Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu’s Book Log
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Finally for this non-cruise-books roundup: I wasn’t going to log this, but since I’m doing short takes anyway . . . I read James H. Schmitz’s The Witches of Karres some months ago, and then completely forgot that I’d read it until I saw it on a pile of books. My only recollection, then and now, is that it had a lot of exclamation marks.
You see why I wasn’t planning to log it.
Non-cruise books read this week (split up for import into MT):
Another re-read was Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon, which I was saving for to cleanse my palate, as it were, after the last Dark Tower novel [*]. This was the first King novel I ever read; Mom brought the hardcover home from the library and gave it to me. I remember that it had a very green cover, and she said that she thought I’d like it but it was a bit “PG-13” at the beginning. I must’ve been about 10, judging by the release date, and wasn’t tramautized at all by the minor references to sex. It’s a fairy tale, slightly earthy, with some nice character work and an engaging plot; it’s possibly my oldest enduring comfort book (I’m not sure I’d call The Lord of the Rings a comfort book, and the Anne series hasn’t held up well). It’s worth looking, at even if you don’t usually like King’s work.
[*] I need to re-read the whole thing before I can be coherent about it, so it won’t be showing up here any time soon. You can get an idea of my initial impression from a question on the ending—warning for series-destroying spoilers—over at my LiveJournal, and I may later have spoilerly notes to self on things to look for on the re-read.
Non-cruise books read this week (split up for import into MT):
After reading Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits, I re-read the original Books of Magic miniseries, written by Neil Gaiman, in which Constantine is part of the Trenchcoat Brigade that gives Tim Hunter the tour of magic. My impression of this series hasn’t changed much since the first time I read it: inoffensive, but would probably be a lot more interesting if I knew the backstories of the people met on the tour. (There are annotations, but it’s not the same.) I do appreciate the art more, having gained more experience in paying attention to the graphic part of graphic novels since. And, several years later, I still giggle at the hare telling the hedge piggie,
But it’s definite summat to tell your grandchildren, eh, Master Redlaw? “Coincidentally, the werry same day I was popped into a cook-pot, I discovered Empusa’s Infinitely Extensible Chain, on a owl.”
I’m given to understand that the subsequent series is not as good as the opening miniseries, which recommends it to me not at all.
Non-cruise books read this week (split up for import into MT):
First up is Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits, written by Garth Ennis. I’ve been meaning to try one of these for a while, and apparently this is one of the best places to start; it’s the semi-famous sequence in which John Constantine is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and weasels his way out of it. I thought it was well and cleverly done, a nice character portrait, and I’ve basically no interest in reading any more because of that. He’s a cynical bastard, he’s clever, Bad Things happen around him, and he hates himself for getting out of those Bad Things when the people around him don’t. The end. It doesn’t seem to me that he’s got many places to go as a character, because he wouldn’t still be Constantine if you changed any of those. And, well, I don’t feel the need to spend a lot of time with a person like that.
I don’t mind Constantine as a bit player, or out of his usual haunts (such as in the fun (work-in-progress) fanfic Hellblazer: Hogwarts). So I re-read the Books of Magic.
Possibly my favorite of the cruise books was Kage Baker’s first fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World. Unfortunately, it’s the hardest to describe. Oh, it’s otherworld fantasy, apparently stand-alone, told in three novellas that build upon each other—but that doesn’t say what it’s about.
Let’s try one way. There was once a prophesied Holy Child, whose birth led to the revolt of the enslaved Yendri race, who then fled across the sea where they could live in peace. Except that the Master of the Mountain, a half-demon mage, kept raiding and plundering the Yendri villages. When grown, the Holy Child (now called the Green Saint), delivered her people from the depredations of the evil Master through the redemptive power of True Love. [*]
This is not their story.
[*] That is, she married him and forced him (and the subsequent brood of highly conflicted children) to behave.
It is the story of Smith, an assassin trying to get out of the business, who finds himself leading a caravan from Troon to Salesh-by-the-Sea in the first novella. He becomes acquainted with several people on the journey (including one of the children of the Green Saint and the Master); these acquaintances will lead him to deeper understanding of, and choices about, himself and the place of his race (the Children of the Sun) in the world.
You see the difficulty I am having? That sounds awfully ponderous, and while this book has a serious core (race relations and environmental awareness are certainly serious topics), it’s anything but ponderous. Consider the opening:
Troon, the golden city, sat within high walls on a plain a thousand miles wide. The plain was golden with barley.
The granaries of Troon were immense, towering over the city like giants, taller even than its endlessly revolving windmills. Dust sifted down into its streets and filled its air in the Month of the Red Moon and in every other month, for that matter, but most especially in that month, when the harvest was brought in from the plain in long lines of creaking carts, raising more dust, which lay like a fine powder of gold on every dome and spire and harvester’s hut.
All of the people of Troon suffered from chronic emphysema.
Priding itself as it did, however, on being the world’s breadbasket, Troon put up with the emphysema. Wheezing was considered refined, and the social event of the year was the Festival of Respiratory Masks.
And then there’s the duel using Fatally Verbal Abuse as a weapon, and Festival in Salesh (during which, it is said, nothing is forbidden, though alas this refers to sins of the flesh only and does not encompass manslaughter; and which features a cooking competition called the Pageant of Lascivious Cuisine for the Prolongation of Ecstasy), and the scene with the Liver Tartare, which caused Chad to ask me what I was giggling so helplessly at . . .
The Anvil of the World pulls off a journey from humorous and domestic, to deeply mythic, that few other novels manage—Bridge of Birds and Terry Pratchett’s better books are what comes to mind at the moment. I am almost certainly failing to do the book justice, but I enjoyed the heck out of it and strongly recommend trying it for yourself.
Another cruise book, Laura Anne Gilman’s Staying Dead. This was the first book from Harlequin’s new fantasy imprint, Luna [*], that I was really interested in reading. It’s set in a present-day New York City where magic works; it’s called current, and it runs along with other kinds of energy—most easily, electricity. Thus, our protagonist Wren Valere has to have her computer and phone warded six ways to Sunday so she can use them, and she’s “useless in a really powerful thunderstorm, stoned like kitty on catnip from the overload of power.” But she has a talent for not being noticed, and for reading magic, which makes her very good at her job: she works as a retriever, getting back things that people have lost and would rather not trouble the police or insurance companies about. Her partner of ten years, Sergei Didier, deals with the clients and helps with the research; the case he’s signed them up for, as the book starts, is the retrieval of a office tower’s cornerstone, which contains a protection spell for the building. There are, of course, complications.
[*] I was under the impression that this was a paranormal romance line, but after reading this and another, I think that’s not accurate—and indeed an old version of its webpage described its focus as “female-focused fantasy with vivid characters, rich worlds, strong, sympathetic women and romantic subplots.” Just in case you were worried about, you know, girl cooties.
This is nice crunchy stuff, and genuinely urban fantasy (as opposed to romance with some woo-woo mysticism tacked on). Both the world and the relationships have a pleasing amount of depth, which is interesting in its own right but leaves plenty to be explored in future books (at least two). I like Wren and Sergei very much, and I have a particular fondness for partnership-style relationships, especially when they evolve under plausible pressures.
I am curious about one thing that I couldn’t quite figure out, which is how widely-known the existence of magic is. It seemed commonly known at first—people are hiring mages (some of whom are in a union), there are enough demons and fatae wandering the streets of New York City for bigots to beat them up and form organizations to drive them out, and so forth. Then I came across a reference to the U.S. Government’s official position on magic, which is that it doesn’t exist, and Wren talked about learning to keep a low profile, and Sergei mentioned that he didn’t know about the existence of the Council (the mages’ union) until he partnered with Wren, despite his being in a position to know unusual things. Now I wonder if maybe only elites of one sort or another are aware of magic. The historical references I spotted weren’t helpful, as they were parallel to ours (9/11, the breakup of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marriage). Perhaps this will be clarified in a later book, or perhaps someone can point out to me something I overlooked.
Anyway, that quibble aside, I enjoyed this a lot. Don’t let the corporate umbrella put you off.
(A note on book design: for some reason, the font of this (and the other early Luna books I looked at) use a sans-serif font, which I found initially distracting. A more recent Luna book, Gail Dayton’s The Compass Rose (coming soon to a booklog near you!) uses a serifed font, so perhaps they’re moving away from that choice.)