Books

I read it finally.

It could have been better. I would have done things differently, not that it matters, and despite being thoroughly spoiled I enjoyed parts of it more than I expected, but I was not surprised often. I wonder how long she spent trying to figure some of it out?

I have to wonder too why it was not important to list what the adult versions of various people were doing for a living, but it was necessary to name all the various progeny. Hmm. Sequel series setup?

House elves - deus ex machina or valid plot device? or: how much plot was excised by using up Dobby?

And on that note: Kreacher’s sudden turn to the light side of the Force = religious conversion?

Hermione and Ron - rounded characters who end a series as peripheral.

Snape - see that man in the distance? he did things we approve of, after all.

One thing I appreciated - Voldemort had previously been a typical bad guy, hovering around in the distance cackling and wringing his hands about the nefarious plans he had. The last few books showed the politics he was influencing. In other words, he grew up and became an evil villain you’d expect in an adult book, rather than the sort of bad guy you’d expect to defeat in a kid’s book.

The trouble with this is, all that text about what’s printed in the papers and so on was pretty boring and not much of it had a lot to do with the rest of what happened - she could have had Harry read it in the background and point out the pertinent bits. She had so much happening off camera that would have been interesting to see, why not tuck away the bits that weren’t really completely necessary? In other words, I didn’t like her choices of what she told vs. what she described. I suppose that the fact that it’s still supposed to be a kid’s book governed this, but it’s still annoying. Especially when I didn’t think it was really a kid’s book any more. When you have an enemy hollowing out a body and sticking his pet snake in, even off camera, do you really have a kid’s book any more?

I was reading a column at Bookslut, The Spy Who Didn’t Suck, and thinking about series– specifically, ones spawned by a single creator who does the writing which then gets turned into movie versions by others, or not, and then the whole series goes down in history like the Narnia books or James Bond or Nancy Drew. Or V.C. Andrews, whose books haven’t been written by V.C. since s/he died but continue to run her name on the cover.

If you were writing a series that saw wild success, how would you feel about the notion that, on the event of your death, someone else would not only pick up where you left off, they were going to finish works in progress? It’s not precisely the same thing as fanfic, which some authors don’t mind and largely ignore while others go batshit insane lambasting ficcers with letters from attorneys. Fanfic is like looking at set characters through a kaliedescope, with hundreds of versions that may or may not be similar to the original; there’s no question really that the originals exist elsewhere. Characters would be reinvented by another person and that would be canon.

How attached to your original characters are you? Would you care if your son (like Christopher Tolkein) published all your drafts and notes? Or wrote more adventures of Mary Sue?

This is the third in the Bartimeus trilogy, by Jonathon Stroud. I don’t think I bothered to blog about Golem’s Eye, the second book.

Stroud is a better writer than Rowling, and it especially shows in the final installment of his fantasy trilogy, where all the elements of the prior books are woven together and concluded in a logical, sad sort of way. His djinn, Bartimeus, is true to his nature to the end, as are his human characters - there was a long period in which Nathaniel, the magician who called up Bartimeus at the precocious age of 12, was an arrogant teenager, but he was painted with less sympathy and no justifications and no periodic come-uppance, as is commonly seen in juvenile fiction. All of the characters were presented honestly and I appreciated that. It could easily have slipped into sentimentality and angst. I am reminded of Lloyd Alexander, whose series I read to creases when I was a kid, in that respect - though writing styles are wildly different, Taran is presented in a straightforward manner without imposing judgement.

Stroud has a deft hand with humor as well, and Bartimeus is odds-on the best narrative voice I’ve seen in a while. All sections from his pov are first person; the rest are in third person, which is okay. I wasn’t able to see the end coming, which is also neat — I’ve gotten a lot better at guessing endings and this one kept me on edge to the very last page.

I liked the second book less than the other two, for some reason. The third was the best. And I’m being vague, because I don’t want to spoil any of it for anyone. For fantasy fans of any age, this is worth finding at the library. I’ll probably loan them to my nephew. He loves Harry Potter. While I also like Potter books, Stroud has more realistic characters and doesn’t leave you with so many questions. I often wonder why the evil magicians aren’t busily figuring out how to take advantage of Muggles more often — sure, there are magical ‘cops’ to keep that from happening, but the basic problem with the “war on drugs” is that there’s always someone smart enough to outsmart the system and there are too few cops and too many people out to make mischief. Then there’s why Dumbledore & Co can be omniscient sometimes, but Umbridge gets away with literally torturing students for like, ever, without any of the kids going to Dumbledore…. I really can’t think too hard about the Potterverse before I cease to enjoy it and start to nitpick. Stroud doesn’t give you that opportunity. He gives you a world that makes more sense, when you’re reading about human characters, which may be jaded and too realistic for some who prefer fantasy worlds that have nothing in common with our own, but it made the game one of figuring out ‘in what way is it different’ — on the surface, it’s the presence of magicians. But then as the story moves on, it becomes a matter of ‘how does the presence of magicians alter society’ and that’s more interesting to me than ‘magically, society doesn’t know about magicians at all, because poof! see, you’ve forgotten already’.

Sheri S. Tepper has been quietly turning out sci fi for a while now. I keep checking them out every so often to see if she’s written something that makes me want to overcome her distant and sometimes stilted writing style.

This one is set on Earth, mostly, and once I reached the very end with its surprise twist, I decided that it was in fact a horror story. I won’t spoil it, but in generalities, terms that kept popping to my mind as I read: cautionary tale, morality play, comedy of intentional maliciousness. There were many, many, many stabs at fundamentalist conservatives (or tyrants, or anyone else infringing on liberty and free will) who attempt to make proclamations affecting many many others with no real compassion for the people they’re harming. At one point a certain group of people literally rewrite history to conform not to reality but to the prevailing ideal of the day, because the impending disasters were too much for them to bear. Tepper paints a universe that is organized and pragmatic, and the wacky humans just aren’t conform-atory enough to fit in until there are some changes….

What ends up happening is not happy. Not to me. I don’t think Tepper intended it to be. This is pretty blatant social commentary. Not an escapist outing. It kept me reading, but only out of a morbid sense of incredulity. There are some cliches here from fanfic, mpreg the most noticeable one, but they’re all used to create a story that starts as Earth Introduced To The Galactic Federation and ends… with just that, and we wonder if it could ever be any other way by the time she’s done.

If you have read my fic: The most disturbing thing was the number of ideas I’d come up with about the Randra Alliance that ended up in this book. Not that they’re terribly original ideas, but still.

Life goes on.

I went to yoga this morning. V. sweaty and ache-y. But it felt good. I was relieved to find that the instructor believes in essential oils, as otherwise the Apocalypse of the Yoga Farter would have ended unhappily. If you’ve never taken yoga and have no idea what it’s about, just know that the process of bending your body into pretzel shapes loosens more than your joints. Having a squirt bottle at the ready in the event that someone’s body rebels against hero pose makes everyone love the instructor.

Some of the books I ordered came already, but I’ve already set them on a shelf in the spirit of procrastination. Go me. I am instead nibbling away at Dragonfly in Amber, the sequel to Outlander. I’ve never read Gabaladon before even though many have sung her praises in my vicinity, and my general impression so far puts her on the same rung with Anne McAffrey, so far as writing style/ability goes. Not stunningly creative, not overwhelmingly lyrical, but adequate characters and fair storytelling. (I’m thinking here of vintage McAffrey, not her latest works, most of which got put back on the shelf at the library after two pages. The first two trilogies were her best, everything after was all downhill, IMO.)

Also, I have a new(ish) novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote Remains of the Day. If you haven’t see RotD: the movie, it’s worth it. The book has rather more detail and is a great entry in the list of Examples of the Unreliable Narrator. This newer book, When We Were Orphans, is one I hadn’t heard of before; I picked it off the shelf at the library when I went by and happened to notice it. Looks interesting. We’ll see.

An eleven year old magician triumphs over an evil magician and saves British government.

It’s not Harry Potter. There are a lot of similarities — it’s a kid’s book, featuring a kid. Nathaniel is sort of like Harry and Hermione rolled into one. He summons a djinni, Bartimaeus, for whom the trilogy is named, and the djinni is every Harry Potter creature rolled into a single entity, from a wisecracking head louse to a falcon to a karate-kicking field mouse (which is not as slapstick as it sounds). The djinni serves against his will; the kid isn’t quite sure what to do with his power or his life. The only friend Nathaniel’s ever had is his master’s wife; he goes up against the evildoers for all the usual just reasons, but is driven by the fact that his decisions and actions led to the evil magician’s torching the house and killing both master and wife, and now he needs to absolve himself of that by taking revenge.

The djinni is not like the one in Aladdin, but he’s snarky and cool and smart. The kid is believably a kid, and trying to grow up in a world where magicians are in charge — many are in Parliament and the PM is one as well — and resemble psychopaths, from what we see of their actions. Which makes sense, if you buy into power corrupting people. The evildoers don’t make stupid missteps so the kid can triumph; Nathaniel and Bartimeus work for it. There are no boarding schools for wizards with whimsical ghosts, no every flavor beans, no chocolate frogs or endearing professors. There are people, not unlike ones we hear about every day, with power to command demons and djinni. Which is no doubt why this trilogy isn’t so popular as Harry Potter — not enough marketing opportunities and believably selfish people behaving as they have been trained to. Because magicians are apprenticed to a single master at an early age, and many end up killing their master along the way. Power is yours, comes the message — use it to your advantage at every opportunity, no matter the cost to others.

A separate wizarding world affords JKR the luxury of flouting rules and creating outright fantasy. Jonathan Stroud creates a world not unlike our own, except for the presence of magicians. It’s also polished and more fully realized than the first Harry Potter. Rowling takes a leisurely stroll through her world that gets more leisurely with every 600+ page book; Stroud gives us what we need to know without cheating us of detail. There’s a lot of action, and believable frustrations for Nathaniel along the way, with believable ways around them.

I enjoyed Bartimaeus. Stroud wrote a lot of the book in first person pov from his perspective, and naming the trilogy after him makes me think he’s really the main character, in spite of his role as a servant. Still, there’s also a lot of Nathaniel’s story, and though it’s third person we’re obviously supposed to relate to him — and I did. It should be interesting to see how the next book in the series handles the next part of his growth.

‘Amulet’ was satisfying in a way that none of the Harry Potters were — tightly written, well plotted, and aside from grammatical/stylistic eyebrow-raisers here and there, a good fantasy/mystery/adventure. I’m happy enough to get the next one.

Oprah would love this one (she might have already mentioned it but I wouldn’t know). Bittersweet and convincing tale of a white girl who lost her mother in the most unfortunate circumstances possible. It’s a typical coming-of-age with a journey, secrets kept and told, and lots of positive energy and hope. A friend recommended this to me. I second the recommendation, if you like tear-jerkers with a heart and some humor. Lively characters, a snapshot of race issues in the south near the tail end of the sixties, and lots of info about bees that you may already know, and some truly moving moments.

Another quick read. This is one of those books everyone reads because everyone else says it’s soooo good. Really, what it is, is a novelty - a book written first person from the pov of an autistic (high functioning) boy that’s interesting and compelling. He has no identifiable feelings, except for fleeting empathies for animals, and anger at his father for lying to him about his mother. Obviously he cares on some inexpressible level for his mother. It’s quite an adventure and ends well enough.

It’s not something you’ll reread, but it’s something you’ll tell everyone else about because it’s worth reading at least once, if only to get a glimpse into a believable portrayal of what it must be like to be in the head of someone with Asperger’s.

whew.

HP6 will be on my doorstep when I get home today from work. I’ve been seeing stories in the news about freaky people who preordered but waited in line til midnight to pick one up just in case theirs didn’t come — good grief. Obsessed, much? It’s a BOOK. Yeah, I preordered, but only because I knew I would buy the thing and figured, why not?

I just read six books in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series. This is my roommate’s favorite series, and so it was on the shelf, right next to all the Cap’n Aubrey paperbacks. It’s not bad fantasy (Brust, that is) and made me laugh numerous times. There were some turns of phrase that seemed to me anachronisms, word choices that made me wonder, but by the time Issola rolls around and we learn all about the creation myth of this series, it made me wonder if that were intentional. There’s humor, swordfights, witchcraft (a jhereg is a small flying reptile, of which Vlad has made a familiar of one), and enigmatic folks who might be higher powers. There’s a secret identity or two, a marriage, a child, assassins, thieves, a war, magical weapons that have personalities all their own, and very little riding on horseback (Vlad hates horses and who would bother when you can teleport?). People get hurt. People die, or move on to another existence — can’t say a higher plane in this world. And at the end of the last book, we learn where to go to get a decent cup of klava, which is coffee pressed through wood chips and eggshells, flavored with cream and honey.

Brust’s series is not in chronological order. (There are fan sites on the internet to help you read them that way, however.) He has five other books in the same setting, about other characters, some of them featured in the Taltos books, and the latest in the series, Dzur, is in the editor’s hands (I know this because I read the editor’s blog, and Brust’s mostly-neglected one).

I can see why my roommate really likes them. Brust has a deft hand for worldbuilding and humor and drama, and pulls some pretty fancy but logical hat tricks here and there, right when you least expect it. I have not spoiled anything; if you haven’t read this series and you like fantasy, this is a good one to delve into. It’s quick reading, but good reading.

I finished this while watching things repair and verify on the laptop. (Which is still going on, but I did finish the book.)

You know, time travel’s been done before, and in similar fashion — the whole Outlander series (Gabaladon) featured a gal who slipped back in time and hooked up with a kilt-wearing laird. But this is a different animal; there are no trips to different places or cultures. Just a man, a woman, and their love story.

It’s the love story that shines through as the most important part of the book — which is what makes it so good. If the focus had been on any of the bits, it would have suffered. But the focus stays with the relationship, how it survives through the years of the man’s inability to stay in one time for very long, how the woman copes with this one way or the other. And the story is a compelling one.

If this weren’t labeled a first novel I wouldn’t have known it. All the pieces fit together, and despite the not-straightforward chronology it’s easy to follow. We start in a moment of joy, and there are many of those, but there is also tragedy. It’s long, but worth it. This is a book I got out of the library but am likely to buy. I have tried very hard not to spoil it here — you’ll be able to find a copy in any library, because this is one of those that’s worth all the attention it gets from book clubs.

What a fast read! and quite entertaining to boot.

At different points, I looked up and said to Roommate, “He’s on a lifeboat with a tiger. And a zebra. And a hyena. And an orangutan. And… and…” This, of course, led to much disbelief on Roommate’s part. However, this is one of those talented books that helps you suspend disbelief nicely, and sweeps you along with Pi on a fantastic voyage that would be endless days of drudgery if one experienced it but we get it in novel format and thus we get the really interesting parts.

It reminded me of Kipling, only not Kipling; animals and a boy getting along, but without the talking and with plenty of believable reasoning backing up the animals’ behavior. Martel balances all the necessary elements very well and gives us a whimsical tale that made the time I spent reading it fly by. I liked the ending. It made you think a little without tacking on a lead weight of Serious and Heavy Issue to sink the story.

Cory Doctorow put this latest work up for free download as well as publishing it deadtree style. It confused me at times, though that was likely due to my reading it online in a browser window and having to find my place when I went back to read more. Also confusing — it’s a story about brothers who were named in alphabetical order, and their names change throughout the book, though they are always referred to by names beginning with the same letter; Allan will be Allen, Alby, or any other A name, Billy will be Bernard or some other B name, and so on. So combine this with never being quite sure you’ve gone back to the same place you left off, and the flashbacks that take the reader to some experience related to what’s going on in the ‘present’ of the book, and it got a little muddled in my head. If I reread it, I’ll move it into another format so I can set bookmarks, or buy the book - though that will put acquisition off until I am gainfully employed with a book budget.

If you enjoy the sort of fantasy in which improbabilities serve to shine light on reality (a mountain and a washing machine (”she kept our clothes clean”) can have children, and some of those children are not quite as human as the others) you might like this. It’s not so much about mountains and washing machines having kids as it is being different and trying to find a place in the world, which is really largely indifferent to those who don’t fit in a particular set of preconceived boxes. Book-hoarding and WiFi networking come into the mix too. The more violent elements of the plot reminded me somewhat of something you would see in Stephen King, but Doctorow is not King, and some of the motivation and emotional underpinnings become clear by the end of the story.

The Secret History - Donna Tartt. This was one of my ’surprise’ packages, and while I am dismayed at the behavior of the clicky-finger and my short term memory, I’m glad it showed up. Yards better than “The Little Friend”, which failed to hold my interest and had an ending that made me throw the book on the floor. Secret History is “Dead Poet’s Society” minus the charismatic professor influencing the boys to good ends. Oh, there’s a charismatic professor — but he spends most of his time in the background. The struggle to belong, the youthful experimentation, the terrible results — I won’t spoil it much in saying that no one in this is your typical high moral ground character. The narrator is as deeply flawed as any insecure kid with social inadequacies can be, down to lying to the professor he works for to get fun money. I read this in two days flat. Couldn’t stop reading. The “what happens next?” was too much for me.

“To Say Nothing of the Dog” by Connie Willis. Yeah. It’s funny, and answers questions like “what’s a bishop’s bird stump?” and “how many more things could go wrong?” Comic, full of twists and turns, engagements, elopement, a dramatic mother not unlike Lwaxana (only not as annoying, more amusing), and a couple of enchanting animals along for the ride. I have this penchant for time travel and this was fun to unravel. Though I figured out who Mr. C was waaaay before anyone in the book, still, twas an amusing and entertaining ride.

“When Nietzche Wept” is probably going back to the library. The Marty Stu-ness of it is such that I can’t make it past the second chapter. Glad I didn’t buy it.

I appear to have ordered books. One arrived yesterday and I had no knowledge that I had ordered it, until I wracked my brains for a bit and vaguely remembered checking prices for used copies of The Secret History. Hereafter, I shall write down any behaviors of the clicky finger - I shall become a fingropologist, studying and keeping notes in a safe place, hopefully preserving my sanity when a package arrives and I can’t recall why.

So far, the summer reading list stands at:

The Life of Pi (checked out of library atm, will be picked up later)
When Nietzche Wept (a novel written by a psychiatrist - so far an obvious Mary Sue and therefore amusing)
Negotiating With the Dead - Margaret Atwood
Bluebeard’s Egg - Margaret Atwood (short stories)
A Winter’s Tale - Halpern
To Say Nothing of the Dog - Willis (also checked out of library)
The Time Traveler’s Wife - also checked out.

I was just informed late yesterday afternoon that I should start at the clinic whenever I like, doing those trainee hours - I have an appointment next Friday to talk to my new supervisor (trainees have three or four supervisors at any given time; one from the university, a clinical supervisor, an overall site supervisor, and sometimes an office manager). So I think I’ll leave the list as is for now. There were other books I checked out but those are professional development sorts of books and probably of little interest to anyone reading here.

Everyone’s probably already seen this list of Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

I ran across yet another link to it in a friendsfriends list, and what with the tiny font and the color of the link, I thought it was “Ten Most Harmless Books.” Which made me think about that — can you list some most harmless books? What would that be like — books that have no influence over people that read them - that engender no emotion or thought in response?

Have you ever read a book that fit that description? Other than things like cookbooks.(Although I could make a case that I get hungry reading them, and that could be dangerous….) Books that were obviously meant to mean something, that made you say ‘eh.’

I’ll have to think about this for a while. I know there are books I’ve read that left me cold - I just don’t remember them right off the bat. You remember the ones that make you go “EW” and the ones that are “WOW” but the ‘eh’ takes work to recall.

I’m almost done with Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell, so I’m contemplating a library trip. So I’m asking a favor.

Post a comment suggesting good books - ones that rocked your world, shook you up, squeezed the emotions out of you and left you on the floor in a little puddle. Or, ones that took you on a grand adventure to the ends of the earth, or the galaxy.

I’ll be here re-reading an old favorite or two in the meantime.

This is nonfiction. Walls does not flinch from plainly telling the story of her family, her noncomforming parents and three siblings and the repeated moves from one state to the next. She survived solely by her own determination and ingenuity; her parents certainly didn’t help. The kids foraged for food, firewood, or anything else they needed to get by, and the parents enlisted their help in stealing when they had no money. Walls describes going through the trash at school to get food the other kids threw away, since she wasn’t given anything and had no money to buy.

I cried at the end; her mother living nearly-homeless while still owning acre after acre of property in Texas, the horrible realization by Walls that at any time, her mother could have sold some of that property to feed and house them — ugh. Ouch. All the times the kids tried to tell their parents “It doesn’t have to be this way!” cut like a knife. My own family was very much like this, in many ways — the dogged determination to provide a better upbringing for your kids, the failure, the constant Pollyanna attitude in the face of stark, unforgiving reality — this could have been me. Except not every kid can break free and go unscathed into the world. The youngest daughter had to move across the country and completely separate, which was something I found myself doing.

If you want to understand more about the homeless and the poor in this country, if you want to see firsthand and judge for yourself the mechanism of a truly dysfunctional family, if you want to know why the abused stay with the abuser — it’s in here, and it’s sad, but Walls takes a human and nonjudgmental approach that I admire. I wondered at times what she wasn’t telling the reader. This is a book I would recommend as an example of why moderation in all things is so important — the parents went to the extreme opposite of their parents, from restrictive and punitive and narrow to “anything goes”, and it’s starkly obvious how that worked just as well. Which is to say, it’s amazing these kids are still alive.