I’ve been taking advantage of some time as a single man to watch DVDs of my favorite bit o’ japanimation: Outlaw Star.

If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry. I gather it’s not widely known.

So, while walking back from the Kennedy Center (I’d just seen Anna-Sophie Mutter perform), I got myself in the mood to watch an episode or two (out of a total of twenty-six) and thought about the gender roles. Or rather, depictions of women.

The primary female protagonist (Melfina) is typically young, school girlish, and large eyed. Most of the time, she’s little more than that. An innocent, virginal object who desires (and is eventually, but only eventually, desired by) the primary male protagonist (Jean Starwind), in the seventh episode, while she’s still dealing with being a  ‘bio-android’ (I gather, essentially human, but with some subtle differences and also grown artificially, rather than born) and not having the memories to go along with her mental age, she falls asleep on Jean’s shoulder. His young friend, Jim Hawking, hits him on the head with a frying pan in looney tunes fashion, when Jean gets a little, shall we say… fresh with the sleeping Melfina. Jim then cuddles up with her and says, ‘She’s like my mom.’

Never before or again are his parents or how a ten year old (roughly)  boy came to be living with a shiftless twenty-something bounty hunter, but that one little moment sets up a rare and totally contrary way to view Melfina (who is otherwise a generally sisterly figure – until she becomes a lover figure, but even that is portrayed in a somewhat platonic fashion: she and Jean are friends first) and is one of the few times when Jim’s needs as a child are acknowledged.

There is a beautiful assassin named Twilight Suzuka. Actually, that should really just be Suzuka, shouldn’t it? She is beautiful, but towards the very end, she meets the man she most wants to kill… and he is wearing her face. He wears baggy, shapeless, sexless clothes, but without those other signifiers and a masculine voice, her face is perfectly adequate as  a beautiful young man. She also very noticeably avoids the question of whether she loves Jean. She promises an answer later, but never gives it. But why does she stick around?

Well, there we are. I’ve just made a big deal of a sixteen year old cartoon. Whatever. I like it.

It’s finally over. I’m kinda sad. Part of the sadness comes from the knowledge that I’ve never read these books again. Basically, I will probably never have the time. Fourteen books, averaging over 800 pages each… not gonna happen. I have yet to read the complete works of Dostoyevsky and that has to be a priority over re-reading the Wheel of Time series. Still. A bit sad.

This one is also only a bit over nine hundred pages, which, I guess is an improvement.

I want to go back to something that’s actual from the previous book, involving how the Children of Light (a kind of radical/reactionary military society that’s very unyielding) somehow agreed to work with a person totally antithetical to their beliefs. I know that the person (Perrin, if you must know) is ta’veren, which means that things just kind of happen around him (the Pattern bends around him, to use Wheel of Time speak) and there was good faith authorial effort to show some development in the Children of Light, but it was just too damn fast. I don’t buy. I didn’t buy it then. And this book is reminding me how I didn’t buy it.

But, the book does one thing very, very right. It picks up speed very, very fast. Very. Fast.

Less than halfway through, it turns into an enormous set piece, with three major, multi-day battles – not including the  more individualistic, ultimate showdown between the mythic hero and ultimate evil. Sanderson shows a good touch for this sort of thing (his battle scenes in the Mistborn Trilogy were pretty good, so it’s not unexpected, but it is appreciated). The action is non-stop, exciting, and propulsive. The battle scenes, at least.

Rand al’Thor, the great hero of the book, has his final confrontation with the nebulous evil that is the ‘Dark One.’ And it’s a little disappointing. Parts of it seem, I kid you not, ripped off from The Last Temptation of Christ. While one can figure out what happened (Rand won, but how is the question) and what was done and the reasoning, it was not clear. Not in a ‘making the reader think’ way but in a ‘sloppily rushed to a not very well described conclusion’ way. There is some irritating deus ex machina regarding some of the main characters and the way in which they survived. And the very end, with Rand sneaking off while (most) everyone thinks he has died and is being burned on a pyre… well, what is the body being burned? And what is he doing to do about his two unborn children? It’s… I don’t know. Some big enemies were brought into the fight without a real explanation of why they were there and what they were and what exactly was motivating them.

But, hey. I finished. Fourteen freaking books. I took the last of them to the used bookstore the other day (not the final book, which I bought in hardback; not used bookstore wants hardback genre fiction, so I will likely donate it to the library). A part of my life that began in 2009 is over and that’s good and bad, but certainly not something I regret.

Well , what do you know? I finished one more book. This only happened because of a combination of getting sick and reading in bed and also of insisting that it is not rude to read in front of everyone if no one is speaking a language I can understand.

But onto the book!

This was a book I had read about somewhere as a good piece of fantasy and which I had filed away in my head, so I snatched it up when Barnes & Noble offered it cheap for my Nook.

The novel takes place in the well and interestingly sketched city-state of Camorr. Lynch makes the decision to do his world building by dropping names (Elderglass towers) and descriptions naturally in the text, as if the reader already knew about these things. The great William Gibson, at his best, does this well. Lynch isn’t bad and he’s helped by the fact that he cribs heavily from Fritz Leiber’s immortal city of Lankhmar and the undying (literarily speaking) duo of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. This isn’t a criticism, necessarily. After all, you can’t write wry, picaresque, roguish fantasy after Leiber and not reference the great man. And because any decent reader of fantasy worth her/his salt will have read those stories, it makes a useful short hand for the reader.

The meat of the plot takes a while to get going but the getting there is fun.

I was a little vexed that the titular Lamora decided to settle the final issue with the major villain via a sword fight, despite being notably mediocre in a fight. It seemed out of character for him not to have had a better plan and also took me out of the story when he acquitted himself decently well (though he won by a trick, of course).

It’s the first in a series but it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, which I appreciate, though not for reasons that will make the author happy. You see, I loved powering through this book and enjoyed it immensely… but I’m not overwhelmed by a desire to return to his world.