Top Ten Literary Characters I’d Adopt

Posted on March 14, 2011 by smellincoffee

This week the Broke and the Bookish are stocking their family trees with literary figures!

1. Hari Seldon (Foundation,  Isaac Asimov)

He’s the grandfather who knows eeeeeeeverything.

2. Minerva McGonnagal (Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling)

“Aunt Minnie”, anyone?  Tough, but kindly.

3. Gred and Forge Weasley (Harry Potter)

Living in the same house as these two would be a constant riot, assuming I was IN on their jokes and not the butt of them. (“Out of the way, SERIOUSLY evil wizard coming through!)

4. Captain Sir Edward Pellew (Horatio Hornblower, C.S. Forester)

I’m more enamored of his character from the movies than the books (less developed in print), but he’s a good man: not just a good soldier in terms of ‘doing his duty’, but he cares about the job he does and will bend the rules if need be.  Robert Lindsay makes the father-son dynamic between himself and Horatio come through spendidly.

Speaking of whom…

5. Horatio Hornblower
Were Hornblower a cousin or brother of mine, I could see the two of us being introspective, overly intellectual, and socially awkward at parties together.

6. Brigadier McLean (The Fort, Bernard Cornwell)
The perfect affable uncle and the most humane soldier I’ve ever read of.

7. Violet and Klaus Baudelaire (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler)

One is fiendishly inventive, the other a bookworm — what’s not to like?

…aside from the hammy villain who intends to kill/enslave/otherwise discomfit them?

8. Ellie Arroway (Contact, Carl Sagan)

No funding? No problem. She’ll sit in the field and listen HERSELF. 

Cool older sister/aunt/mom?  Doesn’t really matter. She’s passionate about science, hopeful, and can give you a lecture on demand — just point at a star and ask, “What’s that?”

9. Either Remus Lupin or Gordianus the Finder (Roma sub Rosa series)
They’d both make good uncles.

10: Captains Jean-Luc Picard and Kathyrn Janeway (various books, including Mosaic by Jeri Taylor)

I like reading about ship captains the most when they have a paternal air about them — not a patronizing one,  but to the point that the reader knows they care about the people under their command.  Janeway is especially noticable in this regard.

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A Man in Full

Posted on March 13, 2011 by smellincoffee

A Man in Full
© 1998 Tom Wolfe
727 pages

Zeus! Send me what trial thou wilt!

A Man in Full is an epic story of individuals grappling with life, facing trials that force them to reconsider their worth and threaten to destroy them utterly, as well as temptations for easy escape and riches. It’s primarily the story of two men from radically different backgrounds living across a continent from one another whose fates are bound together as if by destiny.
Charles Croker is a ‘bull of a man’, a good ol’ boy who rose from the backwoods to the boardroom of Atlanta’s largest real-estate company through risk-taking courage and brass. His work has shaped the very skyline of Atlanta and made him as rich as Croesus. He revels in his power, success, and influence, and no more so during his grandiose parties at a large ranch where he plays at being the master of a plantation in southern Georgia. He’s a man used to everything going his way, but now his latest risk has failed: he’s nearly a billion dollars in debt and sliding fast, emboldening those who see in his decline an opportunity for their own success.  Croker’s foil is Conrad Hensley, a working man from San Francisco with a sense of honor and personal responsibility who’s poor in opportunity. Conrad works in a refrigerated warehouse in circumstances so dire that they make the warehouse’s owner — one Mr. Charles Croker — shiver in dread from a continent away.  Conrad accepts the brutal work because it means creating a better future for himself, but his hopes are thrown against the wall when Croker decides to institute mass layoffs rather than sell any of his five personal jets. For Conrad, it’s the beginning of a tumultous downhill sldie that ends only in prison.
Though there are other characters of note, Croker and Conrad are the central actors whose personalities and lives function as counterpoints for the others. Croker’s self-worth is based on his ability to control his circumstances, his accomplishments in doing so, and in the way his forceful personality makes others act around him. He puts great stock in his status as a Leader, as a ruler of men: he expects his trophy wife, children, and ‘black retainers’ to know their place, and feels pleasure that he, Cap’m Charlie, can take care of them.  Conrad, on the other hand, has never known the privilege of being able to change his circumstances: he only knows that he cannot allow them to get the better of them. He is driven to overcome adversity, to say “YES!” to life, and committed to the struggle. This emotional resilence and self-determination are amplified when he accidentally acquires a copy of The Stoics while in prison and encounters the life of Epictetus, a slave and prisoner-turned-philosophy who taught his students that the only posession anyone has is his or her character.  Isolated in a place seemingly designed to crush spirits, Conrad clings to Epicteus as a life preserver and learns to express courage in the face of a chorus that urges him to submit — courage that he will later try to impress upon other people, including Charlie Croker. 

Given my interest in Stoic philosophy, this book has been on my radar for quite some time. Its presumed setting in Atlanta’s business world turned me off, though, and Charles Croker is an entirely unsympathetic character from the start, whose boorishness does nothing to discredit my prejudices against  business moguls. He begins the book in self-inflicted steep decline, though, and this I watched with morbid interest while wondering what the other story threads about race and Atlanta politics had to do with his or Conrad’s stories.  Conrad is the true hero of the novel, standing stall among a cast of spoiled and avarice-obsessed bankers, businessmen, politicans, and high-society members.  While Croker bitterly surrenders to the idea that his fate is in the hands of other people — after steadily decaying in the midst of debt,  manipulation, confusion, and physical infirmity — Conrad becomes a devotee of Stoicism and determines that he will be the ‘master of his fate, the captain of his soul’*  in spite of his circumstances, being trapped in the violent world of US prisons. Ultimately the stories of Wolfe’s various characters converge in triumph and redemption, giving me a satisfying conclusion after a weekend of gripping entertainment.
For this story of trials, character, and redemption alone I would reccommend the book, but Wolfe also has a visceral style that makes his characters, their environment, and their fates seem desperately real — and often unpleasant. The sheer earthiness of his language and syntax captivated me, and works well to generate pathos. 
Though not without its faults, A Man in Full kept my attention all weekend along, and I’d reccommend it — especially to those interested in Stoicism.

* “Invictus“, William Ernest Henley
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Booking through Thursday: Multi-Tasking

Posted on March 10, 2011 by smellincoffee

Booking through Thursday wants to know:  Do you multi-task when you read? Do other things like stirring things on the stove, brushing your teeth, watching television, knitting, walking, et cetera?

“My mother always said, ‘If you try to combine talking and eating, you’ll end up doing neither very well!’” – Miles O’Brien

 I am rarely far from a book, and often turn to one if I have downtime. Combining reading with eating has been a habit of mine since childhood, to the effect that I’m constantly sipping water while reading — I’m used to the combined stimuli. While living on-campus, I often brought a book with me to the dining hall in case I found no friends to eat with, and I tended to stay long after the meal sipping coffee or hot tea, immersed in my book.

Though I do not watch much television, when I do I mute the commercials and read between the breaks — usually my ‘leisure’ reading, as books in history, science, philosophy, or other such serious topics demand more attention than the commercial break period provides.

I also combine music and reading — sometimes having music on as background accompianment, but often listening to music that corresponds to the subject at hand. For instance, while reading “Our Oriental Heritage”, I listened to music from India and Japan while reading the histories of those respective nations — and when reading one of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, I put on Bosch’s favorite jazz  to better immerse myself in the character’s environment. Last week, while reading Augstine’s “Confessions”, I listened to both Benedictine chants and classical music (specifically, Beethoven), because they seemed appropriate.  I enjoy combining music and literature in this way.

I sometimes combine reading and napping, but this is entirely by accident!

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Inferno

Posted on March 9, 2011 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Millennium, Book III: Inferno

© 2000 Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

410 pages

“I did everything I could,” Sisko cried into the silence that engulfed him.
But everything he had ever done was for nothing.
Everything that had ever been was for nothing.
Zero seconds.
It was over. (p. 366, The War of the Prophets) 

Well, it’s over. The universe is kaput. The two Bajoran wormholes have collided and the very fabric of existence winked away, just as the Bajoran prophecies foretold.  But the competing gods of Bajor, the Prophets and the Pah-Wraiths,  are still fighting — and while their cosmic struggle tarries for just a little while longer, hope lingers for what few survivors there are. In the final moments of the universe’s existence, two ships entered the Bajoran wormholes, and were thus sheltered from oblivion. Aboard them are the crew of the Defiant,  three ’emissaries’, and a scattering of civilians. As surprised as most of them are to learn that the Bajoran prophecies came to past, the wormholes — now, truly, the Celestial Temple — also carry within them the space station Deep Space Nine, protected — as with the ships — inside a bubble of existence. Deep Space Nine still exists — though in what timeframe, no one can be sure — and by returning home, Sisko and his crew hope to change history and prevent the end of everything.
This is truly a wild series. The first novel contained an intriguing mystery that partially buds off the station’s history, while the second throws the reader into a kind of fantasy/political drama. Inferno is another beast all together: a science fiction novel in which our characters try to figure out a way to restore existence from the past without actually changing the past: every timeline, every ‘universe’ is like one face of a diamond which is the multiverse, and if the multiverse itself is destroyed, nothing else matters. I like time travel stories, and this novel forces Sisko, Kira, O’Brian, Jadzia Dax, Worf, Jake Sisko, Quark, Garak, and others to scurry around the station while constantly shifting to various timeframes, trying to figure out some way of preventing history from repeating itself while being harried by two madmen, the Pah-Wraith possessed Gul Dukat and  Kai Weyoun, infested by nanites that make him a loyal servant of the other Pah-Wraiths.  Though this has been a series deep in Bajoran mythology, here it takes a backseat to temporal mechanics and a race against….well, time. True to form for a book about time travel, quite a few plot developments are counterintuitive and resolve — or create — some of the mysteries seen in the first book. The ending shocks even the characters. While this series isn’t notable for the kind of intense character drama seen in say, David Mack’s work, there are some golden scenes in here — most notably, between Sisko and his son. 
This series was written after the television show’s end, and is set before “Tears of the Prophets”, in which a canon Pah-Wraiths v. Prophets storyline erupts. (Jadzia Dax is killed there, while she’s still alive and kicking here.)  Foreshadowing for the rest of the sixth season and the whole of the seventh season abound,  though they tend toward the depressing — the writers allude to Jadzia’s future death on several occasional throughout the series. 
As good as I remembered. Though a different kind of epic story than Destiny,  Millennium is grand storytelling in its own class.
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The War of the Prophets

Posted on March 8, 2011 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Millenium: Book II, The War of the Prophets
© 2000 Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
372 pages

Riker reappeared on the virwer, eyes afire with rage. “The War of the Prophets is coming! Choose your side, Emissary — because this is your war now!”  – p. 408, The Fall of Terok Nor

When Captain Sisko and the rest of the Ds9 crew recovered three lost Bajoran artifacts — the lost Orbs of Jalbador — they thought a great mystery and the murderous schemes surrounding it had finally been put to rest. When when the three orbs spontaneously gathered together and opened a second wormhole, glowing crimson,  the Defiant and all aboard her were thrown into the future while attempting to escape the destruction of Deep Space Nine.  They found themselves trapped in a nightmarish future, where Klingons, Cardassians, and humans were all but extinct species — where the remnant of Starfleet which remained is allied with the Borg and dedicated to the wholesale destruction of Bajor –a Bajor which is the seat of power for a new, mighty empire intent on enacting the Apocalypse.

Defiant jumps 25 years into the future and is immediately caught between the opposing forces: the Ascendancy need Sisko alive to fulfill prophecy, while Starfleet is determined to kill or capture Sisko to prevent his taking a role in the things to come. Gone is the Prime Directive and Starfleet’s scientific, diplomatic culture:  the universe may very well be doomed if Bajor is not eradicated. It’s a bizarre, disturbing future the authors introduce us to, and when Defiant’s crew is captured by both warring parties, the readers are able to see how truly demented the powers that be have become. Weyoun, formerly an agent of the Dominion, is now Kai of the Bajoran people — and while he happily waits for the universe to end in two weeks, Starfleet —  and specifically, Fleet Admiral Jean-Luc Picard and Captain Nog — are sending a timeship 25,000 years into the past to prevent cosmic catastrophe.

Sheer morbid curiosity in this strange world kept me reading the first time, but now I enjoy it more for the fun the authors had with their characters. Kira is the only weak point, reduced to a religious fanatic who yells “That’s blasphemy” and does little else. Garak, the station’s longterm resident Cardassian and former covert operative for the Obsidian Order, gives a unique perspective on the end of things, commenting surreally as he awaits the inevitable.  The drama ramps up toward the end, when Starfleet’s master plan is supposed to unfold….but it all goes to hell.

I had no intention of reading this so soon after The Fall of Terok Nor, but I picked it up to read with supper…and didn’t stop until I was done. If I can find the third book, I just may read the entire trilogy in as many days.

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Top Ten Dynamic Duos

Posted on March 7, 2011 by smellincoffee

This week the Broke and the Bookish are discussing powerful duos — best friends, nemeses, and couples.

1. Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort (Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling)

These two are tied together by prophecy, destined for mutual destruction — for neither can live while the other survives. Potter’s role in Voldemort’s first defeat, his rebirth, and his eventual downfall drive the Potter series. They’re also tied together in a more…personal way, which i’ll not mention for those who haven’t read from Order of the Phoenix on.

2. Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw  (Robots series, Isaac Asimov)
Elijah Baley is a curmudgeonly detective who doesn’t like robots and has no interest in space. Naturally, he’s paired with a robot and sent into space to solve crimes. I loved seeing Baley mature to the point that he regarded Daneel as a friend.

3. Gene and Phineas, A Separate Peace (John Knowles)
These two are best friends, but the relationship is clearly unhealthy and  antagonistic at times. I’d comment further, but for fear of spoiling a classic for someone who’s not read it…

4. Risika and Aubrey, In the Forests of the Night
Risika and Aubrey are both vampires taken by the same woman, Aether, and locked in a relationship of mutual hatred.  They are two of the most powerful vampires living, and both pride and contempt for the other keep them one from acknowledging the other as greater. Their cat-and-mouse game drives the book until they finally descend into a final conflict.

5. Kirk and Spock

The picture that launched a thousand fanzines…

Possibly cheating even that their relationship first appeared on television, but it’s been further developed in countless novels. Besides, I’d be remiss in not mentioning them! According to Michael Okuda,  Kirk and his two best friends were complements of the other:  Spock represented logic, McCoy humanistic emotion, and Kirk the strength of will. (Okuda contributed heavily to TOS and TNG: his comments on the trio come from “The Conscience of the King”‘s text commentary.)

6. David and Goliath, Hebrew texts
You undoubtedly recognize the reference and know what it means, but I doubt that many people are aware of the original story — in which a boy, disgusted by the cowardice of his kin, takes up the sling and throws rocks at a giant’s head,  knocking him unconscious and then slaying him with his own sword.  That’s actually more impressive to me than the stone-throwing, because how did a little kid manage to saw off a grown man’s head with a sword bigger than himself?

7, Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It’s been years since I read any of the Holmes stories, but these two sprang to mind fairly quickly upon reading the subject for this week.

8. Horatio Hornblower and William Bush (Horatio Hornblower series, C.S. Forester)

Hornblower and Bush are introduced in Captain Horatio Hornblower, and the A&E movies show their meeting. Their close camaraderie — Bush is as close to a friend as Hornblower ever has in the book series — makes the end of the Napoleonic wars particularly poignant. Hornblower is marked by his formality, reserve, and introspection, but he and Mr. Bush are obviously fond of each other:  Bush, the ever-faithful lieutenant, made Hornblower more human.

9. The Narrator and Merlin, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
The narrator is a 19th century man thrown back into the 700s or so, where he decides to remake the medieval world into a semblance of his own. Progressive and intellectual, his greatest foe is Merlin — who represents tradition, authority, and superstition. When I read this for the first time, I remember despising Merlin and even today…

10. Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay, A Tale of Two Cities & A Far Better Rest, Charles Dickens and Suzanne Alleyn.

The lives of these two lookalikes converge repeatedly before and during the French Revolution, and their love for the same woman will save the one and redeem the other.

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Teaser Tuesday (8 March)

Posted on March 7, 2011 by smellincoffee

Ah, teaser Tuesday time again.

“And the sea-monsters here are extraordinary,” McLean went on, “like dragons, wouldn’t you say, John? Pink dragons with green spots?”
“Indeed, sir,” Moore said, then gave a start as he belatedly realized the brigadier was teasing him.

p. 51, The Fort. Bernard Cornwell

Garak regarded the doctor warily, the reptilian nobs of his forehead bunching together in deep furrows.”Oh, doctor, I’m afraid that in matters of mysterious deaths, I am entirely bereft of experience.”
Quark took some comfort in noting that no one in the infirmary seemed to believe Garak any more than they believed him.

– 108, The Fall of Terok Nor. Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

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The Fall of Terok Nor

Posted on March 7, 2011 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Millennium, Book I, The Fall of Terok Nor
© 2000 Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
464 pages



The Millenium trilogy was, prior to Destiny, the most epic story ever approached in Trek literature, and  in fact even spawned a PC game — a third-person action/adventure shooter called The Fallen.  It’s a story of the past and future, of grand mythology, in which the good guys battle for nothing less than the existence of the Universe — and lose. It brings together characters from all the Next Generation-era shows,  and is responsible for many of my favorite scenes in Trek literature. But it all started when an Andorian merchantman of questionable repute was found dead in the lower levels of the station…and flooded  Deep Space Nine with mysteries.

The investigation of the Andorian’s murder leads to two more bodies — old bodies, which had been fused into the station‘s bulkheads at some point around the Day of Withdrawal, when the Cardassian Union ended its occupation of Bajor and abandoned its ore-mining station — a day, strangely enough, that three of the station’s residents who were around back then can’t remember.  Suddenly smugglers are coming to the station in droves, which frustrates Captain Sisko mightily, given that he’s in the middle of the Federation’s equivalent of World War 2.  All the little threads seem to lead to three religious artifacts, the Red Orbs of Jalbador — which could open a second wormhole. Though dismissed by most Bajorans as apocryphal,  the various smugglers, a sect of Bajoran cultists, and three Cardassian operatives pretending to be humanitarian officials are all quite obviously interested in finding them.

This first volume of the trilogy is an impressive start: mystery and adventure seem to end in resolution, only things to go badly wrong: Terok Nor ends with the destruction of the station and the DS9 crew aboard the Defiant being thrown into a nightmare.

I had no intention of re-reading this: I just found the first volume while digging through a trunk of books looking for The Ancestor’s Tale,  and foolishly opened it up to see if it was good as I remembered. I read 200+ pages that very night and 200+ more the next day. It would appear my fond memories do it justice.

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Reap the Whirlwind

Posted on March 7, 2011 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind (Book Three)
© 2007 David Mack
464 pages, including a ‘Vanguard Minipedia’, which combines a glossary and dramatis personae. 


 
Cover art by Doug Drexler, depicting the scoutship USS Sagittarius being pursued by a Klingon cruiser
 At the edge of known space, at the borders of three great powers — the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Tholian Assembly — lies the mysterious Taurus Reach, a region dominated by solar systems bearing the mark of having once been the seat of power for an ancient, immensely powerful, organizations. The Federation is eager to learn the Reach’s secrets, but given the immense power they may unearth, their investigation must be done largely in secret. Vanguard Station sits at the edge of the reach, but only a select few of its officers know its importance in administrating this top-secret project. Lives have already been lost, but this pandora’s box is only just beginning to spill out its contents — and they will change the lives of individuals aboard Vanguard and stagger the powers involved.

David Mack created the Vanguard series with this vast mystery already in mind, and in Reap the Whirlwind the drama skyrockets. The Federation’s secret is costing lives, and the awakened power is increasingly unpredictable and aggressive. Reap is easily the most eventful book in the series thus far, radically changing the destinies of several of Vanguard’s officers by book’s end. Commodore Diego Reyes commands most of the reader’s attention, as he struggles to keep a lid on a situation that proves more deadly by the day. Meanwhile, the resident agent of Starfleet Intelligence realizes her manipulations have consequences, both personally and professionally. Though there’s a fair bit of character development, the rise of the ‘Shedai’ and the havoc they wreak predominate the novel. Reap also introduces Dr. Carol Marcus, and given that ‘Clark Terrell’ is also present, it looks like this novel may tie-in to The Wrath of KHAAAAAAAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! 

Even though some of my favorite characters are being sorely absused, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.


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Confessions

Posted on March 3, 2011 by smellincoffee

Confessions
Augustine of Hippo, 354 – 430
Translation © 1961 R.S. Pine-Coffin
346 pages

At the age of nineteen a young man encountered the golden voice of Cicero. Inspired by Cicero’s lush oratory, this boy began to pursue the love of wisdom, philosophy; truth. Ultimately this journey brought him to the faith of his mother, to the Catholic church, and he became a saint — molding the minds of generations to come through his books, now part of the canon of western literature. Confessions records the ten years Augustine spent shifting from Manichaeism  and contempt of Christianity to becoming an ardent saint, one with an impressive talent for self-loathing.

The bulk of the Confessions is a prayerful biographical narrative, in which Augustine monitors his slow transformation — constantly lamenting over the errors of youth and offering earnest prayers of thanks and adoration toward the god he eventually found. Following his conversion-in-heart and conversion-in-fact, Augustine muses on memory, the senses, temptation, and theology before devoting a final book to more praise. The praise and adoration Augustine lavishes upon his god and the church are rivaled only by the amount of scorn he heaps upon himself, others, the cares of life, and earthly pressures. The man is a prodigy, a raging Puritan before his time. I found this self-debasement rather dreary and depressing, and it’s part of the reason I’ve been pecking at the book since mid-November while thinking of Augustine as “that miserable bishop” and “Gloomy Gus”.  This is not a man who I want to emulate.

I approached the book in the first place as a student of philosophy and the humanities, and I hoped to find in Augustine a brother-spirit. This was not the case, for in spite of his praise and quest of ‘truth’,  Augustine accepts the dogma of scriptures freely, never so much as questioning it, and regards those who are interested in the world with derision. The Platonic contempt for material things is fully present here, and rather than studying science, Augustine would advise us to keep our minds on more spiritual things, like the dozens of pages he devoted to sorting out what ‘Moses’ really meant when he wrote that God created “the earth and heavens” and that earth was a ‘formless void’, where ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep’.  He wrote page after page, which I read in utter bafflement. Theology, like debating the meaning of the trinity, often has this effect on me, for it seems no more potent than debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s minds like Augustine’s that made the medieval world, and I do not say that as a compliment. In principle, I admire his desire to find truth and to be a better person,  but I found nothing of inspiration here. I appreciated his skepticism toward astrology and horoscopes (which he developed through reason and the lack of evidential proof), and  I gleaned some historical knowledge from his biographical account — for instance, the Academics were still around in Rome at this time, and apparently influenced by the Skeptical belief that nothing could be known for certain — but that was it.  Augustine is a man whose mind was fixated on the ethereal, consumed by ideological commitment.  He’d make an excellent Muslim (very keen on submission to God, this one) or a Christian puritan, but…as someone who regards ‘orthodoxy’ as a word more obscene than any of George Carlin’s famous “seven”, I felt discouraged by his utter lack of spirit.

Reading the book did help me though, in that it made me realize how easily the contemplative life can turn people into sanctimonious sourpusses. As someone interested in this kind of reflection, but also insistence on enjoying life, it prompted me to decide to err on the side of pleasure — in Bernard Cornwell’s words, to be more of a cavalier than a puritan.

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