Not for me. I hope that's cool with everybody. Thanks.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This won the Booker Prize in 1981. Then it won the prize for the best Booker Prizewinning book out of the first 25. So some people really like this book, and I just don't know why.

I swear, after I gave up on it for a few years, I came back and read the last 300 pages like an anthropologist, trying out a dozen theories as to how someone could enjoy it. (If you like this book, that's awesome. I don't understand, but I'm happy to let you do you.) Everything I look for in a book is subverted here. Like if you wanted to hear music and instead somebody was banging pots and pans instead. Like that.

Pretty language? There's an awful lot of poop and blood and pain and injury and incestuous thought and snot and hairy arms--too much to ever say the language was beautiful.

Story? There were a thousand stories, too many to count, and none of them leading anywhere. It was like a friend showing you a stack of a thousand polaroids, each of something ugly or inconsequential or too close to make out, and he tells you the complete significance of each, and you wonder and wonder why he's telling you these things. Nobody has goals, or if they do, they're so minor (his sister wants white bread) they can't carry a story. None that I cared about.

Love? Hope? Not really. He kinda beat the shit out of those things.

Creativity? Maybe. Like an ADHD fever dream. A jungle of ideas. Near the end, he introduces a character and immediately dismisses him:

Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offense at my voyeurism, calls: "Watch this!" and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. "Fifteen inches!" he calls, "How long can you make yours?" Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times...

That character, I feel, informs most of the other characters. They are odd and weird and they enter the narrative, participate in the story for a period of time, do strange things, act in strange ways, and then disappear again. Their quirks are described and explained like they're clues to meaning, but in the end they're all red herrings. Or so it seemed to me.

As I read it, I was reminded of Tristram Shandy, a novel that does a lot of the same things. We start the story well before the main character is born; there is a lot of conversation about noses and names; there are body parts that get trimmed in accidents; there is a lot of action that leads nowhere. The joke in Tristram Shandy is the belaboring of the inconsequential. Here, it's different; here, it feels like many things of consequence are occurring, revealed to us in pieces, sort of Forrest Gump-like, but instead of paying attention to it we are concerning ourselves with oddities and billboards and neighbors and minutiae and nonsense.

The promise of the magical children born in the minute India became free was, for me, not met. Nothing happened with them, except to be tortured at the end. I gave up trying to understand them as allegory (which perhaps the author intended; perhaps not) because the action and details were so random that I couldn't connect anything together. Maybe with charts I could do it...

I wanted to like it because other people liked it and because I enjoy the author when he's interviewed. But I didn't like it. I really didn't. (I feel like I can say this about a novel by Salman Rushdie, like saying you don't like the Mona Lisa. Nobody feels bad for the Mona Lisa.) I also didn't solve the mystery of why other people do. I'll just have to go on without knowing.

That's cool. Let it be for them and not for me.

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Epic Black Powder Fantasy. Again. Truly.

Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am an unabashed fan of Brian McClellan and his novels--and his novellas too, actually--and I am thrilled that he has produced another gem. This is fantasy at its most entertaining and most exciting, with everything working.

Some characters from the previous trilogy return, along with new characters, in a setting only seen in the novellas, and it takes off right away. From the first page, we have exciting, gripping action with high stakes focused on characters it's easy to care about. Vlora and Olem and Michel and Ben Styke and many others are hit with conflict on every level--personal, ideological, political, physical, emotional--and the author manages to wind the plot, conflicts, and action through every slice and level of society. McClellan is not as prone to wiping out his characters as, say, G.R.R. Martin, but no one is safe; the characters suffer and pay a price for every decision they make, with victory not assured. It's both tense and thrilling, but satisfying and ultimately fair to the reader.

For those who haven't read any of his novels, this is a black powder fantasy, meaning the technology is similar to our 18th Century, but it takes place in a world with magic and living gods. There are sorcerers of different types, including powder mages who can harness the power of gunpowder when they fight. The author makes the magic and the technology and the invented world absolutely believable, with the politics of colonization, oppression, and revolution looking like our own world. (It is original, though; this is not allegory.) On a new continent, with a colony on the edge of a frontier, natives and immigrants sometimes live alongside each other peacefully and sometimes fight for justice and power and wealth and personal freedom. This conflict, which gets placed inside a larger one, definitely has an epic feel, with plenty of room for additional books.

I love following the story of heroes that are limited but awesome. I enjoy the spectacle of them using their gifts and skills and grit to gain an advantage and keep going against all odds, while meeting up with other awesome characters, other heroes, whose storylines cross theirs. To me, that's where the fun is, and this one has it in abundance. It's a big book, so some of the payoffs are longer in coming, but they're better for it. (And it's the start of a trilogy, so not everything is settled by a long shot, but there is a satisfying conclusion.) He gives you characters to root for, and gives you reasons to care. Well done.

Great action, excellent characters, terrific plotting and pacing, fantastic imagination--this feels like fantasy is supposed to: a world of wonder filled with amazing people and exciting adventure.

Highly recommended. :)

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Where I meant to like the novel more than I did, and I'm sorry

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[Some spoilers--veiled, but still spoilers.]

This book won awards, so I don't need to say that there are things to admire here. Of course there are.

Speaking for myself, not as a critic, I like the setting; I like the main character; I like the original world-building. But the plot is disappointing, and I didn't much enjoy it.

The story relies mostly on luck (two miraculous bits of luck) and very little on the actions of the main character. When she does act, it is only to present an argument and wait on the decision, like a court awaiting a jury's verdict; the resolution to the conflict is out of her hands, robbing the scene of most of its drama. It's like a game decided by coin-flip.

Binti comes from an interesting and complex society, and she has unique and exciting skills. So much is promised, and so many questions are raised, but there is very little payoff, and few questions answered. I hope I find the answers and excitement in the sequels.

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