Calvino books are Calvino books. They’re rewarding if approached in the right mindset. What distinguishes them is simply their framing, and this wasn’t my favorite. Drained of verbs, these descriptions of cities reflect thinking that is often profound, though also sometimes banal (yes, suburbs often seem alike). There’s a few too many setups involving superficial duality and an ensuing revelation of redemptive humanist imperfection.

So: pretty good. Cosmicomics and Mr. Palomar remain my favorites, though.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is a talented writer and a miraculous self-promoter. The Angel’s Game — like The Shadow of the Wind — will leave you convinced that you’ve read a better book than you have. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it.

In the case of TAG, the approach is fairly straightforward. Ruiz Zafon reverentially invokes the institution of Literature in all its forms, from a refuge for the young; to the pretentious journalistic elevation of copyediting into a sacred crusade; to the fucking smell of books; to the invocation of Dickens to canonize the institution of the blood- and melodrama-soaked potboiler.

This is all fine so far as it goes. Its real purpose is to telegraph what’s about to come — to create a theology of letters in which pulp holds a place of esteem no less dignified than nominally loftier stuff. Ruiz Zafon is going to give us pulp. He wants us to understand it to be exalted pulp.

I think this perspective is basically right. It reminds me of Michael Chabon’s essays insisting that literature can include acts of imagination, excitement, adventure and the fantastic. As I steel myself for this year’s Man Booker long list, it’s good to be reminded that “good” books don’t necessarily have to be about terminal illness and divorce.

Still, I do think that this framing is at least a little self-serving. Which is fine: Ruiz Zafon delivers a real page-turner, and ably adorns it with literary allusions and devices (albeit occasionally heavy-handed ones). The book has some problems with pacing, and the emotional pallette favors breadth over depth. But it’s pretty great entertainment, ably weaving together thrills, supernatural horror, sexual tension, tragic romance, satire, noir and light comedy.

But I do worry that I will remember that this book is good more than I’ll remember what the book is about. That’s certainly the case with The Shadow of the Wind — I remember where I read it, I and I remember liking it, but I remember terribly little of the book itself, which is pretty unusual for me. Perhaps TAG will fare better.

Eh. It’s clever, writing a book like this one as a follow-up to his own debut. Diving headlong into mystic Christian conspiracy theories, Eco cleverly parodies himself while leveling a broader critique against the human temptation toward gnosis and syncretism. The action surrounding our main characters is also pretty fun.

But the damn thing’s just way too long. Eco tells us over and over again that these imagined connections are meaningless, which makes it difficult to wade through hundreds of pages of historical arcana. By the end, exhaustion had distracted me from his characters’ stories and struggles. A decent editor could have made this great. As it stands, Eco can’t resist the temptation to show off, whether through his own (always modestly disclaimed!) flights of historical fancy, or with inserted experimental fiction that left me cold.

As a sidenote: it was legitimately fascinating to see so much occultism cleanly laid out. I found myself wondering if Mike Mignola used this as a blueprint for his Hellboy universe or if the grail conspiracies are just well-established. But it’s all there: the Templars, Ultimate Thule, Aggartha and on and on…

Pretty brutal. I’m ashamed to admit this is the first Roth I’ve read — my mom sent this to me — but based on his reputation and my sense of the book, it’s hard for me to imagine this is among his best.

The problem is really just length. Roth wants to throw together some research about summer camp and polio and musings about theodicy. The polio asserts itself through the decimation of various basically interchangeable children surrounding the protagonist, who’s a youth educator. But he’s a flat and boringly noble character, devoid of psychology aside from overdeveloped senses of duty and guilt. These ensure that polio will destroy him utterly, even after the crisis of the epidemic has passed. And that could could be interesting.

But instead of that tragic flaw’s artful revelation, the dynamics of it are dumped on us by the narrator in the book’s last ten pages. It feels rushed and unnecessary. Those ten pages are solid, and include this gut-punch about bitterness:

“I’ll never be me as I was me in the past. I’ll be this instead for the rest of my life. I’ll never know delight again.”

Oof. Preach. Anyway it’s more of a sermon than anything else.

Still, great prose and a quick read. It’s really just a novella, though. Could easily have been a proper novel but you get the feeling the author’s heart wasn’t in it.

Though not totally meritless, it’s safe to say this was not a favorite of mine. I had two primary objections.

First, Becks got it about right when she said “I’ve never read a book that got technology as wrong as this.” Much of the technobabble reads like this Onion article. It’s gibberish — nonsense that’s clearly been passed by a technologist for vocabulary-correction, but which is conceptually empty. I can usually forgive this (though after been recently treated to the very high technical standards of Cory Doctorow’s work, I’m less inclined to do so that I used to be). But in this case the nonsense is used both to define the various maguffins that drives much of the story and to provide the too-tidy resolution that our protagonist drops in the climax. And where the hell did Wilson get the idea that overloaded computers can melt? It’s completely laughable.

Second, I was pretty uncomfortable with the book’s politics. I have complaints about the facile approach to political unrest — the restoration of mobile broadband is treated as if it’s the same thing as a popular uprising’s successful conclusion. But these are superficial compared to my discomfort with Wilson’s sympathy for Islamist counterpoints to the repressive secular state that employs the book’s villains. I’m very ready to admit the beauty, wisdom and historical richness of muslims’ faith. I’m less prepared to accept Wilson’s glib assumption of compatibility between her readership’s liberal cosmopolitan values and her religion’s ethics and politics. Of course the imam wouldn’t really object to popular music. Of course our plucky female lead wears her veil out of choice. I’m sure it’s right that this culture is misunderstood and often subjected to ignorant racism. But that doesn’t mean its attitudes toward women and personal liberty aren’t genuinely noxious. Wilson doesn’t ignore this completely, but she’s much too ready to retreat into mysticism when it comes up.

I understand Wilson to be a convert to Islam herself (married to an Egyptian man) so I don’t want to accuse her of cultural ignorance, or to underestimate the difficulty of reconciling her identity and values with the religious culture she’s chosen. I’m sure that’s been a difficult and very personal process, and one that I have no right to criticise. But, speaking purely as an outside observer, the philosophical gymnastics that seem to be required don’t survive the translation to the page. Frankly, she’s got some nerve to snipe at western fiction for its substantive bankruptcy. Her work ignores those depths.

OK. Enough of that. What’s good about this book? Well, Wilson’s a comic book writer (I suspect this explains a bunch of the silly GR Stephenson comparisons that Becks notes). She has a talent for keeping the action moving and for letting her imagination stretch to interesting locales, characters, scales. They don’t always feel fully sketched-out — perhaps she’s used to collaborating with an artist on that? — but she does often succeed. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of the djinn, even if the narrative bridge constructed to them — the Alf Yeom — didn’t really make much sense.

Still, I don’t think the book succeeds. The scaffolding’s there (though it’s at least one act too long), but the foundation’s incoherent. Not recommended.

I haven’t figured out a decent way to automate this, it turns out. Maybe I’ll write a Goodreads WordPress plugin.

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray of black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantles; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping within their household goods, Ersilia refugees look at the lbyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Then, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

(Previously)