Reviews and Comments

I forgot what complete douchebags reporters could be. Reading about the experience of being "outed" as a sex blogger was actually difficult to read, not just for the experience itself (she has to run to the bathroom to throw up when she hears the voicemails from the Sunday Times), but for the knock-on effects that it had on her friends, family, her sense of herself and her loss of anonymity -- she's recognized in the street, has celebrities and radio personalities constantly hit on her, and worst of all, knows that her past lovers now know how emotionally vulnerable she was with them. Ouch.

As such, all the writing about sex and intimacy following her outing seems raw and forced -- she tries to go on with her old life, but the rhythm just isn't there, and it shows. It's great writing, but it feels almost voyeristic at times given that she's no longer able to control what people see of her.

Considering how frenetic most comic books are, it was actually a surprise to read Ooku and feel the rhythm of society and daily living instead of a gunfight. There are no samurai swordsmen in Ooku, no massive drama. There's a man who goes to serve under the Shogun, and has to navigate the court intrigues that result there.

Oh, and the Shogun is a woman. And he's going to serve in her harem of men. And there are 10 women for every man, as most male children die as babies, from a sickness that's expressed in men, but only carried in women. And this happened a long time ago, long enough that most people aren't really aware of it being any different.

The result is fascinating, partly for the inversion of roles in feudal Japan, and half for the dialogue, which maps from the Japanese text, and so is in Shakespearean English. You even get to see someone called a jackanape.

Much, much better than Y, The Last Man.

All right, I'm an addict. I can't stop reading these books. I already ordered #5. Damn you Amazon Prime 2 day shipping.

This one introduces Empowered's version of the Batman. He's called Maidman. He dresses up as a cleaning maid. A sexy cleaning maid.

Have I mentioned that Empowered is absolutely shameless about pointing out that Superheroes, if they existed, would be viewed much like furries? No-one would ever believe you weren't wearing a leather outfit and mask unless you were getting off on it. And in Empowered... they do. Urgh. Yeah, comics today take the subject implicitly, but in Empowered, it's the premise.

The interesting thing about Empowered is that as much as it makes fun of superheroes, it rarely makes fun of the main characters. Especially when they have issues. Thugboy's very conscious balancing act when it comes to Ninjette (he's in love with EMP, but can't help but react when Ninjette sits on his lap) is one of the interesting little dynamics that you really wouldn't see many other places -- you could do it in TV or in a novel, perhaps, but the multiple levels of external and internal dialog and facial expressions in a single frame is honestly something you could only really do in comics, and it's actually done tastefully and respectfully.

Oh, and Empowered's "make a wish" gift to the child with cancer was beautiful. His respect and admiration for her and her growing appreciation for him was completely not where I thought that story would go.

If this were a movie, I'd be blinking myself awake in a chair, belly stuffed full of popcorn, remembering vaguely that there were lots of explosions and weak acting, and feeling a bit silly for having hoped it was going to be something else.

I really wanted to like this book. And I did, when it was called Excession. Banks has had these problems before in other novels, but here it really all comes together. It's a Culture Novel by the tropes.

Seriously, there's nothing in this book that you haven't seen before. Wacky minds? Check. Ultimately meaningless emotional sideplot involving humans? Check. Massively competent SC operative awkwardly standing by the sidelines? Idiot slapstick military trying to take on an Abominator class and failing? Check. Over the top self obsessed villain? Check. And the guy who's supposedly pushing all of this -- the head of the Trapeze gang -- is such a hollowed out shell that even fighting for his life in simulations is so boring that he's going through the motions.

So... yeah. Don't bother.

Worth reading just for the unadulterated, adult perspective of a straight woman who talks about female desire without apology or shame. She likes sex. She likes that men like sex. There are some people that she likes more than just sex, but she doesn't try to limit or hide herself, and when she doesn't feel like having sex with someone (notably an ex fixing her computer), she's more than happy to hand the guy a box of tissues.

The oddest thing about this book is that by being the perfect male fantasy, even accidentally, she points out male fantasies for what they are -- men who think they want sex start crying and say they want relationships, men who think they're insatiable are surprised when they're sated, men who think they're far too straightlaced to do anything risque find that given the opportunity, they'll take it.

Predictably, as soon as this book was published, the author found herself outed and "slutshamed" for daring to have casual sex. The real tragedy is that what she was and is doing is really feminism in its purest form -- acting as you want to act, treating yourself and everyone around you in a responsible manner. It's a pity that's still a shocking idea to most people.

Reading Makers is some bizarre inversion of Pride and Prejudice where instead of examining courtship rituals and suitability for marriage, the writer is obsessed with startups and business plans.

Reading this book was like being in a coffee shop (Coffee Bar, specifically) next to a coked up newly minted MBA trying to sell his virtualized social media company to an investor over the phone based purely on the amount of buzzwords he could cram into a sentence. Except for the sex scenes. Oh god. The TSA prostate exam was more realistic.

I started skipping through pages, picking out bits of dialog where they weren't talking about business ideas or propping up each others' egos by telling them how great they were really. Then I started skipping pages. Then finally I realized that, 300 pages in, I realized that the person I most liked in the novel was the rat-faced reporter who was trying to poke holes in their glorious bubble driven reality.

I put the book down and walked away.