Month: July 2006

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Snicket, Lemony: (09) The Carnivorous Carnival

I saw recently that the last book in A Series of Unfortunate Events will be published this fall (aptly titled The End), which reminded me that I’d never finished listening to the ninth book, The Carnivorous Carnival. Unfortunately, the audiobook didn’t keep my place, and it was easier to check the book out of the library than skim through the audio file to try and figure out where I left off.

This is a Lemony Snicket book, which means that the Baudelaires are resourceful, in peril, and deeply unlucky; the adults are evil or feckless; the situations are ridiculous; and the narrator is morose and digressive. Specifically, the siblings find themselves at Caligari Carnival, where the fortune-teller Madame Lulu has been telling Count Olaf where to find the Baudelaires. The siblings disguise themselves as freaks and join the carnival, hoping to learn where Madame Lulu is getting her information and if one of their parents is really alive. Count Olaf, of course, has other plans, involving some very hungry lions . . .

Other features of this book are: very sarcastic commentary on people whose motto is “give people what they want”; a cliff-hanger; “The Story of Queen Debbie and Her Boyfriend, Tony”; and a digression on miracles and meatballs:

Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear. Some people say that a sunrise is a miracle, because it is somewhat mysterious and often very beautiful, but other people say it is simply a fact of life, because it happens every day and far too early in the morning. Some people say that a telephone is a miracle, because it sometimes seems wondrous that you can talk with somebody who is thousands of miles away, and other people say it is simply a manufactured device fashioned out of metal parts, electronic circuitry, and wires that are very easily cut. And some people say that sneaking out of a hotel is a miracle, particularly if the lobby is swarming with policemen, and other people say it is simply a fact of life, because it happens every day and far too early in the morning. So you might think that there are so many miracles in the world that you can scarcely count them, or that there are so few that they’re scarcely worth mentioning, depending on whether you spend your morning gazing at a beautiful sunset or lowering yourself into a back alley with a rope fashioned out of matching towels.

Like I said, it’s a Lemony Snicket book.

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Christie, Agatha: Taken at the Flood (radio play)

Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood is a Hercule Poirot story set during and after World War II. Gordon Cloade is killed in the Blitz a few weeks after marrying a young woman, Rosaleen, and changing his will to leave his money to his wife: or, more precisely, leaving the interest on his fortune to his wife for her life, after which the principal reverts to his family. This does not please his family, who have learned to depend on Gordon’s generosity; and they are rather interested in an overheard story told to Hercule Poirot, suggesting that Rosaleen’s first husband might have faked his death.

This was a nicely twisty one, which I enjoyed up to the very end. Christie sometimes has an odd idea of what constitutes a happy ending, especially when it comes to romance; she pulls something out here that simply beggars belief. My theory is that it’s a response to post-War anxieties, an extremely conservative response to the upheavals wrought by the return of men and women who served around the world. That ending might have been reassuring to Christie’s target audience in 1948, but here in 2006, I just can’t take it seriously.

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Duane, Diane: (102) Deep Wizardry (audio)

If you at all like Diane Duane’s writing and audiobooks, I strongly recommend the audiobook of Deep Wizardry, read by Christina Moore. There are some really difficult characters to voice here: including whales, dolphins, sharks, parents, and the Power that created death—and Moore does an extremely good job with all of them. I’m really impressed with her flexibility and precision, and her reading adds suspense and emotion to a book I liked already.

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (08) Have His Carcase

Dorothy Sayers’ Have His Carcase is part of a collection of books that I informally call “books that were inexplicably never booklogged.” I re-read it quite a while ago and somehow, it never appeared here. I’m logging it now because I was sadly disappointed by the radio adaptation of Strong Poison—Ian Carmichael is a great Wimsey, but Ann Bell is not even a passable Harriet Vane. [*] So I gave the text of Strong Poison a quick glance, and since Have His Carcase is the next book to feature Harriet, it naturally came to mind.

[*] However, this fan page tells me that two other actresses were cast as Harriet Vane in Have His Carcase and Busman’s Honeymoon (Gaudy Night not being adapted, the only one of the novels, which is a pity), so I will probably give those a try eventually.

I found Have His Carcase very tedious the first time I read it, but I liked it much better this time around, which is solely attributable to Sarah Monette: in a series of LiveJournal posts (warning: book-destroying spoilers), she points out that Have His Carcase is a mystery novel about mystery novels, a meta-commentary on the way that detective stories are constructed. (Note the last two chapter titles: “Evidence of What Should Have Happened” and “Evidence of What Did Happen.”) With that, all the long attempts to figure out what happen turned from tedious and futile to thematically interesting; and the puzzling facts, and the way they are put together into stories, take on extra resonance. I admit, though, that I still skipped the code-breaking section.

The first time I read it, I also was frustrated at the lack of progress in Peter and Harriet’s relationship. This time, again guided by Sarah Monette’s commentary, I realized why there’s so little progress: Have His Carcase is deliberately tossing up examples of ways in which men and women fail to relate, are prevented from meeting each other as equals, all the generalized things that keep Peter and Harriet apart. It’s for Gaudy Night, I think, to deal with the specific, personal things—but they have to overcome both sets of obstacles before they can get anywhere.

Have His Carcase will never be my favorite Sayers novel, but I admire its craft and I’m glad to have discovered its virtues.

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Christie, Agatha: Appointment with Death (radio play)

When I was listening to the BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novel Appointment with Death, I was certain I knew the solution, from reading the book years ago. However, I was completely and utterly wrong: I must have been thinking of some other book. I don’t recommend it, listening to one mystery while trying to fit the solution to another mystery over it.

The actual mystery, as presented in the adaptation, strikes me as decent but not great. The setup: Mrs. Boynton is an evil tyrant who takes pleasure in torturing her children with their imprisonment. Hercule Poirot overhears one of her chidren saying, “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”, and as expected in a mystery novel, some time later she turns up dead. (In the ancient city of Petra, where they’re on holiday; I might see if the novel has more description.) The solving of the mystery, to me, teeters on the edge of farce; the solution is just a touch pat. Then again, maybe I’m being too hard on it because it was so very much not what I was expecting.

(I wish I knew what book I was thinking of. Here’s what the solution I had in mind (rot13): gur ivpgvz pbzvggrq fhvpvqr nf n svany jnl bs pnhfvat cnva sbe gubfr nebhaq ure. I really thought it was a Chrisite novel; does anyone know it?)

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Palin, Michael: Around the World in 80 Days (audio)

Michael Palin has apparently made something of a post-Monty Python career out of travel books and TV series; his Around the World in 80 Days was the first of these trips. As the title suggests, he’s attempting to emulate (the fictional) Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne’s book of the same title (Project Gutenberg page), circumnavigating the globe without air travel. He was filmed as he went for a BBC documentary series [*], and then wrote a book in the months following. You can read the entire book online, but I listened to it as an audiobook read by the author.

[*] Which is apparently only available on DVD in a box set, so we won’t be NetFlixing it, alas. It would have been interesting to compare the two. We’re going to try some of the more recent ones instead.

This wasn’t stunningly funny or insightful, but it was a very agreeable way of passing several hours, and I laughed out loud a couple of times, such as when Palin was on a Chinese train:

As I return to the compartment, I find my way blocked by our attendant who is sloshing a filthy old mop across the floor of the corridor. It’s a painful process to watch, as the floor is carpeted.

(Possibly it works better out loud, because of the pacing.)

You can get a pretty good sense of the writing from the web page, I think, so I’ll just talk briefly about this as an audiobook. Palin tends to put just a fraction more silence between sentences than I expect, which was surprisingly hard to get used to. There was also music behind much of the narration, and I couldn’t quite figure out the pattern. Perhaps if I had it on CD or tape, it would have corresponded to divisions; but as one big file from Audible.com, any structure wasn’t clear to me. It wasn’t intrinsically intrusive, I was just occasionally distracted by wondering about it.

Palin uses light accents when recounting conversations. He didn’t get to America until day 63, so I couldn’t judge how good he was until then; he doesn’t do the worst American accent I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty clearly identifiable as a British person doing an American accent (fortunately, I’ve become less sensitive after all these Agatha Christie radio plays). Then again, I don’t know whether skill at American accents can be generalized to skill at all accents; perhaps British and American English are close enough that it’s harder to convincingly go from one to the other. Anyone know more about this?

Anyway, Audible has most of his other travel works; I’ve just picked up the next, Pole to Pole, and look forward to it.

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Landels, J.G.: Engineering in the Ancient World

J.G. Landels’ Engineering in the Ancient World is one of the best insomnia cures I’ve found, and I mean that in a good way. Usually when I’m stressed out, my brain gets on a hamster-wheel of anxiety and refuses to get off; but it turns out that when I’ve spent fifteen minutes trying to comprehend a single pump diagram, my brain has jumped off the wheel for long enough for fatigue to catch up.

This is an accessible look at what’s known and guessed about engineering in Ancient Greek and Roman times. It’s divided into the following topics:

  1. Power and Energy Sources
  2. Water Supplies and Engineering
  3. Water Pumps
  4. Cranes and Hoists
  5. Catapults
  6. Ships and Sea Transport
  7. Land Transport
  8. The Progress of Theoretical Knowledge
  9. The Principal Greek and Roman Writers on Technological Subjects
  10. Appendix: The Reconstruction of a Trireme
  11. Some Further Thoughts

Personally, I would have liked a bit more civil engineering, though perhaps the roads and buildings aren’t as interesting as I think.

The treatment of these topics is really quite clear; yes, I spent a succession of nights on a single pump or catapult, but that just means that I’m not a good visualizer and have no engineering background. I eventually understood everything except a single pump, which was presented as a variant on other pumps and thus not explained much (it’s page 82, figure 25, “Pump found on Roman merchant ship,” if anyone has the book). I realized partway through that I was subconsciously approaching the book as “okay, if I’m ever pulled into a fantasy world of lower tech level and/or forced to survive in the wilderness, here’s what I’ll have to do,” and so I’d recommend it to writers who are writing about analogous time periods. =>

There are three aspects of Landels’ style that I didn’t like, though they appear relatively infrequently. First, he occasionally drops into dialect, as in this discussion of a screw pump:

Vitruvius recommends that the rotor should slope upwards at an angle of about 37°. Though this is arrived at from the well-known construction of a right-angled triangle with its sides in the ratio 5:4:3, it probably represents an approximation to an optimum angle which has been arrived at empirically. (“Us put ‘un up like this-yur, an’ ‘ee wurked allright; us put ‘un higher an’ ‘ee didden work so gude, so us put ‘un back where ‘ee be, an’ let ‘un bide”.)

Second, he occasionally employs a particularly wordy passive voice, such as in a late footnote: “The attempt to identify [Vitruvius] with Mamurra, Caeser’s engineer officer, is not to be regarded as successful.” I think this is related to the third thing I don’t like: he has a tendency to say that something is “clear” or “obvious,” especially when contradicting someone else. In most writing, words like that are red flags, signs that the writer is handwaving past an important logical connection. I don’t know, maybe it is clear or obvious if you have the illustrations, original texts, and translations, but it makes me twitch when Landels just asserts that it’s so.

This is the second edition of the book, with some sketchy annotations of the changes in the field between 1978 and 2000 in the “Some Further Thoughts” chapter. I could wish for a more detailed discussion of some of the developments, but I suppose one can’t have everything. On the whole this was very good, and I recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the topic.

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Christie, Agatha: They Do It with Mirrors (radio play)

In Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors, Miss Marple is asked to go check on an old friend Carrie-Louise, whose sister fears she is in danger. Miss Marple goes to stay at Carrie-Louise’s home, which is on the grounds of a rehabilitation center for delinquent boys that’s run by her husband. Shortly after her arrival, a troubled young man shoots at Carrie-Louise’s husband; Carrie-Louise’s step-son is killed; and poison is found in Carrie-Louise’s medication.

I listened to this as a BBC radio play, a particularly admirable adaptation in that the fine shadings of the dramatization led me right to the solution. I don’t think the printed page would have had the same effect. For that, I’ll forgive it the exceptionally bad American accent of Carrie-Lousie’s grandson-in-law.

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