Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner

 

This is a weird and witty novel, clearly has a lot of Noir in its ancestry but has a really dry sense of humor about it, and draws amply (and does well to do so) on Spiner's experiences making Star Trek: The Next Generation. There's a co-writer on the title page who probably deserves a good bit of the credit--and Spiner is generous in his acknowledgments. There are some moments that don't work as well as others, but that's not wildly unusual. There are hints that something like at least some of this happened for real, and it's clear Spiner appreciates fans while at least occasionally wishing they'd leave him alone, but this is not any kind of fandom takedown novel (if that's your jam, I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas is a good novel that does some downtaking of at least Lovecraftian fandom). Many of the  secondary characters are fictional versions of real people, which makes it hard to talk about characterization in the novel, but the dialogue feels at least mostly plausible; the moments where Spiner kinda captures the relationships between cast members are often wonderful. I'm not sure how much appeal this novel would have for people with no fond memories of the show, but I enjoyed it plenty.

The Gomorrah Gambit by Tom Chatfield

 

This was a pretty good book, really--not deathless, but good enough to spend and evening with. If I'm reading the signs correctly and it's book one of a series ... well, it's not good enough for me to chase down the rest of the series, but I'm a tough sell on that at best. The prose sparkles and shines, dances and sings; the characters all seem reasonably plausible considering that some of them are clearly larger than life. The implausibilities of the book don't matter all that much in the context of the book, things start almost normal and things build gradually to kinda bizarre, but the next thing is always pretty easy to swallow if your disbelief is still hanging overhead. There are some occasional moments of insight, here, and probably some vague thematic threads related to trust and power and suchlike, but this is not a very complex novel as far as all-a-that.

Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore

 

This was not a very good book, and also it was stoopid. At least the prose was readable, though. There was never any suspension of disbelief or particular concern about the characters or the setting or the story. I probably should have stopped reading like eighty pages in; as often happens when I push on, I regret the choice.

The Trees by Percival Everett

 

This is a really subtly angry novel. Well, the anger isn't all exactly subtle but the measure of it--the breadth and width and depth of it--doesn't become clear until the back third or quarter, when it takes a turn toward a sort of hard-earned borderline-apocalyptic nihilism. That's when the novel steeply increases the discomfort level, at least for this white guy reading it, but I think that's Everett's intention, or at least part of it. In some ways this is a more explicitly literate take on the "vengeance is another word for pain" thing that S. A. Cosby (among others) does so well, but here the pain has deep genetic roots all around. The prose crackles and sings, the characters are (mostly) well-defined--there is some strong hint of mockery of some of them, but that mockery seems deserved, not particularly like Flannery O'Connor laughing at all of her characters behind her hand. The ending has a strong "The Lady or the Tiger" vibe, though I'm not sure the reader has enough basis to figure out which way things fall. Very much a novel that might have people thinking late into the night when they should be sleeping.

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

 I've known for a while that Robbins was like a foundational influence on especially Christopher Moore but also Carl Hiaasen and likely John Scalzi, so I figured I'd finally get around to reading this book of his, which we had on our shelves. Reading it, a large part of where Moore comes from with his prose is clear--and his occasionally goody lewdness, though Hiaasen also has this in spades--and Scalzi seems to have some of it, but I get the sense he might have come to Robbins via at least one other writer (I have know idea who) under the Tom Robbins Influence. The prose has a strong whiff of baked to it, hallucinogenic and loopy and looping, routinely funny but also making strong points, sharply. The story is somewhere in that space between kaleidoscopic and fragmented, with what seems at first like a lot of POVs but which really comes mostly to like three or four; cause and effect sometimes seem at most loosely connected, the novel holds together mostly by an act of authorial will. I could honestly have done without the Von Däniken stuff, but the novel was written in the late 1970s, there are some things that were just going to happen; some of the countercultural-ish messages have likewise failed to age well. There's some didacticism at the end (in the epilogue especially) that leads me to think this is mostly intended as something like a satire, though forty-six years after its publication much of what it's satirizing seems unrecognizable (though not all). It's a readable and enjoyable novel, even if it is very much stuck in its own 1980.

The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

 

This is a kinda neat little mystery novel, with just a touch of weird in the premise. Plays mostly fair--the POV character, a first-person narrator, has some apparently wrong ideas about the sequences of events. It's one of those novels laden with mostly despicable people, if I were the narrator I'd want to be completely shut of the family; but he's a better person than I am, he works to prevent his grandfather from dying. The characters are moderately distinct, you get some sense eventually for who's who and what's what, but it takes several times through the loop before you get all that worked out (at least, it was several times through the loop before I did, I found all the names and characteristics kinda confusing, but I might be an idiot). This is definitely an unhappily unique unhappy family, but the prose--at least the translation I read--was breezy enough to make it a reasonably pleasant read.

Last Call by Daniel Okrent

 Spent a couple of days reading this, it's a kinda long, kinda dense book, and my life took a turn toward the weird. It's an informative book, laden with all kinds of juicy ironies about the rise and almost immediate fall of Prohibition. There are hypocrisies galore. Also some of the ideas people had about how to enforce the 18th Amendment remind me of the last czars, who couldn't have done more to ensure the coming of the Revolution to Russia if they'd tried--some of the ideas that floated around in the Hoover presidency were similarly working against their own stated aims. As with any more or less pop history book, it's kinda a collection of vignettes and short arcs tied together like beads on parallel strings; this is not snark or complaint. I don't know how much is going to stick, it's not a field I have a ton of prior focus on, but it held my interest more than well enough while I was reading it.