Surrender Monkey Gives Up

Before I start on things I have finished, let's do a wrap up of the things I haven't.  Sometimes when I have too many library books out, I suddenly become aware of my own mortality.  This is because I'm so excited to read all these books that when something fails to live up, I can't bring myself to let it keep me from the real meat.

So the last couple of weeks have been full of attrition.  I quit most of them within 40 pages, but I'll give you a rundown so you can decide if you want to concur with my catty conclusions out of sheer love of trash talk.

In reverse order:


Silver Phoenix, by Cindy Pon.  I heard about this book because of the great Cover Controversy: the hardcover version features, appropriately, an Asian character, while the paperback has a more ethnically neutral girl.  That's what brought it to my attention, but everything else about it--YA, fantasy, strong female character on a quest, the type of world it's set in--all implied to me that I'd like it. 

And Ai Ling is just my kind of character.  She starts out ordinary, but circumstances--her father's failure to return from a trip to the Imperial Palace, mysterious hints at his scandalous past, and unpaid debts--make her confront her assumptions about the world she lives in and herself.  Right up my alley.

But it turns out that, as a YA fantasy author, your literary model should probably be someone other than Ernest Hemingway.  This is a book composed of short, declarative sentences.  It's not quite Hemingway; it took me 40 pages to realize it.  But here's the passage that made me realize I wasn't in love with the book:

"She eased the shed door open.  The morning air rejuvenated her as she scanned the horizon.  The rays of the sun were just beginning to wash the skyline.  She reeked of farm animals and damp hay.  Ai Ling scratched her itching scalp and wished for a mirror, then decided it was probably better she didn't have one."  Noun - verb - direct object - prepositional phrase. 

But what really did me in was the magic.  Whenever something magical happened--a mysterious animal drags her into a lake, her amulet protects her from attack--I literally had to flip back a few pages to make sure I hadn't missed something.  Where did the magic come from?  She's always shocked by it, yet seems to expect it.  I'm the queen of suspended disbelief, but I got lost very early on here, and was never won back.  Which is a shame, because I love the flavor that the Chinese cultural basis brought to the kingdom of Xia.


The Italian Secretary, by Caleb Carr.  What could be better: the author of The Alienist and Sherlock Holmes?  They were made for each other!  Anyone else ever set up a failed blind date and been unable to see that it was going to go wrong?

Really, I don't think the book was awful, and it was really short, so I'm even surprised at myself for giving it up.  But I realized that we were a third of the way through the book--litearally--and they were still on the train heading for the location of the murders while Holmes is spouting exposition about Mary Stuart's murdered title character of a music instructor, Rizzio.  Also, the book spends a lot of time setting you up to think Holmes believes that Rizzio's ghost is responsible for the present crimes, but does so in a way that it's pretty clear that he's going to later surprise Watson by revealing that no, he just means that a society can still suffer from the memories of old crimes, not that an actual ghost is doing the killing, silly ol' Watson!

Saddest of all, Jenna Starborn, by Sharon Shinn.  She's my current author crush, and it shocked and dismayed me to put this book down.  And I'm not going to claim that you can't do Jane Eyre in space, because I think you could.  But you have to get all Frank Herbert--all High Imperial.  Your formality can't be Victorian; it has to be Elizabethan.  And you have to really, really sell me on the class distinctions and stiff use of language, which she tried, but couldn't do.   I'm convinced that if it hadn't been a Jane Eyre knockoff, if I hadn't known where the plot was going and what forces were supposed to be behind things, I would actually have liked the book. 

But as it is, I just don't have the time for halfhearted right now!  Not with 600-page Between Silk and Cyanide due in a couple of weeks, and me taking forever with it even though it's great and funny and fascinating.  Not with Mistress of the Art of Death begging for my attention (I finally started it, and it's really good).  And certainly not with the raves I've been reading about The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. 

So, coming up: my pants-wetting wait for Mockingjay and my first review.  Maybe Hunger Games?  Or one I recently finished, Blame?  Or an old favorite, Shining Through.  Since I view it as an exercise and I have a schedule to keep, I'm going to dig into the backlist for good reviews to write.  Votes?

A Good Blogger

A good blogger lets her reading public know before she goes on vacation, not five days after she gets back.  And she certainly does not let a long list of potential post topics muddle her to the point where she doesn't know what to write about and so writes about nothing.

So I guess we've established that I'm not a very good blogger.  But as an exercise, I'd like to practice being one.  So: a resolution.  Starting today (Wednesday, September 1, 2010), I'm going to post three times a week for the next month.  That'll be something in the Monday/Wednesday/Friday range, though I might do more of a Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday thing, since I understand it's bad form to blog at work.

In addition, as part of this little outing, I'm going to try a little exercise for myself.  A few people I know from online have started book blogs recently, and I picked up a NYT Book Review and some free publication the library was handing out, and I've been thinking of the form of the book review.

That's not really what I do here.  This is more of a personal blog with a book theme, at least to me.  It's about my hobby, my personal experience of reading all these books, not so much the books themselves.  That's less because I think that I'm worth reading about and more because I know for a fact that I'm an authority on it. 

Also, to be honest, not a lot of people want to hear about the spasms I went into when I found out that Mockingjay was in transit - finally! - or exactly what about Jenna Starborn is making it less compelling than Sharon Shinn's other books.  Like so many other blogs, I consider this a venue for things I want to blab about but can't convince anyone to listen.

It seems like I should be able to use this space constructively, though.  So during September Of The Ambitious Posting Schedule, I'm going to try to write a Real Review every week.  This will include a synopsis but not spoilers, and an evaluation based on slightly more than whether I loved or hated the book.  I'd really like to see if I can write something structured without turning it into an academic paper.  History says no, but my Magic 8 Ball says 'Ask again later.'  I'll take all the encouragement I can get.

The End of the Affair

My tryst with The Passage has come to a close.  My opinion of it at the end is not quite as high as it was in the middle, but I will still call it a great book and say that I enjoyed it a lot.  I'll also admit to being glad to be done with it, though.

I've heard that this is the first in a trilogy, which makes total sense.  It feels like the first part of a trilogy.  Given that, though, I think it could have used streamlining.  While there was no part that made me itch in a "why are you telling me this" way, I won't say that there was nothing non-essential in this book.

The only thing that I think really drove me crazy, though, was the mystical part.  Even in a more fantastical book, the mythology of things like vampires is really a "science fiction" element.  The fact that vampires hate garlic, sunlight, even crosses, is about creating a scientific systematization around your imaginary creatures.  The sciencey parts of this book work fine. 

But there is a deep, non-sensical level of mysticism that didn't sit well with me. I can even deal with the idea of trapped souls, mindreading, whatever.  But there's just the wrong amount of God in this book.  By the end, if anyone else came automatically to a silent understanding of what needed doing that I could not for the life of me figure out, I was going to kick something.  Everyone in this book has a sense of a greater purpose, a pattern, a meaning in things.  If the plague was the hand of God wiping us sinners from the earth (and yes, it was called Project Noah, why do you ask?), then God has made it weirdly difficult for the survivors. 

Noah himself was simultaneously tested and set up for success in a boat.  He had to take action to save himself, but the boat was not set upon by killer sharks, struck by lightening, and marauded by pirates.  Once God decided to save Noah, he actually saved him.  Peter and his friends, however, wander around getting into trouble, and they (and the author, and theoretically I) believe that the fact that they haven't died is all the evidence they need of a Higher Power guiding them.

I'm not very good at spiritual stuff, really, but from a literary standpoint, if not a theological one, the mystical stuff in The Passage didn't hold water.  (Wait, was that a Noah's Ark joke?  Let's say yes.)

But for all that, for all the Epic Wandering Around they do, I liked it.  I wanted to know what happened.  I wanted to think about the world he built.

And I want to see the movie.  Which will suck, I know.  And no, that's not a vampire joke.  Just pessimism.

Apocalypses? Apocali?

Well now I don't know which post to write.  I'm still reading the passage, and I've thought of and started about four different posts about this book.  I've been reading it almost exclusively for almost three weeks and I'm only halfway through.  I was thinking of waiting and just doing a review when I finished, but then I talked to a friend who did not love it as much as I did, and now I want to talk about my middle-of-the-book impressions, to compare them to my thoughts when I'm done.

So let's do a bulleted list summarizing the posts that I almost wrote at various points.  This has the advantage of presenting the best part of my ideas without letting my inability to deal with details bog us down.

1) The saga of my library adventures.  This book is hard to get hold of, and it's taking me forever to read.  I have stalked the Speed Read volumes at a dozen different libraries; I paid $1.75 for two weeks with it and then got lucky on two more.  I had to turn up at opening time at the library where I was offered a job and had the offer retracted when I told them I was pregnant.  (I know, sounds illegal, right?)  I had to return about eight books that I'm dying to read because THERE'S NO TIME if I'm ever going to finish it.

Why is it taking so long?  I think it's because I usually read books to get somewhere.  I want to get to the end, find out what happens.  With this book, in a way that is rarely true for me, I don't begrudge it the time it's taking to unfold.  It really feels like watching events unfold through the lens of history.  You follow different characters through what they're doing at the same time during an eventful and pivotal period of what will be history.  There's character development, but I feel like the characters are very much actors in the story, and the meaning and importance of what is happening is about the events, and what they mean for society, not for the people involved, necessarily.

I guess it feels like history to me.  I'm thinking maybe The Devil in the White City, where the stories are unfolding from the points of view of all the characters.  You're learning about the characters, and it's an important part of the story, but not more important than the place or time they inhabit, their society and its rules, their movements as they unfold in relation to each other, both short term and long term.  It's storytelling where the teller has already worked out the meaning and is deliberately constructing that meaning for you, not, like most fiction, where the meaning is unfolding before you, with the narrator's experience hidden from you and the illusion of surprise.

Post 2)  An in-depth analysis of the nature of a vampire apocalypse (The Passage), as distinct from a zombie apocalypse (The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Cell), a world-ending natural disaster (Life As We Knew It), or your standard nuclear war end of the world scenario (A Gift Upon the Shore).  Not about books depicting these apocali, mind you--the actual apocalypses themselves.

See, I'm not usually a vampire person, so the vampire apocalypse is something I haven't considered before.  I have ample end-of-the-world preparedness plans, but none of them involved an enemy like this one.  And of course, there's no guarantee that when the vampires REALLY come, they'll be good climbers or high jumpers--of course the type of walls you'll need to keep them out will depend on exactly what kind of undead are after you.  But for all the planning I've done, I've never thought about an agile, intelligent enemy being after you in the long term.  Sure, zombies will lean on your fences and try to reach through, but all you need are sturdy fences--they're never going to think their way through them, or even have much physical might to bring to bear.  But vampires--well, depending on how they operate, they'll be able to trick you, trap you, disarm you, climb your fence.

"What do you mean they cut the power?  They're animals!"  Where's Ripley when you need her?

3) Vampires and childhood.  [Caution: minor spoilers ahead.]  The book makes ample reference to its title as referring to a time of transition, and one of the ways that comes in is in the idea of childhood.  A lot of it is really standard, but the question of how you'd treat children in a world like this is pretty interesting.  Like the idea that someone who does horrible things to adults for a living would balk at a kid.

Or the question of how to protect children from a terrifying world.  They keep all their children isolated in a building where they can't see and aren't allowed to be told of the reality of the world--monsters, struggling to survive.  Then, on their eighth birthday, they're told the truth, let out, and apprenticed to a trade, to begin life as an adult.  The idea that there is some worth in childhood being a separate time of innocence is bizarre to me, but I can see how parents could fall into this.  The idea that children can be protected, that it's better to have a time when you aren't afraid--it seems wrong.  It seems like a recipe for misery when the world changes for you.  If you know the truth from birth, it seems like it would be easier to find the happiness available in reality, rather than believing in a happiness that doesn't exist.

And then there's Amy, of course, who's a child but not really a child, and possibly not even human.  I don't know what's going to happen with her--she's clearly the key to the story, but in what way, I can't tell.

Truly, though, the childhood element of this book has had me thinking a lot about being a parent and wanting to protect my child.  I've had occasional dreams recently of trying to protect my son from something--hiding him from bad guys who are coming, or running away from something while carrying him--that I just can't protect him from.  They're the most upsetting dreams I think I've ever had.  My sensitivity to certain kinds of Kids In Danger fiction has skyrocketed lately, and somehow it's related to the Vampire Apocalypse.

Now, there's a lot going on in this post, and it's not very coherent.  But I'm 450 pages into a 750 page book that I'm loving, and I had a big discussion last night about whether it's like the best of Stephen King or the worst of Stephen King, which led to an argument about which King books are the best or the worst (Brenda and I just don't agree on anything but fantasy, I think).  But I don't know where the book is going from here, and she does, so I wanted to lodge my opinions before they got away from me.  So here they are: my opinions halfway through The Passage.  Let's see where the rest of it takes us.

(Added Monday: also makes a fabulous lumbar support device at my desk.  750 very useful pages!)

Wow

Okay, I've got a more substantial post in the works, but I need to say: The Passage?  Best undead apocalypse book EVER.

Mission Accomplished

For $1.75, I jumped over the 400+ person waitlist and now have The Passage in my hot little book bag.  Thank you, Waltham Public Library! 

Before I re-start it, though, I'm wrapping up Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn.  I just really got into it after I had to send my old copy of The Passage back.  I'm really loving it, which is not surprising because it's Sharon Shinn.  But there is one problem.

There's a major plot point that hinges on the fact that none of the characters have figured out something I figured out very quickly.  If you remember the first book in the series well, you'd figure it out, too.  For the first hundred pages, I wasn't sure if this was going to be a central tension of the book, or if it was just going to keep me guessing for a few chapters while the characters figured it out.  But no--the hurdle keeping apart our protagonists/lovers is one that has a big hole in it.  The characters can perhaps be forgiven for not figuring it out, though it's some very sloppy thinking that's put them there.  But I'm pretty disappointed in the fact that I've figured out the big reveal.  By giving me a little less information, they could have kept it a surprise, while maintaining the satisfying "of course!" at the end.

It's a small complaint, though.  Not as fabulous as Archangel, but if I haven't teased you enough with this review, you should read the first one and then the second one.  Preferably with a few months in between, so you forget just enough to keep the tension alive.  It's not my fault I remember an eerie amount of detail in the books I read.

Stroke of Genius or Oxymoron?

The library rental.  I looked briefly for an article or rant or something about this phenomenon, but a search for "library book rental" just turns up a bunch of Netflix-type systems which--hello!  Why would you pay them $23 per month to borrow books when,  if you live in the U.S., you likely have access to a free library?  And don't tell me it's because they deliver, because many towns have a system where you can get library books mailed or delivered to you, and many others have services for shut-ins that will pick up things like library books.  And don't tell me you're spry enough but don't have time to go to the library, because then you probably don't have time to read.

I suppose I will concede only to a certain type of person who would rack up so many overdue fees that it would exceed these membership costs.  Normally I'd rant about that type of person, but I've come to understand that they're human too, and even to care for some of them as individuals.  And to envy their Kindles.  Go figure.

Anyway, the point of this is that Waltham Public Library appears to be willing to rent me a copy of The Passage.  How much for this great privilege, you ask?  $1.00 for one week; $1.75 for two.  So wait, you're telling me that for less money than my morning bagel I can get this book and make a monetary donation to a library?  Sign me up!

It's really no different than the speed read option--first come first served, so I'll have to race the rest of the populace there tomorrow morning.  But they have one in, and I'm going for it.  As long as the cost is nominal and there are also free books, this seems like a great idea to me.  But maybe that's just because it's working in my favor today.  Either way, wish me luck!

Aching

I started reading The Passage, by Justin Cronin.  With foresight and luck, I put myself on the library list before the buzz really hit, so I was only 35 on a list that eventually cleared 100.  I got my copy when I had 20 other books out.  I picked it up to read with just a few days left before it had to go back.

And kids, it's so good.  I only got 70 pages into its 700, but each chapter is like a novella, full of tension and detail and character development and emotion.  So far I've met most of the main characters (I think), but I don't really know how they're going to come together.  I just barely learned that there's anything supernatural about the story, though the slightly dystopic future (highway checkpoints; New Orleans underwater) is both convincing and thought provoking.

But then I had to give it back.  Curse them!  I don't want to read anything else--I want to read this book, right now.  I would,  hand to god, go out and buy it, except that as we all know that would be the kiss of death.  I never read books I own.  They don't have a deadline, you see.

So I'm waiting for my number to come back up.  I'm also stalking the speed read copies--two weeks, no renewals.  If I check every day, I should be able to run over and get one from Cambridge when it comes back in.  Or Chelsea.  I'm almost ready to drive out to Franklin and check out their speed read copy, and I don't actually know where the heck Franklin is.

But if anyone owns a copy, and would like to lend it to me (anyone who hasn't succumbed to the Kindle, Brenda), that would be enough of a deadline for me.  Please?

Really good book.  Like what you imagine Stephen King might write, if he'd gotten better and better over the years.  Like the Platonic ideal of a thriller/horror with literary weight behind it.  Like I don't know what.  Want.

Vacated

I went away on vacation when I should have been posting here.  Darn me!  In two and a half days at the lake, I figured I could polish off at least three books--that's what a lake retreat is for.  I swam the width of the lake three times total, but I only finished two books.  Dear readers, I feel I've let you down.

One of the books I finished was Lamb, which took me an unholy amount of time to get through.  Ha, I didn't even meant that as a pun.  Before I left, my interest in it was flagging--it got a little too...weird.  The beginning, Christ's childhood, was really, really good, and pretty much in line with what I'd anticipated.  But then he and Biff wander off to see the world, and I don't think I'd realized that the point of the book was to explain what happened between his childhood and his ministry--the 17 missing years.  So when that chunk started, my response was, "Where the hell is this going?"  The stories of the things that happen to them didn't fit into the overall arc of the story I was expecting. 

But once I figured out that this is what the book is--it's mostly Christ's Wacky Adventures, I got back into it. I was able to invest properly in the characters they met and the antagonists and see how things fit together thematically.  And at the end, when they get back home and the story begins to cover the ministry, I was almost disappointed--it did that sort of Hitting the High Points thing that PBS productions of Great Novels do--well, yeah, that's what happened, but it's hard to retain the sense of what makes the story great. 

Overall, I'd say I liked Fool better.

And now I'm into The Passage, by Justin Cronin, which I'm assured is going to be a vampire book, but so far is really just some great human drama.  I had to return it to the library, but I'm hoping I can get a speed read copy from Belmont or Cambridge.  I can pound that out in two weeks--I'm dying to read it right now!

Wandering

Since I've wrapped up some of the books I was reading, I've been dipping into a bunch of other ones to see what I might read next.  I mean, technically I'm still in the middle of four books, but The Prince is going to be sitting on the back burner till I finish it, and The Girl Who Played With Fire is an audiobook, which doesn't count in the same way.  So technically I'm only reading two books: Lamb and The Name of the Wind, both of which are excellent, but enormous.  I need something slight to fill in the cracks, you know?

So first I looked at my pile and made some decisions.  For example, I'm going to put Lamb on the back burner until I go on vacation on Tuesday.  It'll be an excellent book to lie in the sun and read for two or three hours in a row.  I'm also taking Mistress of the Art of Death, by Ariana Franklin, and Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn with me.  Those, plus maybe one or two others, should get me through my four day trip.

Of those that are left, what should I read?  I've started four or five books in the past couple of days, just to see what takes.  So far it looks like The Shape-Changer's Wife, by Sharon Shinn, is a contender, mostly because I've been reading it for about an hour and a half and am a quarter of the way through.  Also because I love Sharon Shinn a whole bunch.  I think she's my new choice of The Author Whose Work I Wish I Could Have Produced.  The Shape-Changer's Wife is her first, I'm pretty sure, and it's not as rich as a lot of her other books, but it's still a pleasure to read.

But then there's The Invisible Gorilla, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, which is one of those books about psychologists running a bunch of experiments, which are such fun.  It's not the best of them--it could be a lot tighter.  It's like they did a great job of learning how to write for a popular audience in every way, except for the academic need to explain your conclusions in every possible way of phrasing them so that no one can pretend you didn't explain it well enough.  I'm in it for the clever experiments; you don't need to end every single paragraph by explaining that we all hold erroneous assumptions about how our minds work.  By the fourth or fifth time, I've got it.

Or how about Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, by Alexander McCall Smith?  The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books are always light and pleasing.  Or The Passage, by Justin Cronin?  Vampire/zombie dystopia with a really promising first chapter.   Or the second Sharing Knife book, Legacy, by Lois McMaster Bujold?  Picks up right where the first one left off!

I did manage to rule some stuff out in this little expedition.  There was a book, Bonechiller, that I just pulled off the shelf randomly a few weeks ago.  I finally picked it up, and the first few pages really didn't speak to me.  I won't say it didn't look good, but it didn't look good enough to me to bother with right now.  And Birthmarked, which I had been kind of looking forward to, somehow didn't catch my eye.  I might try it again sometime--it's one of those ones that has all the elements that would make you set me up on a blind date with it--future dystopia, midwives, girl finding her power, fellow alumna author.  But it's got a waiting list at the library, and I know I won't finish it before it's due.  And somehow, that doesn't bother me right now.

So I'm leaving for vacation on Tuesday!  Just me--Mike and Adam are staying home.  I don't know how that will go, but I'm pretty excited.  I'm going with Linden's family, and I know that these trips to the lake involve pretty much swimming, canoeing, eating, and reading.  Which is all of my most favorite things in the whole wide world.  I'm so excited that I almost feel guilty.

Hopefully I'll get past that.

Spotted Today

On the new book shelf at the library.  In a glorious conjunction of fads, someone has brought together vampires, retellings of Pride and Prejudice through Mr. Darcy's eyes, and even the specific fad of retelling Pride and Prejudice as a horror story, and brought us:

Vampire Darcy's Desire.

I feel that the zeitgeist has jumped the shark.  I'm going to go lie down.

Kafka, Maybe?

I'm not sure I know enough about Kafka to say something is Kafka-esque, but let me tell you what happened last week.  The library told me that I couldn't renew Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, because someone else had requested it.  I looked at the system, and I was a little annoyed that they seemed to have recalled my book when there were several others still in the library--there was one copy in transit, five copies in, and mine checked out. But ours is not to reason why.  I made my plans to return it.

Part of those plans involved reserving another copy for myself.  I was third on the list.  Since one was in transit, that meant that mine would go directly to the person who had placed the request, and I would get the next available copy.  Lame, huh?  But it gets better: in the two minutes between my first check and my placing the request, a different copy--one of the other five--had gone into transit, heading off to fulfill the needs of some avid bookworm like myself. 

Now what this meant is that, when I returned my copy of the book, it would enter the system and be returned to me.  This process (knowing the BPL) would likely take three or four days.

Fortunately, I was able to bow out of this amusing little dance.  I canceled my reservation, and was therefore able to renew the book.  So all's right with the world--no worries there.  For a minute there, though, it was one of those moments that makes you love to hate The System.

It's a good book--hilarious and sincere at the same time.  It's not reverent, but it's deeply respectful.  I would not have believed that you could write a book about the life of Jesus with this many curse words and still manage to come up with 'respectful,' but there it is. 

Joshua (Jesus) and Biff are real young men--Jesus more serious and thoughtful, but not constantly so.  They're both basically good kids, one the class clown, the other the valedictorian who's got the hopes and dreams of his family (or, in this case, the world) riding on him and takes it seriously.  It doesn't make him a prig, though. 

The angel who Biff talks about at the beginning of every chapter is kind of annoying--or rather, the depiction of him is.  I was actually pretty skeptical before I started reading the book, because, having read Fool, I expected something a little more over-the top, irreverent, maybe even dirty.  And I have to say, I thought that would be a pretty cheap, silly thing.  This book is not that--and I'm really glad--except maybe those chapter-beginnings.  It's just kind of cheap humor, is all--the angel is addicted to soap operas, curses like a sailor, and is kind of an idiot.  If the whole book looked like that, I'd be sick of it.  As it is, I think it's making a point. 

I think I love Christopher Moore.

Damn You, Brenda!

You told me Lois McMaster Bujold was sooo good and I had to try her.  And now I'm halfway through Beguilement, and I'm looking for which library I can get the next Sharing Knife book from, and did you know this woman has written about six kersquillion books?  Possible closer to seven kersquillion.  That's like 7000 kajillion--and now I have to read all of them!  Like, right now!

Grr...

What this book points out to me is actually where Mercedes Lackey's books for the new Harlequin fantasy imprint (Luna, I think it's called) has gone wrong.  This book is straight-up fantasy, but mostly the story is a romance, and my God, I feel like a twelve year old swooning when they make eye contact.  But it's such a solid story, both the romance and the fantasy plot, that it all works really well.  Whereas the one Lackey romance that I read--something about dragons and a geeky princess who gets cool new glasses and saves the world through books--was just awful, because it refused to embrace its romanticness--or really to even be romantic.  It was too busy making her a Strong Woman.  This book barely even notices that our heroine is a strong woman.  She just is.  She is weak only in the knees.

Sorry.  Bad pun.  Good book, though.

Other People Obsess About These Things, Too!

Dooce.com has a guest post this week from Sarah of Que Sera Sera about The Babysitters Club.  They were talking about it by a fireplace in a pub in England.  What would I have given to be there?

But she hasn't read a BSC book since 1989.  Slacker.

One of Those Books

So the other book, the one that made the last week an unpleasant slog, was The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg.  I read a blurb about it at Unshelved, and it sounded good--future dystopia fiction, etc. etc.  Then I found my library's copy and realized it was originally published in 1971.  This made me a little cautious, but far be it from me to practice literary ageism.

But then I started it, and oh, it's one of those books.  One of those 1970s sci fi books in which a) everybody's having all the sex with everybody else because in the future we will no longer have any kind of sexual boundaries, leading to b) a science fiction writer writes a lot of sex scenes, which is almost incidental to the real problem, because c) the whole book is an excuse for him to write about his philosophical observations on human nature.

The blurb on the back cover, for crying out loud, was an excerpt of a conversation between an urban administrator and an imaginary critic of the society he lives in, in which he defends their way of life.  I really can't believe I opened it after realizing that.

In the future, mankind has made a religion out of fertility; it is one's duty to bring as much life to the world.  The Earth's population is 75 billion (which they write 75,000,000,000 throughout the book, just to impress you with zeros, I suppose), but that's okay, because everyone lives in high rises called "urbmons."  Three kilometers high, each one houses almost a million people.  They have small enough footprints that most of the world is farmland; a very few people live on the agricultural communes and trade food for manufactured goods of the urbmon.

The entire book was an ironic defense of the urbmon way of life.  Each chapter is told by a different character, all relatively interconnected--they all know each other peripherally--and follows their life in the urbmon.  They wander around and have sex with each other and do their little jobs and think about how awesome the urbmon life is, or maybe it's not, but no, sure it is, after all there's all this sex!  Seven kids, 400 square meters of space, this is the life. 

It took me a long time to read, and it definitely made its point and built its world thoroughly.  But it never went outside the box (no pun intended--wow, I made a pun about this book).  This is a book about the dangers of overcrowding on the psychology of the individual, and you are not allowed to forget it.

So I'm afraid I can't recommend it to you.  I can, however, tell you that the books I'm reading now range from enjoyable (99 Coffins, by David Welllington) to really good (The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold) to fabulous (Lamb, by Christopher Moore).  Read some!

Only Half the Battle

I haven't written much in the past couple of weeks, because I have been slogging.  Two kinds of slogging, actually: the good and the bad.

What do you think, good first, or bad?  Good, I think; bad is more interesting to rant about.  The good stuff is Lady Catherine's Necklace, by Joan Aiken.  Now, I'd heard of Joan Aiken as the author of the famous children's book The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.  I've learned recently that she's written about a gajillion and one books, a bunch of which are novels following the lives of the minor characters in Jane Austen's work. 

This one, for example, is about what happens at Lady Catherine de Bourgh's house after Darcy abruptly decides not to marry his wan cousin Anne and instead to toddle off with Elizabeth Bennett.  Elizabeth's friend Charlotte is of course still married to the obsequious Mr. Collins, and Colonel Fitzwilliam is still lurking about the place.  I understand that in some of her Austen books, Aiken takes some liberties with people's favorite characters and gets them really, really upset (I wish I could link to the Goodreads review of Eliza's Daughter that is just a long string of swear words.)

The story is written with an eye toward Austen's language, and well executed in that respect.  You could not say that Jane Austen would have written it, though.  There is far more high drama (theft and kidnapping and suicide) and small touches that feel comfortable to modern sensibilities but that would not have occurred to Jane (a pair of confirmed bachelor roommates, some gender-bending stuff I won't give away).  Beyond these points, though, both the characters and the story are far more blunt than they would have been in Austen's day.

So why do I call it a slog?  Because for a short book, it took forever to read.  The writing had that lavishly constructed Austen thing going on, but I can hardly blame that; I'm a fairly literate person, after all.  But in spite of the length (less than 200 pages) and the font size (massive), it took forever to read this book.  I enjoyed every minute of it.  Go figure.

This post is ending up longer than I thought.  Tomorrow: the other side of the slogging coin, or: Why I Used the Word Slog.

Y: Why?

So I enjoyed Y: The Last Man as I was reading the series.  It never quite lived up to what I felt was its promise--the art, the premise, the writing of the individual scenes all would have been comfortable in a fabulous, profound, insightful story, which this one kept falling short of.

Mike and I actually disagreed.  We were talking about it last night, after he finished the whole thing and while I was in the middle of the last volume.  He said that the ending was fitting for a book that was mediocre all the way through.  I disagreed: I thought it was good all the way through, but the potential for greatness was so glaring that it made "good" seem like not good enough.

Then I finished the last volume. And, well, crud.  The ending didn't really elevate anything.  It was a disappointment.  I won't give anything away, but I will say that, since the book did not achieve greatness, it would have succeeded better by giving me an ending that was more aggressively pleasing.  That's what I'll say to avoid spoilers.

It's hard to review the whole series like this, though.  I don't want to let my disappointment with the last volume stop someone from reading what I thought was some good comics.  I don't think it used its post-apocalyptic potential as well as it could have, but it was full of great bits, good dialogue, characters I really, really liked.  I have a hard time finding good comics, and I think this was good comics.

The Warhorse

Have I regaled you with me extended opinion of the Clan of the Cave Bear series yet?  No?  Well, let's fix that up right now!

Book 1: Clan of the Cave Bear: Superlative.  Historical fiction full of detail and life, about survival and culture.  Loved it.
Book 2: The Valley of Horses: Excellent.  Suffered a little from switching back and forth between two main characters, one of whom we're already invested in, one of whom we don't know at all.  But once the stories come together, you want to go back and reread the Jondalar parts.  (Though they're still not as good as the Ayla parts.)  Great book, again, all about survival.
Book 3: The Mammoth Hunters: Very, very good.  The personal stories start getting a little heavy-handed, but the cultural details are still fabulous.
Book 4: The Plains of Passage: Totally readable.  I mean, you need to skim the six page descriptions of grasslands, and the sex scenes get a little repetitive, but it's a decent book.  Full of action.  A divergence, but on its own terms, fine.
Book 5: The Shelters of Stone: Oh, ugh.  I know that not everyone will agree with me, but I really didn't like this book.  It repeated not only things we knew from previous books, but even "revelations" that took place within this book are supposed to be startling to characters the second and third time they're exposed to them.  The interpersonal drama is bland and unmemorable, and the cultural stuff is cheap and more like fanfic than the great work I expect after the first two books.

You see the evolution here.  I don't know if it's because I'm getting older as I read these, but I doubt it; the first few I reread often; book 4 I go back and reread select parts.  Book 5 I haven't opened since I finished it the first time around.

I feel for the author, too--it takes her about 10 years to write one of these.  And that means we, the fans, have been waiting for eons.  I worry that it also means that the editors are going to rush her through the revision process and not give it the work it needs, but I'll take what they give me.

Because, ladies and gentlemen--drumroll, please--The Land of Painted Caves is coming out!  Yes, that's right, those of us who have been waiting anxiously, googling Jean Auel every couple of months and reading the same tired rumors on the geocities fansites can now relax, because the authority of the publisher and Amazon are behind the promise of only NINE months till P-Day!  (Publication day, that is.)

So, do I have a lot of hope?  Sadly, no.  I figure it'll be about what Shelters of Stone was.  But I love the characters and the world enough that I'm thrilled to spend some more time there, even if it's a cut-rate bus tour, not the luxury cruise I was dreaming of.

I just lent the first book to Brenda, since she's been interested in edible plants lately.  The book is a veritable Field Guide to Useful Plants in the Prehistoric Steppes.  Sigh; now I want to read it again!

Who's Blurbing Who Now?

Jay Asher, who wrote Thirteen Reasons Why, wrote the blurb on the cover of Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver. He claims I'll "have no choice but to tear through this book." And he is so damned right.

The sort of sad part about the blurb is that this book is everything his book wanted to be. It's more observant, thoughtful, probing, clever. It's deeper; it uses its gimmick better. I was more moved. Thirteen Reasons Why left me kind of cold--I heard the story, but it didn't touch me. It was a good idea, and it was an okay book, but it wasn't much more than that.

Before I Fall might be a great book. It knows how to feel sympathy for mean girls, shallow people, sexist pigs, without--and this is important--excusing them or forgiving them. It knows what's fun about high school, as well as how much it sucks. It understands popularity on so many more levels, and unpopularity, too.

And it doesn't waste any time justifying its gimmick. Sam Kingston is living the same day over and over again, yeah yeah. It's not like she takes it in stride, but no precious real estate is wasted trying to figure out how or why. It doesn't waste your time retelling the parts that don't need it, either--for a long book, it is beautifully economical.

I couldn't put it down. I set aside all the other books I was reading and just ploughed right on through. Jay Asher was right. I'm sorry I couldn't love his book this much, but my hat is off to Lauren Oliver.

Conjunction Junction

Important things in my life come together: Miss Manners and librarians.

We had a librarian like that in my hometown. I remember going in once the year after college and going to the checkout with a stack of books. I had just decided to try reading Stephen King for the first time--seemed like it might be fun--so I had two Stephen King books, plus The Law of Love, by Laura Esquivel, who wrote Like Water for Chocolate. There may have been something else, but I remember these specifically.

And that's because I remember her commenting on each one. Not as rudely as the woman in the Miss Manners column; really just conversationally. Except she didn't like my choices, so it wasn't a great conversation. Of Stephen King: "Oh, I've never liked his books--" said with a definite snootiness. Of Laura Esquivel: "Oh, I tried reading her other book; it was over my head." Any snootiness there--of the, "If it was beyond me, you have no hope, honey" variety--just made me feel superior.

Now, a) I had read and enjoyed Like Water for Chocolate, and b) it seems like a librarian making conversation could come up with more than, "I hate all your choices." Hasn't she heard the rule about saying nice things or saying nothing at all? Is my mom the only one who taught that one?

I have to say, I don't feel Miss Manners gave very useful advice. Shushing the librarian may be all you can do, but I am not convinced that the kind of woman who needs that kind of shushing will respond to any hints that don't involve a blunt instrument.

BSC Redux

I've brought my sister-in-law over to the dark side--I bought her a Baby-Sitters Club book at the library book sale last weekend.

I've written before about the relationship I have with the BSC, and how I have to reread their stuff occasionally. Lately, though, it's been about searching out new ones. I've noticed that, later in the series, they (I don't say "she" in reference to the author, because even Ann M. Martin couldn't have written the literally HUNDREDS of BSC books, BSC mysteries, Baby-Sitter's Little Sister, BSC Super-Specials, etc. that she cranked out, not even in the 20 years she's been running) -- sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, they started teasing stories from book to book, and having longer story arcs.

So I've been tracking Stacey's rift with the BSC, which begins, appropriately, in Stacey vs. the BSC. At the end of that book, Stacey quits the club! And my oh my, I was not ready for that to be it. I had to know more! So I went through the $.25 rack at the library book sale and picked out what I thought was the right set of books. I got Stacey's Big Crush, and though I couldn't pick it up there, I made a note that Claudia's Freind Friend was the next one to check out. Because certainly that's where she re-friends Stacey, right?

But no, gentle readers! Alas, I was on the wrong trail. That was about Claudia befriending a kid with a learning disability. No, I wanted Stacey and the Bad Girls. And I finally found it, and read it (took about 2 hours, but I was also feeding the baby). And boy, were those girls bad! They stole and drank and weren't real friends at all. And I hope it's not a spoiler to say that it all ended up okay and Stacey is back in the BSC. So not to worry.

As BSC books go, this was really pretty good. It had a good amount of tension, and some realistically not-great teenaged girls. I can truly say I enjoyed it.

Though I have to say, whoever illustrates the covers better get the memo that Stacey is supposed to be glamorous, not just cute. That's a "mane" of blond hair, not just light brown drab, my dear.

Now, I just need to keep Stephanie on a steady diet of BSC, until she's caught up with me. Turn to the dark side!

Trying Something New

As Linden pointed out, I don't always need to buy a book to read it again. That's usually my threshold, but this time, I went to the library and picked up Robin McKinley's Chalice to reread it. And I loved it again, and read it in one day this time--it's not a long book. That worked out really well. I guess I'm kind of surprised at how surprising that is.

I might try that with Ursula Leguin's Lavinia as well. It doesn't haunt me quite as much, but it has a very similar feel, of a high fantasy story told through the small, mundane tasks of gathering honey and drawing water. They are books that are almost as much about becoming familiar with the small lives of their characters--outer lives, not just inner ones--as they are about the high events of the plot.

I really loved rereading Chalice. It was not unpredictable or startling, just very satisfying.

I wonder if I'll be able to say something similar about the Baby-Sitters Club book that's waiting for me on reserve!

That's Where The Name Comes From

"It should be observed here that men should either be caressed or crushed; because they can avenge slight injuries, but not those that are very severe. Hence, any injury done to a man must be such that there is no need to fear his revenge."

Would it surprise you to learn that Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that? No, I didn't think so. Seriously, I would never have thought that you could surprise me with how Machiavellian Machiavelli was, but here you have it.

Slow reading, but full of choice, practical, amoral tidbits like this. Really, it makes sense; if you're going to run a city-state singlehandedly, ruthlessness is not optional.

Jaded

I don't know how to say this without sounding horrible, so I'll just come out and say it: the Holocaust can be boring.

Ugh, I know, I know, right? But you know what I mean, Dear Reader--you know how many novels take wartime Europe as their setting, how many times the story has been told, each time with its own details, its own texture on the fine scale, but each time with the same bitter arc, each time with the same tragic point: Nazi-occupied Poland/France/Germany was a really, really awful place to be.

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, by Louise Murphy, is subtitled "A novel of war and survival." Well, yes, that's what it's about. It's pretty straightforwardly about that: a Jewish family, on the run from the Nazis, sends two little children to hide in the woods while the parents draw their pursuers away. They're told to call themselves Hansel and Gretel, and never to tell their Jewish names. They're taken in by an old woman known as the local witch. It has the shape of the fairy tale--she hangs bread on the walls of her house to show generosity to the birds--but turns a lot of stereotypes on their ears--the stepmother makes enormous sacrifices for the children's safety. It's well written; there's nothing wrong with it.

But I can't say I like it all that much. I've read this before--frigid Polish winter, not enough food, terrorists in the woods, SS officer, hunger, fear. It feels so distasteful to say it, but I know this story. And aside from the shape of the fairy tale, this book isn't really bringing anything new to it for me. It almost feels like nothing's happening, because everything that's happening is exactly what I expect to have happen.

I need to go do something virtuous now, to feel less like someone who doesn't care when little children are starving.

Ah, High School

I'm mostly not into YA that captures the truth about what it is to be a young adult, mostly because, well, I'm not suffering from that particular affliction anymore (hallelujah) and it often runs to depressing. I don't mean to be dismissive, because I think books like that do important work for people going through a really difficult time. But the way I relate to those issues is both distant and excruciating, and I'd just as soon not, thanks.

So Thirteen Reasons Why is not my typical YA read. I already explained how I was sucked in by their marketing, and I'm still enjoying listening to the excerpts from the tapes as I go through the book. But of course, it really has to stand on its own as a novel, and I think it does an okay job of that. Actually, a better job than a lot of YA "issue" books, in my opinion.

It's the story of a guy listening to the tapes that are basically his classmate's suicide note. In the tapes, she explains how it came to this for her. What I find interesting the number of levels on which it looks at the high school social experience.

There's Hannah's explanation of being the subject of gossip, especially when it's wrong. It's interesting to see how she kind of deconstructs the whole experience. She sees through a lot of the bull. But there's another level on which Clay (the listener) has it up on her--he sees through some of her perceptions. Since she killed herself, she obviously ended up at all the worst conclusions about everything she saw, but he sees another level where sometimes, if Hannah had reached out, or even accepted others' reaching out, things could have been different.

At the same time, there's another layer of storytelling in Clay's narrative. Because he's describing how he wanders around and interacts with some of his classmates as he listens to these tapes, and you can see him completely missing their inner lives, skimming over them as background noise where there is clearly depth that he's missing. And you see how this happened to Hannah, and how only because she killed herself does he have the luxury of imagining a different outcome.

The levels of observation that author has embedded in the book are really skillful, and I'm impressed. It's very good for a teen issue novel. But I'll tell you the truth; it doesn't really transcend what it is. If you asked me if I'd recommend it to a teen interested in stories like this--absolutely, yes, I think they'd be enthralled. But would I recommend it to an adult? Sad to say, probably not.

A Team of Advisors Working Around the Clock

I'm sure I've shared with you my love of advice columns. I'm sure that people who know me in person understand how firmly I like to give advice, even when I just barely know what I'm talking about. I've also got the voyeuristic streak of someone who spends too much time with fiction, and I love the condensed form of life's weird and wonderful and awful permutations that is the advice column.

I think my current favorite is Carolyn Hax. I also read Ask Amy, Miss Manners, Savage Love (um, not work safe), The Ethicist, and (God help me because she's awful) Dear Abby. Plus assorted chats and, really, anyone who offers personal advice. Occasionally I'll read a pet advice column, if one crosses my path. Or parenting, work--seriously, I'm a junkie.

And when these columnists compile their work, I generally eat it up. Miss Manners' collective works are a particular favorite. Somehow, though, in spite of this--proclivity? obsession?--I was surprised at how much I liked The Good, the Bad, & the Difference: How to Tell Right from Wrong in Everyday Situations, by Randy Cohen of Ask the Ethicist fame. I liked the book even more than I like the column, which is surprising, since it's really just a collection of columns.

The thing is, advice columns are less about the advice than they are about the problems. And in most advice columns, at least 75% of the time, it's easy to know what the right thing to do it. "Dump him." "Stop nagging." "Drink less." "Lock the door when you're in the bathroom, then, dummy!" I don't blame people--it's always easier to see the answer to someone else's succinctly summarized problems than it is to figure out how to change your own sprawling and messy life.

The neat thing about the Ethicist, though, is that his problems are often more stymieing.* Not always--he gets his share of questions where the answer is "Just don't be such a jerk." But there are so many places where rules (an honor code, a movie theater's no-food policy) conflict with what might seem right or kind (not ratting out a friend, bringing a bottle of water to a movie).

The problem I usually have with the column is Randy Cohen's hokey sense of humor. His jokes read like Great Uncle Horace's attempts to jolly up Thanksgiving dinner. Just corny. In the column, it often grates on me, and makes him feel less than sharp. But looking at his answers in volume, as with the book, the thought that he puts into some of these answers, and the insight that they reflect cumulatively, become more noticeable. This relegates the corny humor to something more tolerable--a charming quirk, rather than a lack of comedic insight.

A quick read, and definitely right up there on my list of "advice column collections I've enjoyed." At the very least, you'll get a few conversation starters out of it.

*Seriously, the word spell check claims I'm not making up are often startling.

YA Sprawl

Sometimes when I go on a long stretch of really light reading, I can't seem to get my head together to blog about it. It's all from the gut around here. Anyway, I've been reading up a storm, and had some good hits.

The big thrill has been The Merry Misogynist, by Colin Cotterill. It's the most recent Dr. Siri mystery, and I think it's the best one since the first, maybe even the best one period. There's a supernatural thread that runs through the series, and in some books it's a little overwhelming--extended dream sequences, drug trips, and spirit world adventures generally make for a bit of a slog in my opinion. Dr. Siri's are more fun than most, but eventually I want to get back to corrupt bureaucrats and cranky villagers.

This most recent book is great. It's got a dash of the supernatural, but it by no means dominates the story. It's clear which threads of the plot are major and which are minor, and it's an all-around satisfying (if light) mystery. Oodles of fun.

I've also been reading Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which is the second of the Betsy-Tacy books. It's very sweet, though really a little kid book. I suspect I'll read it to Adam when he's bigger--though the characters are all girls, none of their adventures are particularly girlie. I'm interested in reading how the series evolves--it follows the girls as they grow up, and matures with them. I've heard that, after the little kid ones, the high school one, Betsy was a Junior, is the best. I'm not sure if I'll skip ahead or try to read on through.

Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli, is another one I've just finished. It's a very standard-seeming book about a free-thinking high school girl who's in touch with herself and not susceptible to whe whims of the crowd, and the boy who loves her but can't handle her individuality. It's a little on the after-school-special side--a story for another generation, where the quirky girl is startling. If it was a period piece, something more from the '70s, I'd get it more, but it's more modern, and so feels clunky. What I will grant it, though, is that it leaves me seriously wanting to send anonymous cards to my neighbors and strangers I pass in the grocery store, just to cheer them up.

The Dream Maker's Magic had all the usual Sharon Shinn magic, the telling of small details of life, the person transformations. Loved it. Also Caroline Cooney's They Never Came Back, which is a small, personally told story about the mystery of a girl whose parents fled fraud charges and left her behind. It felt slight, but I enjoyed it; one of those books that doesn't really transcend the fact that it's intended for young adults, but does its job.

That's what I was doing while I wasn't blogging last week. Let's see what happens during this next period of slacking!

Marketing Push

This is the story of how I was sucked in by a book commercial.

I was pottering around Goodreads, which is what I do with myself in my spare time. An ad popped up in the margin, as they often do. Since at least 40% of books that pass in front of my eyes sound at least marginally interesting for at least a minute, I look at the ads.

I'd heard of this book--Thirteen Reasons Why--though I can't remember where. It sounds grim--in the wake of a girl's suicide, her classmates and acquaintances receive tapes that explain why she did it. Intriguing, but not really my style. But the image was good, and gave the impression of something suspenseful. I clicked.

But the website, kids, the website! It's got a ton of material on it, and it's very slick. What sold me, though, were the tapes, which you can listen to. I listened to the beginning of the first one, and I wanted to listen to more. But what's the tape without the story?

So I got the book. At the library, of course--sadly, no one made any money on the transaction. Still, someone was doing her job in the marketing department. I'll let you know if the book was worth it.