Looking for Jake (and other stories) (edition 2005)

Looking for Jake 3
Foundation 23
The ball room 35
Reports of certain events in London 53
Familiar 79
Entry taken from a medical encyclopaedia 97
Details 105
Go between 125
Different skies 145
An ENO to hunger 165
'Tis the season 183
Jack 199
On the way to the front 213
The tain 227
( )

One of those rare occasions where I got to borrow a book from my girlfriend. (She has good taste, but since she lives in Belgium, I tend to encounter books first. But this one I kept meaning to pick up and somehow didn't.) I wasn't sure what I thought of the idea of China Miéville doing short stories: his novels are so often so sprawling, so full of gleefully grotesque imagery, that I didn't think he could contain himself within a short story.

He can.

Some of the stories are more effective than others -- I particularly enjoyed Reports of Certain Events in London, somehow, I couldn't really say why. Anyway, if you like Miéville's stuff, these short stories are a good opportunity to see him constrain himself somewhat and write tight little stories. If you can't seem to get a handhold with Miéville, but you like the idea of his work, this might be it. ( )

loved loved loved "An End to Hunger" which should be THE short story that goes with the INCITE! anthology [b:The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex|407267|The Revolution Will Not Be Funded Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex|Incite! Women of Color Against Violence|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328770093s/407267.jpg|396591]. i was also thrilled with "Jack" once again. (thank you sara b for introducing me to that story a couple of @ bookfairs ago) ( )

In April 2009 I stopped scheduling my reviews ahead of time. The scheduling process was making reading and blogging feel like homework. Since it's currently an unpaid hobby for me, I decided I had to stop being a slave to the calendar even if it meant falling behind on reviews. To keep things interesting on the review side of things, I started picking which book or short story to review next by random. This process has the advantage of giving every recently finished book or story the chance of being reviewed immediately. The flip side of it, though, is that some things can and do fall through the cracks.

Take for instance, Looking for Jake, a short story collection by China Miéville. It feels to me like I just read it. His stories have that effect on me. But at the same time, I can remember observing the strange coincidence of reading "'Tis the Season" while listening to Christmas music. We were sitting outside on a chilly November day at the Soledad Starbucks. We were on our way home from Thanksgiving and were planning our first Christmas at home. Here it is now, a year later.

Looking for Jake is an excellent collection of short stories. Although Miéville is probably best known now for his long and complicated adult science fiction novels, I think he excels in shorter forms.

The title story is set in the same world as Perdido Street Station. It gives some background into how London came to be the way it is in the novel. I'm glad I had read the novel before reading the short story. Had I not, though, there was still enough there to make a compelling story.

There is also a nod at Un Lun Dun in "Reports of Certain Events in London." I hadn't read the novel yet so seeing the connection when I did later in the spring was a lot of fun.

One of my favorites though is "Details" which to this day has me wary of the cracks in walls and the other random details one sees in the course of a day. Imagine if those flaws in life were actually part of a greater evil. That's the gist of the story. It's so simplistic in its execution and yet so deliciously creepy!

"An End to Hunger" set back in the days of the Nintendo 64, while dated by its technological references is still a fun read. It was also the very first China Miéville piece I had ever read (and like Stardust with Neil Gaiman, had completely forgotten about). So it was a nice surprise and a recovered memory of a new year's morning almost a decade earlier reading short stories at my in-laws' house.

I recommend this collection to short story lovers, urban fantasy lovers and China Miéville fans who haven't tried his short fiction yet. ( )

I really liked some of the stories from this collection (particularly "Reports Of Certain Events In London," which convinced me to check it out in the first place.) Mieville is an elegant writer and interesting worldbuilder.

However, the collection as a whole was lackluster because the stories began to follow an obvious narrative pattern. Nearly all of them had very passive narrators who either witnessed something horrific or fantastic happening and ended the story feeling haunted by it, or witnessed something horrific and fantastic happening and decided at the end to do something about it - but we never find out whether they are successful. There's lots of good set-up, but Mieville dodges the work of following through to a conclusion.

There are obviously billions of ways to write short stories, and not every story needs to end with the protagonist accomplishing a goal, learning something about himself, and living happily every after. However, the atmosphere of horror, mystery, and uncertainty that Mieville accomplishes through writing about passive protagonists becomes a bit stale with repetition. I'm not particularly judging him as an author; this is his first collection of short stories and it makes sense that his magazine publications have used a formula that works for him. Nevertheless, I hope his longer works are a bit more full in their execution! ( )