Review: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finding a life story like this one is a once in a lifetime opportunity for an author. Louis Zamperini seemed to live a host of lives, each one pushing the limits of the human experience: Olympic runner, pilot, castaway, prisoner of war, haunted veteran.

Hillenbrand's writing is clear and elegant - it was a long book, but the story flew past. Her extensive research comes alive on the page, and the plot never loses focus as non-fiction sometimes can. The story she tells is one of the most incredible human experiences I can think of, and plumbs both the darkest depths of depravity and the greatest tests of spirit. I was reading this simultaneously with 1984, and the fictional dystopian torture prisons were put to shame.

It's not all pain and suffering, though. There's all the antics, mischief and sabotage you'd expect of prisoners of war, their determination only getting stronger in the face of abuse. The strength that these prisoners take from each other's company is far more than the sum of its parts.

This book gets a place of honour on my True Tales of Harrowing Adventure shelf. Terrifying, enraging and ultimately uplifting.

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Review: Forever Free

Forever Free by Joe Haldeman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like it or not, we plunge forward into the unknown future. If you don't like where things are going, why not tap out for a bit - and try again in 40,000 years? (If you can make it...)

While the critics seem divided on this one, I was blown away. Forever Free is brimming with ideas, and takes all the ideas introduced in Forever War into new territory and permutations. Like Orson Scott Card's Ender series, Haldeman writes strange and fascinating societies, systems, species and philosophies - and not through dry, world-building exposition, but as a conversation about what it means to be human.

William Mandella (kinda sounds like Haldeman backwards, don't it?) is a charming narrator. Raised by hippie parents in a 1970s nudist camp, he remains indelibly, reassuringly human even as the very nature of existence is called into question.

Sci-fi fans: read these books! (While this is called Forever War #3, apparently the middle one, Forever Peace, is standalone. This picks up shortly after Forever War #1 left off.)

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Review: The Silver Pigs

The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ancient Rome is fascinating. It holds the beginnings of so much of our modern world, and the political intrigues, military campaigns, unsettlingly familiar cultural practices and world-devouring expansion give us a lifetime of incredible stories. I want to know it all.

Unfortunately, this means that I struggle to read fiction about it. I don't want to start mixing up the real, breathtaking history of it with someone else's ideas. So it's really too bad that Lindsey Davis's writing is so entertaining. For a first novel, it was really quite good: funny, exciting, and interesting characters. The plot got a little confused at times, but the engaging voice and forward momentum glossed things over well enough.

This is only the first of a daunting twenty books about the same uncouth, grizzled detective. While his hard-boiledness is a little cliche at first, he reveals enough depth and complexity to at least interest me further (but for my earlier objection). He's a good replacement for, say, Jack Reacher, who wears a little thin after the too-many installments I've read. It's also nice to read a detective novel by a female author, meaning our hyper-masculine protagonist treats the women in his life with something approaching decency. (I'm looking at you, Reacher.)

Maybe I will try another one, after all...

And if you're interested in the ancient Rome non-fiction I was mooning over, I couldn't oversell the riveting Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland.

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Review: Running Blind

Running Blind by Lee Child
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The women in Jack Reacher's life are either dogs or foxes, but they're certainly not actual human people. This installment is particularly stuffed with kalokagathia. (I've been wanting a chance to use this word since reading it in Will Storr's brilliant Selfie - it's a fancy way of saying that outer beauty equals inner beauty.)

I was pretty pleased with myself for solving the mystery way early. Spoiler: the ugly girl did it.[the ugly girl did it. (hide spoiler)]

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Review: 1984

1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bleak! Have something else on the go to lighten the mood. My concurrent nonfiction is about American POWs being starved, tortured and generally dehumanized in Japanese prison camps (Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand), and the parallels in abuse are frightening.

I gave this book a go because it was a cultural touchstone I'd never read. It is infinitely more readable than Brave New World, which was the other big dystopia book I somehow skipped in high school. Orwell's characters actually live, feel, and struggle to retain a self. Beware, however, when someone starts to read a political manifesto, because you're going to get, like, the whole thing. (Let alone the interminable appendix on the grammatical construction of NewSpeak - this book does not require a Silmarillion!)

While our hero is constantly dreaming of being part of the Glorious Manly Rebellion, the more interesting character is his love interest, Julia. She sings the party rhetoric louder than anyone, but has been finding ways to flaunt the system her whole life.

Her unquestioning acceptance of totalitarian rule rings scarily true - does any young person today even flinch at giving over their name, address, GPS location, contact list, or photo albums so they can download an app? But she steals, cheats, lies and runs away to live a parallel, private life, and is utterly blase about it. Tyranny is normalized, but so is small, personal rebellion. She's bored by talk of revolution and escape and bringing down Big Brother, which Idealistic Hero Man must resent, but how many of us would actually be her?

Anyway, time for something optimistic. (On Tyranny, perhaps, Mom?)

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Review: The Forever War

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite the title, this not a book about combat. It's about the human experience as a pawn in a faceless military machine. It's also a vision of several futures, as soldier William Mandella travels across centuries of bureaucracy (preserved by the relativistic effects of long stretches of near-lightspeed travel). Published in 1974, it's an anti-war war book, rife with cynicism, disillusionment, and alienation.

It's also a story about how a man from our world (the protagonist is born in the 1970s) deals with being thrown into the future, having to adapt to changing realities of society, combat, and even what it means to be human. By the time he gets to the year 3143, he's just as much an alien as the "enemy", who we barely meet.

There's no sci-fi messiah, no computer overlord, and no futuristic deus ex machina, all of which is refreshing. The imagined technology is terrific (remember the "I know kung fu" sequence from the Matrix? It's a direct lift from Haldeman) but the plot stays very human. The ending is a bit trite, in which our hero lives happily ever after in paradise and restores the nuclear family, but the book remains a muscular, imaginative, plausible vision of what our world could become.

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Review: Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts by Will Storr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just finished a re-read, and it stands up to my original five star rating. An open-minded cynic's investigation into the paranormal, but also an examination of the people who believe, experience and reject it. The book finishes with more questions than it starts with, but gives an overview of the range of experiences, delves into a little history, and surveys the scientific literature on the subject of ghosts, hauntings, possession and the afterlife.

This book will appeal not just to fans of the occult, but anyone who's heard a story or seen a thing they can't explain. The writing is sharp and funny, and Storr immerses himself in his studies. He shows compassion for the looniest, but has little patience for the charlatans. In these subjects, you see the ground being laid for his next project - Heretics: Adventures With The Enemies Of Science - which is also terrific.

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Review: Annihilation

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I venture to say: this is not sci-fi! This is the horror of the unknown, wherein eldritch forces twist the world and warp our very selves!

It's slow like a roller coaster ratcheting up a hill. Vandermeer lets the story drip out slowly, as we strain to make sense of things along with our hero. The book drifts further and further into a dreamlike state, where some mysterious and seemingly inevitable fate looms. It evokes a lot of the same uncanny as The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, another great bite-sized horror.

This is a very short read, and though it's the first of a trilogy it stands alone, provided you don't need every question answered. The concept carried me through to the last page, but I felt no need to unravel things any further. (I was also warned off the second and third installments by a trusted friend, so the Wikipedia plot summary was enough for me.)

If you liked this flavour of horror, I highly recommend Nick Cutter, specifically Little Heaven. Think: similar Eldritch Horror but throw in a Jim Jones-style cult from whom three murderous weirdos try to rescue a little kid.

Also:
Squads have hypnotic triggers implanted by their commanders - not really a spoiler - which I'd never run across before, until one day later when I started The Forever War, from almost fifty years earlier. I'm clearly behind on my tropes.

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Review: American Pastoral

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The older a river gets, the more winding it becomes. This makes for a scenic paddle, but don't expect to cover much ground.

"An act of domestic terrorism blows apart the perfect family" - the plot summary doesn't reveal how many pages are spent detailing the ins and outs of the glove manufacturing process in New Jersey. Further, no matter how many characters the narrator writes off as bores, their pedantry is transcribed at length. I almost never skim; I skimmed a lot. Against this drone, a few key scenes stood out with shocking immediacy. While the contrast must have been intentional, it required serious investment to appreciate it.

For readers who have followed Philip Roth through his writing life, I'd be interested to know your thoughts. Is this his voice, or is this a put-on of rambling American sentimentalism? It all felt a bit long and heavy.

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