A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti
Apr. 13th, 2010 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbg* usual not-a-review disclaimer blah blah blah it's-all-about-me blah blah blah*
I didn't quite know what to expect from A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti. Off the top of my head most of the other Twelfth Planet Press publications I've read have been pulpy and/or noirish, and so I just let this one flow over me. I also don't recall having read anything by Biancotti herself, so there were no expectations there. Short story authors don't tend to stick in my head.
First judgement of the book by its cover: excellent design. Intriguing, mysterious, and slightly mind bending. Highly appropriate to the content, which was a nice surprise. Somewhere along the line genre book cover designs broke my faith in the relationship between cover and contents; now I'm starting to believe again, as long as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
girliejones doesn't discover a sudden passion for irrelevant spaceships shooting lasers. That said, I really like spaceships shooting lasers :-)
Physically the book was made of nice paper, had good flop and I liked the text layout, although the centre margins did get a little eaten by the binding in places. That said, my hands are quite weak.
I suppose I should talk about the stories now...
First I should declare that I am something of a passive reader. I read fiction for purposes of recreation, and I like to leave it to the author to paint their picture for me. In your average collection of short stories I find that when the odd think piece comes up, or we are plunged into the middle (or indeed the end) of a story I feel excluded. I wonder what it is that I should have seen or known or read to make this story make sense. Under such conditions I am inclined to abandon short stories far more often than I abandon bad novels. At least with bad novels there's room for improvement. My favourite short stories are self-contained in one way or another.
However, as a collection of stories explicitly about endings, I came prepared to fill in the blanks. The blanks were OK. Everyone had the same blanks. I wasn't missing out. I wasn't stupid. I came prepared and willing to read between the lines and invest more attention in the text. This was helped enormously by the sequencing of the stories, starting with the more accessible and building to more obscure. If I'd been dropped into the middle of many of the obscure stories in a general anthology, I probably would have rebelled as I have before. The WTF? alarm would have tripped.
So, score one to the publisher for finding a way to make me read things I would not otherwise have had the patience or mindset to read. The writing itself (oh yes, there's an author in there somewhere) was excellent. Light, yet rich prose, and an ability to set the reader down in many strange places. I can't say I liked them all, particularly those written from the viewpoints of fish or broken robots, but that reflects my interest in human (or human-analogue) characters within a genre setting or situation.
Whether I liked them or not though, the quality was clear to see, and I look forward to what comes next. I might even have become more tolerant to stories with spaces, or at least will be less suprised or annoyed when they come along.
I didn't quite know what to expect from A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti. Off the top of my head most of the other Twelfth Planet Press publications I've read have been pulpy and/or noirish, and so I just let this one flow over me. I also don't recall having read anything by Biancotti herself, so there were no expectations there. Short story authors don't tend to stick in my head.
First judgement of the book by its cover: excellent design. Intriguing, mysterious, and slightly mind bending. Highly appropriate to the content, which was a nice surprise. Somewhere along the line genre book cover designs broke my faith in the relationship between cover and contents; now I'm starting to believe again, as long as
girliejones doesn't discover a sudden passion for irrelevant spaceships shooting lasers. That said, I really like spaceships shooting lasers :-)Physically the book was made of nice paper, had good flop and I liked the text layout, although the centre margins did get a little eaten by the binding in places. That said, my hands are quite weak.
I suppose I should talk about the stories now...
First I should declare that I am something of a passive reader. I read fiction for purposes of recreation, and I like to leave it to the author to paint their picture for me. In your average collection of short stories I find that when the odd think piece comes up, or we are plunged into the middle (or indeed the end) of a story I feel excluded. I wonder what it is that I should have seen or known or read to make this story make sense. Under such conditions I am inclined to abandon short stories far more often than I abandon bad novels. At least with bad novels there's room for improvement. My favourite short stories are self-contained in one way or another.
However, as a collection of stories explicitly about endings, I came prepared to fill in the blanks. The blanks were OK. Everyone had the same blanks. I wasn't missing out. I wasn't stupid. I came prepared and willing to read between the lines and invest more attention in the text. This was helped enormously by the sequencing of the stories, starting with the more accessible and building to more obscure. If I'd been dropped into the middle of many of the obscure stories in a general anthology, I probably would have rebelled as I have before. The WTF? alarm would have tripped.
So, score one to the publisher for finding a way to make me read things I would not otherwise have had the patience or mindset to read. The writing itself (oh yes, there's an author in there somewhere) was excellent. Light, yet rich prose, and an ability to set the reader down in many strange places. I can't say I liked them all, particularly those written from the viewpoints of fish or broken robots, but that reflects my interest in human (or human-analogue) characters within a genre setting or situation.
Whether I liked them or not though, the quality was clear to see, and I look forward to what comes next. I might even have become more tolerant to stories with spaces, or at least will be less suprised or annoyed when they come along.
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