Best (Worst?) of 2013: Five Disappointing Releases

In writing a series of posts regarding the "best" of this passing year in a variety of categories, I debated for some days whether or not to write a post dedicated to those new releases that I read which were either execrable reads or were so flawed in some form or fashion that they did not live up to my modest expectation of entertaining me.  Some of these works others will find to be good or even excellent reads.  Others likely will gender a response of "why the hell did you read that dreck in the first place?"  But a "failure rate" of roughly 5% (5 out of slightly over 100 2013 US releases read, with another 25-50 being a mass of decent to solidly good tales that left only fleeting impressions and nothing truly indelible on my memory) is not too bad, I suppose.  Anyway, here are the five whose stories not only failed to capture my attention, but which left me feeling at least wistful about the time lost to reading/reflecting upon them:

5.  Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies:  German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields 

See the link above for the original review, but this excerpt summarizes many of my disappointments with the study:

The sources included in the endnotes is impressive.  Although I haven't kept up with the literature since late 1997, there are a wealth of studies on the issues of women in the Third Reich and roles of women in the Holocaust that appear to be promising reads.  Yet within the body of her study, Lower rarely mentions any of these other historians and their contributions to the field.  Perhaps this is due to Hitler's Furies being marketed more to a general audience than toward an academic one, but ultimately this leads to the sense that Lower's narrative is detached too much from the debates that historians have had on this subject over the past six decades.  While it may be understandable that Lower wants to avoid the old Intentionalist/Functionalist debate regarding the level of intent that the decision-makers had in beginning the Final Solution, the book suffers because there is insufficient grounding of her arguments within the context of larger discussions of the Holocaust's beginning, mechanics, and how its perpetrators justified their actions.  Even the women involved seem at times acting within a narrative vacuum; there is not enough explanation to cover their myriad actions.
Yet despite these serious issues that I have with Hitler's Furies, it is a book that at the very least presents vividly-described actresses and whose discussions at least point the way to possible future paths of exploration within the field.  It is a flawed work, but for non-historian readers curious about the time period, it certainly is a work that will appeal to them.  For many historians of the period, however, Lower's work may be frustrating in the sense that it seems that with just more focus on placing her work within the context of current historiography, her work could have been as important as those of Ian Kershaw and Browning in discussing the mindsets of those involved in the Shoah.  The arguments on complicity and the forms in which it took here will continue to rage on.

 4.  Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds

I bought Lord's second novel on the basis of her strong debut novel, Redemption in Indigo.  Yet when I read it soon after its February 2013 release, I found myself being distracted too frequently while reading the narrative.  There just was no "spark," nothing that interested me, as the setting had too many parallels with prior SF landscapes, the characters were earnest yet lacking in vitality, and while the prose wasn't horrendous, neither did it sparkle with wit, verve, or anything that might have given me a reason to pay closer attention.  The result was a narrative that didn't appeal to me, leaving me then (and now,  months after I traded the book in at the local used bookstore for others) so disinclined to think about its themes that I chose not to write a formal review about how disappointed I was with Lord's sophomore effort.

3.  Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice 

I reviewed this earlier this month and there is little that I would add to that review other than to note that my disappointment stems from the rare case where I tried a book despite my misgivings about the book's premise due to the enthusiastic praise of others.  I suppose in her presumed desire to write a "gender-positive" account that Leckie just failed to make her debut novel a "prose-positive" or "dynamic character-positive" one as well, as the blandness of virtually everything but her underdeveloped theme of the artificiality of gender divisions just left me cold to the pedestrian narrative.

2.  Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, A Memory of Light 

I wrote a detailed review as to why this bloated concluding volume was a major disappointment to me, considering that at one point (well, back in the late 1990s) I enjoyed reading the WoT novels, that any more commentary would just rehash what was stated earlier.  Although I will admit that livetweeting this book back in January (using the hashtag "#WoTTF") did give birth to one of my better literary putdowns:  "non-erotic pornography."

1.  Terry Goodkind, The Third Kingdom 

This is the most disappointing 2013 release read, not because I had any hopes that it would be good, but because I lost a trusted Serbian reading squirrel due to this crap.  Damn good one, Stefan was.  He still is missed, as I have yet to attempt reading another epic fantasy until I can find a suitable replacement.

So there we have it, five disappointing releases, each for different reasons (5:  professional wish for more analysis of sources; 4:  weaker sophomore effort; 3:  too high of expectations based on others' proclamations; 2:  disappointed nostalgia of a former perhaps-fan; 1:  the toil caused by reading the book).  Any thoughts on these five books or any disappointing 2013 releases that you have read this year?

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

I turned to look at her, to study her face.  She was taller than most Nilters, but fat and pale as any of them.  She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked.  She didn't realize what she was playing with.  She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt.  I wasn't entirely certain.  It wouldn't have mattered, if I had been in Radch space.  Radchaai don't care much about gender, and the language they speak – my own first language – doesn't mark gender in any way.  This language we were speaking now did, and I could make trouble for myself if I used the wrong forms.  It didn't help that cues meant to distinguish gender changed from place to place, sometimes radically, and rarely made much sense to me. (Ch. 1)

Ann Leckie's debut novel, Ancillary Justice, has received quite a bit of praise since its October 2013 release.  Depending upon the reviewer, the focus has been on the novel's treatment of gender, its SF elements, or its thriller-style plot.  Normally, I do not mention others' impressions of a story, believing that it is better to focus more on my own personal evaluation of a fiction's strengths and weaknesses, but I mention this here because it is one of the rare few times that I've read a story and wondered just how so many others could praise this novel so highly without spending much, if any, time exploring its numerous and egregious flaws.

Ancillary Justice is set in a remote galactic future thousands of years from now.  Various human groups have colonized the galaxy and one, the Radch, has become the hegemonic power.  Based in part upon the Roman Empire in its methods of integrating disparate traditions within an autocratic framework, a defining trait of the Radchaai is their use of human bodies, ancillaries, to house fragments of AI intelligences, many of which are in turn housed in interstellar-traveling ships.  One of these ships,  Justice of Toren, has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind only a singular ancillary, known in the literary present as Breq, to begin a mission that quickly appears to be suicidal in nature.

Many readers may find Breq/JoT/other ancillaries connected to the ship to be of interest.  Leckie frequently shifts perspectives, sometimes within the space of a single page, in flashbacks that span nearly two decades in time.  These shifts are not confusing, but they also are largely devoid of major differentiation in narrative voice.  There rarely is the sense of anything being hidden within these flashback sequences; everything is spelled out in a laborious, expository fashion.  This lack of narrative tension robs the plot of any real impetus; things are unfolding, in both present and flashback sequences, toward a conclusion that feels more perfunctory than anything else.

Yet chronicles of events foretold do not have to be prosaic.  Intriguing, multi-faceted characters can make even the tinniest of plots rich with depth.  The fractured protagonist and her (to indulge the gendered conceit here; more on this shortly) struggle to piece together a cohesive identity does hold some promise of achieving this richness of characterization, as the below passage demonstrates:

I don't know the answer.  But I do know that, though I can see hints of the potential split going back a thousand years or more, that's only hindsight.  The first I noticed even the bare possibility that I – Justice of Toren might not also be I – One Esk, was that moment that Justice of Toren edited One Esk's memory of the slaughter in the temple of Ikkt.  The moment I – "I" was surprised by it.

It makes the history hard to convey.  Because still, "I" was me, unitary, one thing, and yet I acted against myself, contrary to my interests and desires, sometimes secretly, deceiving myself as to what I knew and did.  And it's difficult for me even now to know who performed what actions, or knew which information.  Because I was Justice of Toren.  Even when I wasn't.  Even if I'm not anymore. (Ch. 14)

Yet ultimately this promise of a conflicted, perhaps occasionally unreliable, protagonist(s) largely remains unfulfilled.  Breq/One Esk too often is the passive observer, her own conflicts pushed down in order to devote more time to describing her environs.  Several chapters in Ancillary Justice felt unnecessarily padded with descriptions that didn't adequately develop either character or plot.  The following passage, with just a few alterations for time/locale, could have been lifted whole-cloth from a Wheel of Time novel:

Next morning I bought clothes.  The proprietor of the shop Inspector Supervisor Skaalat had recommended was on the verge of throwing me out when my bank balance flashed onto her console, unbidden I suspected, Station sparing her embarrassment – and simultaneously telling me how closely it was watching me.

I needed gloves, certainly, and if I was going to play the part of the spendthrift wealthy tourist I would need to buy more than that.  But before I could speak up to say so, the proprietor brought out bolts of brocade, sateen, and velvet in a dozen colors.  Purple and orange-brown, three shades of green, gold, pale yellow and icy blue, ash gray, deep red.

"You can't wear those clothes," she told me, authoritative, as a subordinate handed me tea, managing to mostly conceal her disgust at my bare hands.  Station had scanned me and provided my measurements, so I needed to do nothing.  A half-liter of tea, two excruciatingly sweet pastries, and a dozen insults later, I left in an orange-brown jacket and trousers, and icy white, stiff shirt underneath, and dark-gray gloves so thin and soft I might almost have still be barehanded.  Fortunately current fashion favored jackets and trousers cut generously enough to hide my weapon.  The rest – two more jackets and pairs of trousers, two pairs of gloves, half a dozen shirts, and three pairs of shoes – would be delivered to my lodgings by the time, the proprietor told me, I was done visiting the temple. (Ch. 19)

There are times when colorful detail can add to the story, but in this case, any momentum derived from the character disguising herself in order to carry out her mission is lost in this swamp of extraneous description.  If this were a singular or even occasional issue, it would not have stood out so vividly here, but all-too-frequently Leckie confounds description for scene/character development.  This leads to a narrative that feels hollow, where the backdrop becomes more important than the characters moving through these scenes.

Even when it comes to Leckie's use of non-differentiated gendered pronouns is lacking in substance.  Yes, there are times when the narrator's use of "she" for even obviously male characters makes the reader pause and consider her own reactions, but rarely does this go beyond the surface-level of characterizations.  There is so little apparent differentiation in the actions and customs of these other characters that it was very easy to perceive them all as a homogeneous mass largely devoid of defining traits.  Without any substantive differences in Breq/One Esk's perspectives versus the other characters' own self-perceptions, the lack of any palpable tension in these potentially conflicting identities renders this presumed subversion of gender/character expectations moot, as there is really nothing to react to after the initial realization (spoiled in part upon Breq/One Esk's musing on it in the first chapter) that not all "shes" are hers.

This failure to realize adequately the author's presumed aims in treating gender is but only a symptom of a larger malaise.  The prose on the whole attempts to describe an alien setting, but instead it feels bland and largely devoid of anything interesting when it comes to setting, plot, or character interactions.  Beyond the examples I listed above, there is nothing truly wretched about the story, but there certainly is little that makes it memorable either.  In trying to think of a single word that could sum up Ancillary Justice, the first word that came to mind was "lukewarm."  There is nothing obviously offensive about the work (unless one wants to spend more time wondering why the morally-questionable practice of using the corpses of potentially-enslaved – the narrative does not spend enough time on the issue to determine if this may indeed be the case – people as the corpse-soldier ancillaries is not addressed), but ultimately there is really nothing praiseworthy about the narrative as well.  The characterizations are not well-developed, but nor are they completely devoid of dynamism.  The plot was rather subdued, but has enough points of interests to keep it from being a complete chore to read.  Ancillary Justice is the sort of bland narrative that makes it difficult for me to conceive of reading any future installments in Leckie's proposed trilogy.  One of the more disappointing 2013 releases that I have read.