Jesse's review

[close]

blog this review

Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/862816.Fragile_Things_Short_Fictions_and_Wonders?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (P.S.)" border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41c%2BLs2b2KL._SL160_.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/862816.Fragile_Things_Short_Fictions_and_Wonders?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1882.Neil_Gaiman">Neil Gaiman</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/22010495?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>Every so often, I am consumed with the desire to revisit those nerd days, or nerd-reading days, not kidding ourselves about our dialectical relation to nerdiness today, and devour some...well, what I used to be nerdishly clear about reading was science fantasy, which was sort of a specialized subset of both genres: barbarians vs. ray guns, that sort of thing. (From what I can tell now, the present-day analogue is these 9-book, 900-page-novel series people keep writing, which surely has some Internet-age atavism to it.) I recall liking L. Sprague de Camp a lot, though I think I could name maybe one of his books now. Am not sure that any other genre is any less boundary-policing (cozy mysteries, historicals, hard-boiled, procedurals; or the various declensions of the romance novel, all distinguished by explicitness), so maybe it's the nerdish fervor you see here about what goes, and doesn't go, in which category that's distinctive.<br/><br/>Anyway, so I saw the latest Neil Gaiman collection, Fragile Things, I think first when we were stuck at JFK for like 4 hours, and thought, hey, that looks like fun. Had heard he was good but never really investigated. S. noted that he has one of the all-time worst names to have in middle school, though maybe marginally less so in England. (Whereas if he'd been Neil Poof...) Made me wonder about the whole chicken-and-egg aspect, since the kind of writer you're going to get laughed at for carrying around in middle school has <i>precisely</i> the sort of name that's going to get laughed at in middle school. Maybe there's some sort of genetic determinism at work. Nobody named Buffo McBully writes SF or whatever 12-year-old nerds read; nope, they're named Gaiman or Moorcock. Or Lovecraft. Seriously, it's like you're just not allowed to publish unless your name can be somehow rendered snickeringly sexual.<br/><br/>Soo...found a copy used, read it, and loved it. Gaiman's genius is to take one-liners as story ideas (dotty old bat finds Holy Grail, Sherlock Holmes vs. Lovecraft monsters, Grendel in the Scottish highlands, Snow White as a vampire [she does, after all, look pretty damn pale:]) and really think them out past the gimmick; it's as if the idea of the backstory that could result, and the world it implies, entices him as much as the conceptual bridge built by x-plus-y. Not as easy as it looks, either: the first story in the collection, "A Study in Emerald," was for a Holmes-meets-Lovecraft anthology, which I duly got from the library, having spent considerable time in both vineyards. (Speaking of which: Cthulhu cakes exist and are on the web! If only one could bake a non-Euclidean pastry.) And his story stands out considerably there, too, since it's really the only one that goes anywhere beyond the narrative proposition, "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a giant cross-dimensional gibbering mind-sucking non-Euclidean entity!" Makes you realize how thin are the metaphorical resources HPL offers you, though Gaiman turns his baddies into the eternal Euro ruling class, which is a nice little inbred-royalty joke as well.<br/><br/>Also liked his first collection, and really loved Stardust, the movie, which has the whole Princess Bride snarky-fantasy thing going on. (Recommended it to several conveniently-located teenagers, at least one of whom pronounced it "pretty rad," in only a semi-ironic way.) Then, really getting into the spirit, read China Mieville's Un-Lun-Dun, which had gotten several positive reviews, and had quite a good time. The heroine's not who everyone thinks she's supposed to be, the invention is ceaseless and owes more to Lewis Carroll than JKR, and there's a neat environmentalist theme as well. (Plus some well-plotted visions of tolerance for the different, the creative, and the socially-constructed.) Which is of course what novels nerds like say, right? <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/917171?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>