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Posts Tagged ‘other people’s books’

Books read, December 2012

I’ve been scarce around here, I know; that will likely continue through January, owing to promotion for A Natural History of Dragons + crunch time on the sequel. (Alternatively, working on those things will drive me stir-crazy, and I’ll start posting here every two hours. We’ll see.)

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Wheel of Time Index Post

I’m putting this together now rather than after I’m done with the whole shebang because people (myself included) may want to look back at some of the previous entries before the last ones appear.

I will, of course, update it with the final links as they happen. So if you want something to bookmark, this is one to keep.

Towers of Midnight (analysis)

[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.]

Side note first: the poll results thus far are coming down pretty firmly on people saying that yes, I should read the Prologue to AMoL, and yes, I should blog about it when I do. I must admit, I’m curious why those of you who voted “no” chose that option. Anyway, decisions on that soon. For now, ToM, and the analysis thereof.

For most of the time I’ve been writing these posts, I’ve been analyzing each volume in the context of the rest of the story: the books that precede it, the books I had previously read that follow it, speculation about the books that were out but I hadn’t read them yet. As we round this final corner, though, I find Towers of Midnight almost more interesting in the context of absence: the unknown events of A Memory of Light, and the void that will follow it, the end of the series.

Of course, we may (probably will) get other books. I’ve heard they’re talking about a companion book — something more canonical than the White Book of Lies — and it’s entirely possible that Jordan’s estate will farm out the property the way we’ve seen with Dune. But as far as the series proper is concerned, ToM is the point at which I start thinking, not only about what has happened, but what may never happen.

The list could fill an ordinary trilogy.

To Prologue or Not to Prologue

Tor has a long-standing habit of releasing the Prologue to the next Wheel of Time book in advance of the book’s actual pub date, as a teaser for what’s to come. I read those from (I think) A Crown of Swords through Crossroads of Twilight, then stopped because I wasn’t going to touch the series until the end was in sight. And when I came back, I just read the books themselves; no need to play teaser games with the Prologues.

But now, at last, I’m caught up, and the final book hasn’t yet come out. So I put it to you, my blog readership:

Niccolo vs. Lymond

As I said in my booklog post, I’ve now read the first book of the House of Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett, and it provoked interesting thoughts about how this series compares to the Lymond Chronicles. My thoughts are mildly spoilery for both books, so they’ll go behind a cut, although I don’t think I’ll be saying anything that’s a massive giveaway. (The comment thread, on the other hand, may give away more.)

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(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: Towers of Midnight (reactions)

[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.]

The question of how to divide up these posts has always been a thorny one, since (as I said for The Gathering Storm) it’s impossible to keep all analysis out of my reactions, and all reactions out of my analysis. It might be fairer to say that this is the post about the characters, and the next one will be the post about plot and how Towers of Midnight fits into the bigger picture. Fair warning, though; that means this post is really long. There are a lot of characters, and a lot of them get to do noteworthy things in this book.

So, having said that, first things first:

!!!!!!!!!!!eleventy-one!!!

Books read, October 2012

Way late, but that’s because I came home with a cold and then, just as I was recovering from it, contracted a different one! Yay! Wait, not yay. Anti-yay.

Saba: Under the Hyena’s Foot, Jane Kurtz. This was a startlingly political book. It’s part of the Girls of Many Lands series, which is the “rest of the world” companion to the American Girl thing, i.e. the dolls you may have seen. It takes place in Ethiopia in 1846, and features kidnappings, assassinations, and palace coups — in other words, a lot more in the way of political intrigue than I would have expected out of an “intermediate fiction” doll tie-in book. They’re all written by different authors, so the quality is undoubtedly all over the place, but I note that Laurance Yep wrote a Chinese book for the series (Spring Pearl: The Last Flower) and Chitra Banerjee Divarakuni wrote an Indian one (Neela: Victory Song), so I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’re worth checking out.

Unspoken, Sarah Rees Brennan. YA update of the old “gothic” genre. I was mildly distracted by the part-Japanese protagonist being named “Kami” (though there’s an explanation for it in the story), and early on I felt like the peppiness of the narrator’s voice was at odds with the gothic mood. But the peppiness settled down as the story went on, and the explanation for the name came along, and I ended up quite enjoying this one. The premise — and this comes out early enough that I don’t think it’s a spoiler — is that Kami has always had an “imaginary friend” in her head, a guy named Jared that she talks to all the time. And then Jared shows up. Because he’s a real person. And one of the things I liked best about the book was how this was not a Wonderful Thing, but a shocking development neither of them can quite cope with, because they’re not what each other expected and yet they know each other really well and it’s really traumatic to lose something that was both a deep source of comfort and a constant risk of being thought genuinely delusional by those around you.

Fair warning, though: the book, while it does resolve the central mystery, leaves a whole mess of things dangling for future plot development. So if you are looking for a nice tidy satisfying package of a book, this is not it.

Wieliczka: Historic Salt Mine, Janusz Podlecki. Very short book, mostly consisting of photographs. A souvenir of this place, which I will be reporting on soon if I ever get around to blogging about the Poland trip.

The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction, Stephen M. Wylen. A discussion of what first-century Judaism was like, and its relationship both to modern Judaism and modern Christianity. I’ve studied the early Church before, and that entailed a bit of talking about Judaism, but this was kind of the other side of that picture. It’s not wholly focused on the first century and its aftermath, though: in order to make that part make sense, it starts with a very concise little potted history of Judaism in general, which I also needed and was grateful for. (Things like “the Babylonian Exile” are more than just phrases to me now.)

Writing-wise, I kind of wanted to smack the author. He has a tendency to write in short, declarative sentences. The sentences I’m using here are examples. This gets tedious after a while. Also, there’s a very didactic tone in places, like where he patiently takes you by the hand and explains that the “pious Jewish” interpretation of X and the “pious Christian” interpretation of X are not the same as the “secular historical” interpretation of X, and I’m like, no shit, Sherlock. Occasionally I feels he fails as a historian, too, like when he says “The Pharisees were much more important when [the Mishnah and the New Testament] were being written than they were in the time of Jesus and the Temple” (okay) and then later says “The attention [the Pharisees] receive in [the New Testament] tells us that they really were important in the time of Jesus.” Um. I think your editor missed something there, sir.

Despite those nitpicks, however, overall I found the book quite useful.

This was the month of Not Finishing Books, either because I quit on them or because I only needed to read pieces or because I hadn’t finished them yet. (November has already featured the completion of two books I started in October.)

And now I convince myself not to go fall asleep again.

Books read, September 2012

I should totally have a “Piano Pieces Played” list to explain where the rest of my month went, except that it would get really boring as I listed “Solfeggietto” and “Roslin and Adama” over and over and overandoverandover again. (I’ve been practicing.)

Blackwood, Gwenda Bond. Picked this one up on the basis of her “Big Idea” feature on Scalzi’s blog. Roanoke disappearances! History tying into the present! Alchemy! John Dee! It had so many elements I love . . . but it turns out the problem with that is, I have Opinions on the elements, and get increasingly ticked off when I think they’re being used badly. I don’t want to spoil this for anybody who’d prefer to avoid spoilers, so I’ll rot13 my rant:

Wbua Qrr vf gur ivyynva. V pbhyq cbgragvnyyl pbcr jvgu gung, ohg hasbeghangryl, uvf ivyynval nyfb vaibyirf uvz npgvat ZNFFVIRYL BHG BS PUNENPGRE. Gur Ebnabxr pbybal nccneragyl pbafvfgrq bs n ohapu bs nypurzvpny phygvfgf naq jnf Qrr’f fpurzr gb znxr uvzfrys vzzbegny, naq ur jnagrq gb qb guvf fb gung ur pbhyq bireguebj Ryvmnorgu (hu, juhg) naq gnxr bire gur jbeyq be fbzrguvat. Vg snvyrq orpnhfr ur tbg orgenlrq, juvpu erfhygrq va uvf phygvfgf orvat guebja vagb fbzr xvaq bs nygreangr cynar, naq abj gurl’er onpx naq cbffrffvat crbcyr ba Ebnabxr vfynaq gb svavfu gurve arsnevbhf fpurzr, juvpu vf nyfb xvyyvat nyy gur jvyqyvsr va beqre gb znvagnva Qrr’f haangheny yvsr.

V pbhyq unir tbar nybat jvgu guvf vs Qrr jrer abg n) zrtnybznavnpnyyl cybggvat gb gnxr bire Ratynaq naq o) fubjrq erzbefr bire gur pbfg bs uvf npgvbaf; vg pbhyq unir orra cerfragrq nf uvz oryvrivat gung vzzbegnyvgl jbhyq or fb tbbq sbe gur jbeyq, gur pbfg (gubhtu erterggnoyr) vf jbegu vg. Hasbeghangryl, vg srryf yvxr Obaq, be znlor ure ntrag be rqvgbe, qrpvqvat gur nagntbavfg arrqrq gb or chapurq hc gb jbeyq-guerngravat fgnghf. Gur fgbel jbhyq unir orra orggre jvgubhg gung.

Right. Disappointing. I finished the book, but only through sheer bloody-mindedness (it’s a quick read). There were other flaws, too, but I’ve ranted for long enough, so I’ll leave it at that.

Tam Lin, Pamela Dean. Re-read, as a treat to myself on the publication of Lies and Prophecy (which, as I’ve mentioned before, was partially inspired by this book). I hadn’t read it in a number of years, so it was interesting going back through it this time: I noticed so many details that had slipped past me before, like why Nick’s and Robin’s accents shift when they recite. This is very much a comfort book for me, so I’m not sure what I can say about it to people who don’t already know and love it, but short form is: my favorite ballad, retold in the context of a 1970s Minnesota liberal arts college. With lots of excessively literate and well-spoken characters, and some phrases that have stayed with me for near on twenty years now.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print, Renni Browne and Dave King. maratai offered this free to the first person who asked for it a while ago, so I asked. I was sad when her marginal comments petered out, because those were entertaining me. 🙂 As for the book itself, it’s trying to be a 200-level-ish “how to write” type thing — going beyond the basic platitudes of writing books and into things like proportion (paying attention to, and trying to appropriately scale, how much attention you devote to certain things) or breaks (sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters). That part is good; the part where the authors seem to think absolutely everything should be done via dialogue was less so. (They are rather anti-description, anti-dialogue tags, anti-“beats” — by which they mean descriptions of movement used to break up dialogue — etc.) And then I got to the chapter on “voice” and ranted on Twitter about the meaninglessness of that word the way most writing books, this one included, tend to use it. Augh nonsensical platitudes aaaaaaaaugh.

So, very much a mixed bag.

The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Discussed elsewhere and else-elsewhere.

Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, I went ahead and read this one, even though I won’t be blogging about it until November and December. I wanted to be able to read things like the wiki and Leigh Butler’s recaps without hitting spoilers, and I was having a bad week where I really just wanted a GIANT BOOK I could trust to entertain me without requiring much from my brain. (That part kicks in when I do the analysis, later.) Also? I really just wanted to know what happens next. Which is a good feeling to have, going into the end of the series. Anyway, commentary will come later. [Edited to add: commentary is now here.]

Re(Visiting) the Wheel of Time: The Gathering Storm (analysis)

[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.]

And now we talk about structure.

I don’t envy Sanderson the challenge he faced, picking up the end of this series and trying to wrangle it into something like order. Jordan may have insisted that by god it was going to be ONE MORE BOOK, but I don’t see any way in hell that could have ever worked — and I say that without even having read Towers of Midnight yet, let alone A Memory of Light. There’s enough here in this book that unless both of those are Crossroads of Twilight-level bogs of plotlessness (which I very much doubt), a single volume would have read like the Cliff Notes version of the finale.

But Sanderson didn’t have a terribly good foundation to build on, structurally speaking, as he went into the final stretch. Card-weaving would make an ideal metaphor to describe the situation here, but since very few of you know how that works, we’ll go with architecture instead: he, as the construction manager, inherited a building with four good, solid stories at the bottom, three or so dodgy levels above that, three ramshackle levels held together with increasing quantities of baling wire and duct tape, and then one that makes a valiant attempt at being structurally sound. Atop this mess, he had to build one (eventually three) final levels, and make them as habitable and pleasant as possible.

Spoiler-cut time, as I start dissecting this book to see what makes it tick.

(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: The Gathering Storm (reactions)

[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.]

I’ll be doing two posts apiece for the final three books, the ones written by Sanderson — not because Sanderson wrote them, but because the story in them is actually new to me. (I should have also done this for Knife of Dreams, on the same grounds, but I’m not going to backtrack that far now.)

In order to keep my remarks something like organized, I’m splitting them into my reactions as a reader, and my analysis as a writer. Of course, it won’t really be possible to keep those two things entirely separate: my reader-reactions will inevitably include some analytical comments, and my structural analysis will perforce be colored by my feelings as a reader. But this will at least allow me to have two lengthy posts, rather than one unreadably long monstrosity.

Reactions first. And these are as spoilery as spoilers get, so let’s go behind the cut.

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Books Read, August 2012

I utterly forgot to keep track of my reading in August. Some combination of travel and psychotic deadlines, I guess, but mostly just brain failure. What follows below is the stuff I can recall emember finishing; I want to say there was more, but if there was, I don’t remember it.

Team Human, Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan. YA urban fantasy, with the tag line “Friends don’t let friends date vampires.” It’s actually less anti-vampire than that sentence would have you believe, though, which kind of disappointed me; I was in the mood for a book about how no, vampires aren’t just a different kind of human, and no, dating them is never going to be a good idea. It’s still a fun read, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for.

1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart. This is, in some ways, a Civil War book for people who aren’t very interested in the Civil War. Because it isn’t about the battles and so on, which is what you probably think of first if you say “I’m not very interested in the Civil War.” It is, instead, a social history of the attitudes in the lead-up to and early days of the war, and how certain ideas (like secession and abolition) moved from being nearly unthinkable to being inevitable. You may, from time to time, find yourself wanting to punch various historical figures in the face, but that’s their fault, not Goodheart’s. I found it highly readable.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg. One of several childhood favorites I picked up at a used bookstore. This one was slightly less cool than I remembered; the parts that involved hiding out in the museum were a smaller portion of the book than I remembered, and Claudia was a little more abrasive. But even when she was being abrasive, the book wasn’t setting her up as a snotty know-it-all who needs to be taken down a peg, which is what this character type usually gets, so I appreciated that. And, y’know, the idea of running away to hide out in a museum is still really cool. 🙂

The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. When I was a kid, books didn’t divide very cleanly into “fantasy/not fantasy” in my head — largely because of my tendency to read magic into things that didn’t actually have any. This was faintly true of the Konigsburg above, and far more so of this book. It still feels magical to me, even now, with the kids and their game, nevermind that there’s nothing actually supernatural in it. There is, however, startling diversity: the story takes place in southern California, and actually feels like it, with lots of non-white characters. I’d put it up there with The Westing Game for childhood books that turn out to have merits I never recognized at the time.

(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: On Prophecy

[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.]

Next month I’m going to dive into the final stretch of the Wheel of Time analysis. But before I do that, I’d like to talk about prophecy.

I thought about waiting a while longer. See, the major example I want to use for illustration is a plot that hasn’t actually paid off yet, as of the books I’ve read. This means that, while I can talk about where I think it’s going to go, I don’t actually know yet if I’m right. (Possibly some of you do, as I suspect the resolution is in The Towers of Midnight. But I dunno; maybe it’s in A Memory of Light. If it’s in ToM, though, don’t give any spoilers in the comments. I want to find out on my own how much of this is accurate.) In some ways, though, I think it’s more interesting to do it like this: to say what I think right now, without the hindsight warping it. So here we go.

The reason I wanted to discuss prophecy is that I think it’s one of the things Jordan does really, really well. In fact, if there’s one thing I would point at as the reason for my fannishness in high school — the thing that made me engage so enthusiastically with this series — prophecy would probably be it. On a metaphysical level, I’m not so fond of the trope: it puts the characters on a railroad track, taking away their agency and making their choices less meaningful. And that’s kind of true here, too, though Jordan sometimes goes the additional step required to make that interesting, which is to have the characters grapple with what it means to have their actions predestined. On the whole, though, it isn’t the existence of prophecy that I like.

It’s the way Jordan handles it. He strikes, I think, a very good (and delicate) balance of foreshadowing, giving enough information to be interesting, not so much as to spoil the entire plot. More to the point, he does this the right way: not through vagueness (which is what way too many fantasy authors try), but through breaking the information up and scattering it in a dozen different places.

It isn’t just the official Prophecies of the Dragon, with their pompous, pseudo-epic verse. It’s Egwene’s dreams, and those of the other Dreamers. It’s Elaida’s Foretellings, and Nicola’s, and Gitara Moroso’s. Min’s viewings. Aelfinn and Eelfinn tricks. Aiel prophecies and Sea Folk prophecies and things that aren’t even prophecy of any sort; they’re just little details of culture and history, stray lines characters speak here and there, tiny pieces you have to glue together to see that they have any significance at all.

Sure, some of it is vague. (Hi, Karaethon Cycle; how ya doin’?) But some of it is very specific, very clear . . . so long as you put it together right. And that’s why I think it works: if you’re the sort of reader who doesn’t want to know where the story is going, you don’t have to. Just read along, notice the obvious stuff, and let the rest surprise you when it comes. If, however, you’re the sort of person who likes to put together narrative jigsaw puzzles — which I am — then you can have a great deal of fun playing chase-the-clue through the books.

Having made the general statement, we’ll now go behind the spoiler cut for a specific example to show what I mean.

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Books read, July 2012

The shortness of this list makes it look like I didn’t read much last month. It’s true that I didn’t read a lot, but what the list doesn’t show are all the books I started and didn’t finish. Some of them were novels I put down because I wasn’t enjoying them enough, some were research books of which I only needed to read part, and some I will finish — just haven’t done it yet.

But as for the stuff I did get all the way through:

Mastiff, Tamora Pierce. Discussed in more detail elsewhere, but that was as part of a conversation on writing theory. General summation is that I found this one disappointing. The individual bits were well enough, but as a follow-up to Bloodhound and a conclusion to the series, it just didn’t pack enough of a punch. I had been hoping for better.

Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal. This, on the other hand, I enjoyed more than its predecessor, Shades of Milk and Honey. I wanted more oomph in that book, and the sequel delivered. But that inspires thinky thoughts in me, since I was on a panel with Kowal at Fourth Street in which we talked about “domestic” fantasy and novels that don’t resort to violent confrontation as a source of conflict, and well, this book is a lot less domestic than the previous one. Indeed, that’s why I enjoyed it more. Espionage! Napoleon on the march! Military applications of glamour! Fun stuff, but now I have to go chew on the issues we were discussing, and think about the changes Kowal made.

The Phantom Tollbooth, Normal Juster. Would you believe I’d never read this? I thought I had — assumed it, really, since it’s one of those childhood classics everybody seems to have read — but my brother (who hadn’t read it) had the book lying around, and when I picked it up I discovered that, nope, had never touched the thing in my life. Anyway, it was enjoyable, though (as when I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, which is very much in the same genre) I had to read it in short bursts. I just can’t do large doses of whimsy at a time, you know? But Juster does the good thing, which is to have interesting points squirreled away inside the whimsy, so I’m glad I finally got around to reading this one.

Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Book This Afternoon

I really wanted to like your book, because it’s so very much up my alley in terms of subject matter. But the writing just didn’t work for me, on a fundamental level: too much dialogue that didn’t sound like things people would say, too many places where one paragraph didn’t lead into the next, too many one-line paragraphs chopping the whole thing up into kindling.

Man, my batting average is not very good right now.

Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Book This Evening

Look, I sympathize. It is genuinely difficult to have your POV character be Totally Wrong about something in a way the audience can detect but he is completely unaware of, and have that work. But one of its failure modes is “your POV character is a blithering idiot,” and I’m afraid that’s how I felt in this instance.

It probably didn’t help that everybody else in the novel was coming across as abrasive and unhelpful, too.

Sorry. I really wanted to like your book, but it just didn’t work out.

Geekomancy

Huge, huge congratulations to my friend Michael R. Underwood, whose first novel, Geekomancy, is out this week from Pocket Star.

It’s e-book only, which means I cannot do the traditional friend service of running to the bookstore and surreptitiously turning all the copies to face out, while having a loud conversation about how this book changed my life and even made my bed for me when I got up this morning. But I can link you to it, which is . . . okay, not as entertaining. But it’s something!

Conga-rats, Mike. A very long and energetic line of them. 🙂

Information Density Pt. 2, or, let’s try an example

I said before that it’s hard to talk about certain issues in writing without specific examples. Since I just finished reading a book that I think illustrates the challenge of information density and scale very well, I’m back for a follow-up round.

Before I get into the example, though, an anecdote. One of the archaeological sites I worked on has reconstructions of period houses as part of a public display. Several are very well-constructed, and one is a mess. But I’ll never forget what one of the archaeologists said about that one: “We’ve learned more from our mistakes here than we have from the ones we did right.”

The book I want to discuss is one I think failed to manage the kinds of issues that don’t fit easily into fiction. It tried, but it didn’t succeed. I think well of the author for trying, and am not here to mock or belittle her effort; in fact, as the author in question is Tamora Pierce, she’s someone I think fairly well of overall. But I think you can often learn more from an ambitious failure than a success.

Oh, and just in case anybody didn’t see this coming: there will be MASSIVE SPOILERS. If you haven’t yet read Mastiff, the third and last of the Beka Cooper books, I will be discussing the main conflict (though I will try to stay away from spoiling some of the other important things that happen along the way).

For those who haven’t read any of the series . . . it’s about the Provost’s Guard, aka the Provost’s Dogs, who are the police force for the medievalish kingdom of Tortall. (Aside: yes, it’s odd for a setting like that to have an organized police force. But whatever; it’s the buy-in for the story.) The protagonist, Beka Cooper, starts off as a “Puppy” or new Guardswoman, and becomes more experienced as the series goes on. Each book deals with a different type of crime: in the first one, it’s smuggling; in the second, it’s counterfeiting; in the third, it’s slavery.

. . . sort of. Slavery is actually legal in Tortall; the actual crime in this book is treason. But slavery is more central to the plot in many ways, and if you follow me behind the cut to spoiler territory, I’ll start to unpack that.

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