Eat My Globe by Simon Majumdar

Back in the 1990s, I was pretty much obsessed with food. One of the things that fed my obsession was a website called Chowhound. I checked it every day, and one of the more interesting posters there was Simon Majumdar. I am no longer obsessed with food (chronic illness, disappearance of appetite, end of obsession), but I still occasionally hang out on Chowhound. And when I saw that Simon had a book out, I ordered it.

It tells of a year in which he pursued the goal: "Go everywhere, eat everything." Often more about his travels than the food, it is very entertaining and frequently funny. For example, here is a description of riding in a car in China, a trip frightening enough that he decided it was better to keep his eyes closed:

No sooner had I retreated into my little haven of security than I was dragged back from it by the sounds of singing. I use the term very loosely here. What came out of the driver's mouth was like the unutterable scream from a character in Dante's Divine Comedy and, as the driving got more dangerous, the caterwauling got louder. I am not sure if it was my own delirium by this point, but the wailing began to take on familiar sounds and, I am pretty sure that by the time we arrived in Yangshuo, I had endured much of the canon of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, together with a strained rendition of "The Candy Man" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

My driver had one more surprise for me. Before we arrived at our final destination, he needed to take a leak. So, did he pull over to a safe spot and find a bush? No. He stopped in the middle of the road. When I say stopped, I mean he slammed on the brakes. Only the welcome presence of Big Red (Simon's luggage) stopped me from plunging through the windshield. He then got out of the car, which was now parked in the middle of the road with trucks whizzing by either side, and began to pee against the front wheel. As he stood there, hands on hips and trousers open to the world, he gave me a wide grin and a big thumbs-up.

Oh, goodie, we'd bonded.

Despite such entertaining passages, it took me three months to finish the book, because reading about endless traveling and eating is grueling. Not as exhausting as Majumdar's actual trip, of course, but I got tired and slightly nauseated just reading about it all. Even when I go on a trip for a week, I grow tired of eating out. A year of traveling, seeking out food, overeating and over-drinking--just very tiring. And while I was tired reading Eat My Globe, Majumdar was absolutely shattered by the end of the trip. It is an interesting memoir, as much a personal journey as a physical one. I enjoyed the book, but could only recommend it to people who have been obsessed with food, themselves.

Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

Isabelle Spellman is a 30-year old private investigator who works for her family's business and acts like she's 13. She decides that there is something odd about her parents' new neighbor, and sets about pursuing his secrets with disastrous results. I think that the book was supposed to be funny, but really it's very hard to engage me when the narrator is a fucking idiot. And Isabelle is just that--a fucking idiot. Stupid and immature in one package. And stupid. Not funny, just annoying. But at least now I know that I'm not missing anything by avoiding the rest of the series.

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard

This is a Faustian tale about a necromancer who makes a wager with the devil to regain his soul, which he had signed away years previously and now wants back. The devil says that in return for his soul, he needs to convince 100 people to sign away theirs in the span of one year.

To entice people, Cabal is given use of a satanic carnival. He recruits the aid of his brother, Horst, who is a vampire but also much better at judging people than Johannes has ever been. And so they set off, visiting towns and trying to entice people to sign away their souls, usually in exchange for something they want. As they begin, they start collecting the souls of people who are rotten and bound for hell anyway. But as the deadline draws closer, Cabal grows more desperate, and he starts pushing people harder and casting his net wider.

There really isn't much tension about whether Cabal will come out successful in his bargain with the devil--in these stories, does the protagonist ever fail? The tension comes from what Cabal is willing to do to reach his goal. At the beginning, though he is a necromancer who signed his soul away to the devil for research purposes, and he is the sort of obsessively-driven person who doesn't relate well to normal people, you sort of root for him. He's no saint, but he does some good things, and they take care to collect the souls of people you can't sympathise with. But his moral fall as he grows desperate to win his wager does provide some tension, and it's sort of fun to have a vampire provide the moral conscience of the story.

The story is also, surprisingly, funny in places. It's a certain sort of humor, and I could tell that the author was British even before I read the back flap--for instance, the worst thing about Hell isn't the heat or the demons, it's the paperwork. I wouldn't call Johannes Cabal the Necromancer a comedy, but it has plenty of little funny moments. Overall, the novel drew me right in, and I enjoyed the first half or two-thirds a lot. It dragged a bit as I got closer to the end, but it was still an entertaining novel with a fairly satisfying ending. Recommended.

The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

The Steel Remains is a venture into fantasy by Morgan, who usually writes science fiction. (Last year I reviewed his novel Thirteen here.) This is dark sword and sorcery in the tradition of Elric and Kane, both of whom I read and loved as a teenager.

The main character of The Steel Remains is Ringil, a noble-born knight and retired war hero. He seems to be suffering from PTSD and we are treated to multiple, very unpleasant, flashbacks. Ringil also happens to be gay, in a world where it is illegal and you can be executed for it. And he has a very strained relationship with his father and brothers. All of which lead to Ringil walking around with a giant chip on his shoulder. He's an angry badass with a lot of ghosts walking around with him. He is summoned back into the family fold by his mother, who gives him the task of tracking down a cousin who was sold into slavery after her husband gambled away their life savings. It turns out to be a much harder, and more costly, task than he expects.

It is also the story of Archeth, a probably-immortal half-alien who serves a weak and manipulative emperor in a city growing ever more controlled by religious fanatics; and Egar Dragonbane, a northern barbarian who runs afoul of the local shaman and has to leave his tribe in order to survive. They are both old war friends of Ringil's, and naturally their storylines converge before the end of the novel.

There are certain things that can be expected from Morgan novels: they are violent, they are dark, and at least the last two I've read have featured religion as the evil guys. I'm an atheist--I have no use for organized religion. But I do get tired of heavy-handed religious persecution in plotting. In fact, I think I've been tired of it since I read Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels about 25 years ago. So the evil religious orders were a real turn-off for me--not because I want to defend religion, but just because I've seen it plenty of times before, and I'm tired of it. I nearly gave up on The Steel Remains quite early on, because it just wasn't really working for me. But I stuck with it, and I'm very glad I did, as it got better as it went along. It takes us to weird and horrible places, not the least of them Ringil's memories. But I appreciated having a character who was damaged by the horrible things that had happened to him--it made him more believable.

The Steel Remains is obviously set up so that it can be the first of a series, and I suppose that I will read the next one when it comes out. I read this one as a library book, but I will be purchasing a copy of my own, as this one is worth re-reading. I am so happy to find a good old-fashioned sword and sorcery novel of the sort I used to read in my teens. Highly recommended, but not for the homophobic.

Drood by Dan Simmons

I am probably writing this review too soon, because I just finished the book and haven't yet decided what I think of Drood. But if I delay writing this review, I will probably never get around to writing it, so here goes:

Drood is a dark mysterious thriller that spans the last five years of Charles Dickens's life, as narrated by his friend and fellow-writer Wilkie Collins. Now, I am perhaps not the ideal reader for this work, as I haven't cared for what I've read of Dickens's and Collins's writing. The book, as told by Collins, weighs in at 771 pages, which seemed excessive to me. It is one of those historical novels which gives one the feeling that the writer did a lot of research, and is determined to make us all suffer for it. An alternate view might be that it is an accurate imitation of the style of a writer whose style I dislike. Either way, the pace is glacially slow and I nearly gave up halfway through.

The novel begins with a train crash. Dickens was traveling on a train that derailed near Staplehurst. He was not seriously injured, but was horrified by the carnage that he witnessed. He also told his friend Collins that he had met an eerie and mysterious man named Drood, who Dickens though might have been killing the wounded rather than offering them aid. Dickens becomes fascinated with Drood and sets out to find him, bringing Collins along with him on a late-night tour of the London sewers. Dickens claims he found Drood, and later Collins gets sucked into Drood's sinister cult. The story is interspersed with details of Collins's social life, his writing projects, and his increasing drug usage, at a very leisurely pace.

Neither Dickens or Collins are portrayed as particularly likable, and I found their competitive relationship very believable. They were friends, but were also rivals and their relationship soured later in life. For example, when Dickens says that he intends to take a play Collins wrote and "fix" the problems to improve it and open the show in Paris under his own name, Collins's rage is certainly justified. Likewise, Collins's sniping to the reader about how his serialised novels sold better than Dickens's seemed very realistic. By the time Collins decides to murder Dickens it seems reasonable and justified, though it is unclear if Collins was of sound mind when he made that decision. The book also adeptly skewers the values of a Victorian "gentleman", as both Dickens and Collins behave quite badly without any apparent hesitation, but Collins sometimes gets huffy over minor things like being asked to share things Dickens has told him. Apparently Victorian gentlemen may visit whores and opium dens, abandon his wife, keep multiple mistresses, and father illegitimate children, but a gentleman never betrays a confidence.

I am uncertain whether I liked Drood. It is, as I said, overly long, and would benefit from greater brevity. The story picks up after 400 pages or so, and it eventually becomes a fairly compelling read. The ending was rather unsatisfying, however, and I finished discontented. I suppose I am glad I read it, but would not recommend it to most other readers.