Author: katenepveu

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Pratchett, Terry: Nation

Terry Pratchett’s latest novel, Nation, is a non-Discworld fantasy. Set on an island in the Great Pelagic Ocean (a slightly alternate version of the Pacific) in the 19th century, it opens with a tsunami that kills every member of The Nation but one [*], a teenage boy named Mau, and shipwrecks an English girl called Daphne (née Ermintrude). Together, they begin to rebuild The Nation.

[*] Pratchet’s YA novels tend to be much darker than his “adult” ones. I think I only laughed in two places in this book, both quite late; and the more serious tone makes the handful of footnotes a rather awkward fit.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. I thought the portrayal of the tsunami and its aftermath was one of Pratchett’s more effective pieces of writing, and of course I’m a sucker for building-civilization type stories. This book reminds me somewhat of The Bromeliad in this respect, and indeed most of its themes are familiar ones in Pratchett’s work: science, faith, community, monsters (the human kind), and so forth. But because Pratchett is writing so close to the real world this time, the book is working in much more difficult territory. I’d like to offer a searching analysis of how the novel negotiates this, but I can’t. While I think it avoids the most obvious pitfalls, I so enjoyed the characters and what happen to them that I have a hard time bringing my analytic facilities to bear. About the only criticism I can muster is that I wonder if the Epilogue isn’t a little too perfect: it makes me look back at the way that perfection was achieved and see the seams in its construction.

(Spoilers, ROT-13: gur arprffnel ryrzrag vf qncuar’f sngure orpbzvat xvat, juvpu bayl unccraf orpnhfr bs gur vasyhramn, ohg gung genhzn vf oneryl zragvbarq nsgre gur bcravat. vs jr’q frra gur ratyvfu punenpgref tevrir bire fcrpvsvp qrnguf, be rira gnyx nobhg gur qvssvphyg gvzrf nurnq tvira gur uhtr cbchyngvba ybffrf, gur syh jbhyq unir sryg yrff yvxr n cybg pbairavrapr gb zr.)

After the recent distressing news about Pratchett’s health, I don’t know whether to expect more novels from him. But I’m very glad to have this one.

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de Camp, L. Sprague: Lest Darkness Fall

I’d been vaguely meaning to read L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall for a while, and Jo Walton’s post about it on Tor.com brought it back to mind. It’s a very short book and seemed like moderately light reading.

My opinion of it is much closer to Chad’s than Jo’s: some good bits, but too much of its time for me to really get into. As Chad notes, the characterization is thin at best (particularly, I think, of the women); I also had the sense that the political plot would have worked much better if I knew more history. And a really egregious bit of Eurocentrism at the end left a bad taste in my mouth.

I do like the technical, rather than political, aspects of the book (minor spoiler, ROT13: V jnf fhecevfrq naq cyrnfrq gung ur qvqa’g trg thacbjqre jbexvat), in the same way that I liked the nonfiction Engineering in the Ancient World. If that’s your kind of thing, you might just stick to the first half of the book, which I probably should have done.

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Sears, William, Martha Sears, and Linda Hughey Holt, Pregnancy Book, The; Penny Simkin, Janet Whalley, and Ann Keppler, Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn

I read two reference books during my pregnancy, The Pregnancy Book, by William Sears, Martha Sears, and Linda Hughey Holt, and Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn, by Penny Simkin, Janet Whalley, and Ann Keppler. Both were recommended by the ever-helpful Rivka, who saved me from browsing through the vast array of pregnancy books and, very likely, having a meltdown.

The Pregnancy Book is a month-by-month discussion of maternal emotional and physical changes, fetal development, and family concerns. Any chronological breakdown of pregnancy is going to be imprecise, and so occasionally I’d find that a later chapter addressed an issue I’d experienced (I went through phases when I was reluctant to read ahead). Overall I found its tone reassuringly matter-of-fact and helpful.

Since the Searses have another book specifically on birth (called, of course, The Birth Book), The Pregnancy Book has relatively little detail on labor and delivery. Since for various reasons we chose not to attend a childbirth class, and the library’s Lamaze DVD was approximately twenty years old and quite horrible, Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn was a great relief. It is considerably more medical than The Pregnancy Book, with much detail on medications, interventions, terminology, and so forth. I found the sections I’d read useful, and if I’d not superstitiously avoided the chapter on Cesarean sections, that would have been useful too.

A note on diversity: I hadn’t realized that all of the sketches in The Pregnancy Book portrayed people who were not obviously non-white, until I opened Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn and saw photographs of non-white people. I did think, while reading The Pregnancy Book, that occasionally it assumed a middle- or upper-class reader; if Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn had class biases, I didn’t notice them in the sections I read.

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Scalia, Antonin, and Bryan A. Garner, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges

On my suggestion, the local library system ordered Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner . . . and I only got around to checking it out now. Hey, I’ve been busy.

This is a compact, readable distillation of advice on legal reasoning, brief writing, and oral argument. I didn’t find anything new in it, but it was a nice refresher, and I think it would be a fine overview for new attorneys.

The other thing of note is when Scalia and Garner disagree, which they do four times, over whether to use contractions in briefs, to put citations in footnotes, to put substantive discussion in footnotes, and to use “he” as a unisex pronoun. The remarkable thing is that I agree with Scalia on the first three (no, no, and yes), and yet his arguments, especially regarding the fourth and in comparison to the rest of the text, are so remarkably cranky that they nearly make me want to change my mind.

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Pratchett, Terry: (23) Carpe Jugulum

I don’t have much to say about Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum, which I re-read after Maskerade. My previous review was a little generous, as time has made me less tolerant of the similarity in plot to Lords and Ladies. Other than that, all I have to add is that I’d be curious to know more about Oats, and I still want to know if Pratchett has an end in mind for Granny (and Carrot, and Vimes, but particularly Granny).

(Oh, and a comment about the physical volume, not the book; recent US releases of Pratchett’s novels have been notable for their bad proofreading, but this ten-year-old British edition suggests that Pratchett just has bad luck with copyeditors, or something: in several places, “baby” is rendered “babby” (if that’s dialect, it’s extremely inconsistent), and one of the witches gets called the wrong name at least twice.)

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Pratchett, Terry: (18) Maskerade

After re-reading Lords and Ladies, I gave into the urge to re-read the rest of Terry Pratchett’s Witch sub-series of Discworld books, starting with the next, Maskerade. This is probably funnier if you know Phantom of the Opera well, or even at all—I’ve seen it, but I don’t remember a thing about it. However, though it’s much lighter than the books it comes between, it’s still an enjoyable enough diversion, perhaps especially when sleep-deprived.

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Thurber, James: 13 Clocks, The

I read James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks from the library years ago, liked a lot, and then forgot almost everything about it during the time it was on my “look for in used bookstores” list. It’s just been reprinted, and Chad bought me a copy as a gift.

I was pleased to rediscover that it is indeed a lovely book, though I am puzzled why Neil Gaiman’s introduction asserts that it’s not a fairy tale. I mean, this is the first paragraph:

Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was. . . . His nights were spent in evil dreams, and his days were given to wicked schemes.

Also there is a prince, spells, impossible quests, and at least two indescribable things.

I would prefer that Saralinda were just a little less soppy, but the joy of the language almost entirely carries me past that; this is one of the rare books that I want to read aloud. If only FutureBaby would deign to arrive, already . . . (The illustrations, by Marc Simont, are also charming.)

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McDermott, J.M.: Last Dragon

I received an ARC of J.M. McDermott’s Last Dragon through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. Unfortunately this book confirmed that I should stop requesting things from that program without knowing more about them. “Hey, a fantasy novel, why not?” is insufficient reason to get a book, especially since flipping through it in the store would have made it clear that this was not a book for me.

So this is not really a review, because I only made it through the first chapter. The dealbreaker was that all the dialogue is in italics, which as a practical matter I found too much work to read. If the book had grabbed me right away, I might have been able to push through regardless, but it didn’t. The prose and narration are deliberately fractured, as the opening paragraph indicates:

My fingers are like spiders drifting over memories in my webbed brain. The husks of the dead gaze up at me, and my teeth sink in and I speak their ghosts. But it’s all mixed up in my head. I can’t separate lines from lines, or people from people. Everything is in this web, Esumi. Even you. Even me. Slowly the meat falls from the bones until only sunken cheeks and empty space between the filaments remind me that a person was there, in my head. The ghosts all fade the same way. They fade together. Your face fades into the face of my husband and the dying screams of my daughter. Esumi, your face is Seth’s face, and the face of the golem.

And then the narrator is remembering being a young woman in a strange city, and an unpleasant story her uncle told her, and for some reason even though she is very pale-skinned and from the far north, her teacher was called sensei, and I just couldn’t get any traction.

Since I couldn’t read this, I’m passing it on; see my LiveJournal for details.

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Brust, Steven: (111) Jhegaala

I’ll say right up front that I have very little useful to say about Steven Brust’s latest Vlad Taltos book, Jhegaala. This is the long-awaited story of Vlad back East, set shortly after Phoenix, and as a result of its position in the series, my principal reaction is that I want to re-read Athyra and maybe Orca too, to see how they look in light of Jhegaala. (The Dragaeran Timeline (spoilers, obviously) suggests that the book is narrated between the two, which makes emotional if not necessarily logistical sense to me.)

This book is a prime example of why I make a mental distinction between plot and story. The plot is a mystery whose solution (a) is deliberately not explained until the end, even though Vlad has arrived at it earlier and (b) doesn’t particularly interest me in and of itself. The story, as in most if not all the other Vlad books, is Vlad’s development; and while that is of great interest to me, I’m having trouble fitting into my conception of his overall arc. (This happens with some of the other Vlad books, too; I love Dzur for its story, but two years later, have forgotten pretty much all of its plot, whereas Orca sticks with me for both.)

Miscellaneous other notes: as would be expected from its chronological position in the series, this is a bleak book. It works very well thematically in terms of its title House, which represents metamorphosis and endurance. And I really liked the Nero Wolfe joke.

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Brockmann, Suzanne: (13) Into the Fire

I have to give Suzanne Brockmann credit for this: she is not afraid to write things that will displease her fans. Her latest, Into the Fire, has three plot threads, and all three are very likely to annoy someone.

Actually, the very fact of three plot threads is enough to annoy me, mildly, as I think the book is overstuffed. But, to take each of them in turn:

First, there is a romantic suspense plot involving Murphy, whose wife was murdered several years ago back in Hot Target. The person responsible for his wife’s murder has turned up dead, he’s a suspect, and he can’t remember what he was doing at the time. This thread was just not going to work for me, because romances almost inevitably give me the impression that they are reducing dead lovers to mere obstacles in the way of One True Love, which annoys me. And while I am abnormally sensitive to this (for no reason that I can tell), I’m particularly uncomfortable with the way Brockmann characterizes the characters here.

Second, there’s more in the tangled *takes deep breath* Tess, Nash, Decker, Sophia, Dave, and Gillman . . . thing . . . which gives some answers but also introduces more questions and yet another character. Added all together, I’m neutral on these developments, but I suspect most of Brockmann’s fans will not be.

Third, there is new plot for Izzy Zanella, who was prominently featured in Into the Storm. I like Izzy, but this strikes me as Kitchen-Sink Angst, plus I have deep doubts about the last heaping of Angst (spoilers for the very end, see sidebar for ROT-13: vg’f vzzrqvngryl boivbhf sebz ybbxvat ng n gjragl-sbhe-jrrx zvfpneevrq srghf, rkcyvpvgyl fgngrq gb or oyhr-fxvaarq orpnhfr bs gur zvfpneevntr, gung gur sngure jnf abg oynpx? Jura gurer ner zhygv-enpvny nqhygf bhg gurer jub nera’g arprffnevyl vqragvsvnoyr nf fhpu ng svefg tynapr?). And aspects of this are likely to be controversial apart from the overall outcome.

On a positive note, Brockmann continues to populate her books with diverse characters: Murphy is multi-racial, while one new character is deaf and another is in her late forties. (Though I’d be even happier if at least one of her romances involved two non-white characters.) And her books are unquestionably fast smooth reads.

One final comment: this may not be the best book to read while pregnant.

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