Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

This may be the single best collection of multi-author science fiction short stories I have ever read.  I would recommend each and every story in this collection to anyone who enjoys sci-fi.  While some are obviously better than others, each and every story is unique, imaginative, and compelling.  Let’s get into why I like this book so much.

Women are criminally underrepresented in science fiction.  Both as authors and as protagonists.  The main theme of this book is women.  Almost all of the authors are women and every story has a woman as the protagonist.  For better or for worse, women see and interact with the world differently than men and that can be seen in their writing, which in this case is definitely for the better.  This book treats you to some completely different worlds that you won’t find in the minds of men and even those worlds that could come from the minds of men are seen in a polarized light that reveals a different side of familiar scenes.

I have a passion for language.  And by that, I mean that you don’t want to get me started on how stupid gendered nouns and pronouns are and how they reinforce gender stereotypes.  That’s why it was pleasant to see that some of the stories in this collection embrace gender fluidity as a norm.  It is a concept somewhat on the fringes of sci-fi and only normally used as an afterthought to shape a world instead of being front and center as it is in the stories in this book.  Given the gender fluidity of humans, of course aliens may be much more gender fluid, of course future humans may fully embrace their own gender fluid nature.  Reading these stories it’s kind of a “well, duh” moment that these ideas would be explored but it’s good to have them explored nonetheless.  And while it may be somewhat discomfiting to some, reading gender neutral pronouns like zie and zir and zem in a story, it is a great introduction to those who still think of gender as binary.

If you like science fiction, you should run out and get this book right now.  If you like the stories in this book, you should run out and get more books by the authors in question.  I haven’t had a feeling of such pure delight reading sci-fi in quite some time and this book completely put me in my sci-fi happy place.  That said, this is also what I would call softer science fiction so it is also very accessible to those not really into science fiction.  I don’t mean that to sound like an insult, as the worlds created in this book are rich and complex, but they are told more from a viewpoint of taking the advances in technology for granted, like we would if we were writing a story where someone calls someone on their cell phone, instead of getting bogged down in technical details of warp drives and tachyon fields and such.  That’s how I define soft vs. hard science fiction.  Regardless, everyone should buy this book and give the authors all their monies.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

This is more of a short story or maybe novelette than a book so I’m not entirely sure why it came as a stand alone story, but that’s what you get sometimes when you buy e-books in bundles, I guess.

The premise of this story is pretty cool.  A technology exists which can create a time loop which allows super rich lonely people to relive the same week over and over again.  You have full autonomy and can basically do whatever you want but your actions have no consequence and at the end of the week, everything kind of gets reset.  Since reliving the same thing over and over a la “Groundhog Day” would get pretty tiresome pretty quickly, the technology has some randomness added to it using a device called the Eisenberg Constant.  People aren’t necessarily going to be in the same place at the same time, individuals won’t react the same way in the same situation, etc.  Things are going swimmingly for Henry Selinger until things seem to start going awry with the Eisenberg Constant.  A locomotive-like vehicle has crashed into a nearby field.  Strange voices can be heard in his bathroom.  The news on the radio is getting weirder and weirder.  An exceedingly frightening creature is haunting his dreams.  And the Eisenberg Constant repairman won’t be here until Monday!  What’s a man to do?

I should probably give this story 4 stars because it really is a fun and interesting read, but man is the ending unfulfilling.  The curse of the short story.  Egner has a very interesting writing style and he clearly describes some pretty absurdist stuff in this story.  It would be interesting to read some of his other works.  Unfortunately, it looks like this is his only story that has been translated from his native German into English.  Oh well.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading “The Bestiary” is like reading a more mundane version of a Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.  It is a collection of short stories from various authors each of which describes a not-quite-of-this-world animal.   I am not sure how the authors or the stories were selected for this compilation or if the stories were written specifically for this compilation, but it is interesting how similar in scope much of the bestiary ended up being.  I would say fully half of the stories describe either parasitic or mimetic animals.  I found this very strange until I thought about it for more than a few seconds.  Bestiaries of the past were fantastical because so much was unknown.  A modern bestiary needs to be somewhat more grounded into the reality we now know and the obvious choice for animals are those that can blend and those that live off others.

Overall, this is an ok collection of stories even if some are a bit of a slog to get through.  They range from the mundane to the fantastical to the downright weird.  There are 28 beasts in total, one for each letter of the alphabet plus two non-alphabetic animals.  I will say that I had more of an affinity for the parasitic type stories just because they seem more believable.  There were also a few mind controlling ones that were fun reads as well.  Favorites include “The Counsellor Crow” by Karen Lord, “Daydreamer by Proxy” by Dexter Palmer, “Pyret” by Karin Tidbeck, and “Zee” by Richard Howard.

Can I recommend the book?  Eh, yes?  I would say that if you love reading Monster Manuals, this book has a lot to offer even if it is missing the “claw, claw, bite, rake” portions of Monster Manuals.  For others, I’d give the same warning that I give every collection of short stories:  There’s good stuff to be found here, but as with every collection, your mileage may vary.  Personally, I think that as long as there are a few gems, it’s worth reading.  This collection doesn’t quite hit that mark but it comes close.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

I can only imagine that this novel was an experiment.  Populate a world with both the mundane and the fantastical and blur them all together.  Add to it a special character called a “Narrator” whose job it is to follow along on the action and put into words all that he sees and does.  Make that Narrator very bad at his job.  Write a novel from that Narrator’s perspective.  What you are left with is a jumbled confusion.  While I was able to track the basics of the story, at very few points did I have a concrete picture of the how or the where or the why or the what of what people were doing.

Many of the descriptives in the book read like the author picked the most obscure words out of a thesaurus and sprinkled them throughout.  I have never used the dictionary more than while reading this book.  There are also many instances of the Narrator making simple grammatical errors and then correcting them in the next sentence.  Add to that the fact that this Narrator is describing a fantastical world with places and characters that require well thought out narratives in order to understand and you have one hell of a confusing jumble of a mess.  I mean, there’s never really even any explanation as to why there are these Narrators to begin with or why they’re entrusted with the telling of history.

I’m sure much of what I said above is exactly the point of the novel.  It’s an accurate description of what it must be like to go through war.  A jumbled mess of marching from place to place with randomly interspersed bouts of extreme violence.  Perhaps the Narrator lost his mind in the process and the result is the jumbled mess of his attempts to do his job.  Good reading material it is not, however.  If I had to describe the novel in a way that you might be able to understand, I’d say you start with the story of “Heart of Darkness”, add a hint of Lovecraftian horror, then sprinkle with a dash of “A Clockwork Orange” then mix with some “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, but that makes “The Narrator” sound much better of a read than it actually is.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Imagine you are using drugs.  These drugs make you hallucinate a little bit.  They also take the ordered sections of your brain and shuffle them together just once, but you’re not really very good at shuffling either so the last parts just kind of get tucked down at the bottom of the deck.  Then, suddenly, there is a pen in your hand and a stack of paper in front of you.  You start writing.  That is the best description I can give behind the genesis of Anna Tambour’s “Crandolin”.

The book starts out in what can only be described as micro-chapters.  It flits and darts from place to place and time to time and person to person with so few words separating the chapters that you don’t know whether you’re coming or going and you don’t have a clue what the characters mean to each other or where or when they are.  It’s dizzying to the point that you stop caring.  Eventually, the book coalesces into something more tangible and you get a solid feeling for who is where and when, but there is still a disjointedness because it’s never quite clear who or what is being pursued or even if there is any point to the story at all.

This may be one of those books that you appreciate more when you read it a second time.  You know, if you’re an English major.  But since I’m here for you, the common bookworm, and not those ivory tower prigs, maybe if I explain the story a bit you’ll enjoy it a little more than I did.

There’s this guy named Nick Kippax.  You might call him an epicurean.  Always searching for new and exciting flavors and recipes.  One day, he finds this cookbook with a recipe on how to cook a crandolin.  Crandolins totally don’t exist.  On the page of that recipe is a mysterious stain.  Maybe it’s a stain from the last time someone cooked the recipe.  Why not taste it?  Thus Nick Kippax finds himself blown into tiny pieces and spread across time and space.  One piece finds him/itself as a Gorbachevian spot on the face of a young woman who works on a train in Russia with a bunch of people who are in love with her.  Another piece finds him/itself in some jars of honey belonging to the best honey maker in the world which a man who makes sweets envies and kidnaps.  Another is in a birds nest somewhere?  Maybe another is in a virgin’s pubic hair that some weirdo wants to make a mustache out of, I think?  There’s also this old dude who isn’t real, but is, and goes around planting factual stories in writers’ minds and is going senile.  There’s also this woman who isn’t real, but is, and goes around planting fanciful stories in writers’ minds and is looking for something.  There’s this bunch of dudes questing for a girl locked in a tower by her father who has just died.  A bunch of stuff happens to them.  The end.

Did I make you want to read the book?  No?  What if I told you there was lots of sex in it?  There isn’t, but would that change your mind?  I have failed as a book salesman.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

A word of warning: I highly recommend reading this book in paper form.  It does not work well on e-readers at all.  This is equal parts the author’s fault and equal parts the technology’s fault.  Greene is extremely inconsistent in his use of notes and footnotes.  Some he appends to the end of the chapter and some he appends to the back of the book.  If there is a rhyme or reason to it, I couldn’t figure it out.  And the way they’re tagged it’s impossible to tell the difference between them.  I gave up on them all together because half were asides that added nothing to the knowledge.  Another problem is Greene’s use of pictures.  Often, the picture is pages away from when it is first referenced and then the picture is referenced time and time again in subsequent chapters. This is more a technology problem as a hyperlink can only hyper to one place so you click on a link to a picture and can get back to the first link but every other link goes back to the first spot.  There is also the problem of some pictures taking up entire pages and anywhere you click sends you back to the original link.  This is more of a problem with my reading it on a touchscreen only Kindle.  I cannot count the number of times I found myself scrolling through pages to attempt to get back to where I left off as a result of these deficiencies.  It was a very frustrating read.

Fully titled “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos”, this book explores the incomprehensible world of modern physics with an emphasis on the possibilities of more than one universe.  So yeah, you’re in for some dense reading.  If you have a basic understand of cosmology, though, don’t fret too much.  Yes, some things will be over your head, but Greene is one of the better authors who knows what he is talking about and can condense that knowledge into language that is understandable to the more common folk.

The book thoroughly goes through every possible multiverse/parallel universe scenario thought up by both the human imagination and math.  Since this is a science book, the emphasis is strongly on the latter with more of a hat tip to the former.  Greene structured the book so the easier to wrap your head around stuff comes first and the further you go the more mind-warping the multiverses become.  There is very little actual math in this book, which is a departure from Greene’s other books.  And with very good reason.  The maths necessary to describe what Greene is describing would take pages and pages and likely be books by themselves.  It turns out that figuring things out on a universal level ain’t easy.  Who’da thunk it?

I will share my favorite universal theory because it kind of blew my mind.  It blew my mind both because of its simplicity and because of its obviousness despite the fact I had never heard of it before.  Given: Our universe is infinite. Result: There are an infinite number of me’s writing a blog post about Brian Greene’s book right now.  *pshooo* If that’s too much to wrap your head around, think of it this way: If the universe is sufficiently large, there will be exact duplicate sections of space.  Keep on increasing what “sufficiently large” is and behold another you.  Still lost?  Ok, take a microscopically tiny section of space. Break up the rest of the universe into the microscopically tiny sections of space.  Think there won’t be duplicates?  Now just keep expanding that section of space.  Infinite yous!  And that’s not even counting the number of not-you-yous who are really, really similar to you.

People who are new to Greene should read anything else by him first.  Of the material I have read of his, this is his weakest.  Much of this can be attributed to him taking the esoteric subject of modern physics and choosing to write exclusively about an esoteric topic of that esoteric subject.  Still, the idea of a multiverse is fascinating and this book is a one-stop shopping spot for every angle of attack on the theoretical world that is the multiverse.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

Have I ever mentioned that I love the judicious use of footnotes?  Well, I do.  And David Foster Wallace is the grand master of footnote use.  He uses them both as asides and as deeper knowledge into a subject.  And as asides to deeper knowledge into a subject.  And as deeper knowledge into asides.  Only occasionally does it seem overwrought. A literary gift indeed.

This is my first foray into the mind of David Foster Wallace and I like what I see.  “Consider the Lobster” is a collection of magazine essays Wallace wrote throughout his career.  He has a style that is so unique I am fairly certain that I could pick up an untitled piece of his and immediately recognize his fingerprints.  And it’s not just the footnotes.  His use of self-reference and his use of anagrams also have their own Wallace-y feel that I’ve not experienced elsewhere.

The essays in “Consider the Lobster” can be broken up into three groups: book reviews, acts of journalism, and personal stories.  The two personal stories are a speech he gave and a retelling of his experiences on the day of September 11, 2001.  The speech, I should remark, is titled “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”.  It should give you a pretty good hint into Wallace’s sense of humor.  It details his vain attempts to get his students to agree with him on Kafka’s deadpan humor.  Then, in a brilliant act of story sequencing, he follows it with “Authority and American Usage” which is an absolutely deadpan hilarious 62-page review of a book on the correct usage of American English.  I cannot recommend it enough.  It’s this essay that made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace’s style.  It almost makes me want to read “Garner’s Modern American Usage” on which the review is based.  Almost.  The journalism pieces that are worth pointing out are “Big Red Son” which is an in depth look at the Adult Video News Awards, pornography’s answer to the Oscars, and “Up, Simba”, a recounting of his time following John McCain during the 2000 primary election season.  So, two pieces about pornography.  “Up, Simba” reminded me of why, once upon a time, I somewhat admired and respected John McCain before he went all Palin.

Finally, there is “Consider the Lobster” itself which is a piece Wallace did for Gourmet magazine covering the 2003 Maine Lobster Fest, which of course is a thing.  I love that here we have a piece in a foodie magazine about one of the foodiest foods there is and Wallace basically makes it into a screed on why you should not eat lobster.  And he’s persuasive.  Scratch another food off of my list.

If you have never read David Foster Wallace, you should.  You owe it to yourself to do so and “Consider the Lobster” is a great introduction*.  It is full of humor and wit and supremely accurate use of the English language.  “Infinite Jest” has been on my list of “I should read this” books for a long time, but “CTL” cemented its place unto my “I WILL read this” list.

*He said having never read anything else by the author.