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Posts Tagged ‘other people’s books’

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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The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time

[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.]

This is a companion book to the series, released after A Crown of Swords, in 1997. According to Wikipedia, it’s considered to be “broadly canonical” — which is to say that it (unlike the RPG) was developed with Jordan’s input, but that any new information it introduced was eligible to be contradicted later on. (Whether or not that happened, I don’t know; I didn’t see anything in my read-through that struck me as being off.)

Interestingly, the reason the book can exist in that nebulous middle zone of accuracy is because it’s treated like an in-world document, written by some unnamed scholar living in the time of the series. This is not done as well as it could be: the scholar is left completely undefined, in terms of who they are and why they’re writing. I know it would have introduced difficulties if they became a person in a specified position — then you’d start wondering how they got that information — but it would have added a degree of flavor that I, personally, would have enjoyed. (As it stands, about all you can conclude is that the writer isn’t Aes Sedai, because the book talks about how the Tower probably has records they don’t let outsiders see.) And it does fall down in a few places; the section on the Age of Legends discusses their achievements with terms like “molecule” and “anti-gravity” and “genetics” that are not, I think, generally known to Third Age inhabitants (nor are they presented as half-forgotten terms from the past). But overall I think the approach works fairly well.

Though in some places more than others.

Books read, May 2012

The title of this post only barely merits the plural.

Bayou Arcana: Songs of Loss and Redemption, various authors and artists. A graphic novel, collecting stories by a slew of (male) authors and (female) artists, all centered around a Louisiana bayou, “one of the seven sacred hearts” of the world. (According to the afterword, some of the other hearts are in the Outback, the Amazon, and Tibet, and there will be volumes for them, too.) I felt a few of the stories in here were a bit too brief and/or elliptical for their punch to really hit me, and I’m kind of meh on some of the art — but then, that is frequently my feeling on graphic novels as a medium. I liked this one enough to want to read the next volume, now that the core characters have been set up, to see where they go from here.

Deeds of Men, Marie Brennan. Yeah, my own novella. A quick re-read for the purposes of refreshing my memory on a few things.

. . . and we’re done.

So where did this month go?

A lot of it went to illness. Not to delve into the gory details, but I had a minor procedure done early this month that will hopefully address a chronic issue that is possibly at the root of my sleep problems (and therefore my generalized fatigue); it is, unfortunately, the sort of procedure that makes things worse before it makes them better. If it does the latter at all. I should know one way or the other by the end of June. And then copy-edits landed on my doorstep, and there was KublaCon (at which kniedzw and I ran our LARP), and then con crud.

I started a number of books this month, some of which I abandoned, some of which I hope to finish soon. But the only ones I actually finished were a graphic novel and my own novella. Which is pretty pathetic. Next month I start seriously noveling again, and I also have Fourth Street — but as far as leisure reading is concerned, my count pretty much has nowhere to go but up.

Malevolence

(The following post talks about The Avengers on its way to the actual point, but does not give spoilers.)

Interestingly, one of the moments that has stayed with me the most strongly from The Avengers is the speech Loki flings at Black Widow.

He has other Villain Speeches in the movie, of course. But this one stands out for its sheer, unbridled malevolence. He doesn’t say those things out of megalomania or fraternal resentment or any other such understandable motivation; he says them because, quite simply, he wants to hurt her.

I’ve said before that I tend to write antagonists more often than villains. That is, I write characters who think they’re doing the right (or at least the necessary) thing, who happen to be wrong about that. There are exceptions, of course; Nadrett doesn’t give a damn what’s right, only what he can get away with. But I have a harder time writing that sort of thing.

Which means — of course — that I want to study how it’s done. So this is a Recommend Stuff to Me kind of post: what books/movies/TV shows/etc have those moments of pure malevolence, where the character is just trying to hurt somebody? Off the top of my head, there’s Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles (“Stop sidling, my swan. I am going to hurt you, but I am not going to kill you, just yet. You are going to provide me with a deal of merriment still.”), some of Angelus’ moments in Buffy, and pretty much everything the main villains do in Tokyo Babylon and X, but I’m having trouble thinking of more. (Actually, that’s a lie. I can think of plenty of sadistic villains. It’s just that most of them are sadistic in a shallow, uninteresting way, and I want ones that really manage to get the knife between the ribs.)

Where have you seen this done well?

Edited to add: Please to be avoiding spoilers as much as possible. This discussion will necessarily involve a degree of revelation, but if you can use phrases like “the main villain” instead of the name (where the villain is not obvious from the start), etc, that would be much appreciated.

Books read, April 2012

The trend of reading fiction by women instead of men continues. Partly this is because half of the titles I finished this month were YA (and three-quarters of those were by Suzanne Collins), but still. I had this odd feeling of, I dunno, backwards activism or something when I sat down with Saladin’s book — like I was virtuously promoting diversity in my reading by picking up something by a man. <g>

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The DWJ Project: index post

Since it’s annoying to have to page back through archives in search of something, here’s an index post for all of my entries in the Diana Wynne Jones Project, alphabetized by title.

Books read, March 2012

This post tells you a great deal about what my March was like.

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor. The elevator pitch for this one might be “Harry Potter in Nigeria.” Sunny, a girl with albinism, finds out she’s one of the “Leopard People,” which is to say people with magic, and learns how to use her power, so as to defeat an evil magician. I loved it for the setting and the differences that produced (Sunny’s schooling isn’t half so formal as Harry’s, and the whole approach to that, not to mention the magic itself, is not much like Rowling’s work), but the general shape of the story is familiar, and didn’t engage me as much as a more unusual structure might have. Especially because there’s a vibe common to this sort of urban fantasy, a “magic people are cooler than normal people” vibe, that rubs me the wrong way, and while there’s hints in here that said attitude is not an admirable thing in Leopard People, the story itself doesn’t do as much as I would have liked to deconstruct the arrogance and separatism. (Possibly later books will do more? I think this is the first in a series. Certainly the underlayer to the evil-magician thing suggests more to come.)

The Time of the Ghost, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Range of Ghosts, Elizabeth Bear. Discussed elsewhere.

The Skiver’s Guide, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Changeover, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Earwig and the Witch, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

. . . yeah. If it weren’t for my determination to finish the DWJ Project this month, that list would be even shorter. February’s prediction came true with a vengeance.

I hope to do better in April, but as mentioned before, I’m getting into research reading now, and that doesn’t go as fast.

Elizabeth Bear’s RANGE OF GHOSTS

On a more cheerful note: today is the release date for Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear (matociquala).

She had me at “Central Asian epic fantasy.” I have been eagerly awaiting this book since I first saw her mentioning it on LJ, oh, more than a year ago — maybe two. THERE IS A SHORTAGE OF MONGOLIAN FANTASY IN THE WORLD, Y’ALL. Fortunately, this is the first book in a series, and so that means the lack is being addressed, at least in small part.

The most succinct thing I can say about this book is that it’s rich, to a degree I haven’t seen in . . . ever? Rich in culture, rich in fantasy, rich in politics. I don’t know enough about the Mongols to tell where Bear diverges from their real society into her own invention, but her Qersnyk tribesmen are not Standard Fantasy Nomads, and the care and detail devoted to the horses in the story is both beautiful and necessary. Without that, I wouldn’t believe in the culture. The political complexity laid out in this first book bears no resemblance to the “good guys vs. black-armored masses” dichotomy of older epic fantasy, and promises to bear interesting fruit as the story goes along. And then there are the touches that are just pure wonder: the sky above your head depends on who controls the territory you’re in, and in Qersnyk lands, there is a moon in the sky for each member of the ruling family. Temur, the Qersnyk protagonist, looks up each night to see which of his cousins are still alive.

This is very much the first book in a series. The necessity of setting things up means the story is less plotty than I was expecting; Bear can’t just wave vaguely in the direction of the usual epic fantasy tropes, but has to spend time developing her world and the societies Temur and Samarkar (a female wizard from Tsarepheth, and the other main protagonist) come from. There’s a lot of foundation-laying going on, and the climax of this book doesn’t particularly wrap anything up, even in the short term. (There is no blowing up of the Death Star 1.0 here.) But the richness is pretty entrancing all on its own, and I’m very eager to see what grows out of it in the later books.

(And I want to see more of Bansh. Because Temur’s horse is the best horse ever.)

As I said, this is the release date — yeah, I got an advance review copy; envy me! — so hie thee to a bookstore and see if they have it in. Between the familiarly Europeanish tone of most epic fantasy and the real-world setting of urban fantasy, the difference of Bear’s world is like a breath of fresh (and magical) air.

The DWJ Project: Earwig and the Witch

With this, we reach the end.

Earwig and the Witch is an illustrated children’s book (aimed at ages 8-12) published this year, though it was prepared before Jones passed away. It tells the story of a girl called Earwig, who lives quite happily at an orphanage, where she’s able to make everyone do what she wants. But then a very peculiar couple comes along and adopts her, and for the first time in her life, Earwig finds herself facing a challenge.

It’s a short book, of course, and (perhaps because of Paul O. Zelinsky’s illustrations) has a distinctly Roald Dahl vibe about it. If I find myself wanting more — more about Earwig’s friend Custard, and more about the circumstances that led to her being left on the orphanage doorstep, years ago — that’s par for the course, rather than any particular flaw in the story itself.

***

And of course, I do want more. I saved reading this book until today, and knew that sitting down with it would make me sad, because it’s the last one. There’s a collection of Jones’ essays underway, and I’m looking forward to that; there may be unpublished manuscripts or half-finished books that will yet find their way out into the world. If any such things appear, I’ll read them, because I want to soak up any last drop that I can. But in essence, there will be no more fiction from Diana Wynne Jones.

She was, as I said before, the reason I became a writer. Her books have been with me for more than two-thirds of my life. I don’t love all of them; this re-read has uncovered a number that don’t click with me for some reason, and a few that aren’t very good at all. But her body of work is amazing.

Requiescas in pace, Diana Wynne Jones. And thank you.

The DWJ Project: Changeover

Today is the anniversary of Diana Wynne Jones’ death. In memory of that, I bring you the final two posts of my re-read, which — through design on my part — will cover her first and last published novels.

This, of course, is the first one. It isn’t fantasy (or science fiction), and it was written for adults; as such, it definitely feels different from the bulk of her work. (There are not usually any strip-teases in her books.) And yet — as you would expect — there are touches that come across as familiar, a voice that will show up again and again in later stories.

The plot is (deliberately) farcical. The British government is preparing to hand over the reins of their soon-to-be-former colony, a fictional African country called Nmkwami. One of the governor’s aides, reading out his notes about suggestions to “mark change-over” (that is, to commemorate the handover of power), is misheard; the governor thinks he’s said something about a man named Mark Changeover. The “who’s on first” conversation that ensues leaves the governor with the distinct impression that some kind of rabble-rouser or terrorist is on the loose in Nmkwami. And, because nobody in the bureaucracy wants to admit they haven’t heard anything about such an important problem, the confusion snowballs, until all of Nmwkami, British and local alike, is turned out to hunt the Anarchist-Communist-Imperialist revolutionary Mark Changeover.

I’ll go ahead and put the rest behind a cut, though given how difficult it is to find this book, you guys may or may not care about spoilers. (Many thanks to katfeete for loaning me her copy, thus saving me about ninety dollars buying a used copy online.)

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