Other recent books

[redbird]

I read a few of rysmiel's Rex Stout books while visiting Montreal: The Golden Spiders, Might as Well Be Dead, and Champagne for One. That I got through three is evidence that I liked them better than the short stories. (I'd also read Some Buried Caesar recently, courtesy of the library, after Rysmiel and others suggested I might like the Nero Wolfe stuff better at novel length.) I didn't make much of an effort to figure things out myself, just read along and watched Wolfe and Goodwin poke at each other and sometimes other people (notably in the comments to us the readers). I may or may not go back to them later.

Also in Montreal, I picked up a copy of Those Gentle Voices at a used book store, on the theory that it was an Effinger I'd never heard of. Unfortunately, it deserves its obscurity; it doesn't have the inventiveness or characterization of Effinger's best works, and is implausible on a number of levels. The book starts with some programmers analyzing data to find the source of an extraterrestrial signal. That's the best section, because it's got some good descriptions of New Orleans. In the next section, a multi-national expedition is sent to Wolf 359 to find the ETs; the mission as defined could, as the crew know, have been handled as well by computers, but computers wouldn't have started playing "let's enlighten the natives" and thus driven the plot.

That's where the plausibility falls down. The natives entirely lack tools (even the disposable sort used by non-human apes), language, and social structure (there's not even a connection between mothers and their children, once weaned), but not only catch on immediately when shown fire, but are speaking fluent English in weeks, jump into the iron age within a few years, and recapitulate all of Terrestrial in a linear fashion within a few decades. We're not offered so much as a handwave of how a species could have been that ripe to make the second, third, and so on inventions but never think to pick up a stick or rock to use as a tool.

[This post was prompted by glancing at some "50 book challenge" posts and noting that at this rate, I'll have no trouble whatsoever hitting 50. The key variable, I think, is how often I get to the library, with secondary factors being rereading and the amount of time I spend on things other than books, which include newspapers as well as Websites and Usenet. My best count is that the second and third Nero Wolfes, the Effinger, and Ryman's 253 are this year's, and The Golden Spiders would get filed under 2006.]

Comments

[lcohen]

this might seem odd, but i kind of read nero wolfe books as though they were science fiction. like there's this world-building that created this new york that never was but should have been and i love to visit that world sometimes. and yes, archie and nero are not exactly feminism's friends but i love stout's love of language. they're almost a guilty pleasure for me but i have reread all of them several times.

[redbird]

The world-building stuff is odd; there are all the bits that are exactly right, for me, the Taconic State Parkway and such, and then there's an address that has to be well into the Hudson River, or invented street names down in the Village, tossed in next to the Goodwin's entirely believable comment that he could sit all afternoon in a Village diner drinking milk and eating pie, and go unremarked by sketching a cat.

Champagne for One I almost had to read as science fiction, because so much has changed since then: it's not just dealing with Goodwin and Wolfe's different forms of sexism, it's that the entire plot depends on 1950s attitudes toward unmarried mothers. (Yes, this is one of the places where the reading protocols for historical fiction overlap those for sf, though the methods and kinds of incluing are different, and Stout wasn't providing stfnal levels of incluing, because he was writing about his own present, more or less).

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Those Gentle Voices is early GAE, when he was still best as a short-story writer. He did get out one excellent novel in his distinctively semi-gonzo early style, though: his very first, What Entropy Means To Me. If you haven't read that one, I'd recommend it. However, good luck finding it.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

GAE once said he wrote Those Gentle Voices while he was in the hospital and desperate need of money; he'd have been just as happy if you hadn't read it.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I ordered a copy of "Golden Spiders" a few days ago. And I have a steadily growing collection of Rex Stout books. Archie Goodwin is pretty much my favourite detective character.