What Have You Read Lately? Part 2, more rants, raves, reviews

Ah! Thanks 'tac! No wonder I was mystified. I don't have that book, and I read several of the essays in it elsewhere.

To the bookstore!

It is one of his best, I think, Surtac. I will be so interested to hear your views. (and thanks for the info!)

Have been getting a fair amount of reading in owing to spending an hour on the stationary bicycle every day. I love that “calories burned” counter!

's Faded Sun Trilogy…not a trilogy at all but one long – and quite good - story, though I don’t think I’ll read it again soon. The regul are fascinating, and the mri are even scarier at the end than at the beginning. They made me think of the old Star Trek episode with the Doomsday Machine; can’t say I feel too sorry for the Elee. I sure hope the humans can figure out some better use for the mri than to conquer an empire.

E. E. Knight’s 2 most recent David Valentine books, Fall With Honor and Winter Duty from the “Vampire Earth” series…which are not about vampires at all, but are straight-up “valiant human (and non-human) resistance fighting alien invaders” stories. The invaders are admirably horrible, especially some of the earlier books really get creepy, but not out of context, and they do a good job of using human qualities (our biology and psychology) against us. Knight does a very interesting job of imagining what human society (societies, really, since there are several) might be under these conditions. I’ve enjoyed (allowing for the gross-out parts) all of these books, and will definitely look for the next one. If you’re interested, each the books is a discrete story, so you don’t have to start with the first one, though I think they would be much better if read in order.

Reread Wen Spencer’s Endless Blue…an excellent story about a really alien place and the people that live there. I won’t say too much about the plot, half the fun of it, like one of C J’s stories, is figuring out what is going on…though I still enjoyed it the second time around. Great characters, human and alien, and a well-realized (at least to my unscientific experience) place that is as important to the tale as the people are.

John Barnes’ Finity…I was disappointed with something about this, having read other things by Barnes that I really liked. It’s a good premise, the characters are interesting enough, but it’s kind of like the author couldn’t really figure out how to end it. I wonder what he would have come up with if he hadn’t set out to write a happy ending.

I read the DFW essay on Tracy Austin’s memoir over breakfast this morning.

What a lovely piece of writing – eminently readable, and with a frisson of accuracy that was almost visceral in both its tone and my reaction to it.

I think he nailed his hypothesis perfectly. I’ve never been much of a fan of men’s tennis (I find it too fast to watch comfortably) and I pretty well gave up following women’s tennis at all after Hana Mandlikova retired.

But I think here he’s grabbed hold of a universal truth with regard to elite sports and elite sports people generally.

I read through the entire essay thinking the whole time that it applied perfectly to test cricket in addition to the tennis, golf and gridiron examples he uses. The elite cricket players from different teams and different times are equally valid examples: the imperious but deserved arrogance of Viv Richards’ West Indians as they swept all before them; Shane Warne’s ‘ball of the century’ delivery to Mike Gatting; the sheer elegance and subtlety of David Gower’s batting in full flight; Warne again in Adelaide as he stole the game away and shattered England’s heart in the process.

There are many other examples I could quote, and I’m sure others will have examples their own from other sports, but I think his essential point is made – elite athletes are different from you and I and anyone else who is not in their league.

His other postulate too is interesting also – if I’m reading it correctly, it seems to be that the focus achievable by these elites is at the cost of their own imaginations. And I can think of many other sports memoirs that show a similar disconnect between ability on the field and ‘charisma’ (or lack of it) off the field. (Austin's seems to be an extreme example though.)

And it may be that our relationship with our sporting heroes can be defined in that way: they provide the ability and the spectacle, and we provide the imagination to understand and appreciate that ability.

Anyway, on the strength of that essay and the title piece which I’ve read online somewhere, I’ve just ordered both Consider The Lobster and the earlier A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

Good one, Surtac!

I'm happy you remember the Czarging Czech!

As I was intimating before, I think it applies to more than just athletes, but to many others who have developed a craft to near perfection, the craft is not being clarity of spoken expression.

Speaking of clarity, I still mourn for DFW.