Damn Fine Story, Chuck Wendig

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date 18th October 2017

If you want writing advice, this isn’t a bad place to stop. If you want advice on how to put a story together, this is a great place to stop. It has all sorts of anecdotes and examples about how good stories are put together, and sometimes about how well-known stories fail (think The Phantom Menace et al). It works just the same whether you’re talking writing a book, a screenplay, or sometimes even a good joke. Oral storytellers would benefit too — Wendig gives examples from his father’s oral stories too.

If you’re easily offended, though, maybe you want to avoid it. Wendig swears freely and relates stories his kid thinks are awesome, often scatalogical. He’s irreverent and sometimes he spoilers stories like Star Wars, or doesn’t but doesn’t in a way that takes aim at them, and… Yeah, just, if you have any sacred cows, you might want to avoid.

My main criticism is that sometimes the jokey asides just felt like filler. I enjoy Chuck Wendig’s humour and randomness at times on Twitter… it felt out of place in the middle of a chatty seminar on storytelling. Time and place, dude. Time and place.

Rating: 3/5

The Gods of Olympus, Barbara Graziosi

For me, there weren’t many surprises here in Barbara Graziosi’s analysis of the Greek pantheon and their afterlife. I already knew how they translated into the Roman world (thank you, Mrs Wilson, for many fascinating lessons in classics!) and I had some idea of how they translated into the medieval and Renaissance world as well (I believe thanks there must go to Richard Wilson, Martin Coyle and Rob Gossedge – I can’t untangle in my mind quite who was responsible for this, but I blame my degree all the same).

Nonetheless, it’s a good survey of the Greek pantheon and the enormous influence they had on religious thought and, in the end, literature. I could wish for a bit on modern paganism, since I have friends who have revived the worship of the Olympians, but that’s probably a little much to ask.

It’s an enjoyable read, though not a particularly enlightening one, for me.

Rating: 3/5

The Naming of the Shrew, John Wright

There’s a lot of hilarity to be found in the Linnaean species names, from Crikey steveirwini to the unfortunate Rubus cockburnianus (named in honour of the Cockburn family, of course – how can you doubt it). I figured a book digging into all this would be interesting, or at least entertaining enough to beguile an eight hour plane ride.

Not so much. The author is undoubtedly – and commendably – enthusiastic. He’s dug around in all the vagaries of zoological and botanical naming, and he’s found some gems. He also tries to explain exactly how these names are coined and accepted. Unfortunately, he’s rather longwinded about it, and it becomes a long list of funny names joined by some anecdotes. Some of them I’m glad enough to know, but I did get rather tired of the idea by chapter four, and started wondering when the light at the end of the tunnel was going to show.

Rating: 2/5

The Lost City of Z, David Grann

I’ve been meaning to read The Lost City of Z for ages, especially since I read Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God. I’m not here for the exotic diseases and epic endurance of hacking through the jungle, though: I’m interested in the archaeology, and the resolution of the mysteries. Where are these cities, and did they exist at all? The Lost City of Z is interesting in terms of the exotic diseases, larger than life explorers and hacking through the jungle, along with some history of that drive to explore, and less so in actually finding the archaeology. It’s mostly focused on figuring out what happened to Percy Fawcett and his son on their final attempt at finding Z, as well as tracing their lives up to that point; less interesting to me, though it has its moments.

The last chapter, in which an archaeologist who lives in the Amazon actually explains where he thinks the great vanished cities are, is the most interesting to me. There’s echoes of the ritual landscape of Stonehenge and Avebury in his description of the palisade walls and ditches dug around the settlement — combined with the power of the jungle just reaching up and strangling all those remaining signs. That’s the book I find I really want, written by a Francis Pryor or Mike Parker Pearson of the Amazon.

Rating: 3/5

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson

How We Got to Now is a reasonably entertaining and easy to read survey of six topics which shaped the world we live in now, in various ways. The main benefit is that Johnson tries to look across disciplines and from different angles, and tries to capture the whole of the picture. The six topics he picked make sense: glass, (artificial) cold, (the understanding of) sound, hygiene, time (and the accuracy thereof) and (artificial) light — they’re summarised under six headings: glass, cold, sound, clean, time, light. That does sound a little odd with the title, since sound is hardly something we invented. Nonetheless, he makes good points about the way science and technology surrounding those topics has made our modern lives what they are.

Not world-shattering, but entertaining enough!

Rating: 3/5