at least as much as them.

There are some smaller ideas floating around the book as well, but these are the main ones. I was hoping that all of this stuff would come together by the end, but most of the threads were left hanging loose. Raising important questions is always a good idea, and Leckie does that in spades (or in hearts or clovers or diamonds, whichever suit you prefer). But all of the questions have been asked by science fiction novels before, (See also: The Left Hand of Darkness, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and I tend to prefer books that offer answers to the questions they raise, even if I end up disagreeing with that answer.

Instead, we get a sort of science fiction equivalent of a Chili's appetizer platter. Not something you're going to rave to your friends about when you leave, but still pretty freaking delicious.

Nerd rating

7 wizard staffs (out of 10)

I feel like I've said a lot of negative things, here, but the book is engaging and suspenseful, and there are plenty of fun creatures and fantastic landscapes. If you're looking for something solidly sci-fi, this is an excellent choice, and a pretty fast read once you're through the first couple chapters.

Non-nerd rating

3 cold, frosty beers (out of 10)

The world Leckie creates is complicated, and there is a lot of information thrown at you that doesn't always get explained until fifty pages later, or sometimes not at all. There's a decent amount of fighting and a hint of a love story, but the gender terminology make that love story difficult to follow or understand. I'd recommend staying away from this one if you are new to the genre.

All book reviews are posted first on my Goodreads page, for those of you who are a part of that particular electronic social club. They all trickle over to this blog eventually.

Book review in one tweet

A short introduction into monks, their lives, and most importantly, their love of God.

Favorite quote

Law is love which binds and obliges…These words embrace not only the letter but also the spirit, and indicate that St. Stephen realized the rule was not merely an external standard to which one's actions had to conform, but a life which, if it was lived, would transform the monk from within.

Review

About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go with him on a monastic retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani, the long time home of Thomas Merton. The retreat was fairly unstructured: a couple of talks by the guestmaster, three simple meals, prayer services seven times a day (starting at 3:00 AM), all of which were entirely optional. The monks charged nothing, and simply allowed us to pay whatever it was we felt like we should. There was really only one thing required, one rule that you had to follow.

And that was silence.

The silence was what made the Abbey so different, the experience so unique. For three days, the only time you opened your mouth was in prayer. It was one of the best experiences of my spiritual life, and it was that memory of silence that attracted me to The Silent Life, a book about monastic ideals and practices from the man who once lived and wrote at Gethsemani.

And I was largely pleased with what I read. Merton is often not the best stylist. His prose tends to be more practical than poetic, and he is more concerned with explaining than convincing. This is not a work of apologetics, not a book that will attempt to convince you to join a holy order, or even become a Christian if you are not one already. Rather, it is a fairly succinct and basic primer on what the monastic life is, how that life is lived within different orders, and the philosophy that informs all of them.

Bored yet?

Some readers likely will be. Actually, who am I kidding, most readers likely will be. But if you stick with the book long enough, you'll find that every once in a while Merton will write something that will blow you away with its depth of thought. There were a number of pages that I read over and over again, not because they were unclear, but because there was so much of importance that was being said, so many implications for my own life that sprang from his thinking, that I wanted to make sure I noticed and understood all of them.

The life of a monk is and always has been antithetical to the rest of the world. Which is a fancy way of saying that monks are weird. They sing weird music, they wear weird clothes, they live in weird places. They live alone, and yet their guest house is always full. And most of all, they are silent. They say what needs to be said, and as little else as possible.

The Silent Life embodies those values as well as explaining them. It says what it needs to say, it says it plainly, and then it shuts up, and gets out of the way between you and God.

Nerd rating

6 wizard staffs (out of 10)

This is a book for religious nerds, people who are fascinated with deep spiritual thinking of all types, and people who have ever wondered what being a monk is actually about. It's not Merton's best work, but it's fairly short, and worth grabbing if you're lucky enough to have a copy at your library.

Non-nerd rating

5 cold, frosty beers (out of 10)

Normally I'd probably rate this as three or four beers, but I think there's enough here that applies to everyone to keep non-nerds interested. The spiritual thinking of the monks is pretty insightful, and easy enough for anyone to understand. Just don't worry about which particular church father said what, or which order of what monks was known for praise and which for writing, and you'll enjoy it just fine.

All book reviews are posted first on my Goodreads page, for those of you who are a part of that particular electronic social club. They all trickle over to this blog eventually.

New Short Story Collection

My newest ebook, The Life and Times of Butterfly the Lower Back Tattoo, is now live and available in the Amazon Kindle store and on Smashwords.com for $0.99. It's basically a "best-of" collection from the last year of web stories, along with two additional stories you'll only be able to get in the ebook.

The collection includes:

• The Life and Times of Butterfly the Lower Back Tattoo
• The Knights of the Four Seasons Fitness Club
• The Way of the Sub
• PIXAR's Seven Step Plan for World Domination
• A Brief History of the Axe Body Spray Crisis
• The Unicorns in Sneakers (new story)
• Stormtrooper Worker's Compensation Claim (new story)

And fifteen other stories. The ebook will eventually be available in the Nook store and on Apple iBooks, if you'd prefer getting it from there.

Newsletter

With the help of an army of robot slaves, you can now sign up to receive my newsletter, which I'll probably send out two to three times a year (basically whenever I release a book, or whenever I'm feeling lonely). If you sign up within the next week (2/28 - 3/7) I'll send you a Smashwords coupon for a free version of The Life and Times of Butterfly the Lower Back Tattoo saving you a whopping $0.99.

If you reading this, you should stop and go to my Butterfly page to read The Life and Times of Butterfly the Lower Back Tattoo. And let me know what you think of it. I like hearing from people.

As some of you know, I write an occasional column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Speaking for all Christians Exactly Like Me." The column came about as a result of McSweeney's annual contest, which awards ten or so people with an opportunity to write for the site for a year. Today, I'm continuing an ongoing series of interviews with the other nine winners (or as many of them as I can track down and get to return my emails).

Today’s guest is KA Semenova, author of the McSweeney's column "Classic Russian Writers: For teh Internets." You'll probably figure this out on your own, but my questions and responses are in italics.

JJ: So, I want to start with asking you a little bit about your column and the theory that lurks behind it. You say in your bio that you want to test the “theory that human nature is neither analog or digital,” so you “update classics of Russian literature with modern technologies to see if the insights of those writers hold up today.” Can you expand on what you mean when you say you "update" a story for teh internets? Beyond the different technology, is there a sense in which you're trying to "update" the themes of the story too? Or is that one the points you're trying to make, that there are certain meanings that endure in spite of technological change?

KA: Yes, to your last sentence. I’m not trying to update the theme of the story at all. My entire point is that updating the technology does not change the meaning of the story, in any fundamental way. Why would it?

My sort of ongoing thesis—or my hobby horse, if you know me—is that human beings are more alike than they are different. I think that is true across cultures as well as across time. Which means, in this context, that human beings are human beings, whether they are using a teletype machine or texting. And that’s what this little experiment is all about.

If I can trace the origin of the McSweeney’s column to one thing, I’d say it’s this: I belong to some writers’ groups on Facebook, and once this guy, let’s call him Bob, asked for recommendations for novels that dealt with infidelity, to see how other writers had handled it. And I suggested that Bob read Anna Karenina, because Tolstoy had covered that particular ground, and had done it brilliantly.

And Bob said back to me, “Why would I read something that old? The world is so different now, how could I possibly find that useful?”

And I think that is just about the dumbest thing anyone has ever said. And I find it particularly distressing that it comes from someone who calls himself a writer. He epitomizes for me a kind of narcissism, a solipsism out there—that you see often on the Internet—that “our world” is fundamentally different than the world that came before.

I just don’t think that’s true, and my McSweeney’s project is about playing with that idea, doing case studies, as it were. What happens when you put a Chekhov character on Twitter? Is he still the same person? My revision of “Lady with a Dog” suggests that Gurov and @Gurov are exactly the same guy.

JJ: So, breaking in here, with this in mind, what do you think about science fiction? Because some science fiction writers would say that the advancing technology portrayed in their stories does alter their characters in fundamental ways. Actually, this is a pretty common definition of science fiction, a story in which the science is so important that it cannot be removed or changed without fundamentally altering the story. It's really hard to take something like Neuromancer, replace the technology, and still understand who Case is as a character. Though it's really easy with something like Star Wars, which is a fantasy story pretending to be science fiction.

I guess I'm wondering if we could reverse the process you do, like take a science fiction story, replace the technology with something more primitive, and see if the story still made sense. Maybe it depends on the technology; perhaps the Internet doesn't fundamentally change things in the way that, say, true artificial intelligence would.

KA: Interesting question. But I’m not sure I have a great response because I don’t read science fiction. It just doesn't interest me because, in my mind, I already know the answer to the question, and the answer is that the technology is largely irrelevant. Science fiction, however you slice it up, is about human relationships. Those books are genre—they’re quests, or romance novels, or war novels, or what-have-you—dressed up in a different world.

And I can sort of understand, theoretically, that it would be interesting to play with the laws of physics, etc., but personally, it doesn't draw me in. So I can’t respond here with any good examples because I haven’t read anything resembling sci-fi since I read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in like 8th grade.

But I will give you this to think about: Historically, UFOs anticipate the next development in technology. Meaning, if you go back to 18th century Europe, the UFO reports are big steel ships in the sky. In the 19th century, reports are about plane-shaped objects. In the last century, they became flying saucers. So it seems to be a fundamental part of human nature to see UFOs, but their descriptions change over time; so clearly there is a relationship to technology as it evolves. Humans apparently always anticipate (and fear) what technology will bring next.

And I think that might bring us to Jonathan Franzen, yes? I mentioned him in my McSweeney’s bio as one of the catalysts for my project.

About a month before I wrote the first column, Franzen published a screed about the Internet and technology and culture more generally. The article really amounted to a big fat nothing. He constructed a straw man (he clearly doesn't understand Internet culture at all), then utterly failed to destroy it anyway. And I think that’s too bad. There was a moment that I really liked Franzen, in the 90s, when I read The Corrections, and when he refused the Oprah’s book club imprimatur, which I thought was interesting. I sort of got him about that, and thought he had something useful to say there.

And ever since (I realized when I saw his last piece), I've been waiting for him to say something interesting, do something usefully provocative, but he’s not delivering. Somebody said, about this last piece, that he’d become an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn. Exactly.

So I referred to him in my bio because, like him, there are certain things about the Internet that bug me. I have questions about the way technology might be changing us. But I’m more interested in nuanced discussion, in asking questions, which Franzen isn't doing. He’s rather offering up opinion in the form of verbs, like saying Rushdie “succumbed” to Twitter, as if it were a disease. That doesn't get us anywhere.

To me, Franzen is doing what Bob did, just in the opposite direction. Franzen likewise is positing fundamentally different pre- and post-Internet worlds, though in his case, he idealized the before, whereas Bob idealizes the now.

JJ: Do you think some familiarity with the original Russian stories (in translation or otherwise) you update is necessary to really appreciate what you're doing?

KA: Maybe. At least in the form they’re offered on McSweeney’s. John Warner and I have discussed this issue. In my original submission, the editing I did to the story was shown. The reader could see the red-lines and the replacements, so he or she could see very clearly that I only had to change a few words to bring Chekhov up to date in terms of technology and setting. But McSweeney’s had some technical problems displaying that, and John was also concerned that it interfered with the enjoyment of just reading the piece, which was also a concern of mine.

So we agreed to post them with all changes accepted, as it were. And that I would post the red-lined versions on my own website, so that anyone who is really interested can go look at the editing, to see what exactly I did.

But to respond to what I think is a kind of implicit question in your question—eg, does anybody besides you get what the hell you’re doing?—I don’t know. I know John does, obviously. Because we’ve talked about it. I do hear where I think you’re coming from, though, that there is inherently a somewhat limited audience for these pieces. But that’s really okay with me, because that is the great thing about the Internet, that you can find limited audiences, fellow Russian literature geeks like yourself. And there are a lot more of them out there than you’d think.

In any case, this is what I've always liked about McSweeney’s, that it is often like hanging out with a bunch of grad students, at a bar, after class. It can be a kind of para-academic, funny place. And I think—and I hope I don’t offend anyone, but—for much of McSweeney’s stuff, it’s not really about reading every word of every column. It’s about seeing the title, and reading a piece, and getting what the writer is doing, and considering that idea. And usually laughing. Part of the fun is whether you get the joke of it at all.

I’m totally a person who believes in tribes, and I know mine. So when John said to me, when I submitted a piece, “Amazing. I’d never heard of Karamzin. This is fascinating,” I knew that a tribe member had gotten what I was doing. And I felt like I’d just won the Internet, so it’s all good to me.

JJ: Grad students at a bar—that sounds about right. I remember when the column contest was in its judging phase, John tweeted something about how around 25% of the entries had PhDs and about 50% had advanced degrees of one kind or another.

KA: That sounded exactly right to me too. I was in a history PhD program at Georgetown (left early), and one night a group of us sat around after class at the Tombs, a bar, constructing the funny hat theory of history. We almost killed ourselves laughing as we developed an outline. Even assigned chapters to each other. I was supposed to write on the pickelhaube. (picture right) Which of course I never did. Maybe I should reanimate the theory, and submit it to McSweeney’s next year.

Anyway, it’s kind of enough for me if someone notices that I put Gurov on Twitter, and then they think about that notion for a second, making of it what they will. My goal really is to raise questions, not answer them. Because, to return to Franzen, deciding the Internet is “bad,” just gets you nowhere: it gives you no answers, it gives you no questions. And to decide, like Bob, that writers before 2000 have nothing interesting to say is even worse. Both are intellectual dead ends.

JJ: How'd you get started writing? For a general audience, that is.

KA: I’m not sure I have yet, exactly. I’ve worked around publishing for about thirty years now, which is working with writing, but behind the scenes. Most of my writing for a long time was academic (I have an MA in Russian history) or things I did for myself, like journaling. I only started writing seriously, aiming for publication, about five years ago. (I have two novels in progress and two memoir-type things, too. I like to skip around!) And I didn’t really expect McSweeney’s to take my column, which meant I wasn’t quite prepared to go public yet. (Which is why I had to delay publishing this Q&A, because my web site wasn’t ready yet!) I always thought I’d go “public” later, with one of the long-form pieces.

JJ: Can you give us a little teaser on what these books are about?

The memoirs are about my Russian family, who lived the 20th century the way most Russians did—war, famine, emigration, etc. I’ve been engaged on a genealogical/historical research project involving them for twenty-some years now, so those books are about that. What I’m working on right now, though, is crime fiction, set in northern Ohio. Sophie, a PhD candidate in history who has been away for a decade, comes home to hole up in her grandmother’s cottage on Lake Erie to write her dissertation. When a priest at a nearby Russian Orthodox Church is murdered, Marty, her old high school boyfriend, who is now a sheriff’s deputy, asks for her help. Then another priest is murdered…

JJ: Is that the kind of thing you like to read too? What do you think is the best thing you’ve read recently?

KA: Hmmm. Without a doubt, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with it—it’s an 800 page novel—and had the most fun I’ve had in years with a book. Couldn’t put it down. And just before that, I read Death of a Nightingale, Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis’s third novel. More generally, for the last few years, that’s the kind of thing I’ve been reading: Scandinavian fiction, mostly the crime fiction, though not exclusively. (And this started for me long before Dragon Tattoo went big. I’d read all of Henning Mankell by the time Larsson broke out.)

There is something deeply interesting about what is going on with crime fiction in northern Europe, not only in the Scandinavian countries, but also people like Tana French in the UK. Right now, I’m reading a book by a Swede, Johann Theorin. I had to order two of his books from the UK—they’re not available in the States yet—because I just love his sense of place.

JJ: So you are a Scandinavian crime fiction hipster?

KA: Yes! I’m not ashamed to say it! I have a whole big theory about it, to tell you the truth. I think the Scandinavians are up to something very interesting. They are perhaps alone in genuinely taking on the way neoliberalism (and the fall of the Berlin Wall) has shaped our world over the last couple of decades. They are the people who are really grappling with this, in fiction, in my opinion.

Many people like to say that the crime novel originated in the UK (with Sherlock Holmes) but I think that’s just wrong. (Of course, it’s usually Brits who say this.) Some people point to Poe, in the States, working a few decades earlier, but again, I just don’t buy that. Poe wasn’t quite doing crime fiction, and I don’t think American crime fiction has ever been especially interesting, then or now, in terms of its ambitions. It tends to be genre, and while many of the Scandinavians are doing genre stuff, a lot of them are much more ambitious.

I think that crime fiction, of a certain kind, anyway, originated with Dostoevsky, and that some of the Scandinavians are up to the same thing he was doing, which is using crime fiction to comment on social reality. I’m so interested in this, in fact, that I want to do a blog on it. I’ve registered a domain, and I’ve got some posts ready, but OMG, so not enough time in the day…

JJ: That’s a type of fiction that I don’t think I will ever really appreciate, mostly because I can’t handle the creepiness of it, especially the books about serial killers. I’m much less afraid of supernatural monsters: demons, witches, vampires, whatever, which I think is mostly because I assume that those creatures all have rules that govern their behavior. Serial killers are a complete mystery to me; their motivations and actions make no sense. It’s similar in some ways to how I’m afraid of bees and wasps but not snakes or rats or birds. I know what a bird is going to do, but I can’t ever figure out what a bee is going to do.

KA: Wow. We’re so different. I don’t like reading something when I know what’s going to happen, for exactly the reasons you cite. If it’s a zombie, I know he’s going to walk around stiff-legged and try to eat brains. If it’s genre mystery, then the detective is going to get the bad guy in the end. Where’s the fun in that?

I like books in which the end cannot be predicted; or if it can be (like the Wallander books; which are conventional police procedurals in that sense), then there must be something else at stake. In that instance, it’s Wallander’s health and relationships; but also more broadly, the health and relationships of Sweden, as he’s taking on political changes in the world and how that’s affecting the country.

JJ: So if zombies or vampires or demons don't scare you, what does scare you? Anything?

KA: Bad dreams. I had one recently. I woke up at 4:25 am, with my heart pounding, and I didn’t know where I was. I looked around my room, and it took me a long time—like a minute, no joke—to be sure I was home, in my bedroom. Because I’m not usually up at that time, of course, so the light was kind of odd and things looked different, somehow.

And in my dream, someone who I have seen exactly once since 1983 had just gotten hit by a bunch of falling metal boxes. (I have no idea where they came from.) He was leading me out a door, then the boxes fell, then he was lying on the ground, with a bloody face, and I was frozen, trying to call 911. Which is the moment I woke up.

I don’t have bad dreams like this very often, like maybe once every five years or so. But when I do, they’re really awful. I don’t tend to be prophetic on this score, thank God. I have no idea what triggers them. Wish I knew. I’d stop doing whatever it is.

JJ: I have attempted to hurt my wife three times in my sleep, twice I tried to choke her, once I punched her really hard. All three times I was having a dream where I was protecting her from some kind of attacker. So I have this fear of doing really serious harm to her in my sleep, which is sort of related to a larger, general fear of hurting the people I love, which probably has something to do with my fear of my own brain, and how weird it can get sometimes in there.

KA: Wow. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. I get how freaky that would be. Though you’ve oddly made me feel better, I must say. At least I don’t have to worry about hitting someone.

JJ: Glad I could help. Let's end on a hypothetical. Suppose that somebody you loved was going to enter the McSweeney's column contest next year. What advice would you give them?

KA: I would say to them, “If you do it, what’s the worst that can happen?” And if the only answer they can come up with is “They’ll say ‘no,” then I’d say, “As worsts go, that’s not much.”

Because that’s how I got myself to do it. In fact, I adopted “What’s the worst that can happen?” as my mantra, the question to ask myself when I’m unsure about whether I should do something, take a chance. Over the last year or so, it’s got me a McSweeney’s column, a distressed turquoise chalk-painted bookshelf, and a new kitten. And I’ll be teaching a workshop in Puerto Rico in August. So I’d have to say this mantra is really working for me, so far.

You can read all of "Classic Russian Writers: For teh Internets" at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. I'd suggest Vsevolod M. Garshin's "The Signal." That one is a killer.

Book review in one tweet

Poisonous cave lizards, giant birds, and spiders that will eat your brain. Also, monks. The monks are the most dangerous.

Favorite quote

For a while he watched a thin white cloud, light as air and impossibly far away. When it scudded beyond the range of his vision, he looked instead into the wide gray blank of the sky. The empty sky, he thought idly to himself. A heaven of nothingness. Without that space, the clouds could not sail past. Without it, the stars could not turn in their orbits. Without that great emptiness, the trees would wither, the light dim… Kaden stared into the sky until he felt he might fall upward, plummeting away from the earth into the bottomless gray, dwindling to a thin a point, then to nothing.

Review

Epic fantasy, more than any other genre, is often built on conflict between extremes: light and dark, order and chaos, Cardinals and Cubs, etc. Authors create characters to embody these principles in their actions and attitudes, and set them against each other in order to say something about our values and choices, the light and dark within ourselves. And, very often, these characters are given powers (magic, martial, or whatever) that reflect in some way how well they embody a particular value. So the most powerful evil character is also usually the most evil in general. The most powerful good character is usually the most good in general. Think Gandalf and Sauron, and you'll get the idea.

Now this sort of story principle is one of the things that makes epic fantasy unique, and it's also the sort of thing that authors will play with in different ways. The Emperor's Blades contains this same classic sort of conflict, but instead of the typical sorts of moral conflicts, Staveley gives us a conflict between... Well I'm not sure what to call it. Emotion and aloofness, I suppose. Feeling and void. He makes up his own word for the void: vaniate, a sort of detached, passionlees state that banishes all fear and love, all anger and worry, all sadness and joy. Kaden, the heir to the throne, is in pursuit of this blank ideal for much of the book, while his brother Valyn embodies the opposite end of the spectrum, often emotional to a fault, both in love and hate, anger and kindness. Each learns to harness the power of these respective extremes, making themselves into quite powerful, if quite different creatures. And it's the combination of their two approaches that dominates the climax, with each needing the other in order to survive.

Yet ultimately, neither of these approaches is really embraced by the end of the book. Both, actually, are shown to be rather horrible in their own way. And this is where the third sibling, their sister Adare, will likely become important in books to come, as a character in which to reconcile these competing principles. Really, my only small criticism of the book was with the handling of her character, since there were a few long sections when Adare seemed to disappear. Her face-off with the religious establishment of the capital city seemed far less important than the brothers' respective conflicts, and was accomplished in much less actual page time. But I have a weird feeling that she's actually the most important character in the series.

Staveley has written extensively about the writing of epic fantasy; his blog, not coincidentally, is called On the Writing of Epic Fantasy. It was actually in these fairly detailed essays that I first encountered Staveley, and had a few discussions with him on Google+. (Yes, I know that is surprising, but people actually do use Google+) You can see the fruit of all that thinking in The Emperor's Blades. Staveley knows all the notes, knows when to improvise, and when to just let the music flow. I look forward to his next one.

Nerd rating

8 wizard staffs (out of 10)

A few small complaints aside, this is an excellent start. And with the second book of the series already finished and ready to come out in 2015, there won't be a lot of time to wait for the next chapter. Get it from your library. And make sure you start it during a week where you don't have a lot to do. There will probably be a couple late nights.

Non-nerd rating

5 cold, frosty beers (out of 10)

Not a bad novel for beginning readers of epic fantasy. The character list is fairly short, so you won't get overwhelmed with a few hundred names of royal family members and their third cousin's illegitimate children (I'm looking at you Double-R Martin). The book is still very solidly in the fantasy genre, however, with plenty of weird names, weird maps, and sword fights. If you're a fan of black ops or spy movies, you'll probably enjoy it.

These reviews and more can be found (and are posted first) on my Goodreads page, for those of you who are a part of that particular electronic social club. All of them will make their way to this blog eventually.

Book review in one tweet

Everyone is a con artist, unless you are a giant stone golem. Then you are an emotionless work machine. #ManyPunsIncluded

Favorite quote

Just below the dome, staring down from their niches, were statues of the Virtues: Patience, Chastity, Silence, Charity, Hope, Tubso, Bissonomy, and Fortitude. (Many cultures practice neither of these in the hustle and bustle of the modern world, because no one can remember what they are.)

Review

I've spent the better part of a year submitting stories to short-fiction magazines, most of them of the sci-fi-fantasy variety. Every single one of these magazines has a fairly specific set of guidelines for the formatting of submissions and the kinds of stories they are looking for. Here's a typical example (adapted from Clarkesworld Magazine, probably the best free fiction site online, except maybe Tor.com, magazines which have rejected me... I mean… have rejected my stories a total of seven times between them.)

Though no particular setting, theme, or plot is anathema to us, the following are likely hard sells:

• stories in which a milquetoast civilian government is depicted as the sole obstacle to either catching some depraved criminal or to an uncomplicated military victory
• stories in which the words "thou" or "thine" appear
• sexy vampires, wanton werewolves, or lusty pirates
• "funny" stories that depend on, or even include, puns

I am pretty confident that Terry Pratchett is the reason for that last one, just like I'm pretty confident that the editor of this list used the word "milquetoast" to confuse people. (It means timid). Pratchett is an insanely successful author, and his books are really fun and easy reads, and yes, full of puns. I suspect that legions of Pratchett fans have been flooding the editorial inboxes of magazine editors everywhere since he hit the height of his popularity in the early-to-mid 90s.

But writing humor is hard work, especially in the fantasy realm. This is mostly because fantasy is already so ridiculous that it has to take itself incredibly seriously to get the reader to buy in. So a fantasy story that doesn't take itself seriously will often smash itself to pieces pretty quickly.

So I was a little nervous picking up Going Postal, this being my first introduction to Pratchett and his Discworld series. But from the very first couple Prologs (there's two), I felt confident that I was in good hands. Pratchett has a gift for writing humor that makes you laugh and advances the storyline at the same time, like Shakespeare, only not as long-winded or as good. He has a real gift for crafting horrible character names, Moist von Lipwig being the worst, and the name of the main character. This is a good rule of thumb for all humor writing, I think: any time you can give one of your characters an adjective for a name, you should do it.

The story follows Moist as he goes from a convicted con man to the head of the Ankh-Morpork city post office. I won't give away any more of the plot, except to say that there's a pretty funny scene between a nineteen-thousand-year-old golem and Death.

Thematically, Pratchett spreads the humor around, taking shots at the usual comedic targets: religion, government, big business, and even academia, although the academics he makes fun of are mostly wizards. This is fair, I suppose, although it also leaves me a little underwhelmed at the end. I know this is pre-modern, but I like stories that have a point beyond "Everybody is a fool." I could probably find a point like that in Going Postal if I really tried hard, but I don't think I should have to try hard. I'm out of school.

Nerd rating

7 wizard staffs (out of 10)

If you want a new series to get into, Pratchett currently has 40 Discworld books out, most of which can be read independently of each other. I liked this one enough that I'll probably check out a few more, and that's about the best recommendation you can give for a series.

Non-nerd rating

9 cold, frosty beers (out of 10)

This is just about the easiest fantasy you'll ever read, with the exception of Harry Potter. It's ideal for airplanes, beaches, bus stations, and other places that normal people read books. Give it a shot, unless you are like my wife, and you have an intense hatred for the word "moist."

These reviews and more can be found on my Goodreads page, for those of you who are a part of that particular electronic social club.

As some of you know, I write an occasional column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Speaking for all Christians Exactly Like Me." The column came about as a result of McSweeney's annual contest, which awards ten or so people with an opportunity to write for the site for a year. Today, I'm continuing an ongoing series of interviews with the other nine winners (or as many of them as I can track down and get to return my emails).

Today’s guest is Ali Fitzgerald, author of the McSweeney's column/webcomic "Hungover Bear and Friends." You'll probably figure this out on your own, but my questions and responses are in italics.

JJ: Let's start with the most important question: Why is Hungover Bear always hungover? And what does he like to drink?

AF: Well, I don’t necessarily think he’s always hungover. I think he could just as easily be named “Melancholy Bear.” But his drinking definitely contributes to his malaise, and a hungover bear is way funnier. I want to explore the funny/strange side of drinking related depression with him. I imagine him as a kind of introspective, infinitely lovable Lost in Translation character.

I’ve thought about what he would drink quite a bit. And I think it would be Chianti, whiskey, and good IPAs. Coincidentally, that is what I drink.

JJ: So do you identify with Hungover Bear over the others, or do you think there are elements of your personality in all of the characters?

I’ve thought about that question a lot too. I kind of based Hungover Bear on myself, or more accurately, a personification (bearification?) of the way I feel sometimes. The others are mixtures of specific people/behaviors I’ve encountered along the way.

But sometimes I’ll do something and think to myself, “Oh man, maybe I am Self-Righteous Hawk.” But I console myself with the fact that I think we’re all Self-Righteous Hawk sometimes.

JJ: Do you think of your column primarily as humor or as social commentary? It's definitely got elements of both, and the best humor always has some sort of commentary within it. I'm mostly wondering how you see it, or what you intend for it.

AF: That’s a good question. Both? It’s interesting how much you can get away with using animals as proxies. Since I started the column, I feel like I should reread Animal Farm for that kind of allegorical humor. Actually, Patricia Highsmith has a bunch of great short stories from the animal’s point of view. There’s one about a one-eyed rat in Venice, where the rat isn’t anthropomorphized at all, but we still get a sense of its psychology. I’m really excited to plumb the social commentary depths with these characters, because I feel like it’s rich terrain.

Generally speaking though, it’s important that the comic be funny. It really pleases me to think that people will become attached to the characters and chuckle along with them.

JJ: Who do you think of as your audience?

AF: You know, I’m not sure. In my early twenties I tried to get a comic nationally syndicated and the response was that it was “too dark.” I was surprised because the comic was called Patent Sweater, and it was culled from my sweetest, sincerest self. After that I went to grad school and embraced more abstract, perhaps less mainstream leanings, which is to say that people who like my comics are probably not the same as Family Circus readers. But you never know - I actually had a conversation a few days ago about how subversive the structure of Family Circus really was. Surprisingly experimental with all those misleading footsteps and time-lapses.

JJ: How carefully do you pick the titles for your columns? And are the two panels that you include in each column meant to be read independently of one another, or do you put them together for specific reasons?

AF: For titles, I have a list of Al-Anon slogans that I choose from and alter to suit my whims or the comics. A few weeks ago I used "Face It," because Hungover Bear was wearing a giant Werner Herzog head.

Deciding which comics go together is a fairly visual decision. They have to look “right” to me. But they are meant to be read separately as little narrative snapshots.

JJ: Ok let's get to a big question now. Why do you illustrate comics?

AF: That is a big one! I’ve rewritten this answer several times with the same degree of non-specificity. But here’s one: I’ve made and read comics for most of my life, and I think there is still so much to be explored with visual storytelling.

Right now we have this briskly changing cultural landscape, what with the internets and all, and ways of reading and composing narratives are being redefined. I admire people who push the graphic medium, like Joe Sacco, who just made a graphic novel detailing one battle in WWI without any text. It folds out to form a 24-foot-long drawing, which is incredible and shows what comics can do.

JJ: That sounds pretty awesome. Read or seen anything else lately that you really liked?

AF: I just finished the collected short stories of Patricia Highsmith, who I think is the tops. Her writing is so clear and fully-formed, and her stories are these brisk, bizarre little psychological tales. I also saw the documentary Blackfish recently which I watched twice because it was so compelling and harrowing. As for visuals, I saw a Peter Saul show here in Berlin some months ago that was totally inspiring.

JJ: Let me pause here briefly to thank you for describing something as "the tops." Also, anything on the web (in terms of visual storytelling or art) that you admire? Also-also, what sort of direction do you think we're moving in, as far as visual storytelling goes?

I’m not really up to date on webcomics really, but I was reading that wildly popular one by Allie Brosh the other day [Hyperbole and a Half], and I feel like she uses pictures to create this incredible buildup of pathos/humor. She combines text and drawings in this really endearing, highly readable way.

The New Yorker has a “Sketchpad” section now where artists relive an event, like a Pixies concert for example, in comic form. That’s kind of where I think we’re going. Not necessarily to this comics journalism-only place, but to a place where comics regularly cover a range of things, including “mature” and “highbrow” stuff like depression and Pixies concerts.

JJ: How'd you get started illustrating?

AF: I only started illustrating as a career(ish) when I moved to Berlin a few years ago. Before that I was making large-scale art installations and more invested in the gallery circuit. Then I got to Berlin, disillusioned with my life/art/America, and so I partied and half-heartedly tried to work in the same way. Eventually I began writing/illustrating stories about my expat adventures, which felt better and more honest at that time. Plus I could do them sitting in front of a heat lamp in my apartment, which is what I needed during the first few Berlin Winters.

A lot of those comics seem pretty self-involved to me now, partly because I was learning the craft and how to make stories accessible. Now I feel like I have a certain faculty with it that makes it more fun and less labored. Although it’s always a struggle somehow, I think, to make things relevant.

JJ: Ok, so here's the part where I read your McSweeney's bio and ask you things about it. First question: How's the view from the top of the Berlin wall?

AF: My street really does straddle the shadow of the Wall. When I leave my house I stumble over these little brick markers and then suddenly I’m in the East, where a Siemens factory has replaced the former death strip.

My friend Hilda wrote this blog post about my street which used to have an escape tunnel underneath it. Having said that, my apartment actually faces the backyard, where I smell wafting Turkish cooking and watch my neighbors’ kids run around.

I have a bunch of teaching jobs here in Berlin, and will literally teach anything if someone pays me to. Otherwise, I have a studio practice where I paint/draw and occasionally contribute arts writing. Lately I’ve been doing a monthly comic for Modern Painters Magazine about contemporary art, and some other “Berlinterviews,” a word I stole from my friend Sabrina. In my free time I go to the sauna and take walks around the Soviet Memorial, or I indiscriminately watch good/bad TV with my girlfriend.

JJ: I noticed from your bio that you watch a lot of Golden Girls, which I can only assume makes you an excellent person. Is the show still funny in German? My guess is that you'd lose a lot of Blanche's classic flirtatious style. Also, what's your favorite episode?

AF: Actually, my Belgian friend tells me that the Golden Girls is one of the rare shows that’s actually funnier in German. My German isn’t good enough for me to say that definitively. Blanche still carries it off though. I can’t pick a favorite episode, but I found this good top ten list.

JJ: Finally, let's say that somebody you loved was going to enter the McSweeney's column contest next year. What advice would you give them?

AF: Hmmmm…I mean, I think they should make themselves familiar with McSweeney’s. It was always one of my favorite sites/publications and I made Hungover Bear and Friends partially with them in mind, which I think helped it fit in.

You can follow Ali on Twitter at @AliFitzterrible, and you can see more of her work on her website AliFitzgerald.net.

Book review in one tweet

If you read *Infinite Jest* and you loved all the endnotes about math, then this is the book for you. #ManyParadoxesAlsoIncluded

Favorite quote

"If this still fails to make the basic idea clear, you're asked to please just eat it (the idea) because this is the best we can do." - p. 271

Review

Everything and More traces the development of the mathematical concept of infinity, from the somewhat incomprehensible work of really smart Greek guys to the slightly more incomprehensible work of really smart French guys to the perfectly incomprehensible work of really smart German guys. There's even an American thrown in at the end for good measure. Though the material is super challenging, what Wallace is really going for here is understanding; he wants you to actually see why the concept of infinity was so difficult for mathematics historically, and why the work by Weierstrass, Dedekind, and Cantor (the "heroes" of this book) was so revolutionary and beautiful.

He mostly succeeds. As in, by the end of the book, I felt like I actually sort of understood Cantor et al's basic thinking, in spite of how complex it got. And I think, even more importantly, that I understood the potential problems with it. We tend to treat math as a sort of pure and unquestionable branch of knowledge, but what Wallace does really well is to trace out the places where even the most rigorous concepts of infinity fail to provide that pure certainty. And, in turn, sort of expose the basic uncertainty behind all of math. This uncertainty exists, in spite of how well math works in practical applications. It's Cantor's work that leads eventually to Gödel and his incompleteness theorems, which I know nothing about, but which I intend to read more about after finishing this book.

If you're considering reading E & M, then please consult my favorite quote above, because it perfectly sums up the proper approach. It is impossible to read in the same way you might read, say, Oliver Twist or Moby Dick or the latest edition of Cosmo. If you happen to be a mathematician, or if you just had a lot of college calculus, you will likely understand it better than I did. But for the rest of us, there are a lot of places in this book where you'll have to "please just eat it" and move on. There's enough of value in the rest of it to make this worth doing.

Nerd rating

6 wizard staffs (out of 10)

Normally I'd be giving this seven or eight staffs, but this book is really only suited for three types of nerds: math nerds, David Foster Wallace nerds, and "I'll read anything that looks hard because I am a book hunter and no prey is too challenging" nerds. All other nerd varieties should probably steer clear.

Non-nerd rating

2 cold, frosty beers (out of 10)

I suspect many people will need two cold, frosty beers to get through two pages of this. But if you do manage to get through it, you may find a few things that keep you thinking long after you put the book down. Many of the concepts of infinity can be expressed in terms of regular language (as opposed to massive strings of math symbols), and it's these normal paradoxes of infinity that will make your mind start to spin, rather than glaze over with thick molasses. I'm pretty sure that simile makes sense.

FYI, there's a lot more book reviews like this on my Goodreads profile, if you happen to be a part of that electronic book club. If not, you can select the "Books" Category of this blog to see the other books I've reviewed.