King Hereafter: A Joint Review

I'm very excited to be reviewing Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter with Aarti at BookLust.  I feel this way partly because I love Aarti's blog, and partly because the book was full of words and content and plot, and I was grateful for a little hand holding.  It's not the story of Shakespeare's Macbeth, but rather a take on the historical figure on whom Macbeth is based.  I understand this to be a matter of some speculation, but I know much less about the subject than Dorothy Dunnett (you do, too, I guarantee it), so I'm going to take her at her word.

This is a long book, so we're going through it party by part.  This is the first half of our conversation about Part I; you can find the second half at her site, here.  Part II coming soon!

I'm in blue and Aarti's in red.  So, without further ado...

I have so many things I want to talk about in this book!  There’s the world she’s building, the writing style, and the politics.  But I think the first thing I wanted to mention was just how much the fact of the book being tied to Macbeth influenced my expectations and experience.  I find that in books that are based on other stories I know, I’m always looking for the characters I know about, and looking for how the stories fit together.  So I kept trying to figure out who was Banquo.  

But of course, this isn’t based on the Shakespeare, but rather on the history that he was writing from.  And it’s a different story from that one in almost every way.  Did you find the Macbeth tie in distracting, or that it set up expectations?  Or do you think it added anything to your experience of the story so far?

At the risk of sounding very uncultured, I’d have to say I don’t think Shakespeare’s Macbeth has tied in much at all for me because I hardly remember it at all!  I read it in high school and then never again, and all I can say is that Groa is nothing like Lady Macbeth so far :-)  I do think that Groa’s son, though, might be seen as a slight nod to the witches of Macbeth as he seems to have the ability to predict the future.  But I like that he is so fond of Thorfinn and just states what he thinks are facts, and then those facts just happen to turn everyone else’s world upside down.

I’ve read Dunnett’s other historical fiction books - The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo and it’s interesting how these ideas of fate and destiny are present in all of them.  In a way, if you know the story of Macbeth, you know how this story will end, but what’s so interesting is that Thorfinn himself seems to know how the story will end, but he’s still going out there doing his best every day to make the most of it.  I love that.

I also just love Thorfinn and Groa.  I was worried that I wouldn’t like Groa because I don’t love most of the women Dunnett writes.  But Groa is great and I am so looking forward to seeing her grow.  And Thorfinn - he’s so inscrutable and hard to read.  So many times through this part of the book, I feel like he was having conversations with people on multiple levels, and I really only understood the most obvious one!  Did you get that feeling?

Through most of the first section I felt the absence of female characters.  There’s Godiva, who is absolutely amazing and I want to be her, but she’s really the only one till Groa comes in.  I love her, too, and I felt like I understood her better than any other character, by far.  She starts out sort of on the outside of everything Thorfinn is doing, which is hugely frustrating (because she’s so great and you want her to be in the middle of the action), but it’s frustrating for her, too.  I think that makes it even more satisfying when she does get to play an active role, and when she and Thorfinn finally become close.

As for Macbeth, the story is already so far from the Shakespeare that the parallels are more interesting than informative.  I mean, killing Duncan was just a selfish, dirty move in the play, but here, it’s the only thing that made sense.  A lot of my enjoyment of the story comes, I think, from getting a feel for the rules these people are playing by--how do you predict what all the other players are going to do, and what does loyalty look like?  The latter is a huge deal here, because there are friends and there are allies, and they’re related but not entirely overlapping.  Thorfinn’s relationship with Eachmarchach is a great example--they’re clearly true personal friends, but on both their sides there’s an element of cultivating the political allies they need.  (It reminds me of all my friends who say they hate networking; all social activity is a little bit networking!)

Let me ask you this, though; how much of the outline of background events did you actually follow?  I feel like I recognize about half the names that are used in a lot of the descriptions of things that are going on, and can pinpoint and remember the details about even fewer.  There’s always another uncle or step-cousin or half-brother, and so many are named Thor and Finn!  (A character named Finn appeared in the other book I’m reading and I had an instinctive reaction of trying to figure out whose cousin he was before I realized that he worked at Google and had probably never been a-viking.)  I’m fascinated that the story can be so engaging when the “lens” is set so wide, and so much of it is taken up with broad descriptions of political maneuvers and war craft.

Head on over to Aarti's site for the second half of the review.  And stay tuned for more of Thorfinn, Groa, and all the other guys named Thor!

Mr. Penumbra Stands Alone

February was the least prolific reading month I've had in the ten years or so I've been keeping track, and very possibly ever.  I finished two novels and one collection of comics--and one of the novels I started in January. There were a few factors there--an emotional slump, a few false starts, and at least four really long reads that I've put a ton of time into but not yet finished.  Hopefully this means March will make me look like a whiz kid, but right now I'm feeling kind of a reading slump, where everything I pick up seems either too hard or just bad.

I have WAY more to say about the graphic novel, Fairest, but I think that needs a post of its own.  so let me just give a little shout out of love to Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.  This book absolutely made my month--it was just what I needed to read.


I knew almost nothing about this book when I started it, and you don't really need to.  The only thing I think it helps to know from the beginning is that this is a bright, hopeful book.  I kept waiting with dread for the grimness to come in, but it never does.  There's a bad guy, kind of, but although he's sinister, he's more of a B-conflict; the main conflict of the book is The Mystery.

Clay is an unemployed graphic designer in desperate need of a job, so when he lands the role of night clerk at a small "independent" bookstore, he's not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  But he realizes that the store is kind of a front for a lending library for the terminally eccentric, and he starts to learn more about books and the goals of a secret society.  With the help of a girlfriend who lives her job at Google, some of the smartest technology in the world, and some of the oldest examples of the printed word, Clay assembles a crack team of brilliant, kooky friends and allies to solve the mystery of centuries.

I loved almost every character in this book--they were all super-competent and passionate, and they were all great ambassadors for their little worlds--the artists, designers, programmers, researchers, antiquarians, anthropologists, bibliophiles.  Each of them got a chance to showcase their arena, and nobody got sniffed at.  Not so realistic--almost cartoonish in its upbeatness--but so right for me at the exact moment I read it.

There was an exception; I hated Kat.  Everyone in my book club hated Kat.  I think it was easy to hate Kat, partly because Clay LOVED Kat--every sentence she appeared in for the first third of the book involved the word "cute," or maybe "gorgeous" or "adorable."  Or else Clay was distracted by how awesome and charming and frigging cute she was, wearing the same shirt every day.  Kat is kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl--not quite the traditional definition, because she definitely has her own goals, but she's definitely the perfect girl who is just totally on board with whatever the hero wants to do and opens up a whole new world of possibility to him as though she had nothing else to do with her time.  Even the changes she goes through in the story make her seem kind of sad and childish, like an object lesson--which wouldn't be so bad if she had started out more complex than "supersmart and adorable."

Anyway, she was by far the weakest part of the story.  Everyone else shone.  I'm not going to read too much into her being the only major female character--I loved the book too much.  I'll read more Robin Sloane (please, I'd like him to write some more, please) and hope he does something a little more interesting with women then.

Brackets!

The Morning News does a Tournament of Books every year, and they've released the brackets!

(See it in more detail here.)

I have to admit, this kind of "competition" seems kind of silly to me--how do books go head to head?  How can you put Round House up against The Fault In Our Stars?  That's the only bracket where I've read both books, and aside from both being about teenagers, they have pretty much nothing in common; comparing them is apples and oranges.

But of course, I haven't read most of them (many on my to-read list, though!).  So I can put only slightly more thoughtful consideration into this than I do into picking Superbowl Squares--which, I will point out, were randomly generated.

Some Quick Thoughts

I don't think I can explain this week to anyone in a way that really communicates how it went, but I'll say it was a rough one to get through.  So let me give you some quick thoughts I wanted to jot down, and promise you some more thorough and thoughtful posts soon.

First, I think this is cute: Blind date with a book.

Next: The sequel to Sharon Shinn's The Shape of Desire came out, and I had it from the library for a while.  I liked Shape of Desire, on the whole--it wasn't that strong a book, but as I told Brenda the other day, I would almost read Sharon Shinn's summary of the Yellow Pages.  I love the way she writes about day to day life, fitting the pieces together so that everything just seems to make sense.  And I respected what she was doing with the book--taking the intense romance of the paranormal romance and showing what it really looks like 20 years later--the missing time, the parts of his life you can't share, the loneliness of keeping secrets from those you love.

Unfortunately, Still Life With Shapeshifter was a little closer to reading from the phone book that I can get on board with.  I think, first of all, that the sister relationship is a little harder to sell me on--sure, there's love and protectiveness, but at some point you have to let a person lead her own life.  Second, she meets a hot guy very early in the book and totally falls for him--it's not exactly instalove, but anyone who's sucked in by the charms of a good looking TV reporter who's trying to get information out of them has sketchy judgement in my book. 

So I gave up on that book, sadly.  Luckily, the world is still full of Sharon Shinn books I haven't read yet.  Mystic and Rider--soon!

And my final point: I have volume one of Fables: Fairest out from the library right now, but the very notion of this book has been bothering me, and I think  I finally figured out why.  Giving the women of this series a spinoff is kind of ghettoizing them.  Fables has some amazing female characters--Frau Totenkinder is probably my favorite, but Snow White is a powerful, intelligent leader; Rose Red is a charismatic and clever leader; Cinderella is a kick-ass spy.  You've got the evil Baba Yaga, the upstart Ozma, and the Beast's Beauty, who's working to find a role of her own in Snow White's shadow.

Why do theses women need a special "girl" series?  I'm really afraid to open it.  But I'm trying to convince myself that it's really just a chance for more Fables.  After all, it's the same excellent writer, and it looks like the spin might be a bit more on the history of the characters, rather than the modern storyline that's taken over the current series.  So I'm really hesitant, but I'm holding out hope.

I need to do a comics review soon; I've got some good stuff on my list.  I'll try to hurry; February is kicking my butt, so it may be a bit.  Thanks for your patience!

Loneliness II: The Dispossessed

As I mentioned before, the two unrelated books that I've been reading have turned out to be about solitude, loneliness, and being apart from your community.  This could have been the grimmest month in reading history.  Fortunately, the two books are very different and they're both really enjoyable.

It took me a long time to dig into Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed.  I love so much of her work, but her books are always about Ideas, and in some of them--especially some of the older ones--these themes can eclipse the characters and the story.  Even though I've come around to start enjoying this one very much, it's definitely a novel of ideas.

Shevek is a scientist who has left his home world of Anarres for the nearby Urras.  More like defected; Anarres was colonized hundreds of years ago by Urrasti exiles who followed the philosophies of anarchy.  Anarres has no laws, no government; people work for the love of work, and the cooperate because it's the best way to get things done, and if this seems idealistic, well, it's got its flaws.  Urras, on the other hand, is a world much like ours, where the dreaded "propertarians" rule all.  The story of Shevek's adaptation to this new world is told alongside the story of his life in the old one, and we come to see what's wrong with each society, and presumably with human nature.

This is a "man without a country" story, so loneliness and alienation are naturally on the menu.  What's sadder is the loneliness that follows Shevek throughout this life.  It's perfectly possible to be alone in a crowd, especially if the crowd kind of depends on everyone doing the same thing.  Somehow, this book more than most others illustrates for me the poignancy of the fact that the status quo usually works for the majority of people.  That's why it's the status quo.  It's those few people who don't fit nicely into the system who suffer for everyone else's comfortable stasis.

There's a lot of unhappiness in Shevek's life, but it's alleviated in a weird way by the fact that the story switches back and forth between two unhappinesses.  In the chapters on Anarres, Shevek starts to see the problems with the idealized society he was raised in and the gaps between himself and his fellow Annaresti.  In the Urras chapters, you see a man of ideals trapped in the bureaucratic machine of a materialistic society, without allies or a way out.  Both situations are kind of miserable, but they're so differently miserable that just when you feel like you can't stand another minute in the soul-crushing environment of (X), you switch over to a chapter where the totally different environment of (Y) is described--until you start to remember just why (Y) seemed so oppressive two chapters ago.

Annares reads like an analog of Soviet Russia, with anarchist custom in place of the machine of state in stamping out alternate ideas.  But there's an interesting twist, in the Urras actually has two major nations, and there's an actual communist state to compare things with, as well.  The notions of personal freedom in this book--its idealized status on Anarres and the complexity of what freedom really is and what it is meant to be used for--are, I think, the most interesting part of it. 

Honestly, all the philosophical discussions are fascinating.  When teenaged Shevek and his friends debate Odonian philosophy, when professor Shevek discusses the implications of sequential physics on morality, these are the most fascinating parts of the book to me.  I wish I had more opportunities to think like this, to have these discussions.  But the plot of the book holds it together enough that I'm able to enjoy the story, too.

I'm not sure how many stars I'm going to give this book when I rate it--do I base the rating on the value the book holds for me, or on the pleasure I got reading it?  On how long I think it'll stick with me?  However I go with that, this is a stretch, an intellectual book, and one I'm quite glad to have read.

On Loneliness, Part I: Seraphina

I have been in the same two books for weeks, and they're echoing off each other in thematically in ways that are so interesting that I've been writing a post about it.  I've been in the middle of the post for a while, picking apart the ideas of loneliness and society and materialism in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed and contrasting that with the ideas of fear, privacy, and prejudice in Rachel Hartman's Seraphina.  It was a thoughtful, complicated blog post about themes and undertones and the human condition.

But then I was reading Seraphina, and I was so busy reading about her and feeling about her and worrying about her and looking around her that I completely forgot to look for themes.  I was too busy being swept away by the details of the winter celebration in her city, worrying that someone horrible would find out her secret, puzzling out the odd behavior of the dragons and humans around her, agonizing with her over her mistakes and aching with her for things she can't have.  I stayed up way, way too late last night finishing this book, because I absolutely couldn't put it down.

I'm a sucker for good, solid, fun worldbuilding, which is really the strength of this book.  Politics, geography, history, religion (the many saints, the many blessings!), dragon lore, personalities, music--it's intricately constructed and solidly based.  People make mistakes and love the wrong people and lie when they should tell the truth and tell the truth when they should lie.  But it works out, and you want to know what happens, and it's all as wonderful as you could hope.

Seraphina's loneliness is absolutely touching to me.  She has a secret that prevents her from being close to people--if anyone knew that she was half dragon, she would be in danger.  Even with her secret safe, she must be o guard to keep the signs hidden, and she knows she can never have a normal life.  This sadness, distance, and low-key fear are underscored by the extreme hatred of dragons and physical danger that exist in her world.

Her sense of personal isolation, of being alien and unlovable, really touched me, and the ways that the world revealed itself to her as she opened herself up to it were thrilling in that emotional, personal way that normal joys can be in really wonderful novels.

I know this book isn't flawless.  But my experience of reading it was that of being enthralled, and I'm incredibly sorry it's over.  That's five stars in my book.

Thumbnail Reviews

I don't usually do this, but in the past few weeks I've read some books I really enjoyed but didn't have a chance to blog about--honestly, sometimes didn't have a lot to say about.  Still, good books!  Fun!  Share!  So let's be brief about them.

His At Night, by Sherry Thomas. We can thank Sarah for this one--specifically, her ability to read an entire novel during a slow bus ride, meaning she plows through the library's ebook catalog as fast as they can update it.  She reads all the bad romances out there; when she gives one three stars, I sit up and pay attention.  And sure enough, here you have likeable characters caught in tough situations, an exciting plot, and believable emotions.  The sex gets a little dirtier than in most straight-up romances I've read--and in one part it's disturbingly rapey, which is sadly common in romance--but with apologies for that, this was a lot of fun.

The Diviners, by Libba Bray.  Brenda plugged this one, and she was right.  This was really about the Roaring '20s, and that's its biggest strength.  The cast was a bit sprawling, and some of them didn't really get used effectively--this is definitely not a book for the many people I know who don't read the beginning of a trilogy till the third one is out.  But I liked Memphis and Evie and Theta.  Some of the characters weren't adequately fleshed out, but there's more coming, and I can't wait for it.

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich. This was a book club pick, and it's one of those reasons I'm glad to have a book club.  I probably wouldn't have picked it up on my own--it's kind of a family saga, coming of age thing, and it's pretty long.  But there was also a core of a mystery/drama around the narrator's mother being raped and beaten, which did a lot of the work of driving the story forward, which very much kept me interested.  The coming of age part--which is really the meat of the story--was great, with lots of the observed details of life that don't usually excite me, but somehow worked well for me here.  I didn't like the ending--it seemed weirdly random--but (unlike my book club friend Kris), I did like most of the characters, as messed up and flawed as they were.  While the book sometimes swung suddenly between the family drama/coming of age and the mystery/thriller parts of the story, they balanced each other out to make this a really touching, thoughtful read.

I think I might make this a regular thing.  When I don't have a whole review in me--because the book didn't hit me that hard, or because too much time has passed--I'll whip up a mini-review and when I have three call it a post.  Mmm....blog content.

Romance Title Quiz #2; Cowboys in Kilts

By popular demand (okay, really just because I love them), more romance titles!  Which have I made up?  Could I possibly make up some of this stuff?  Three real ones, one fake, who's the winner?  I did an Amazon search on the fake ones just to make sure they didn't really exist; there are a lot of romances out there!

1) What kind of wedding is this, anyway?
   A. One Hot Cowboy Wedding
   B. Three Brides, No Groom
   C. The Misbegotten Bridegroom
   D. The Bridegroom Wore Plaid

2) Customize your selections!
   A. Some Like It Steamy
   B. Some Like It Wicked
   C. Some Like It Kilted
   D. Some Like It Scandalous

3) Holidays and horses.
   A. The Cowboy and the New Year's Baby
   B. A Cowboy Under My Christmas Tree
   C. Darn Good Cowboy Christmas
   D. For Auld Lang Cowboys

4) Lusty Ladies.
   A. The Duchess of Love
   B. Courting the Countess
   C. Countess in Cowboy Boots
   D. Desperate Duchesses

5) Instruction manuals.
   A. How To Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation
   B. How To Marry a Marquis
   C. How To Catch a Highland Heart
   D. How To Tame a Willful Wife

You'll notice that my fake titles are almost always the least interesting of them, though I think I came up with one or two good distractors this time around.  Oh, and check out the previous edition of the quiz. Enjoy!

Intrigue and Soapboxes

As I said before, I've been reading The Sleeping Partner, the third and most recent Sarah Tolerance novel by Madeleine Robins.  I love these books, and this one is just as great--rich in historic detail, some cool personal details about Miss Tolerance's life, and what is so far an intriguing mystery.

But what I'm finding just as interesting is figuring this book out.  The first two books in the series, Point of Honour and Petty Treason, were published by Tor-Forge, a division of MacMillan.  This third book, however, looked different immediately--the cover looks distinctly self-published.  It doesn't look professionally designed--the font is not generally a cover font, the use of negative space feels strange, and the pattern in the background is kind of off-putting.  I was surprised by this, and I went looking for the publisher to see what it was about.

Turns out it's not a self-publishing scheme, but an "author-centric" publishing house, Plus One Press.  This seemed like it could be an interesting niche publisher--after all, a lot of small publishing houses are sort of based around the idea that they can find new, different voices and treat them more personally than the big houses, right?  Here's the first paragraph of their About Us page:

Plus One Press is a small, independent publisher, representing an alternative approach to the current mainstream publishing model. We strive to be an author-centric publishing house, where our responsibilities are to our authors and their works, rather than necessarily to some commercialized product-centric vision of maximized profits.

It starts out smooth, then gets a little soapboxy at the end, but still, I'm with them.  Then I read deeper into their long, long, long mission statement, and found that they have clearly been camping out on that soapbox.  They've set up a tent and a camp stove and are serving tea and crumpets along with leaflets and chanting.

The publishing industry is an "insensitive behemoth that has little or no regard for the creative element it seeks to exploit."  Readers are "currently suffering from a disease that they aren’t even aware of."  They go on to say that this is about not having access to a broad range of voices, since publishers won't put out that material.  But that doesn't sound like a disease, does it?   

Whatever I think of the publishing industry, when someone starts talking like a conspiracy theorist, my first instinct is to take a step back.  What I hope, though--more than anything--is that Madeleine Robins is out there writing another Sarah Tolerance book, and that, whoever publishes it, I'll get a chance to read it.  Hear that, Ms. Robins?  If you self-publish on Amazon for the Kindle, you've gone at least one guaranteed buyer.

Long Awaited!

I think you have to be a book-loving parent of a small child to truly understand how great it is to have a day off work when he  has school.  My husband and I sat there on the couch ALL DAY and just read.  I used to live like that all the time in  my wild and crazy youth.  It was indescribably comforting.

And I was reading a long-awaited read!  Bitterblue, by Kristin Cashore, is a book I bought five minutes after it came out, and then sat on for most of the year, as I am wont to do.  Because I'm worried it won't live up to my expectations; because I'm impulsive and some other book jumped in front of me while I was busy anticipating this one; because the first chapter is about a teenaged royal sneaking out to the seamy side of town, which seemed kind of cliche.

This reaction ties back to a lot of feelings I have about princess stories, which err on one of two sides: All The Fun or All The Boring.  This read very much like an All The Boring story, meaning oh, poor me, I'm royal and it's so wearying to have everything I want, I need an AUTHENTIC experience.

This time, though, when I came back to read more, I found it.  Cashore's take on being queen is just what I want--the business of running a country as one of information, perception, trust, ideas and their execution.  I love the tension in who Bitterblue should trust, and I love that this changes over the course of the story.  I love that there are so many characters, and that Bitterblue has different relationships with all of them.  I love that I was really kept guessing about what would happen.

There is a but here, which is that I thought the book proceeded much more slowly than it should have.  I am a cautious person and not one to dive into action without looking at it from all sides, but Bitterblue knew from the beginning that things were a mess, that she didn't know what she needed to know, and that she wasn't making the forward motion she needed to.  There's really no explanation for why it takes her fully half of the book to even consider taking small actions.

I realize it's the story of her passage from child to queen.  I guess I was surprised by how passive she was as a child--rather than impulsive or having poor judgement--and I think it slowed the story down, not just in terms of plot, but in terms of her development.  I love that she has realizations throughout the book--early and late--of things she's taken for granted and things she doesn't know.  I guess I wish those realizations had built on each other with a little more intensity.

In the end, I did love it.  I especially loved getting more Katsa and Po--not just more face time, but more nuance, more about their relationship, and more of their own growth and changes.

This Long Awaited Reads thing is awesome.  Now I'm reading The Sleeping Partner, which is not only long-awaited but in paper, not electronic.  This is my most successful PLR ever!

Best Books--For a Laugh

Check out Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of all time.

What really made me laugh was the difference between the Board's List and the Readers' List.  The latter was voted on by readers of the site.  Modern Library is a "classics" division at Random House; I don't hold it against them too firmly that they put two James Joyce books in the top five--they're going for Quality and Gravitas.

But the readers of this site were apparently heavily into Modern Crackpot Philosophy, because the top 10 of that list contains seven books by either L. Ron Hubbard or Ayn Rand.

The Radcliffe list is pretty good, though, and I suddenly have a powerful urge to read Henry James' The Wings of the Dove.

Writerly Trick

The conjunction today is an NPR conversation with Will Self about his new book, Umbrella, a blog post at Jenny's Books about a book with a first person plural narrator (The Fates Will Find Their Way), and my current reading for book club, The Round House, by Louise Erdrich.  So the topic will be writers who use unusual stylistic tools in their novels, and the question will be, why?

Let's take "being writerly" off the table.  Of course, people who want to be fancy or edgy or literary are going to use these tools indiscriminately.  I think that happens way more often than some people will admit, but there's a difference between using it poorly, using it unnecessarily, and using it carelessly.  Carelessly is someone whose book seems more writerly without punctuation, or more literary in the first person present tense.  Whether they use it well or poorly, that's kind of an inane reason and I don't have much to say about it.

When we read The Red House for book club (I was going to let that pass without pointing out the similar title, and then I realized that you might think it was a typo--I'm talking about Mark Haddon's book about British people on vacation), one of the things I wanted to talk about was why the author chose not to use quotation marks, and to put all the dialog in italics instead.  I think the effect was to make all those speeches feel like thoughts; since one of the big things that was going on in that book was contrasting all the characters' internal lives, and many of the other tools he used were tricky about blending one person's thoughts into another, this seemed like a fitting tool.

My question this month is about why Erdrich doesn't use quotation marks.  She doesn't italicize dialog--it looks just as it would look otherwise, but without the quotation marks.  My theory here is that the book is clearly written from the position of the narrator looking back from a period of years.  The entire story takes place when he's 13, but he talks about what happens many years later, how he came to understand certain things as an adult, how his relationships changed once he was grown.  I think the lack of quotation marks makes it seem more like a story someone is recounting--he's telling you what was said, but he's not quoting--you're not there in the moment, but being told the story.  I think it's a tie to an oral tradition. 

(I'll have more to say about this book later, I'm sure; I hope no one's disappointed that this post isn't a full review, but I'm not quite there yet.)

Now, Will Self, in the article I linked above, talks about why his new 400 page book has no chapter breaks and almost no paragraph breaks.  He says this:

"Lives don't divide up into chapters," he continues. "People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen. But it is enormously reassuring, and a good ordering principle for the kind of ghastly incoherent and largely inchoate mess that human consciousness is. And I'm inclined to think that all we actually have is experience."

I have to admit, his explanation didn't thrill me.  He talked in the interview about modernism, and how this narrative technique is a tool of modernism that is used because it more accurately reflects the human experience of your thoughts and sensations and feelings swirling and overlapping and happening in an unbroken torrent.

My very first thought when he said that was that recreating the human experience is different from telling a story.  I've vented embarrassingly about the importance of plot, but this is separate--this isn't about whether it's an exciting story, or whether it's realistic or moving.  Telling a story is different from trying to pour experience into someone, and I think the structure of telling a story isn't an artificial crutch to bypass this search for verisimilitude.  Rather, it's a language of its own that gives us a shared vocabulary, allowing stories to communicate so much more than they contain.

I'm still thinking about how I feel about his comments.  I know that his book sounds incredibly ponderous to me and I don't want to read it (I'd go so far as to say I want to not read it).  But in thinking about what result he's going for by using these literary tools, I'm trying to decide if I just don't have any particular interest in that result, or if I disagree that this strategy will work.

I had the same idea about the book reviewed in the blog post I linked to at the top of the page.  When the author sat down to write this book, did she start with the unusual, tricky narrator?  Or did she start telling the story and realize that this opened so many more doors? 

I suppose you could say that anything that makes me more aware of the writer than the book is a risk, in my mind, and maybe a failure.  But if a writer can pull something like this off--do it gracefully, appropriately, and write such a compelling novel that I'm not tripped up by the unfamiliar bits--then she's added something wonderful to the world, and to my skills as a reader.  I'm going to be thinking a lot more about this as I come across more writerly tricks.

Thoughts on the Duds

As requested and promised, I wanted to talk a bit about the books that didn't do much for me this year.  These are the ones I put down, but also the ones I look back on without any particular fondness.

Not every book is going to be a life-changer, of course.  But I don't expect them to be, and that's not the standard I'm using here.  Looking back over the list, there were just quite a few books that kind of fizzled for me.  And, reviewing, I think I can pinpoint a couple of good reasons--Netgalley and bloggers.

Netgalley's pretty obvious--they're kind enough to give me ebooks to read and review.  But since they're generally pre-release books, there is very little information to go on when selecting them--a cover and a blurb.  They're usually by authors I haven't read, they don't provide a sample, and (by definition) few or no reviews exist yet. 

This means it's a craps shoot to pick one up, but when I do, I try to give it an honest shot.  That's not to say that I don't put them down when I need to, but I give them more of a chance than I might otherwise, just because I value the service and want to do my part for them in good faith.  This has meant reading a good handful of books that I either didn't like or, as often, just didn't quite click with.  Safekeeping and The Tragedy Paper are good examples of this. 

Really, you can expand on this a bit to any form of free ebooks.  They're so easy--I don't have to go to the get them, I can just log in and grab whatever vaguely interesting stuff the library has on Overdrive.  This has led me to start things I should not have bothered with.

Book bloggers are by far a really great addition to my reading and blogging life.  It's fascinating to see how my tastes align with some people, to see where we differ, or where one of us expands on another. But I have this annoying habit of putting any book that crosses my radar and doesn't sound actively off-putting onto my to-read list.  I think to-read and noticed-the-existence-of are way too closely related in my world.  Which has meant that quite a few inconsequential books--especially YA--have caught my attention. 

Really, the more I think about it, the less I think it's the bloggers.  I get YA recommendations all the time, and there's so much great YA that I really love that I take those suggestions.  But to be honest, there are books that are really meant for kids, and I've (finally, at 36) grown past them.  Almost anything that's actually about high school holds almost no appeal to me.  There are also a few trends in YA that are going on right now that I have no interest in, even when people whose opinions I trust enjoy them--the afterlife is a big one (The Catastrophic History of You and Me, The Everafter)--as well as ones I've enjoyed that have been ridden right down into the ground--the end of the world in all its forms (No Safety in Numbers, Monument 14, the whole Matched series).

Of course, there are exceptions to every one of these rules I'm mentioning.  I read The Mist this year, and enjoyed it, even though the world ended.  I loved Beautiful Music for Ugly Children and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, both of which are about high school.  These aren't rules, they're just patterns.  The exceptions are what keep me coming back for more tries.

But I think I'm getting better.  I think sheer age is changing me--I'm more aware of the fact that I only read about 100 books a year, and that I'm not going to get to read All The Books in my time on earth, so I might as well read the ones I want to.  I've also been working consciously on not worrying too much about making the wrong decision.  I mean, if someone tells me that I, personally, must read a book to the end because it will, in their opinion, speak to me, I will give it a shot.  But just because everybody likes something doesn't mean I have to like it.  I think I'm starting to get over the notion that everyone else knows something I don't, and that I'm just missing the point when I don't feel as they do.

Luckily, Long-Awaited Reads Month will get me off on the right foot in this area.  I've put off way too many books I'm excited about following up on passing whims.  Now I'm going to focus a little on the things that keep getting back burnered.  Part of this, I think has been dread that I won't love the books I've anticipated as much as I'd like to.  I think I'm going to need to be okay with that. 

See this?  I'm growing as a person.

Under the Tree

Because I love to gush, let me share the list of books I got for Christmas!  It's a combination of ebooks I've wanted but been too lazy to buy, books that I needed to get in print, and some excellent instincts on Mike's part.

 

I think In the Garden of Iden might have to qualify as a long-awaited read.  Time travel historical romance--yes please.  Winterling is by the author of The Magic Thief, and I just wanted more Prineas.  And I've been really into historical mysteries lately, somehow, and have been really tempted by Instruments of Darkness, partly because the protagonist is a married woman who solves the mystery in professional partnership with an elderly neighbor, which is very 19th-century-edgy.

 

I'm picky about what I get in print.  I wanted The Quilt Walk because I collect Sandra Dallas books, in honor of my grandmother, who loved them.  I wanted Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy because I love Rumer Godden.  I read the book years ago, and I've falling into a nun book place lately; the last scene in this book just sticks out in my head right now, and I really want to reread the rest of it--and it's only available in print.

Final Harvest is a collection of Emily Dickinson's poems edited by Thomas Johnson.  I realized a few weeks ago that I didn't own any Dickinson, even though the structure and imagery of her work makes it just the kind of poetry I would love.  Hereby rectified (thanks, Steph!).  Ebooks aren't right for poetry--they're no good for flipping through randomly.  This is also why a collection of fairy tales should be read in print, which is why I now own Philip Pullman's Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version.

 

Finally, Mike did some amazing mind reading.  He picked up the first volume of Gunnerkrigg Court, which I love love love and will now get to reread.  He also got me the first two volumes of the comic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, which he bought about three days before I read a review that made me really want to read it.  I'm about halfway through rewatching the series, and I'm hoarding the comics till I finish up and go into withdrawal. 

Oh, and I almost forgot about the ebooks my Secret Santa got me!  She did an amazing job, clearly looking at my Goodreads lists and reading some of my posts here.  She got me Flashforward, which I had been really interested in when the TV show appeared a few years ago, and The Fatal Strain: On the Trail of the Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic, because I love popular science and medical investigation books.  

Okay, looking over this post, I think this can only be called an embarrassment of riches.  I'd say thank you to everyone, but they don't all read here.  Thank you anyway.  I'm an incredibly lucky person--not just for the books, but for all the loved ones to share the holidays with.

Long Awaited

Ana has declared January Long-Awaited Reads Month, and I have jumped out ahead of the pack (I like to think) by finishing John Scalzi's Red Shirts on the first day of the year.  The year is off to a promising start.

I've only ever read one book by Scalzi before, but I consider myself a fan, because that book was the fabulous Old Man's War.  His characters are pragmatic, sarcastic, and just the right amount of idealistic.  Old Man's War was mostly worldbuilding, deftly and compellingly done, and I can't wait to dig into that world more in the follow-up books. 

Red Shirts is something different--more lighthearted, but also more conceptual.  It's clearly born from a "what-if"--what if all these extras who get bumped off for a moment of drama in Star Trek were real?  Aren't these unacceptable losses?  And the story spins it out in different directions: wouldn't these crew members realize that something fishy--or at least dangerous--is going on?  Why are the writers killing all these people off, anyway? What's the writer's relationship with or responsibility to the characters?  How convoluted can sci-fi pseudoscience get before your brain goes off the rails?

I knew the basic premise going on, but I didn't realize that the book was going to go in the direction it did--I expected more satire and less practical action.  I love practical action.  I love smart people figuring things out.  I love characters who are dryly funny and make the jokes I like to think I'd make in a stressful situation. 

This month will not be all long-awaited reads.  There will be book club reads and impulse reads along the way.  But I want to really push to make sure some books I've been looking forward to forever get read this month--The King's Peace, The Sleeping Partner, and Black Powder War are my solid goals.  Wish me luck!

The Big 7-0-0

It's nice to come to a round number of posts on a wrap-up post, isn't it?  So, for my 700th post on this blog, I decided to give you 2012 in review.  Unfortunately, this ended up being seriously daunting, and between travel, hosting, being hosted, and general fretting, I've been putting it off. 

Let's start with some stats: 107 books total this year.  I always feel like I need to qualify this number, though--8 graphic novels, 5 novellas, 15 kids' books.  I don't separate YA, since the difference between YA and other books is frequently arbitrary.  I didn't pick out nonfiction, either, but the number is almost laughably low. 

Another thing I noticed was that there was a lot of filler this year.  Kind of junky stuff.  I mean, there are always going to be the Anastasia Krupnik books, which are light and kids and hardly count, but I read them for joy, and they take no time at all.  But there were quite a few books this year that passed right over me, hardly making a ripple.  Not that I can't remember them--I rarely have that problem--but that, if I could go back and have that time back to read something else, I'd take it.  Books that had clever ideas that didn't pan out (Safekeeping), YA books that were formulaic and I could have done without (Monument 14), books that had buzz but didn't touch me (The Age of Miracles). 


I'm not even counting the ones I was personally excited about but let me down (Princess Academy: Palace of Stone).  I'm just thinking of the ones that I picked up with a vague idea that I ought to read it and kept going with in spite of the fact that I wasn't necessarily enjoying it.  I do that a lot less these days--I'm much more likely to put a book down now than I ever have been in my life--but I'm still at risk of letting momentum carry me through the mediocre.  I'm going to do a post on that phenomenon soon (for Lianna!), but I'm sad to look back on those parts of the list, especially when looking ahead at the great to-reads that have been waiting forever.

But enough about the bad stuff.  Let's do the good stuff, and let's do this chronologically (with the help of Goodreads.  Which is over capacity right now, probably due to all the bloggers trying to get on to do their year-end wrap-ups.  Which, by the way, have many of the books I've listed below on them).

I started the year with Dash & Lily's Book of Dares, and I'll put it on a top 10 list, any day.  I can't blame anyone who finds it too twee, because oh, a scavenger hunt with a stranger in NYC at Christmastime, with your cranky grandpa upstairs and your gay best friend crashing on your couch and yes, it's twee.  But it's a Christmas book, and it's charming, and I loved it.

Petty Treason, by Madeleine Robins, the first Sarah Tolerance novel.  Thank you, thank you, Aarti, for having this book in your list of "Heroines Who Don't Annoy Me," because I love Sarah Tolerance. 

Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth E. Wein.  I'd like to thank the publisher of this book for giving me an ARC.  I love it when I love an ARC, and I was happy to join the stampede of good press that this got before it came out.  The sense of time and place, the two very different characters who are so close, and the intense, nailbiting plot--it was unexpected and just right, and I want more books just like this.

The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green.  My first John Green, though I've tried before.  There are people who loathe him, mostly because his characters are too glib and don't talk like people.  I think this book gets away with that, though, because these teenagers are dying--they're introverted, bookish, and mature.  And I loved them--tears were jerked, and I didn't even mind.

Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. I don't have a ton to say about this, except that I really enjoyed it.  I feel like it was amazingly well-crafted and structured, as though the different focal points of the narrator's life, Tinker's life, the Twenties in general, and New York specifically were all nested neatly inside each other and playing off each other brilliantly.  I still wish we'd been able to have our book club meeting about this book.

Old Man's War, by John Scalzi.  I am now a John Scalzi fan.  This book is all worldbuilding, but good worldbuilding is just about one of my favorite things in reading.  It satisfies my need for tight, neat order--it's like Competence on a universal level.

Bab: A Sub-Deb, by Mary Roberts Rinehart.  Like meeting Bertie Wooster and Anne Shirley again for the first time.

The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley.  Okay, this is the one you really need to read if you haven't.  I know, the Top Secret Government Agency That Deals With the Supernatural has been done inside out.  And that alone would not have won me over.  But a really good amnesia story, super-duper Competence, and that perfect balance between drama and humor (without a bunch of flat-out jokes) made this an incredibly appealing book.  There's almost no one I wouldn't recommend this to.

Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, by Kirstin Cronn-Mills.  This one sort of snuck up on me.  In a lot of ways it's a pretty standard YA book, with a certain amount of self-centeredness and focus on sex and romance by the main character.  But the main character is a trans guy trying to figure out what life after high school looks like, and somehow that makes the sense of drama of adolescence seem much less annoying.  The characters who say one thing and mean another, or change their minds, or don't even know their minds are all so human that I was really impressed.

So there you have my Best Of list for the year.  It's a bit short; hopefully tomorrow I'll have a Resolutions post that will make next year's list longer.

Merry Christmas

Or, if Christmas is not explicitly your bag, then at the very least, happy day off work.

Swiss Cheesy

I already touched on The Tragedy Paper, but now that I've finished it and started reading Ally Condie's Reached, I feel like I need to talk a little bit more about believability, or at least common sense.

Let's start with The Tragedy Paper, which I wrapped up earlier this week.  Throughout, there seemed to be some behaviors and reactions that didn't quite strike me as realistic.  But it was pretty clear from the pacing of the book that we were building up to some reveal, and it wasn't clear how it would affect all the characters.

You have Tim who likes Vanessa, who has a boyfriend Patrick.  Tim is narrating his version of the school year to a student the next year, Duncan, who's listening to this audio recording.  Duncan likes Daisy.  Tim and his class were seniors last year, so you don't expect them to be on campus, but it's clear that something happened and it's not clear how the year ended, so Duncan's tension, his being drawn to the story, all of these could theoretically be resolved if their behavior feels authentic in light of the big reveal.

Now, right away that's off-beat.  It's a pretty daring move to write a book that feels wrong for the first 80% and depends entirely on the payoff at the end.  Not unheard of, but risky.  And then there's the reveal, which I won't spoil except to say that, while the circumstances were crazy enough to be a crisis, the actual way things play out is not satisfying.  People who are blaming themselves for things need to be able to come to that conclusion with at least a slim layer of rational thought for it to be satisfying--otherwise you've got a psychological drama with no psychological weight.

But the least convincing part of the book?  So the whole thing is structured around the notion of the classic, literary, dramatic tragedy.  The students are studying tragedy and writing a HUGE (I cannot overemphasize the HUGENESS of this assignment) paper on the subject.  And then the events of the year parallel the elements of tragedy that they're learning about.

I'm trying not to give away the end.  But let me say that when the principal of the school comes to you and says "maybe we've been teaching you too much," I find myself strangely unconvinced.

So how has Reached unconvinced me in the first 50 pages?  Well, the first two books and 50 pages?  We'll move beyond the Teenage Love May Save The World plot, or the whole Yes, The Rebellion Matters, But Not As Much As My Heart thing.  Let's touch on the little things.

Like Cassia being called in to do an important Sort, and making a mistake on purpose, knowing that if the failsafes aren't in place, she'll be caught instantly.  Tell me, if they know the "right answer" to the sort she's doing, why did they call her in the middle of the night to do it?  Now, this can be lifted out of the realm of unbelievable by finding out that it was a test, but if that's true, why didn't she think of that?  What powers does the Society have, and what do the citizens believe it can do, anyway?

And Xander's repeated, drilled-in conviction that the Rising can cure the Plague (because Xander is a Good Guy, and Good Guys only infect little kids with curable Plagues) has me already wondering about his lack of skepticism.  As does everyone's constant debate about the true identity of the Pilot, with no one saying, "Hey, maybe this Pilot who is everywhere and always is Metaphorical, and there is a Pilot In Each Of Us."  No one seems to have thought of this.

Honestly, it's not like I loved the series.  And there's no way this one will be as tough as the second boo, so I'll read it.  But dude, I am SO Spartacus.

Thrilling and Otherwise

The thing about my new kick of trying to read thrillers is that they're frequently populated by unlikeable characters and tense moments, and damn if I don't need to find some balance for myself in here.  For a long time there, I was jumping back and forth between Gone Girl and John Dies at the End, and while both are really great books, they did not make the best combination for me emotionally.

In some ways, they do balance each other, though.  Gone Girl is all about slowly building tension, while John Dies is about being slammed over the head with crazy.  The only problem is, there's barely a likeable character between them.

Gone Girl is a standard Gillian Flynn story of twists, turns, reveals, and doubts.  Nick comes home to find his wife missing and signs of a fight.  There are police, and Nick is kind of a jerk, and there are entries from Amy's diary, and secrets are revealed one by one, and nothing is what it appears to be, and it's all very creepy and dreadful.  It's incredibly compelling, but almost every single character in the book ranges from irritating to horrible to sociopath.  There are maybe three characters I don't actively dislike, and honestly, I'm not convinced I'm not going to find out some nasty stuff about them any minute now.

John Dies at the End, on the other hand, is hilarious and gruesome.  A bunch of post-high school losers are milling aimlessly around a Midwestern town when our narrator finds himself accidentally dosed with a strange drug.  Everything that happens ranges from impossible to nightmarish, with levels of gross out somewhere between poking a bratwurst with mustard in your ear and being slowly digested by a man-sized worm-slug.  It's like Bill and Ted's Most Bogus Journey EVER.  The characters aren't hateworthy--they're kind of losers, but mostly just dim and overwhelmed.  But there is such a pervasive sense of Evil in here, with pretty much no capital-G Good to balance it out. 

This can kind of get to you after a while.  I went for YA to try to solve the problem, but The Tragedy Paper ended up not helping that much, due to being boring (see last week's review).  Instead, I'm going for Terry Pratchett.  If you need to find a nice protagonist who's doing his or her best to do the right thing in this crazy world and for whom it mostly works out in the end, he's your guy.  It helps that the books aren't just funny, but also thoughtful, intelligent, and well-plotted.  Next on my list was Mort, mostly because the Death books are some of my favorites, but also because isn't that thematic with the rest of the line up right now?

In sum: Gone Girl, John Dies at the End, and Mort are all highly recommended.  But if you're going to read one of those first two, I suggest some puppies and kittens to balance out your mood.

Discussion Questions

In honor of book club, the discussion questions about David Levithan's Every Day that I promised you.  Some minor spoilers below, but nothing too explicit.

1. Let's start with the obvious, glaring flaw of the book.  What kind of psychological damage would it do a child to never know the same people for two days in a row?  In exactly what ways would this person be twisted and miserable?  What skills would s/he have been unable to learn?  And did you have a problem suspending your disbelief around this issue?

2. A has a very philosophical view on his (let's stick with one for simplicity) situation.  He has a pretty balanced view of some of the things he has and some of the things he's lacking.  But he also has blind spots, things about what it means to be an individual living in a body and a life over time.  Where are the blind spots?  Do you think that any of them are about the author, not the characrer?

3. How obnoxious is A in his pursuit of Rhiannon?  How much of this is being 16 and in love?  What other elements are at play in this obnoxiousness (Self-centeredness born of a life of self-denial?
General lack of knowledge of what meaningful long-term connection looks like?)

4. How do you feel about the end?  Do you think it was a good resolution for A?  For Rhiannon?  For what's-his-name?

5. What do you think about A's notions of gender?  Is this Levithan's ideal post-gender vision, or is it partly misguided because of the big hole in A's psychology where his relationship with his body would normally be?  If the former, what do you think of these ideas of gender?

6. Speculation: what would a different life look like for A?  Is there any option but to live this way?

I'm sure there are more things to go over.  I'm curious what anyone else would have to ask about the book; I really felt like there was so much going on here.  I guess that's what book club is for!

Ah, Youth

I know I've said this before, but YA stuff is really hit or miss for me.  There are big swaths of stuff in the YA department that is really only there for marketing reasons (Code Name Verity, which, I don't care who you are, if you haven't read it, read it right now) or that is fantasy and science fiction (The Hunger Games is a great example), and these tend to stand on a book by book basis for me--sometimes I like them and sometimes I don't, but it's not their "YA-ness" behind that reaction.

The problem generally starts coming up in realistic novels, usually that take place in high school.  Not all of them, but more than most other kinds of book, I'm likely to find myself drifting off from something that's well-written and straightforward just because it feels so foreign and distant to me.  I'm much more likely to feel that way about a high school novel than I am about something that takes place in feudal Japan or a Brazilian slum.

I'm reading two books now that both fit into this category, and I wish I could pick apart why my reactions are so different.  The first one, The Tragedy Paper, is an ARC of a novel by Elizabeth Laban.  I'm having a tough time with this one, for all YA-ish reasons. 

The main character of the book is Duncan, who's just arrived for his senior year at boarding school, and finds a gift from the former inhabitant of his room.  Tim MacBeth (and OMG, two characters named Duncan and MacBeth?  You're putting some pressure on yourself when you pick those names for your book) was albino, transferred to the school for the last part of senior year, and has always been kind of an outcast.  There are many ominous hints of a big Something that happened at the end of the school year, but we don't know what it is yet--the CDs that Tim left for Duncan telling his story are apparently going to get around to that.  So far, though, it's just about liking a girl and being sure she won't like him because he looks strange.

The characters feel small, and their problems are in very large part caused by self-consciousness and nerves.  It's their emotional states, really--their problems are treated with respect, as though they were important.  But what seemed important when I was in high school often seems kind of small right now, and I can't help but think, "if you'd just get comfortable with yourself, you wouldn't really have any problems."

The other book is called Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, by Kirstin Cronn-Mills, and this one is all about becoming comfortable with yourself.  But this book is absolutely fantastic.  The narrator, Gabe, is graduating high school and starting his own midnight radio show at the local station.  He's also starting the process of transitioning from being Liz, a biological female.  While Gabe's problems are all about awkwardness and discomfort, they feel way more earned.  Being nervous about liking a girl is a much bigger deal if you've been going to high school as a girl for years and are now trying to flirt with the girl you're interested in while presenting as a guy. 

The tension between Gabe and his parents (who still call him Liz), the support of  his friends, the sense of pressure and excitement--they all feel earned, not manufactured.  That's an authenticity that I don't have to imagine the hormone soup of adolescence to appreciate.   I'm zipping through this book and I just can't put it down.

I've been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the past few weeks; damn, that show is good.  There are so many moments this time through, though, where I'm reminded that these are kids.  Most of the romantic scenes (especially the ones that do not involve anyone 100 years of age or older) just remind me that each of these couples totals my age between them, and that breaking up means something different at 17 than it does at 35.  There's enough great stuff going on, and the story is told well enough, that these feelings are fleeting, but it's a good reminder that relevance is relative, and my feelings about something are not directly related to some objective standard of poignancy that's out there.

I don't know if I'll finish The Tragedy Paper.   There are bits of it that are rather heavy-handed--apparently every senior at this school has to do a final project, legendary in scope and importance, about the definition of a tragedy in literature.  It feels kind of put on--I know plenty of high schools that have a Big Scary Senior Project, but none where everyone has to do the same thing.  And at this point, I just don't trust the book enough to assume that the Big Mystery is going to balance out the feelings and tension that are going into it, both from the characters and me. 

But I'll likely be finished Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by tomorrow.  And it'll likely be because I stayed up way too late reading it.  There's my review right there.