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Posts Tagged ‘other people’s books’

The DWJ Project: Stopping for a Spell

I decided to spread the short-fiction collections out between novels, and tackled this one first.

All three of the stories contained in it were originally published independently; Fantastic Fiction lists Chair Person and Four Grannies as novels, and Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? as a picture book. All three come with illustrations in this collection, though, and they’re all about the same length, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the first two were picture books, too.

I know I’ve read some, maybe all, of her shorter work before, but I can’t say any of it ever really made an impression on me. Coming at it now, I have to say the impression made by these three stories isn’t very good. The magic in all three is thoroughly arbitrary, working for no particular reason and then stopping when it’s no longer needed. “Chair Person” and “Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?” also share a structure I don’t like very much, namely: “Horrible person moves in and is thoroughly abusive to a family; parents are too polite to get rid of him no matter how bad his actions are; the kids eventually solve the problem with magic.” It’s like the Goon from Archer’s Goon, but without a broader story to dilute the nastiness, and both the Chair Person and Angus Flint are far, far more unpleasant than he is. And I can’t say I was terribly fond of Erg in “Four Grannies,” either, for all that he was nominally the protagonist.

So yeah, not the best. I’ll be interested to see how the rest of her short fiction compares; some people just have a knack for one length over another, and I suspect that may be the case here. So if you’re looking for Diana Wynne Jones books to try out, this is not a good place to start. Aside from the occasional bit of clever description — one of her trademarks, after all — these stories really don’t showcase her strengths.

Books Read, April 2011

A longer list than March’s, but the post will be shorter, because the DWJ books have all been discussed elsewhere already.

(And while it may be a longer list, I’m not sure it amounts to more pages read. March included a Wheel of Time book, and a bunch of Bujold; April is lots of DWJ and two graphic novels. I won’t be surprised if this turns out to be more like my usual level, as opposed to January and February, where I was mainlining books like a woman who hadn’t read much fiction in, well, ages.)

Now let’s see if I can remember these . . . .

The DWJ Project: The Homeward Bounders

We’re almost at the end of the Diana Wynne Jones books I wrote recommendations for; this is the last but one. (The final title is Eight Days of Luke, which is also a favorite, but it’s sort of a first-and-a-halfth tier favorite, along with Archer’s Goon and The Power of Three and maybe some others, too.)

So that link has the plot summary and so on. Here, outside the spoiler cut, I’ll say that the only DWJ novel that has ever seemed to me at all similar to this one (and vice versa) is Fire and Hemlock, though I’ve heard people talk about a few others in a way that makes me think I may change that evaluation, once I remind myself of what those others are like. Partly it’s the role of real-world folklore — though in this case the components are easy to spot, since many of them are named in the opening paragraph. The Wandering Jew. The Flying Dutchman (whose ship is on the cover of my edition). Him, whom I won’t name here because this is the non-spoiler part of the discussion, but those of you who have read the book know who I’m talking about. Then again, there may well be other layers that aren’t so obvious to spot.

But really, what makes this one feel akin to Fire and Hemlock is the way it sort of slantwise approaches some really thorny things before turning to look at them directly, without flinching. Neither of these books is precisely happy. They both end on a note of hope, but it’s tempered with some real sorrow, the victory coming at a fair bit of cost. I’m really sort of startled this counts as a kids’ book, even if the protagonist is twelve. But kids need stories of this kind too, I suppose — even if it leaves me, at the age of thirty, feeling like somebody has stomped on my heart.

I think that’s all I can say that’s non-spoilery. Follow me behind the cut for the rest.

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The DWJ Project: Howl’s Moving Castle

When I started these posts, I had to decide on an icon. I can no longer remember what cover was on the copy of The Lives of Christopher Chant I read back in the day, and sadly, my memory of my original Fire and Hemlock cover turned out to be way cooler than the reality. (In my head, it looked a lot more like the photograph is described. I would pay so much money to see Diana’s actual Fire and Hemlock picture.)

But I remember the cover under which I first read Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s the one you see in this icon, and while Howl himself doesn’t look right, that is Calcifer. (One of the many reasons I was disappointed with Miyazaki’s film is that Calcifer, while adorable, was utterly wrong.) So, since I wanted an icon that might actually be recognized as Diana Wynne Jones-related, this was the natural choice.

Since I’ve started to begin this project by re-reading my first tier of favorites — I don’t have a favorite, one that stands out above all others — I will once again point you at the recommendation I wrote some time ago, which gives you a sense of the plot. This one is much more fairy-tale-ish in its flavor, firmly set by the opening paragraph’s proclamations about the misfortune of being born the eldest of three. Its hard edges aren’t as prominent, either, as in the previous two books; there are some unpleasant notion lurking in the whole business with the fire demons, and also in what happens with Mrs. Pentstemmon (not to mention Prince Justin and the Wizard Suliman), but there’s less that makes you squirm and think, um, these people aren’t entirely good, are they? Howl’s faults, while real, are also less sharp-edged.

But it’s a Diana Wynne Jones book, and that means it also has some interesting truths about people’s behavior. I saw somebody’s post talking about how Christopher gets smacked upside the head by Flavian’s outburst in Lives, and so, in a way, does the reader; there’s a similar kind of reversal here with Fanny, as Sophie’s mental image of her (and the reader’s) changes from the beginning to the end of the book. Sophie’s own motivations are for a time unclear to her, and Howl . . . well, let’s just say that I’m wondering if my childhood fondness for this book somehow primed me to like Francis Crawford of Lymond. There are some unexpected similarities between the two.

I’m wandering close to spoiler territory, though, so I’ll put the rest behind the cut.

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The DWJ Project: Fire and Hemlock

This is the other book that had to be put up at the top of the reading order: The Lives of Christopher Chant because it’s the first one I read, and Fire and Hemlock because it is, as I’ve said before, the book that made me a writer. Since this month is the five-year anniversary of my first novel being published, the time seemed very right to re-visit it.

As with Lives (and a few others to come), I’m going to cheese out a bit on writing up broad commentary and just point you at my recommendation from 2004. This is, as I say there, a “Tam Lin” story (and a “Thomas the Rhymer” one, too); it’s because of this book that I picked up Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which in turn became one of the foundational inspirations of the first novel I ever finished writing. But it isn’t a straightforward retelling of either of those stories. It is, instead, its own riff on the idea, with its own twists and solution.

For many years, I would have told you I didn’t understand that solution. In some ways, I still don’t — I mean, I kind of do, but slim as this novel is, I never feel like I can quite hold the entire shape of it in my mind at once. Bits keep slipping through my grasp. This used to bother me a lot, and I blamed it on the fact that I first read the book when I was nine; having gotten a certain form of not-understanding into my head, I couldn’t let go of it and see what was there. Then I read this two-part post by rushthatspeaks, and that referenced an old essay by Diana Wynne Jones that I was able to find online (pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), and you know what? I no longer feel the slightest bit ashamed of not being able to comprehend this whole book at once. The layers that went into it boggle me: not just “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer,” but the Odyssey, and Cupid and Psyche, and a T.S. Eliot poem I’d never read that turns out to be quite important, not to mention all the trios I’d never consciously thought about, Nina/Polly/Fiona and Granny/Ivy/Polly and Laurel/Polly/Ivy. Re-reading it this time, I bent my brain in half mapping out similar trios among the men. The novel is worlds more complicated than I ever consciously noticed before.

(In case you didn’t guess, you shouldn’t read those essays without having read the book first. Spoilers, and a lot of stuff won’t make sense.)

I never thought of DWJ before as the sort of author who would do that kind of intricate weaving within a narrative (hah, the irony of deploying my usual textile-based narrative metaphors for this). I’ve always known she was an incredibly strong storyteller, but now I find myself wondering if I’ll spot anything as elaborately layered in her other books, or if Fire and Hemlock is going to stand apart from the others in that regard. I know it’s always felt different; only The Homeward Bounders ever seemed comparable to me. But as I go back for this project, I may find it has other cousins among her work.

Okay, behind the cut for more spoilery bits.

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AROTGOTTVSP,AWBSNSFAPOAPCFTFG

A Review of the Game of Thrones TV Series Premiere, As Written by Someone Not Starting from a Position of A Priori Contempt For the Fantasy Genre

(LJ won’t let me have a post title that long.)

I thought it was pretty good. The three of us watching who had read the books thought it was a faithful and effective adaptation of the source material; the fourth member of the audience, who had not read the books, said it succeeded at getting her interested, which is what you want from a premiere. Lots of good casting choices, and because it’s a series, it can take the time it needs to build up the characters and the world by methods more gradual than Ye Olde Info-Dumpe.

It being HBO, of course, they were not shy about showing you the nekkid, and things that were faintly disturbing on the page become moreso when you actually see them happening. (In particular, it’s hard to miss how problematic the Dothraki are.) But I didn’t feel they were gratuitously amping the R-rated stuff up just for the sake of spectacle, which is my usual HBO complaint.

I definitely want to see more. Though we’ll probably go the route of recording several eps and then watching them in one go, rather than doling it out an hour each week.

And that, New York Times, is how you do it. You get a reviewer who actually likes the genre to give you an opinion. Not somebody who is convinced of the worthlessness of fantasy before they ever sit down to watch the show. Please remedy this error in the future.

The DWJ Project: The Lives of Christopher Chant

After much hemming and hawing, I decided that I needed to start the re-read with The Lives of Christopher Chant, as it was — so far as I recall — the first DWJ book I ever read.

So I think what I’m going to do with this project is post an entry for each book, and put the non-spoilery stuff up top, then hide the spoilery stuff behind a cut. (I’ll put in a warning, for those reading this by RSS feed or other methods that might show the whole entry at once.)

Mind you, it’s hard to know what to say. I love this book in that unreserved way you can generally only get by forming your attachment in childhood, when things can bypass your brain and go straight to your heart. The easy thing to do is point you at the recommendation I wrote back when I was doing those on a monthly basis — with two corrections, those being that I spelled Throgmorten’s name wrong there (how could I make such a mistake?) and somewhat mis-spoke on what constitutes the unifying thread of the story. It’s really more about Christopher’s spirit travels than it is about the Chrestomanci business.

If you want an introduction to Diana Wynne Jones’ work, I’d say this is a good place to start. It has a lot of her hallmarks: children with more power than they’re initially aware of, hard bits the story doesn’t flinch away from, choices with consequences. It also sets you up for the rest of the Chrestomanci books, all of which take place later, though half of which (Charmed Life, Witch Week, and the Magicians of Caprona) were written sooner. (When I get to Charmed Life, I’ll have more to say about the chronological relationship of those two.) I really love the concept of the Related Worlds, and the notion behind just how nine-lived enchanters come to exist, and I also love the way the story seems to go beyond the boundaries of the frame. Just how did Cosimo Chant and Miranda Argent end up married, anyway? What happens with Fennig and Oneir after Christopher leaves school? What’s the tragic tale of Mordecai Roberts and Miss Rosalie, before the book begins? We get hints, but nothing extensive, and if you tell me there’s fanfic out there answering those questions, I won’t be at all surprised.

But the stuff I really want to say involves specifics, so let’s go behind the cut for that.

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The Diana Wynne Jones Project

Okay, folks. So I mentioned a while ago that I think I’m going to re-read the complete works of Diana Wynne Jones.

How should I go about doing this?

She wrote multiple different series, and a whole lot of stand-alone books. Should I read them in chronological order of publication? That would, in some cases, break up series by rather large amounts. Read all the series first, then tackle the stand-alones, in chronological order or not? Go at it any which way, grabbing whatever tickles my fancy? I’m really not sure how best to approach it. The one thing I’m sure of is that I’ll start with either Fire and Hemlock (beause it made me a writer) or The Lives of Christopher Chant (because it was the first one I read), but recommendations for what to do after that would be welcome.

For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder if my subconscious had The Lives of Christopher Chant in mind when it came up with the title for “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe.”

apropos of the previous post

George R. R. Martin has an announcement.

As a professional, this is fascinating to me. They have set a publication date of July — in this year — for a book he says he isn’t done with yet. By contrast, I finished With Fate Conspire in September of last year, did copy-edits in January, and will be getting page proofs in March, for a street date at the end of August. I know the reasons for that schedule, and in no way begrudge them; a lot of factors go into determining what gets done when. But it’s fascinating to see how quickly it can all go, when the publisher decides to push.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Path of Daggers

[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.]

After reading A Crown of Swords, I found myself realizing that I organize the series into four generalized groupings, based on the narrative momentum. It begins with the Good Four, which are The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Each has its flaws, but on the whole, they’re the books in which the scope and complexity of the story manages to be a feature rather than a bug. They’re followed by the Wobbly Three — The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, and A Crown of Swords — during which, as I’ve documented in past posts, the structural decisions made during the Good Four start to have destabilizing consequences for the pacing and shape of the narrative. Those three do still achieve interesting forward progress on the plot, though, despite their increasingly swampy nature.

This month, however, we start in on the Bad Three: The Path of Daggers, Winter’s Heart, and (god help me) Crossroads of Twilight.

The boundary between the Wobbly Three and the Bad Three is indistinct, and may well owe its placement to the fact that I had to wait two years for The Path of Daggers to come out. I don’t entirely think so, though. It seems to me that, although we’ve been running into increasing structural problems since TFoH, this is the first time that the shape of an individual volume has fallen like a badly-made souffle. There’s no arc to this book, no feeling of growing tension or climax at the end. The most exciting stuff happens around pages 100-150 and 300-350, but the book is 591 pages long. The actual ending coasts along mildly for a time before saying without warning, “oh, by the way, some shit,” and then you’re left staring at the Epilogue.

This gets, um, very ranty. I told you I call these the Bad Three, right?

Books read, February 2011

Continuing my quest to read all the fiction!

Seriously, I have read more fiction in the first two months of this year than in the entirety of last year — possibly the last two years. (Presuming we don’t count all the Victorian lit I speed-read while hunting for a title, and really, we shouldn’t count it, because that stuff was going in one eyeball and out the other.) Eventually these posts will include some nonfiction, but for now, I am wallowing in made-up stories, and it is glorious.

I averaged a book every two days, though admittedly, some of them are novellas.

I should have posted this on Valentine’s Day. (Or not.)

So in my SF Novelists post, I made a mention of how a lot of romance novels don’t work for me because they’re often too focused on the hero and heroine, to the exclusion (or at least sidelining) of other characters. And that reminded me that I had some thoughts I’d meant to post, about why, despite giving it a good shot, I don’t think I’ll ever be a romance reader.

Before I get into those thoughts, however, let me say up front: the tl;dr version of this is not “romance novels suck.” Anyone using the comment thread to bash the genre wholesale will be invited to do their bashing elsewhere. This is about why I’m the wrong reader for the genre.

The reason, in short form, is this: I don’t find them all that romantic.

It has to do with where my own personal buttons are.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: A Crown of Swords

[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.]

Back in the day, I think A Crown of Swords was my favorite book in the series. As I’ve said before, it’s the one I waited the right length of time for (enough to build anticipation, not enough to become annoyed); furthermore, it has a lot of Mat, and also some really good moments for both Elayne and Nynaeve. In retrospect, it isn’t as good as The Shadow Rising — which will probably remain the best-constructed slice of this sprawling narrative, unless Sanderson really knocks my socks off — but it’s okay. Its major weakness is probably the fizzle of confrontation at the end. (A lot of people apparently complain about how little time passes during the book, but a) man, that must take obsessive work to figure out, since there are no dates given and b) I don’t care about time so much as plot elapsed. And while this one is firmly in the throes of “too many new plots, not enough resolution,” stuff does happen.)

I’ll get to the plot construction in a minute, but first: exciting news! I think I’ve figured out Faile. But I need other people to check my characterization math, because I don’t have a copy of Lord of Chaos around to see if I’m correctly remembering her behavior there, and I don’t remember what happens later well enough (especially the bits from Faile’s pov).

Follow me behind the cut . . . .

after much delay

Dear Internets: as a reader new to the Vorkosigan books (I know, I know; I’ve been meaning to read them for years), which book should I start with?

Relevant factors include publishing order, internal chronology, accessibility, and quality of writing. Recommend the one you think is most likely to make sense and hook me into the series.

The [X]-page test

There’s a discussion going on right now in various corners of the internet about how to begin a story: sartorias talks about it here, and then you can follow links to this and this and some other pages I seem to have misplaced.

It’s timely for me because right now I’m going through another of my periodic bookshelf surveys. See, these days I go to a variety of conferences and conventions where I’m given free books, and because I still have the Starving Grad Student instinct of “free stuff is always good,” I take them home. Then they sit on my shelves for months or years without being read, until I get into one of these moods. Then I go through, grab those random books, and read their beginnings to see if I will a) keep going, b) keep it on the shelf for possible later reading, or c) cull it.

In my head, it’s the twenty-page test, though in truth that number fluctuates wildly. If I’m feeling determinedly fair — or uncertain — I’ll give a book fifty pages to convince me I should keep going. If I’m feeling cynical, it’s only ten pages, or five. On occasion I don’t make it off the first page, though that’s rare. (I have very little truck with the notion that you need a really killer opening sentence; for something the length of a novel, killer writing often requires larger units of measurement.)

What makes me keep reading, and what makes me stop? On sartorias‘ LJ, I said this:

I’m coming around to the thought that what I need most in the opening paragraph isn’t action or conflict or even character (which is what I need to keep going after a page or two), but very simply a sense of confidence. Some writers can string together words in a fashion that makes me believe they know what they’re doing; some cannot. And I think that difference is also the difference between writers who pull me in, and those with whom I remain stubbornly aware that I’m reading black marks on a page.

I don’t think I can put it any more concretely than that, except to add an addendum from elsewhere in that comment thread, which is that this only partly depends on the confidence of the author. I’m sure there are many writers out there who sleep well in the certainty that their work is brilliant, but to me it still looks shaky and weak. What I really need is for me to feel confidence in the author — however that may be done.

Some of what I’m looking for is prose — not necessarily Amazing Artful Prose; just prose that knows it’s aiming for and hits the target — but it’s also a feeling of solidity to the setting, or a character whose personality leaps off the page. Or all of the above. (Less often conflict, because for that to be compelling, I need a sense of who and what is at stake. So that takes longer to build.) The unhelpful thing about this is that it can’t be boiled down to useful instructions for the would-be writer, beyond “practice.” Practice will make you certain you want this word and not another, a semicolon instead of two separate sentences, this interesting detail about the setting, a wry bit of self-deprecation from the narrator. Practice will get you to the point where those things happen semi-automatically, without you having to consciously put each one in place, and when that happens I’ll stop seeing the seams between all the bits and just see the whole.

Sad to say, a lot of the books I’m surveying right now are failing that test. With some, to be fair, they’re hampered by genre; the further a given book is from the center of my affections, the more aware I am of the basic machinery at work. They may be perfectly good novels, for some other reader. And, of course, the ones that pass that opening test may not turn out splendidly on the whole; last week I read one that started strong and ended up disappointing. But when I find one that has a confident opening, it truly is a pleasure.

tonight’s random thought

I want to get a dog — a golden retriever, ideally; or a yellow lab would do — and name her Ramoth.

Then I want to get a kitten, and name her Lessa.

And then I want to teach the kitten to ride around on the back of the dog.

(Time-traveling capability a bonus, but not required.)

Crack Addicts (not so) Anonymous

Over on Dreamwidth, Toft has posted about discovering the crack that is Mercedes Lackey (specifically, Valdemar).

It’s prompted an outpouring of squealing fangirl love in the comments — I suspect it’s mostly fangirls, though there may be the occasional fanboy in there — with frequent deployment of CAPITAL LETTERS to properly channel the commenters’ sentiments. I’m in there with them; I, too, was once a twelve-year-old girl, and Lackey’s books once occupied a beloved position on my bookshelf.

Some of them still do. When I packed up to move to California, one of the things I did was go through our bookcases, pulling and re-reading out the things that were there because I’d loved them when I was in junior high. The idea was to say farewell, to squeeze out those last, precious drops of nostalgia and then free up shelf space for books that are, well, better. In a few cases, though, the nostalgia was still going strong — and those books, I kept.

Understand, it’s not that they’re good. It’s that they’re crack, and furthermore crack which, for whatever reason, still has the power to affect me. Yes, Vanyel is Emo McAngstyPants, and THAT’S WHY I LOVE HIM. The fact that Dirk and Talia and Kris refuse to have the one simple conversation that could end all their suffering is not a FLAW, it’s WHY I SHOWED UP FOR THE BOOK. Drizzt Do’Urden could give Vanyel a run for his money on the emo front, with bonus chunks of unadulterated inner monologue OF WOE (plus awesome fight scenes!). David Eddings may be writing the same series over and over again, but in the Belgariad/Malloreon instance it’s a series that features smartass characters being smartasses to one another and I could watch that ALL DAY, YO. And Robert Jordan . . . well, I dumped his books because they take up too much damn room, but I’m making up for it in other ways.

And you know, there’s something wonderful about seeing people admit their love for crack, whether it’s stuff they adored in childhood or just picked up recently. So have at it in the comments: what do you love, not despite its ridiculousness, but because of it?

This is officially a SHAME-FREE ZONE; no need to preface your comments with “These books are so bad, but –” That part goes without saying. Just tell us what books you adore, against all reason. Unleash the power of your caps-lock key because lowercase letters AREN’T ENOUGH TO CONTAIN YOUR LOVE. Admit your addiction to emo soulbonded sparklepony hurt/comfort Mary Sue wish-fulfillment CRACK.

You know you want to.