Changes (a book review post)

For those of you unfamiliar with The Dresden Files, you do not want to start with this book, book 12 in the series. While each book has an intact story that doesn't exactly require the previous books to understand, there is so much back story built up that, even though Butcher does a fairly decent job of quickly filling in details about past events/people, a lot of the context will be lost. Besides, it's a good series and, if you want to read them, you should just start at book one, Storm Front.

If you've been around for a while, you'll know that book 11, Turn Coat, was the first of the Dresden books that I haven't been in love with (or extreme like). And, wow, it was enough to allow me to go a whole year before picking up Changes. I thought about it several times over the past year but, every time I did, I decided to go with some other book. I suppose a streak of reading books I didn't enjoy much prompted me to go ahead with book 12.

The first thing I will note is that the editing is much better in this one. Although there are more commas than are strictly needed, there are none just stuck into the middles of clauses. At least not so many that I noticed them like in the last book.

The idea behind this book is right in the title. Butcher has decided to change Dresden's life, really shake it up. The one thing I have really liked about the Dresden books is that Dresden is not a static character. This is not one of those series where everything goes back to the status quo at the end of each book, which is why you can't pick the books up at random and read them. If you don't read them in order, you can't follow the overall story arc and the growth of the character. The truth is that change is a normal thing for Harry Dresden. Well, except for the fact that he can't ever seem to get ahead. But there are far-reaching consequences in these books that you don't always see in series fiction like this where each book has a happy ending and everything is fine again. Dresden may get the technical happy ending, but nothing is ever fine.

In this one, though, Butcher goes after Dresden hard.

In fact, it's so hard that it's like someone walking up to you on the street and just punching you in the face. Which is kind of the problem, because Butcher picks one of the most cliche ways of doing that: "They've taken our daughter." That's sentence one, and, of course, Dresden didn't know anything about having a kid. Nor should he have because it was from a singular sexual encounter. I'm just going to say, really, only teenagers expect people to believe that you can have sex once and get pregnant.

Sure, I know that it's technically possible, and teenagers, which I know from years of working with them, want adults to believe that, really, they only slipped up the one time and, oops!, pregnant. The reality, though, is that that pregnancy is the result of two humping like bunnies for months. So it's really kind of insulting for Butcher to throw the unknown kid at us from the one sexual encounter Dresden had with the mother years before.

But that's (almost) the only complaint I have about the book. Once you get past the whole "I have to go rescue my daughter" thing, it's a well constructed story. Butcher systematically goes through and dismantles Dresden's life and even managed to throw in a couple of things I didn't see coming. That doesn't happen for me very often. [In fact, the big problem I had with book 11 is that I knew who the bad guy was and what was going on by about 1/4 of the way through the book. The rest of it was just going through the motions.] I don't mind Dresden having a daughter. I don't even mind that he didn't know he had a daughter. I mind that it's the result of this one time thing that happened. Beyond that, this book is a great ride.

Oh, I did say "almost" the only complaint. The other thing is the cliffhanger that Butcher threw in on, literally, the last page. I won't say what happened, but I find just tossing that in at the end to be about as cliche as the beginning. So, yeah, take out the first page and the last page and this is an awesome book. Unfortunately, the reliance on those two gimmicks takes the book down a peg for me. It's still a great series, though, and I would highly recommend it to any fan of fantasy, especially modern fantasy.

Common Zeitgeist

I have a confession to make. Before I do, though, let me make it abundantly clear that it is only a confession because my wife makes me feel guilt over this issue. I would imagine that others of you out there like me feel no guilt whatsoever over this particular issue nor do you (probably) have anyone in your life that makes you feel guilt for this. It's a subject of interest to me, though, because it deals with the different tastes that people have in reading. The confession? I'm a fan of The Dresden Files. No, not the abysmal and ill-conceived television series, the books.

I just finished Proven Guilty, last week, and am about halfway through White Night. However, I don't think my wife even managed to finish Storm Front. There are a lot of reasons I like the series. Primarily, I like it because it's not static. Often, books of this type are so episodic that the characters never change or grow. You take the same character(s) from one book and transplant it exactly as it is into the next one. That was fine when I was a kid reading The Hardy Boys, but I'm a bit beyond that, now. I appreciate that Butcher allows for change and growth both in his main character and in his supporting characters.

Of course, my wife is not wrong when she, basically, lumps Dresden into the pulp fiction category; it is. I know pulp fiction has pretty much always been looked down upon, but I don't have a problem with that form of entertainment the way my wife does. Yes, pulp fiction can be... well, I suppose there's no other way to say it... bad... just bad, but! it's not always bad. What I mean is that I don't think there's any real significant difference in the proportion of the good/bad between pulp fiction and any other kind of fiction. For instance, I'm pretty sure that no one would lump William Gibson into any kind of pulp fiction category. He's pretty "high brow" reading by most standards. I don't find his current work at all engaging, though. My response to Pattern Recognition was so neutral that I don't have anything I can even say about it. I'm not sure why I finished it. My wife didn't, although it certainly falls within her reading tastes. I'm having the same reaction to Spook Country. I did almost put that one down, but I'm really bad about not finishing a book once I've started it no matter how bad it is (ask my wife), so here I am 20 pages from the end of it and no more engaged in it than I was after the first 20 pages. I'm not sure if my wife made it 20 pages in before she put it down. The real problem, though, is that I can't even say they're "bad" books. They're well written. They just don't engage. At the end of both of these books, my response is that nothing really happened. The plot just flatlines all the way along.

But I digress...

Dresden. Well, Butcher. Let me step back a moment.

I started planning my book in the fall of 2009. At the time, I didn't really know anything about The Dresden Files. I knew it kept popping up on my suggested viewing on Netflix and that it was based on some books, but that's about it. However, I bought the first two books in the series for my oldest son for Christmas that year since, I figured, it was the kind of thing he'd be into. [Books are included as part of Christmas for all of our kids every year. It's tradition.]

I started writing The House on the Corner in February of 2010 and picked up Storm Front to read somewhere around the same time, based on my son's approval of the book. Besides, I wanted to see what it was exactly that I'd given him to read. It became immediately apparent that Butcher and I were operating under the same zeitgeist with our books. Magic in a modern world setting. Pop culture references. But, then, he's of an age with me, so that doesn't surprise me. At any rate, the Dresden books resonate with me because of that. I like their feel.
Of course, as a writer, I also find the books somewhat frustrating for that very reason. The more of them I read, the more similarities of design I find. I finished The House on the Corner at the end of July 2010 (a few days after my van blew up while I was inside it), and I'd probably read the first four Dresden books by that time. The conflict between magic and religion, which I touch on in my book, is brought into Grave Peril. And, as I said, I just finished Proven Guilty, more than 6 months after I finished my book and 2 months after making my book publicly available, and I've found another similar theme. So, yes, it appears that Jim Butcher and I have been eating from the same table for quite a while. But, you know what? I really don't mind that. In the end, my book has no overt resemblance to his. The kid heroes in mine aren't detectives, and I have no plan on writing crime novels. I do enjoy reading his, though. Sometime or other, I'm going to have to try out his high fantasy series and see what I think about that. I'll let you know when I do.