Oh, and after reading Going Postal, I re-read The Truth, wondering if it was too similar, being a stand-alone about the starting of Ankh-Morpork’s newspaper industry. I don’t think it is; the plot of the book, which is Yet Another attempt to get rid of Lord Vetinari (the last to date, I believe), isn’t as tightly woven with the newspaper stuff. Also, it’s just not as good, since I couldn’t remember the plot at all before I started re-reading.
Pratchett, Terry: (33) Going Postal (text, audio)
Combining audiobook logging and backlog catchup, we have Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, read by Stephen Briggs. I read this when it first came out, and then listened to it several months later.
Going Postal is a stand-alone Discworld novel, in which (semi-)ex-con-man Moist von Lipwig is given the task of resurrecting Ankh-Morpork’s Post Office. This is a monumental task, what with the two slightly crazy men who are all that’s left of the staff, the mountains of undelivered mail, and the supernatural aspects of the building itself. And then there’s the almost inadvertent, but certainly dangerous, competition that a revived Post Office poses to the Grand Trunk semaphore company and its chairman, Reacher Gilt.
I really enjoy a con story, so this was up my alley from the start. When I realized it was also a book about geeks of all kinds, plus had a rich brew of themes (communication and piracy, angels and messengers and deliver(y)(ance), tools and people, and above all, hope), well, I was thoroughly enamoured even before I got to the terrific climax. It’s not a perfect book structurally: the Post Office’s resurrection runs on two different parallel tracks, one mystic and one practical, and the mystic one drops out about two-thirds in, which feels a little odd. But it has chapters with “in which” subheadings, and a hysterical Lord of the Rings movie joke, and this passage that I will think of forevermore when reading corporate-speak:
If Moist von Lipwig had been raised to be a clown, he’d have visited shows and circuses and watched the kings of fooldom. He’d have marveled at the elegant trajectory of the custard pie, memorized the new business with the ladder and the bucket of whitewash, and watched with care every carelessly juggled egg. While the rest of the audience watched the display with the appropriate feelings of terror, anger, and exasperation, he’d make notes.
Now, like an apprentice staring at the work of a master, he read Reacher Gilt’s words on the still-damp newspaper.
It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. Oh, yes. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although “synergistically” had probably been a whore from the start. The Grand Trunk’s problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, “well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error”—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting “fundamental systemic errors” committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and “were to be regretted.” [*]
[*] Another bastard phrase that’d sell itself to any weasel in a tight corner.
. . . .
It was masterly . . . the bastard.
“Er . . . are you okay? Could you stop shouting?” said Miss Dearheart.
“What?” The mists cleared. . . .
“You were shouting,” said Miss Dearheart. “Swearing, in fact.”
I really, really like this book. I also think it would be a pretty good entry point to the Discworld series.
As for the audiobook, Pratchett’s novels lend themselves well to being read aloud, with their light omniscient POV and their wordplay that I sometimes miss in the rush of plot. I’d tried listening to Jingo, but the narrator (Nigel Planer) didn’t sound like Vimes to me, an entirely personal reaction. Briggs is also a good narrator, and with the exception of Death (who I doubt anyone could do properly), none of his characters jarred me. (His Reacher Gilt was particularly nice.) I may have enjoyed this book even more on audio.
Dahl, Roald: James and the Giant Peach (audio)
In audiobook news, I most recently finished listening to Jeremy Irons reading James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. I grabbed it from Audible largely because I thought Irons’ narration would be enjoyable—as indeed it was, though I’d forgotten that my primary association with Irons’ voice was as the bad guy in The Lion King (yes, I know, I’m an uncultured lout), which was briefly disorienting.
(I can’t remember whether I saw the movie or not, which probably means I didn’t.)
I don’t know that I have much to say about this: it’s a Roald Dahl book, after all. There’s a mistreated child, horrible adults who come to bad ends, and extreme and wacky weirdness. Despite the fantastic nature of the story, it has a certain concreteness in the characterizations and the way that the characters meet the problems of voyaging in a Giant Peach. Strangely, this made it disproportionately vexing when the story flat-out ignores the occasional physical impossibility. It is likely that the audio format gave me more time to dwell on these things, which wouldn’t bother a general reader.
With that minor caveat, recommended.
Peters, Elizabeth: (05) The Deeds of the Disturber
Presenting my reactions to Elizabeth Peters’ The Deeds of the Disturber, the fifth Amelia Peabody novel, in epistolary format:
Dear Amelia Peabody Emerson,
Allow your son to finish his sentences, please.
Very truly yours, etc.
Dear Elizabeth Peters,
Permit me to introduce you to the concept of “the idiot plot,” which is a plot that only exists because the characters act like idiots. An excellent example would be a domestic subplot which could be resolved at its first appearance, in Chapter Four, if only Amelia had allowed Ramses to finish his sentence.
As the name might suggest, idiot plots are best avoided. I hope this information is useful.
Respectfully, etc.
Dear self,
Even when you are in that difficult mood of “we own three thousand books and I don’t want to read any of them,” don’t take an Amelia Peabody book out of the library, because even on a fast skim you’ll give up halfway through out of annoyance and skip to the end. Not only will you have wasted your time, but you’ll have Prince Humperdink saying “skip to the end” stuck in your head all day.
You may have an exception, if there is a single book in which Ramses becomes human, just out of curiosity to see how it’s managed.
Love and kisses,
Me
Brockmann, Suzanne: (01-02) The Unsung Hero; The Defiant Hero
After reading Hot Target, I got the first chronologically in Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series, The Unsung Hero, in which Tom Paoletti, the founder of the private security agency in Hot Target, is still a Navy SEAL. He’s on medical leave for a serious head injury, and has headed to coastal Massachusetts to spend time with his uncle. When he thinks he sees a believed-dead terrorist at the airport, he begins to fear for his sanity. Also, his uncle’s friend since WWII is dying from cancer; and Tom has angsty romantic history with Kelly Ashton, his uncle’s friend’s daughter. (The WWII thread takes place in occupied France and is also Angsty.)
The main romance in this one is more interesting, with conflicts inherent in the relationship from the start (for one, people usually change since high school). I still liked the secondary relationship more, a sweet little geek-townie story between Tom’s niece Mallory (the townie) and David, an aspiring graphic novelist (the geek). One thing of interest about Brockmann’s books is the existence of mixed-race characters and interracial romances; David is mixed-race, as is Alyssa Locke, a recurring character who first appears here. I approve.
The next one is The Defiant Hero (Brockmann seems to have abandoned the “Hero” titles after this one), which I found a little too high-strung to really like, though it might just be because I was in a cranky mood. It’s much more an action novel than the first, thanks to an ongoing hostage situation. Two ongoing hostage situations, actually: (1) one of the main characters, Meg, has had her daughter and grandmother quietly taken hostage by terrorists, in order to force her to (2) take hostage someone else working in an embassy (which she has access to as a translator). In the second hostage situation, Meg demands that a particular SEAL be brought in for negotiations, because they have UST—well, okay, she demands it because she knows they both speak Welsh, which the terrorists are vanishingly unlikely to understand, but you know what I mean.
The WWII portion of the book is provided by Meg’s grandmother’s reminiscences about the evacuation of Dunkirk, which gets a little too cute with its narrative tricks. The secondary romance thread is Alyssa and Sam Starrett, which I don’t particularly like at the moment, since he admitted to deliberately sexually harassing her because he was afraid she’d be the one to open the SEAL teams to women. Their thread isn’t resolved by the end of the book, though, so perhaps he’ll turn out to be less of an asshole.
These, by the way, were originally published in 2000 and early 2001. The terrorists in book two are from a fictional country called Kazbekistan; it will be interesting to see how subsequent books handle international terrorism.
Brockmann, Suzanne: (08) Hot Target
More library romance:
Hot Target, by Suzanne Brockmann, got a lot of buzz when it first came out because it had a same-sex romance as its secondary plot. Despite a bad experience with another Brockmann, I appreciated the gutsiness of including a gay relationship, so decided to give it a try when it was available at the library.
There are actually two gay relationships in the story. Apparently the books in this series contain three plotlines: a primary romance, a secondary romance, and a World War II story. In this case, a movie’s being made about two romantically-involved WWII soldiers, and the producer is getting death threats over portraying one of them as gay, so the studio hires a private security team. The producer and one of the team members make up the primary romance. In the secondary thread, there’s a triangle between the producer’s brother (so far in the closet that he’s eating Turkish delight with the White Witch); the FBI agent investigating the death threats; and the FBI agent’s ex-lover. For great parallelism, the brother plays the closeted WWII soldier in the movie, while the ex-lover plays the openly-gay soldier.
That sounds a lot more complicated than it is, probably, but the complications are what makes the secondary thread far more interesting than the primary thread. The emotional difficulties faced by the primary characters feel quite perfunctory [*], showing up out of nowhere and then dropped nearly as quickly by the pressures of the plot. The permutations of the secondary triangle are messy and interesting, and I like Jules (the FBI agent) quite a bit. For him, and for the other interesting secondary characters—it is a well-peopled novel—I decided to keep reading them out of the library.
[*] Fandom has eaten my brain, because it took some effort not to write “pasted on yay” there.
Roberts, Nora: Northern Lights
Another library romance:
Northern Lights is Nora Roberts’ most recent mainstream novel. This didn’t suck, because the suspense elements were reasonably-well integrated (it helps if you make one of the main characters law enforcement). I have no idea if the flavor of Alaskan small-town life is accurate, but I found it entertaining. I feel no need to own this, but as library reading it worked just fine.
Balogh, Mary: Summer to Remember, A
Library romance roundup:
First, pre-cruise, we have Mary Balogh’s A Summer to Remember, via a review from Asperity on LJ. This is a Regency novel (unlike the rest in this roundup, which are contemporary). Yeah, it’s got some very well-worn elements, a bet and a pretend engagement and a rake and an innocent, but it’s charming and humane all the same, with consequences, family relationships, and eventually a mutual rescue. It does have a bit of the sequel nature, in that it assumes a little too much that the reader will know everyone’s name and relationships, but it was otherwise a smooth read.
(I read a bunch of Balogh’s other books in a gulp and got sick of the plots, so I put them aside and will try them again later in a more measured fashion.)
O’Brien, Robert C: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Another insomnia book was Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I saw the audiobook of this in the library and was very excited because I’d really enjoyed the novel as a kid. Unfortunately, the narration’s volume varied in a way that made it unsuitable for car listening, but Chad reminded me that we owned a print version. Mrs. Frisby is a widowed field mouse, whose son, Timothy, is too sick to move from their winter home in a farm’s field before plowing begins. Mrs. Frisby eventually seeks help from the very strange rats that live under a nearby rosebush, who have secrets and perils of their own.
I really enjoyed rediscovering this book and finding that it was as charming as I’d remembered. There’s one minor quibble that didn’t occur to me when I was a kid (the fate of Jenner’s group seems a little too convenient, both thematically and for the plot), but otherwise it sets up an interesting world and follows through on its premises entertainingly. It also has what looks like a gaping sequel hook, something I’d also not realized previously. However, there doesn’t appear to be an actual sequel, though there is another NIMH novel by the author’s daughter. I won’t be reading that, but I enjoyed re-reading the original.
Stout, Rex: (18) Curtains for Three
I left off my re-read of the Nero Wolfe short story collections back in 2002, with Three Doors to Death. I went back to the re-read a few night past, when I couldn’t sleep and was downstairs where the Wolfe collection lives. The next was Curtains for Three; I like the first of these the best, but don’t actually dislike any of them.
In “The Gun With Wings,” a famous opera singer has apparently committed suicide, on the day that his wife discovered that she was in love with another man, who loved her back. They come to Wolfe because they think they know that the singer didn’t commit suicide, and they want to be sure that the other didn’t kill him. It’s interesting for its sympathetic clients and as an example of the rather high-handed way Wolfe will treat his clients; the solution is not terribly difficult. The second, “Bullet for One,” has an entirely arbitrary title; it’s the one where a man is shot while riding in Central Park. I found this non-engaging, for no reason I could put a finger on. The last, “Disguise for Murder,” is another someone-killed-in-Wolfe’s-office story, this time as members of the Manhattan Flower Club visit Wolfe’s orchids upstairs. As I may have said regarding the TV adaptation of this story, it would have been vastly more interesting with a different and more straightforward motive (spoilers rot-13’d: vs gur xvyyre (gur jvsr qvfthvfrq nf n zna) unq orra gur ivpgvz’f ybire, engure guna gur jvsr bs ure ybire). Not Stout’s kind of story, though.