![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
TWIB-III: 19: (2/16-2/22)
I read two books in the week before my big Asia trip. They were:
1) Hands Across the Sea – Timothy P. Maga
The main insight I took away from Hands Across the Sea is that it doesn't take much to be published by a university press. Maga's book, which purports to be an examination of U.S.-Japan relations from 1961 to 1981, is next to useless to students of the subject.
It suffers from one of the most egregiously poor editing jobs I've encountered in recent memory. Maga makes sweeping, unsupported statements, which he contradicts mere paragraphs later. Sentences are at times completely nonsensical. More to the point, it would behoove any author of a book on Japan to make sure he spells the names of prime ministers correctly. And phrases such as "box of newspaper clippings" do not make for academically acceptable source notations.
I've previously remarked that some offerings on the subject would have been better had their authors not tried to shoehorn U.S.-Japan relations into an overly limiting framework. Maga's book suffers from the opposite problem. His shallow and abbreviated retelling of U.S.-Japan relations, which lacks any attempt to put events into context, reads like a fifth grader's first attempt at a serious history report. Maga recounts some selected events, but fails to explain their significance, why he's chosen to include them (but not others) in the volume, or to put any of it into a broader historical context. U.S.-Japan relations during the Cold War were heavily influenced by developments in other nations, but you'd never know it judging from Maga's book. Indeed, while I seriously question Cha's thesis, I feel Alignment Despite Antagonism gives a much better overview of how geopolitics affected the U.S.-Japan relationship.
Maga's book also fails due to its severely limited scope. He structures his narrative entirely around the administrations of Cold War presidents, completely neglecting to examine how changes in Japan's political landscape altered the countries' relationship (see Iokibe's 日米関係史 for a good examination of these aspects). It's as if Japan were an agentless, monolithic entity that consecutive U.S. administrations molded like Silly Putty. Perhaps most basically, how anyone could write a "history" of Cold War-era U.S.-Japan relations that doesn't even mention the Nixon Shocks, the Plaza Accords, or the security treaty's significance to U.S. military goals in Asia, is truly incomprehensible. This book is not worth the time it takes to read it.
2) Lonely Werewolf Girl – Martin Millar
Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl is an entertaining novel, but not as good as its predecessor The Good Fairies of New York. Millar's books are essentially Shakespearian comedies built around large casts of characters whose misunderstandings, deceptions, and foibles drive the plot forward, and Werewolf, with its struggles for dynastic succession and tangle of competing love interests, is no different. Millar handles these elements quite well, but at almost four times the length of Fairies, Werewolf’s narrative feels much looser and suffers for it.
Millar's unusual style--heavy on exposition, telling-not-showing, sentence fragments, and unchanging narrative voice--keeps his plots (which are frankly not all that groundbreaking) refreshing. Although these elements should irritate--they're some of my biggest pet peeves in fiction--they don't, because they are so obviously style as opposed to an indication of lack of authorial skill. Millar also excels in penning characters who are both truly flawed and likeable despite that fact. He's also a surprisingly subtle author beneath the heavy narrative style: Lonely Werewolf Girl deals with family dysfunction, drug addiction, eating disorders (and were those hints of sexual abuse in the relationship between Kalix and the Thane?), and the characters' problems are not magically solved at the book's conclusion.
That said, the book is indeed overlong, which makes Millar's larger-than-life characters grate more than they would in a shorter volume, and although the sloppy editing is less sloppy than in Fairies, it does get noticeably worse as the book progresses. That said, Werewolf is hard to put down and I do recommend it.
That will be all.
1) Hands Across the Sea – Timothy P. Maga
The main insight I took away from Hands Across the Sea is that it doesn't take much to be published by a university press. Maga's book, which purports to be an examination of U.S.-Japan relations from 1961 to 1981, is next to useless to students of the subject.
It suffers from one of the most egregiously poor editing jobs I've encountered in recent memory. Maga makes sweeping, unsupported statements, which he contradicts mere paragraphs later. Sentences are at times completely nonsensical. More to the point, it would behoove any author of a book on Japan to make sure he spells the names of prime ministers correctly. And phrases such as "box of newspaper clippings" do not make for academically acceptable source notations.
I've previously remarked that some offerings on the subject would have been better had their authors not tried to shoehorn U.S.-Japan relations into an overly limiting framework. Maga's book suffers from the opposite problem. His shallow and abbreviated retelling of U.S.-Japan relations, which lacks any attempt to put events into context, reads like a fifth grader's first attempt at a serious history report. Maga recounts some selected events, but fails to explain their significance, why he's chosen to include them (but not others) in the volume, or to put any of it into a broader historical context. U.S.-Japan relations during the Cold War were heavily influenced by developments in other nations, but you'd never know it judging from Maga's book. Indeed, while I seriously question Cha's thesis, I feel Alignment Despite Antagonism gives a much better overview of how geopolitics affected the U.S.-Japan relationship.
Maga's book also fails due to its severely limited scope. He structures his narrative entirely around the administrations of Cold War presidents, completely neglecting to examine how changes in Japan's political landscape altered the countries' relationship (see Iokibe's 日米関係史 for a good examination of these aspects). It's as if Japan were an agentless, monolithic entity that consecutive U.S. administrations molded like Silly Putty. Perhaps most basically, how anyone could write a "history" of Cold War-era U.S.-Japan relations that doesn't even mention the Nixon Shocks, the Plaza Accords, or the security treaty's significance to U.S. military goals in Asia, is truly incomprehensible. This book is not worth the time it takes to read it.
2) Lonely Werewolf Girl – Martin Millar
Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl is an entertaining novel, but not as good as its predecessor The Good Fairies of New York. Millar's books are essentially Shakespearian comedies built around large casts of characters whose misunderstandings, deceptions, and foibles drive the plot forward, and Werewolf, with its struggles for dynastic succession and tangle of competing love interests, is no different. Millar handles these elements quite well, but at almost four times the length of Fairies, Werewolf’s narrative feels much looser and suffers for it.
Millar's unusual style--heavy on exposition, telling-not-showing, sentence fragments, and unchanging narrative voice--keeps his plots (which are frankly not all that groundbreaking) refreshing. Although these elements should irritate--they're some of my biggest pet peeves in fiction--they don't, because they are so obviously style as opposed to an indication of lack of authorial skill. Millar also excels in penning characters who are both truly flawed and likeable despite that fact. He's also a surprisingly subtle author beneath the heavy narrative style: Lonely Werewolf Girl deals with family dysfunction, drug addiction, eating disorders (and were those hints of sexual abuse in the relationship between Kalix and the Thane?), and the characters' problems are not magically solved at the book's conclusion.
That said, the book is indeed overlong, which makes Millar's larger-than-life characters grate more than they would in a shorter volume, and although the sloppy editing is less sloppy than in Fairies, it does get noticeably worse as the book progresses. That said, Werewolf is hard to put down and I do recommend it.
That will be all.
no subject
I noticed the editing problem too. I checked out his blog and he seems like a fairly lazy author, which might explain why he's not as rich as Terry Pratchett, to quote Neil Gaiman. He admitted that he doesn't go over the manuscript before he hands them over to soft skull press. so they're to be blamed more.
Oh, and I read that the next one they're releasing is Milk, Sulfate, and Alby Starvation, which sounds like a neat book from the description. Also, Millar's working on a sequel to Lonely Werewolf Girl.
no subject
For me all of the characters would have been more likable in a shorter work, because by page 370-something I well understood that Malventia was a fashion slave, Daniel a goodhearted coward, Moonglow sweet but oblivious, etc. Millar never really took these traits places, so the longer the narrative went on, the more they seemed like cartoons and less like characters.
If that's the case I think Millar and Soft Skull are to be blamed equally. It's your freaking novel, dude, take some pride in your work. And it's your freaking product, Soft Skull, make it presentable.
It'll be interesting to see what he does with a Werewolf sequel. Ugh, so many books to read already!
no subject
no subject
True about the length, but I also think it's going to put off readers who haven't read Fairies or are put off by Werewolf's style plus its length, which translates into fewer sales and less Millar books Stateside, and that's a shame.
Dude, why not send some of your stuff to Soft Skull? I think your troll story would be right up their alley!
no subject