Desert Island Lists: Books edition

While I struggle to get my ass in gear with the rest of the True Blood recaps, let me pose this question to you:  What five books do you want with you when you're stranded on a desert island?  Series are acceptable with qualifications - finished ones like Harry Potter or unfinished like A Song of Ice and Fire (with the caveat that you get the next volumes as they come out) are fine but the complete works of Agatha Christie, for example, are not.  I'll start.

• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
• The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

Now you, in the comments.  And put your thinking caps on because there are movies and television series to do in upcoming posts.  (Television is HARD!)

Mini comics review: Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft

In support of my author-crush on Joe Hill (and also because my friend Spencer recommended it), I picked up the first trade paperback of Locke & Key, "Welcome to Lovecraft." The Locke siblings, Tyler, Kinsey and Bode, have had it tough recently: their dad was murdered by a psychotic student and their mom moved them across the country to the town of Lovecraft in New England.  Their new home is the strange Keyhouse, the mansion where their father grew up, which holds wonders and horrors and secrets.  Trouble follows the Locke family to Lovecraft, violent, relentless trouble.  Author Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez draw the reader in and raise the stakes immediately; this story is unsparing.

I'm pretty limited in my exposure to comics.  I enjoy Y: The Last Man, Fables, The Umbrella Academy; I collected "Season 8" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I suffered through the first 100 issues of The Walking Dead.  Buffy just got too far out there for me and I gave up.  TWD I find just too grim and gruesome.  I like reading horror novels - Stephen King, Joe Hill, some Clive Barker, Justin Cronin - but the scary comics are just too much: I think I prefer the images in my head to the images on the page.  That's why I just didn't wholeheartedly embrace Locke & Key ... and yet I'm torn because I am interested in the story, just not the artwork.  I think I'll try the next TPB and see how it leaves me.

Mini book review: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

Man oh man, don't I just love me Joe Abercrombie's books.  No other fantasy writer I've read - and I've read a lot - writes action like he does.  The world he's built is populated with fascinating, deeply flawed characters who have a propensity for violence and adventure.  With Red Country, Abercrombie has added yet another great book, taking place some years after the events of The Heroes, which was after Best Served Cold, which took place after the First Law trilogy.  When Shy South's brother and sister are kidnapped and taken west, into the Far Country, she and her stepfather Lamb give chase.  Shy is a tough cookie, struggling to forget the evil deeds of her youth. Lamb is a giant Northman, quiet, scarred and with only nine fingers.  Shy thinks he's a coward.  She's going to change her mind about that.  As they follow the trail of the kidnappers, they join a wagon train heading to the wild west town of Crease.  Red Country has a  Western flair - quite different from the Mediterranean aspect of BSC - and the wagon train's journey brought Lonesome Dove to mind, while the nasty little settlement of Crease makes Deadwood look like Paris.  Like Abercrombie's other books, Red Country is full of great characters, several of whom have appeared in previous volumes: Captain-General Nicomo Costa is there, with the cleaver-wielding Sgt. Friendly and assorted other of his mercenaries; Caul Shivers and Glama Golden have cameos; and the mysterious Mayor of Crease seems awfully familiar.  The wild West tone is slightly jarring compared to the previous books but Red Country is great fun and a solid entry in Abercrombie's bibliography.  I'm starting to think I should buy these books.

Well, now I've done it

I've finished Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy, the final book being Last Argument of Kings.  And now I have to go back and read Best Served Cold and The Heroes, in the proper order, now that I know more of the characters.  You don't have to have read the trilogy first but having done so will provide a richer understanding of this world Abercrombie has created.  And since I love this world so much, I want to go back and get everything I can out of it.

I think what Abercrombie does so well - aside from the dark humor and the incredibly written fight/battle scenes - is circle around to minor characters, plot points and loose ends, and tie everything together or call-back to it.  I would love to know whether these five books were painstakingly diagrammed out before he wrote them or if he's just very skilled at remembering everything that's happened.  A friend of mine who is also a huge Abercrombie fan told me that there's a new book coming out this fall, Red Country.  Here's the description:

Shy South comes home to her farm to find a blackened shell, her brother and sister stolen, and knows she'll have to go back to bad old ways if she's ever to see them again. She sets off in pursuit with only her cowardly old step-father Lamb for company. But it turns out he's hiding a bloody past of his own. None bloodier.
Their journey will take them across the lawless plains, to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feuds, duels, and massacres, high into unmapped mountains to a reckoning with ancient enemies, and force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, a man no one should ever have to trust . . .

Read that bit again about her "cowardly old step-father" - that could be Logen Ninefingers, couldn't it?  Seeing how the last we heard of him was SPOILER him diving out the window and running away from being King of the North END SPOILER.  That would be fine by me - I like the ol' Bloody-nine.

Nominal update

Sorry things have been so light around here.  But we just finished up the ski season last weekend so that means summer is just around the corner ... and I promised my old friend Joe B. that I would get back to recapping Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles once the seasons turned - it just seems like a summertime show to me.  So, Joe, if you're reading this, I have moved T:TSCC back up to the top of the list.  (Of course, I have to watch Tucker and Dale vs. Evil again first because Mr. Mouse wants to see it.  You could have knocked me over with a feather when he said he wanted to see that movie.)

Also, I recently finished the second book in The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged.  These books are getting better and better as they go, as Abercrombie finds his voice and hones his craft.  It's funny, having read his books in reverse order, because this trilogy is much more of a fantasy high fantasy novel, whereas the magnificent The Heroes is very strongly a battle fantasy high fantasy novel, with very little magicky elements.  The battle focus was what I was expecting and the more fantastical elements of the trilogy were a bit of a surprise.  I've just started the last book in the trilogy and am so pleased that it seems to be the longest of the bunch.  That just means there's more of it to read - yay!

Mini book review: The Blade Itself

After having read Joe Abercrombie's two standalone novels set after The First Law series (Best Served Cold and The Heroes), I've finally gotten my hands on The Blade Itself, Abercrombie's debut novel and the one that kicked the whole thing off.  I have to say, I really like this stuff.

TBI follows three main threads, separate at first but then weaving together in a complicated tapestry.  There's the Northerner, Logen Ninefingers, also sometimes known as The Bloody Nine, separated from his crew and pondering the violent life he's led.  He falls in with the sorcerer Bayaz, who may or may not be an actual legend, and follows him to one of the Union's fabulous cities.  There, their paths cross that of Captain Jezal dan Luthar, a feckless youth who is learning how to be a swordsman, and the crippled Inquisitor Glokta, once a soldier and swordsman himself, now ruined by torture and himself a torturer.  Glokta is set on rooting out the government's corruption, Jezal wants wine, women and fame, Logen wants to be a good man again ... and no one is quite sure what it is Bayaz wants.

As this was Abercrombie's debut novel, it took a little while for him to find his voice, that fabulous voice that rings so clear in Best Served Cold and The Heroes - dry, blackly funny and with a gift for battle scenes.  By about the final third of the novel he hits his stride; by the time the Bloody Nine comes out to play, I was grinning as I turned the pages.  Abercrombie writes wonderful battle fantasy and this was a good start - I'm very pleased to have two more books in The First Law trilogy yet to read.

Book review: Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Monzcarro Murcatto, the Snake of Talins, the Butcher of Caprile, mercenary general of the Thousand Swords, the center of Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold, is not a woman to trifle with.  Feared and hated by her enemies and her rivals, beloved only by her brother, Benna, she has won a lot of battles for her employer, the Duke of Orso, moving him into a position of power and collecting a fortune for herself.  She is beautiful and ruthless, a deadly soldier, popular among the Duke's subjects.  When the Duke summons her and Benna, they go to his stronghold obediently, only to find themselves betrayed, Orso nervous that she might attempt to overthrow him.  Benna is murdered and Monza is very nearly killed as well, strangled and stabbed and beaten and thrown off the castle walls.  So much for loyalty.

Monza survives, somehow, rescued by a very strange and creepy fellow who sets her many broken bones and stitches her back together.  When she is healed (or mostly healed), she is but a shadow of her former self, scarred and aching, her sword hand mangled beyond use.  What is intact is her single-minded quest for vengeance and that focused fury drives her on.  She collects a motley team, including a murderer with a numbers fixation, the realm's best poisoner and his apprentice, a torturer, a besotted mercenary and a Northman who is trying to be a good man.  Once Monza has her crew in place, she goes after the seven men who betrayed her and killed her brother: the Duke, his two sons, his banker, a general in Orso's army, a mercenary and a thug.  One by one she sets them up to take them out in this bloody and exciting revenge fantasy.

As I mentioned before, Best Served Cold is a stand-alone novel set within Abercrombie's First Law universe. The order of the five books is the First Law trilogy, then BSC, then The Heroes.  I'm going at this rather backwards, having read the last novel first and the second to last one second; I promise that I will read the actual trilogy in order, although it hasn't really mattered in these stand-alones.  Except for one thing: the Northman who joins Monza's crew is Caul Shivers, a Very Scary Dude in The Heroes.  In BSC, we learn how Shivers goes from a talented fighter who wants to do the right thing to the one eyed, murdering beast.  I kind of liked having met him a the monster first, because it made his descent more interesting to me.

I loved Best Served Cold.  It is violent and bloody as hell, funny (although not quite as funny as TH) and fast-paced with betrayals, deceptions and double-crosses.  Monza Murcatto is not at all a nice person but she makes for a wonderfully flawed and interesting protagonist.  On the strength of these two novels I am fast becoming a huge Joe Abercrombie fan.  I cannot wait to get to the first volume of the First Law trilogy.

Book review: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie, is a magnificent high fantasy novel.  Taking place over the course of about three rain- and blood-soaked days, the story covers the battle for the control of the North: Black Dow and his scruffy, scary War Chiefs hoping to gain some more ground to the south, and the well-armored, rich Union armies unwilling to let them encroach any further.  There are three main characters - Bremer dan Gorst (Union), a disgraced but lethal fighter; Curnden Craw, the North's last honest man who just wants to retire; and clever "Prince" Calder, devious coward and world-class smirker - but the cast numbers in the thousands, most of whom get slaughtered.  There are, I believe, exactly four women with speaking parts in this book - there's not a lot of room for women in this war.

And what a war!  The Heroes is a brutal, bloody battle fantasy that is clear in its belief that there are no heroes in war, only lives wasted.  There are no elves or unicorns in this fantasy novel; there's hardly any magic.  What there is is battle.  Abercrombie writes the most incredible, visceral and easily-pictured battle scenes I've ever read: I got the idea of reading the book in the first place from a mention in an A.V. Club article that posited that a scene with Gorst and Calder's brother meeting to fight on a bridge was one of the writer's favorite pop culture moment of the year.  And yes, that scene very nearly lives up to the hype (although my favorite scene - discussed in this A.V. Club review - begins with one unknown, very minor character who gets killed after several pages and then the viewpoint switches to the guy who killed him, until that guy gets killed and the viewpoint switches to his killer, and on and on.  In addition, this book is very funny: twisted, dark and British-dry.  I laughed out loud several times.  When's the last time that happened in a high fantasy novel (that wasn't written by Terry Pratchett)?

In case you couldn't tell, I really, really liked this one.  The Heroes is my first Joe Abercrombie novel, but it won't be my last.  I've already gotten Best Served Cold, his other stand-alone novel set in the land of The First Law trilogy (this time starring a girl!) and I can't wait to start it.