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Posts Tagged ‘other people’s books’

(Re)visiting the Wheel of Time: New Spring

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books from Knife of Dreams onward.]

It occurs to me that it’s no longer accurate to title these posts “Revisiting the Wheel of Time,” since from here on out I’m not re-reading stuff; I’m reading it for the first time. But calling them “Visiting the Wheel of Time” sounds odd, so we’ll go with the parentheses approach.

The schedule, of course, has been one book every two months — but Crossroads of Twilight being the wasteland that it is, and New Spring being so short (it isn’t really; it’s 122K, which is perfectly respectable, but svelte next to the usual doorstops), I decided to “double up” for this round. It was the right decision; there isn’t really enough here to make me feel it would be worth that kind of pace.

It’s an odd book, really, and occupies an odd position in the series: a prequel written while Jordan was mired in the deepest part of the bog. It started out as a novella, then got expanded to a novel; I know I read the original version, but don’t remember exactly what it consisted of. (Did it start with Lan’s arrival in Canluum? I feel like it might, since that starts with a line about “new spring,” and it’s also where Lan comes back into the story, after being largely absent for the first 200 pages.) Sometimes novellas get expanded by tacking on more material before or after — and I’m pretty sure that’s at least a big part of what happened here — but I don’t know if the novella material also got expanded or altered.

I’m also not sure who the book is intended for. New readers? There’s so much in here that doesn’t get explained in the least, like who the Aiel are and why the rest of the continent is at war with them; I don’t even think the story gets around to explaining what exactly happened to Malkier until near the end of the book. Current readers? There’s too much explanation of things that were made abundantly clear long ago, and on the flip side, there just isn’t enough in here that’s new — that isn’t expansion of things we’d already been told about in the main books.

Is it possible for an author to fanfic his own work?

The DWJ Project: The Pinhoe Egg

Last of the Chrestomanci books.

Marianne Pinhoe comes from one of several “dwimmer” families, who practice a kind of magic that they keep hidden from Chrestomanci and his establishment. Doing that gets harder, though, when Gammer — the old woman who rules the Pinhoes — loses her wits, and a war ensues between the Pinhoes and the neighboring Farleighs. Marianne also gives Cat Chant a strange egg from Gammer’s attic, which leads to further trouble.

I quite like this one, though not to the degree that I like the ones I read as a kid. It’s . . . pleasantly comfortable, if that makes sense. I enjoy seeing Cat now that he’s found his feet, and Marianne is fun, too, especially since she’s got the “large, boisterous family” thing going on that we saw in The Magicians of Caprona.

As for the spoilers . . . .

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Books read, July 2011

A lot of short things, a lot of re-reads; it was about all I had the brain-power for. But it adds up to a reasonably respectable-looking list.

The Merlin Conspiracy, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Warlock at the Wheel, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew. Comic-book adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Not entirely successful; it depends way too much on captions to explain stuff, and (naturally) the dialogue bubbles tend to the extremely wordy side. But I’ll say this for it: I felt like it told the story about as completely as the film adaptation I’ve seen did (the one with Alan Rickman et al). That’s pretty good, for something this length. (I haven’t read the original novel — I know; I know — so that’s the only metric I have.)

Charmed Life, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Conrad’s Fate, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Tokyo Babylon, vol. 2, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 3, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 4, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 5, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 6, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 7, CLAMP. The Parallelsfic exchange reminded me that I’d started a re-read of this manga series a while ago, so I went back to it. Tokyo Babylon is urban fantasy in a way that not many urban fantastists try to achieve: it spiritualizes the way the city (in this case, Tokyo) chews people up and spits the bones back out again. It isn’t happy, as that description might suggest; it’s extra not happy once you get into the character-level metaplot. But the individual stories resolve . . . not hopefully, I guess, but well. The episodes basically all concern Subaru using magic to lay ghosts to rest, and his empathy and patience are kind of beautiful.

Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan. Discussed elsewhere.

Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett. So I started reading Sourcery twice and kept getting distracted from it; the beginning just didn’t hook me. I’m sure it’s a perfectly fine book and I’ll go back to it someday, but for now, I said “screw it” and went ahead to the book with Granny Weatherwax and Shakespeare and other such fabulous things. This is probably my favorite Discworld so far, simply because I want to copy down into my quotes notebook entire paragraphs of Granny Weatherwax thinking about theatre and words and art and truth.

Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Nancy Butler and Hugo Petrus. Another comic-book adaptation; this one was written before Sense and Sensibility, but I read it second. I found it the less successful of the two, but that may be because I know the source better. The intro talks about how Butler knew she’d be pilloried if she changed around Austen’s story too much; me, I wish she had, to make it work better within the medium. Then she might have avoided the heavy reliance on captions and two-panel scenes and all the rest. (On the other hand, it could be a stellar case study in why a faithful adaptation is not necessarily a good one. If that sort of thing is useful to you.)

Witch Week, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Ovid, David Wishart. I nearly bounced off this on the first page because the first-century Roman narrator called the woman who came to hire him a “tough cookie.” But it ended up being a nicely intricate (and well-researched) historical mystery — “mystery” of the political sort, rather than the evidence-and-prosecution sort; it revolves around Emperor Tiberius’ refusal to let Ovid’s ashes be returned to Rome — so if you aren’t turned off by mythological and historical allusions rubbing shoulders with hard-boiled detective tropes, I do recommend this one. And there’s more in the series, too.

The Magicians of Caprona, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne. I don’t think I’ve ever read any Verne before, though I know of his work pretty thoroughly. This made for a fascinating read, in that you’re 40% of the way through the book before they even start her descent; everything prior to that is a) discovery of the notion and b) the logistics of getting from Germany to an obscure mountain in Iceland. And then at that, they don’t even make it all the way to the center of the earth! But it reminded me a lot of the Golden Age SF that came later, with its scientist-heroes and unabashed willingness to spend pages on the discussion of scientific theories.

His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik. Re-read, because I needed to get my brain into nineteenth-century-dragon gear early in the month, and then didn’t finish it until the month was nearly over. It remains a very fun read, especially if you’re fond of Patrick O’Brian and his ilk; the blending of the Napoleonic Wars (and the British naval mindset therein) with dragons is just cool.

Traveling for a chunk of this month, so I expect the next list will be shorter.

The DWJ Project: Mixed Magics

Like Sophie, I am remorseless, but my remorselessness lacks method: I failed to actually determine whether there was a particular subset of the short story collections I could obtain so as to cover all the short stories, with a minimum of duplication. As a result, I’ve already read two of the four stories here in Warlock at the Wheel, and technically I also read “Stealer of Souls” on its own, since I ordered the World Book Day edition of that before I realized it was in (and subsequently ordered) Mixed Magics.

Anyway. “Warlock at the Wheel” and “The Sage of Theare” I’ve reported on. As for the other two stories:

“Stealer of Souls” pleased me all out of proportion by answering the morbid question that’s been lurking in the back of my head for years: what happened to Gabriel de Witt? If he still had eight lives left when Christopher was a boy, then it must have taken a heck of a lot of dying to get rid of him between then and Christopher’s tenure as Chrestomanci. Turns out it’s more or less like I thought, to whit, once you get old enough your lives just start slipping away via the same natural causes that everybody else suffers from. You don’t get extended life or anything, just more chances to bounce back. And it makes sense to me that, being as old as he was, and passing in that fashion, he would abdicate and let Christopher take over. (So for a little while there, they had three nine-lifed enchanters around. Man, knowing that we’ll never get any more of these books has apparently stuck my brain in fanfic gear, because now I want a story about the one time Gabriel, Christopher, and Cat had to team up to lay a smackdown on something.)

Oh, you want me to talk about the actual story? I liked it, though I kept being irresistibly distracted by the fact that the guy was calling himself Neville Spiderman. It was good to see some follow-through with Tonino, and the whole thing with the souls was suitably creepy. Not the most memorable, but not bad, either.

“Carol Oneir’s Hundredth Dream” scratched the “so what happened with Oneir, anyway?” itch, though only tangentially. I liked it for its commentary on storytelling and creativity, and also for watching Christopher be a politely sarcastic bastard (which pretty much never gets old for me). I think I wanted it to be longer, so it would have more space to develop things, but what we got was pleasant enough.

The DWJ Project: The Magicians of Caprona

In Verona Caprona, the families of the Montagues Montanas and Capulets Petrocchis have been feuding since, well, forever. To make matters worse, although they’re the most powerful spell-making families in Caprona, the virtue seems to be going out of their work; their spells are failing, right when an alliance of Florence, Pisa, and Siena is threatening Caprona’s borders. As with Romeo and Juliet, it’s up to the kids to bridge the rift their parents won’t cross — though in this case it involves less death, more Punch and Judy shows.

This book takes place in the same world as The Lives of Christopher Chant and Charmed Life (the same specific world — Twelve-A), but is more like Witch Week or Conrad’s Fate in that it uses Chrestomanci for a side character. This one is generally happier than either of those; among other things, it goes the opposite direction from the usual pattern of neglected or abused children, and puts our characters into huge, boisterous, occasionally contentious but entirely loving families. I especially love the way that fantasy gets integrated into the family dynamic in an understated way: aunts and cousins popping out of the woodwork to help or interfere with things isn’t a coincidence, it’s a function of the magic that underlies them all.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to the spoilers we go.

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The DWJ Project: Witch Week

The back cover of my copy of Witch Week calls it “a wild comic fantasy from a master of the supernatural.”

Um.

There are certainly funny bits in this book. (The mop-and-hoe incident comes to mind.) But “wild comic fantasy”? On a micro scale, Larwood House manages to hit almost every abusive-boarding-school trope there is: never warm enough, dreary food, teachers ranging from neglectful to cruel, and all the student-level nastiness you would expect. On a macro scale, the world is one where witches are still burned at the stake, and since half the students at Larwood are witch-orphans, that means half the characters live in fear of the inquisitors coming after them. You know how I’ve been talking about the way Diana Wynne Jones’ books contain these hard edges, but buried in a way that lets you deal with them on your own terms? The hard edges here are scarcely buried at all. I think Witch Week is a very good book, but I almost never re-read it, because I can’t lose sight of how grim it is.

Which is not to say it’s unrelentingly bleak; it isn’t. (I don’t want to scare off anybody who hasn’t read it already.) But you may spend a goodly chunk of the time outraged, before the narrative gets to the point where it says “you know how this world is really messed-up and wrong? Yeah. That isn’t an accident; it’s the real conflict underlying everything else.”

Onward to the spoilers.

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Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Crossroads of Twilight

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

This is the book that killed me.

Prior to the publication of Crossroads of Twilight, I was willing (if not happy) to wait two or three years for each Wheel of Time book, slowly plodding my way toward the conclusion. After this one, I was done. I would not pick the series up again until the end was in sight — as indeed has been the case. All the way through this re-read, I’ve been bagging on CoT, dreading its arrival . . . but wondering, subconsciously, if maybe I had mis-remembered; maybe it was just the disappointment of having waited more than two years, or the disconnect caused by not re-reading previous books, and it wasn’t really as bad as I thought.

Reader, I did not mis-remember.

This book is, from beginning to end, the Catastrophic Failure Mode of Epic Fantasy Pacing. It is everything I’ve been critiquing since The Fires of Heaven, writ extra large, with underlining. Hell — to the best of my knowledge, it is the one book about which Jordan ever publicly admitted, “you know, maybe that wasn’t a good idea.” Given the flaws I’ve been pointing out along the way, that admission should tell you something.

Going into it, I wondered how I should approach analyzing this book. What could I say that I hadn’t already said before? I suppose this post could consist of me tearing out my hair and going “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH,” but that’s not too helpful. Instead I decided to approach this systematically: reading the book, I noted down the number of pages in each chapter, the point of view character(s), and, in no more than one sentence, what important events take place. What changes in the chapter? What new thing do the characters (or the readers) learn? What fresh problem starts, or old problem concludes? Having done that, I now have a wealth of evidence to back me up when I tell you:

NOTHING BLOODY HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK.

And I don't just mean in the hyperbolic way people usually accuse this series of.

The DWJ Project: Conrad’s Fate

The people up at Stallery Manor keep “pulling the probabilities” — manipulating chance to change the world into one that’s more favorable to them. The problem is, this causes all kinds of spillover changes, most of which go unnoticed by people elsewhere in the world (things have always been that way, right?), but which are readily apparent to people living in the town of Stallchester. Conrad, a boy of twelve, gets sent up there to become a servant and sniff around for the cause of these problems . . . and also to kill somebody. You see, Conrad has an evil fate: some kind of bad karma hanging around from a past life, when he failed to take out somebody he was supposed to. If he doesn’t make good on that now, he’ll die before the year is out.

And then things get more complicated when an older boy named Christopher shows up, from another world, looking for his missing friend Millie.

Yes, this is another Chrestomanci book (and I think the only other story that shows us Christopher in his pre-Chrestomanci days). I bore it a bit of a grudge the first time I read it because I wanted MOAR CHRISTOPHER DANGIT, and that isn’t this book; I liked it better now that I was reading the book it actually was. Really, what it is could be described as “the Chrestomanci series meets Gosford Park / Downton Abbey;” a lot of the story revolves around the servants-eye view of a grand household, first as vast amounts of effort are spent on keeping three people in style, then as a bunch of guests show up.

The rest of the details go behind the cut.

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The DWJ Project: Charmed Life

Since I got a request for Witch Week, I postponed the Dalemark books in favor of doing the Chrestomanci ones instead. But never fear, I’ll get to them all. 🙂

After Eric Chant (nicknamed Cat) and his older sister Gwendolen are orphaned in a steamboat accident, Gwendolen, who is a powerful witch, schemes to have them taken in by Chrestomanci as his wards. But Chrestomanci refuses to let Gwendolen go on learning magic — Cat, for his own part, doesn’t seem to have any — and so she begins causing trouble, and plotting with some rather unsavory magical types to boot. When Gwendolen pulls off her most spectacular trick, Cat finds himself saddled with the resulting mess.

This is actually the first Chrestomanci book, though it’s third chronologically, and decidedly not the first one I read. (That was Lives, and then maybe one or both of Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona; I can’t remember precisely.) I never quite read it with the right eye, though, since I came to it as a Christopher fangirl, and accordingly process Chrestomanci through a lens that didn’t actually exist when the story was written. Also, many of the things going on in the story were from the start entirely obvious to me, since I already knew the setting.

Despite me having that odd perspective on it, this is a delightful book. It has all the hallmarks of DWJ’s writing, from the whimsy to the interesting world to the deft handling of some really, really unpleasant elements. But saying more involves spoilers, so behind the cut we go.

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Books read, June 2011

In which it will be obvious that I am now working on a novel.

Dreaming of Wolves: Adventures in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, Alan E. Sparks. I don’t actually remember how much of this book I got through — not all of it, certainly — but whatever, we’ll count it as read. I picked it up for environmental detail on the aforementioned Carpathian Mountains, as it is the account of a man who went there as part of some wolf-studying project. It’s not very well executed, but I got what I needed from it, more or less.

The Land Beyond the Forest: facts, figures, and fancies from Transylvania, E. Gerard. More research, and again I didn’t read the whole thing; just the section on Romanians. This was written in the late nineteenth century, and wow, the racism. I have to quote:

Briefly to sum up the respective merits of these three races, it may be allowable to define them as representing manhood in the past, present, and future tenses. The Saxons [of that region; not of England] have been men, and right good men too, in their day; but that day has gone by, and they are now rapidly degenerating into mere fossil antiquities […] The Hungarians are men in the full sense of the word, perhaps all the more so that they are a nation of soldiers rather than men of science and letters. The Roumanians will be men a few generations hence, when they have had time to shake off the habits of slavery and have learned to recognize their own value.

Yeeeeeeeah. But, well, I’m writing a nineteenth-century-ish novel set in a Romania-like region, so I don’t regret picking this up from the library. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll be copying from it all that closely: there is merit to Isabella being obsessed with dragons and really quite careless of human notions like racial superiority.

Eight Days of Luke, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

The Snow Queen’s Shadow, Jim C. Hines. If I’d gotten around to posting this sooner, I could have said, ha-ha, I have this book and you don’t, nyah nyah. But the book is out now, so I’ll skip that part and go straight to the bit where I say that Hines has done a remarkable job wrapping up this series. He’s said elsewhere that it took him a while to figure out that the fairy tale books have been about questioning and complicating the notion of “happily ever after,” and this delivers on that theme, in very excellent ways. (Also, to echo Mris: this series is now done. So if you’re one of those people who prefers to wait until you can get all the books, you’re now cleared for take-off.)

Deep Secret, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

So far, July is shaping up to be the Month of Much Manga. (And comics, but that doesn’t alliterate, so.) But we’ll see how it goes.

The DWJ Project: Warlock at the Wheel

Another short-story collection, and more successful than Stopping for a Spell — but that’s largely because it includes a few stories I think are better than anything in that collection; some of the others here are just as forgettable. In other words, the quality is very uneven.

“A Plague of Peacocks,” “The Fluffy Pink Toadstool,” and “Auntie Bea’s Day Out” all feel a lot like the pieces in Stopping for a Spell, being of the “person is unreasonably awful and then gets their comeuppance via magic” type that I really just don’t enjoy. I wasn’t much of a fan of “Carruthers” either, which feels much the same even though its structure is different, and “No One” was a less-than-confident foray into science fiction.

The three I liked better:

“Warlock at the Wheel” is (loosely) a Chrestomanci story, and benefits from that by having more plot momentum than the ones I mentioned above. After Charmed Life he goes on the lam, but very incompetently, and hijinks ensue. It isn’t up to the standards of her novels, and Jemima Jane is rather like the Izzies in The Merlin Conspiracy (by which I mean she sets my teeth on edge), but it did entertain me by confirming the speculation I made when I posted about The Homeward Bounders: Chrestomanci’s agent Kathusa has a Kathayack Demon Dog, which is either a hell of a naming coincidence or a direct pointer toward Joris’ Home world.

“Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” was the best of the lot for me. It sets up far more complete of a world than any of the others, and ditto characters; in fact, it almost feels like it’s connected to something else, but to the best of my knowledge that isn’t the case. (Please do mention in comments if I’m wrong.) I would definitely have read more about Siglin and the Dragonate and the Thrallers and the whole heg business.

“The Sage of Theare” is also good, and also a Chrestomanci story. It’s more conceptually complicated than “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight,” but less successful for me on a character and worldbuilding front (which is why I prefer the other). If it could have married its philosophical ideas about questioning and doubt and order and chaos to a firmer narrative framework, I would love it.

I think I’ll do the Dalemark Quartet next, but I’m still open for requests for things people would like to see me tackle sooner rather than later.

The DWJ Project: The Merlin Conspiracy

At the request of elaine_th.

This is, as mentioned before, a sequel of sorts to Deep Secret, albeit a loose one. The only significant connection is the re-use of Nick Mallory as a character; Magids also appear, but this book has much less to do with the Upper Room and other Magid affairs, being mostly about the world Blest.

Like Deep Secret, though, it divides itself between two protagonists: Nick, who gets flung out of our world and has to help three people before he’ll be able to come home, and Roddy (Arianrhod), a Blest girl who’s trying to stop the titular conspiracy. She, of course, is one of the three people Nick helps (or rather, promises to). And then there’s Romanov, a very powerful magician who starts out seeming like an enemy, but ends up being more interesting than that.

In one structural respect, I think this one works a bit more smoothly than Deep Secret did: the alternation between Nick’s pov and Roddy’s jerks around much less than the Rupert/Maree equivalent. This may partly be because the narration is less explicitly framed as taking place at a specific point in time; aside from the opening couple of lines, that drops away until nearly the end of the book. (Contrast Maree’s entries, which were being written more in realtime, which caused unfortunate difficulties.) The flip side is that Nick and Roddy spend much less time on the page together; they’re off on near-separate tracks until about page 360.

Which got me thinking: of the DWJ books I know well, nearly all of them are either written from a single pov (third limited or first), or the omniscient perspective of a narrator. The exceptions are all later books: these two and Enchanted Glass; maybe others I’m not remembering. So I’ll put it to the LJ hive mind and ask, is this impression correct? Are pov shifts something she started doing later in her career? Because they don’t feel like something she was entirely comfortable with on a technical level.

As for details of the plot, we go behind a cut for that.

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The DWJ Project: Deep Secret

I was about to read The Merlin Conspiracy when I remembered that it’s technically part of a series, of which this book is first. I have no idea whether it’s necessary to take them in order — I’ve only read The Merlin Conspiracy once, years ago — but I figured I might as well.

Deep Secret is the first of two Magid books, which take place in a multiverse setting that isn’t the Chrestomanci one (though you could probably find a way to graft them together). The worlds exist in a Mobius loop/infinity symbol configuration, one half of which is “Ayewards” and magically positive, the other half of which is “Naywards” and magically negative. In the middle is the Koryfonic Empire, straddling eleven worlds and going downhill fast. The entire thing is supervised in a fashion by Magids, who serve a collection of entities referred to as the Upper Room, who are sort of godlike, to the extent that their nature is ever made clear.

Rupert Venables, the most junior Magid, is having to deal with two problems at once. First, he has to find a replacement for a more senior Magid who just died (though Stan hangs around as a disembodied voice to help him out). Second, as junior Magid he’s in charge of the Koryfonic Empire, even though he lives on Earth, and the Empire is having some rather serious problems. His efforts to pick a replacement keep being interrupted as he gets dragged away from Earth to deal with problems on Koryfon — but, as the laws of narrative efficiency would lead you to expect, it turns out those two problems aren’t as unrelated as they seem.

Much of the pleasure of this book comes from its setting. You see, Rupert decides to simplify his Magid search by pulling all his candidates together in one place. The requirements of a magical node, the balancing of fatelines, and a mundane excuse to lure the people there mean that everybody winds up at a science fiction convention in Wantchester. And so the book is filled with lovingly-observed details about con culture: all the weirdness and friendliness and administrative drama that such events bring. (I seem to recall hearing once that the hotel — where, thanks to magical disturbances, one can make endless right-angle turns without ever coming back around to the elevator — was inspired by an actual hotel used by some con in Britain, probably one DWJ had been to. All I can say is, we’ve got one of those here in the States, too.)

I also quite like both Rupert and Maree Mallory, the other major protagonist in the story. Rupert takes a while to warm up — the first few pages aren’t as immediately engaging as in most of DWJ’s books — but Maree has a strong narrative voice. And this is a more adult book than most of hers; I think Rupert is twenty-six and Maree is twenty, and certainly there’s more in the way of swearing, sexual overtones, and explicit violence than I recall in the others. (Certainly it’s on the long side, compared to most.) All in all, I quite like it.

But I do have a couple of quibbles, plus some more spoilery things I like, which will go behind the cut.

Spoilers ahoy!

The DWJ Project: Eight Days of Luke

This book is the reason I can never quite believe that Loki is evil.

See, it was my very first introduction to Norse mythology. I’d long adored D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, but had not yet encountered its northern counterpart. (I think the edition of this novel I read back then had an afterword explaining who the gods were, or all the reveals at the end would have flown totally over my head.) Thanks to Diana Wynne Jones, I’m subconsciously convinced Loki’s a sweetie who never really meant to hurt anybody.

It’s also the last of my top tier of favorites, which means I did a book recommendation for it yonks ago; read that for a plot summary.

This was her fourth book published (third fantasy), and as fjm said in the comments to Witch’s Business, it’s the first one to really feel like a DWJ novel. Not just because of the neglected kid protagonist, but because the fantasy isn’t random; it’s a meaningful layer to the story, and not entirely shiny. Luke may not be a villain, but he isn’t quite what you’d call good, either. He’s far too pleased with his own cleverness and power, and not inclined to think about the cost to others unless somebody reminds him.

As I stray into specifics…

Books read, May 2011

Last month was both busy and tiring, so not nearly as much reading got done. Most of these have their own posts, too, so this entry will be short. (Short enough, in fact, that I’m not going to bother with a cut.)

Stopping for a Spell, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

Winter’s Heart, Robert Jordan. Discussed here.

Witch’s Business, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, trans. William Scott Wilson. This is a translation of selections from a rather famous seventeenth-century Japanese text on how to be a samurai. But it dates to the early part of the Edo period, which means it comes from one of those points in time where what being a samurai meant was in flux: Japan was (relatively speaking) at peace, so now the expectation was starting to be that samurai should be Confucian gentlemen as well as warriors. Furthermore, Yamamoto — the guy whose sayings are collected here — had not seen much war (at least by the standards of the period immediately preceding his), so you have to weigh that into the balance with his declarations about how it’s grander to throw your life away for your lord than to kill the enemy for your lord. (I found myself raising an eyebrow at him a lot.) A lot of what’s in here comes across as flat-out crazy to a modern American mind, but trying to understand the mentality behind it is a very interesting exercise.

The Ogre Downstairs, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

The Dragon-Seekers, Christopher McGowan. Research for A Natural History of Dragons, and many thanks to elaine_thom for recommending it. This is a social history/collection of biographies about English fossilists in the decades leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species. There were a few things in the introduction I looked askance at; the writer is a paleontologist rather than a historian, so the context is occasionally a bit weak. But I appreciated the reminder of how people of this kind all knew each other and worked together (or at cross-purposes), and I very much appreciated McGowan’s attention to the role played by quarry-workers and other non-specialists, without whom the fossilists would not have been supplied with things to study.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Winter’s Heart

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

Took me a while to get around to posting this one. I actually read the book last month, but my notes have been sitting around for a few weeks now — possibly a sign that I’m running out of steam. This is the ninth book, after all, and I’ve been doing this since January of last year; after a while, momentum does become an issue. (Doesn’t help that the next book is Crossroads of Twilight. I think I may have mentioned how little I’m looking forward to that one, once or twice. Or three times. Or more.)

But anyway. Winter’s Heart. Which is, indeed, better-shaped than the previous book, though still suffering the characteristic problems of the Bad Three.

So let's get on with it.

things I am remembering while watching Game of Thrones

It’s been a long time since I read the books. I think I’ve been through each one twice, except for A Feast for Crows, which I read when it came out, and that was the last I touched the series. And I decided — just before they announced the No Really We Mean It This Time publication date for book five — that I’m going to hold off until the end is in sight, so that means I’m fuzzy on a lot of things.

But watching the TV series, I remember why I like the books. It isn’t because Martin’s writing is Gritty! Epic! Fantasy! Grit for grit’s sake is not pleasing to me. I’ve picked up, and then put down, several other series in that vein. But Martin manages some things that his fellows in the sub-sub-genre don’t, and they are why I hooked onto him and bounced off the others.

Example: characters. There are many unpleasant people in this series . . . and yet, they’re unpleasant people I want to know more about. The absolute bastards are generally intelligent bastards, and I’m keen to see what they do next. The bitter assholes have understandable motivations for their bitterness and assholitude, and some of them preserve a weird core of decency underneath it (which is not the same as a Heart of Gold). People have loyalties instead of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. I am a reader who generally prefers sympathetic characters; what Martin manages, and many other authors do not, is making me sympathize with people who aren’t very nice. (Exhibit A: Jaime Lannister.)

Also the world. I loves me a good world, whether it’s secondary or built off the real world. I don’t just mean the setting detail, though that’s part of it; the wall of ice and the regional surnames for bastards and Dany eating the stallion’s heart, all that stuff pleases my little anthropological heart. But there’s also the history underpinning it, that makes it feel real instead of a set built just for this story — and the history is both In Ye Olden Days stuff and the intricate network of kinship and alliances that sets up the present moment. Catelyn calling out to the armsmen in the tavern, and Jory reminding Jaime that they fought at each other’s sides once. (I especially love how many of those details the TV show is managing to preserve.)

And, partially underlying those world details, the fact that Martin makes me believe — as so many of his compatriots don’t — that he understands how medieval society worked. How politics work. Money and favors and people passing along tidbits of information; the importance of kinship and ideals, and pragmatism ramming up hard against those ideals. My friends and I are catching up on past episodes, and the conversation between Robert and Cersei just made me so happy, because of the richness it managed to convey. “What’s holding this kingdom together?” “Our marriage.” The trade in daughters isn’t a side note to the important stuff; it’s one of the central posts holding that society up. And Robert’s a shitty king, but he understands war — really understands it, not “the author tells me he does” — so you suddenly see that he isn’t an idiot, just very ill-suited to his current challenges, and it took both him and Cersei to screw up their marriage. That whole scene felt real, because it was based on real understanding, rather than the pale fictional shadow so many authors fall back on.

I know there’s a lot of shocking stuff in his story, and it isn’t to everybody’s taste. But for my own part, I don’t ever feel like I’m being shocked gratuitously — which is not true for many of the other Gritty! Epic! Fantasy! authors I’ve tried. (Note: I speak here of the books, and not HBO, which continues to give me uncomfortable-looking sex scenes I could really do without.) And Martin gives me things to care about, too, even when they’re broken and ugly things and I don’t understand why I care. If I had to put it in simple terms, I might say I feel a sense of empathy in his story, that I don’t feel in his imitators’ work.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I’m really enjoying the TV series, and it’s reminding me of why I enjoy the books, too. I haven’t given up on them; I’m just going to wait until I can enjoy them on my own, more timely schedule.

The DWJ Project: The Ogre Downstairs

Caspar, Johnny, and Gwinny are none too happy with their mother having remarried, to a man they think of as the Ogre. The Ogre’s sons, Douglas and Malcolm, aren’t very happy with it either. Then the Ogre buys Johnny and Malcolm chemistry sets, and wacky hijinks ensue when some of the chemicals turn out to be magic.

This, like Witch’s Business (aka Wilkins’ Tooth), is in the camp of “books I read once and never went back to.” It’s not hard to see why. This isn’t a bad novel; it may bear a strong resemblance to the stories in Stopping for a Spell, but it’s far better than any of those, probably because it’s longer and therefore has more time to develop its ideas. But there’s no deeper, more fantastical layer — not even the hint of one you get in Witch’s Business. The chemicals that drive the plot never get explained, and their source vanishes at the end of the book, without ever having made more than a cameo appearance in the tale. So basically, this feels more like standard-issue children’s fantasy, less like Diana Wynne Jones.

There are a few characteristic touches, though, discussion of which I’ll put behind the cut.

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The DWJ Project: Witch’s Business

Originally published as Wilkins’ Tooth. I don’t know why the title got changed, unless it was because some marketing person thought the original might be mistaken for a mundane story about Wilkins going to the dentist.

This was Diana Wynne Jones’ first fantasy novel for children (her second novel at all, after Changeover, which I can’t find for less than eighty dollars and may never end up reading.) In it, a pair of children whose pocket-money has been stopped set up a revenge business — Own Back, Ltd. — but run into trouble when the local crackpot turns out to be a witch who feels they’re intruding on her territory.

The premise feels pretty standard for a children’s book, whether fantastical or otherwise — much moreso than her later novels do. The protagonists sort of hope somebody will hire them to get revenge on the local bully, but instead the bully hires/blackmails them to get revenge on his behalf. Their efforts to carry out the job lead to more trouble, things snowball, the kids hit a point where they owe too much to too many people, etc. It’s pleasant reading, but not memorable; I’m not surprised that I’ve never gone back to re-read this one.

The one almost-memorable part has to do with the witch and the Adams family (not to be confused with the Addams family). Another author might have stayed with the simple plot of escalating problems, but DWJ hints at a deeper layer that created many of those problems in the first place. Unfortunately, she only hints: we never get much detail about why the Adamses were cursed, etc. I wish there had been more of that, to underpin the fun with something a little more substantial. But I’ll have more thoughts about that when I report back on The Ogre Downstairs.

The DWJ Project: Dogsbody

Tackled this one at the request of marumae. (Or rather, moved it up in the queue at her request.)

Quick synopsis: Sirius is a luminary, a member of a godlike race of entities that inhabit and personify the stars of the universe. At the beginning of the book, he’s put on trial for having killed another luminary using a Zoi, which is an object of great power. But instead of being executed for his crime, he’s exiled to Earth, in the body of a dog. If he can find and recover the Zoi before the dog’s natural lifespan ends, he can return home.

It is, as marumae said, a very bittersweet book. Sirius, born as a helpless puppy, takes a while to understand what’s going on around him, but we the readers can see the unpleasantness of it from the start. There are a lot of of awful people in this book (as well as some very good ones), and the worst part is that they’re completely plausible in their awfulness: not mustache-twirling villains, but people with ordinary cruelty and lack of compassion. And then there’s a second, subtler kind of unpleasantness, which is the inhuman nature of luminaries; they aren’t necessarily bad, but even at their best they don’t have human considerations.

The interesting thing for me, reading this book, is that I now have the perspective to see how this feels like a Diana Wynne Jones who hasn’t fully hit her stride. (Dogsbody was published in 1975; it was her fifth book, and fourth work of fantasy.) All her usual touches are here: finely observed detail, souls both generous and stingy, abused children, numinous wonder breaking through into the ordinary, and more. But there’s a lot at the end, after Sirius and the others follow the cold hounds, that is fabulous in concept but (for me) not quite there in execution. Explaining why involves spoilers, so stay outside the cut if you want to avoid the next two paragraphs.

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