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Snicket, Lemony: (10) The Slippery Slope (audio)

I think I may do a single run at finishing A Series of Unfortunate Events, now that the last book’s out and I’m in the mood for some frivolity. At any rate, I just finished listening to the tenth book, The Slippery Slope, as read by Tim Curry, and went straight into the next one.

The theme of The Slippery Slope is aptly described in its opening paragraph:

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called “The Road Less Traveled,” describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is now dead.

The Baudelaire orphans find themselves on various roads less traveled in the Mortmain Mountains, where they meet a number of unexpected characters, some new (and occasionally surprising, at least to me) and some old; face serious (though obvious) moral dilemmas; experience at least two landmark events in their lives; and learn a bit about the mysteries surrouding them. We the readers learn more [*], which is perhaps unfair, but that’s what happens to the Baudelaire siblings.

I forget how many days prior books have taken, but this one took only three by my count, and it introduces a hard deadline just five days away. The relationship of that deadline to the overall series’ progression remains to be determined. I haven’t heard howls of indignation from anyone who has finished the series, though, so I’m guessing that however we get there, the destination won’t suck. (Remember: only cake-sniffers spoil people for things they haven’t read yet!)

[*] Specifically, it seems (ROT13’ed for spoilers): gurve sngure vf hadhrfgvbanoyl qrnq; gurve zbgure znl or yrzbal favpxrg’f fvfgre, naq vs fb, fur’f nyvir; naq gel nf gurl jvyy, gurl jba’g svaq gur fhtne objy.

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Robb, J.D.: (23) Born in Death

J.D. Robb’s Born in Death is the book where poor Mavis finally gets to give birth. (She’s been pregnant since book 15, Purity, and this is #23. This is what happens when books take at most a month each.) I got it out of the library a couple of weeks ago.

The problem with writing in the mystery genre is that, paradoxically, the genre itself sometimes removes suspense. When one of Mavis’s friends disappears, it’s pretty clear that since we’re already halfway through the book, the disappearance must be related to the ongoing mystery, and given the existing setup, it’s not hard to guess how. I found the book a little flat as a result.

As for the plot itself, I have one quibble and one internal debate. The quibble: I would have preferred just a little more attention to a key underlying assumption of the underlying conspiracy. The debate: whether the stuff that made it traumatic for Eve was gratuitous.

However, Mavis finally has her baby, and it’s all heartwarming and stuff, which is what I was reading the book for anyway, so I can’t complain too much.

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Christie, Agatha: ABC Murders, The (radio play)

In The ABC Murders, Hercule Poirot gets a taunting letter warning him to look out for Andover on a certain date, signed “ABC.” Of course, someone is murdered on that date, and an ABC Railway Guide is found near the body. More murders follow, and Poirot must track down an apparent psychopath.

As usual, I listened to this as a radio play, so I’m not sure whether the presentation of a particular form of misdirection originated in the book or in the adaptation. The misdirection worked almost too well: I said to myself, “ugh, is this the kind of story we’re getting?” and stopped giving it my full attention. It seemed to end satisfyingly, however, and in a way consistent with the characters. I should remember that my skepticism apparently is reduced when I’m tired.

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Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer: (03) The Mislaid Magician

The Mislaid Magician is the third book in Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s series of epistolary novels set in an alternate Regency with magic. However, that description isn’t quite accurate any more, as the subtitle “Ten Years After” indicates:

6 March 1828
Tangleford Hall, Kent

My dear Thomas,

 . . . Our new prime minister found some letters that had been sitting unopened in the “Secret” packet since October, if you please! Some Prussian railway surveyor has gone missing in the north. It ought to have been looked into at once, but Lord Wellington has had his hands full with the royal family since he became PM last month. King George has never seen eye to eye with his brothers on political matters, and he and the Duke of Cumberland have had another row about the succession. Something about the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, I believe. It was all Old Hookey could do to keep it out of the papers.

But that business has blown over, for the time being at least, and now Cecelia and I are off to Leeds to see what we can find out. . . .

Meanwhile, if you have forward me any information on the theoretical interactions between magic and railway lines or steam engines, I’d appreciate it.

Yours,
James

8 March 1828
Skeynes

Dear James,

Make up your mind. Railway lines or steam engines? The current state of opinion on theoretical interactions varies considerably with whom you ask. As usual. . . .

If you care to hear my theory, although God knows you have seldom paid the slightest attention before, I think the steam engine is certain to lend itself to some exceedingly useful interactions. Nothing so thoroughly comprised of the elements of earth, water, air, and fire could fail to do so.

I am of two minds on the questions of railway lines. On the face of it, the lines should great promise as a way to link two (or even more!) points with a durable physical connection. . . . Yet, because railway tracks are made of many bits of metal placed end to end, considered as a staging point for a spell, it would be like running the Derby in installments. The enterprise might eventually work, but one would need a dashed good reason to take the trouble.

I plan to be in town before you . . . . The Bull and Mouth is far from elegant, but I suspect your children will love the bustle of the place. For once they will behold chaos they did not create themselves. I’ll meet you there.

Sincerely,
Thomas

Yes, we’re back to a letter-only format, adding Thomas and James’s correspondence to Kate and Cecy’s, and we’re out of the Regency and fully into the Industrial Revolution. While they investigate, Cecy and James leave their children with Kate and Thomas; the book is not overburdened with children, however, as only three of the collective six are particularly visible. (I was, in fact, able to keep James and Thomas straight now that they’re apart. Oddly, I could keep all their children straight too, which I did not expect.) Thomas and James’s letters are a nice addition to the narrative, and of course it’s always good to see Kate and Cecy again.

Separating the characters gives the added bonus of generating more than enough plot to go around, as stuff must happen at both ends of the correspondence to keep the book going. (Though at one point, things are so quiet at Kate’s home that she reports the solution to a mystery without even noticing that she’s done so. I’ll forgive her lapse of analytic reasoning under the circumstances, and, more importantly, forgive the authors for getting that bit of information in through her lapse.) All in all, then, this was as enjoyable as I’d hoped. My only quibble turns out to be with the previous (second) book, not this one: there, we were told in passing that Aunt Charlotte had apparently become a magician in the short time since the first book. It was such a small reference that I missed it, and so initially thought this book had mixed up the aunts when Aunt Charlotte’s magicial ability suddenly became relevant. Not the case, though, and don’t fear, there’s not very much of Aunt Charlotte in this book either.

If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one. If this one sounds interesting, you could start here perfectly well, but you might as well read the first one too. I don’t know if the authors contemplate any more: the ending is a satisfying conclusion but creates the possibility of further book-worthy happenings. I would certainly welcome reading about the characters for as long as the authors want to write about them.

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Minekura, Kazuya: Saiyuki, vols. 1-9

A long-delayed post: all nine volumes of Kazuya Minekura’s Saiyuki. (I booklogged volume 1 nearly 18 months ago). The delay is because I’d been doing LiveJournal posts on the art (spoilers inevitable), wanted to finish those before writing up the story as a whole, and never got around to volume 9 until just now. I haven’t re-read the other eight volumes for this post, but I’m mostly going to speak in generalities anyway to avoid spoilers.

First, a couple of notes on structure. Saiyuki is a nine-volume action/fantasy manga that sends four characters off on a roadtrip to save the world (see the volume 1 post for more details). The ninth volume wraps up a couple of arcs, but the story continues in Saiyuki Reload, which is still in progress; Tokyopop has currently released five volumes. There is also a prequel, Saiyuki Gaiden, which is set 500 years earlier when the major characters were in Heaven together; it’s almost finished and Tokyopop has licensed but not yet released it. I think you can pretty well get the general idea of Gaiden from the references in Saiyuki, but it probably helps to know that the backstory does exist.

[Spoil me for Reload and die. Since Gaiden hasn’t been released yet in English, spoiler-protect any comments referring to it with ROT13.]

(Oh, and there is an anime; apparently it is awful.)

The nine volumes of Saiyuki, as was helpfully pointed out in this LiveJournal post full of spoilers, have their own internal structure. The initial volumes superficially introduce the four main characters and then move beyond that to the backstory of three of the four (the fourth, Goku, gets his backstory in Gaiden, basically). The story then moves to the two strongest relationships within the four, Hakkai & Gojyo and Sanzo & Goku, and then to the weaker but still important relationships between the other pairs. (One of the things that I like about the series is that they each have distinct interactions and relationships with all the others.) Finally, the story considers the four collectively.

This summary suggests three things that I want to highlight about the series. First, it is ultimately character-centered: pretty much everything in it eventually comes back to the characters. Second, the pasts of the characters are vitally important; they didn’t just appear fully-formed one day when they were needed to save the world. Third, the series gets better as it goes along. I hate recommendations of the form “well, you really need to read eight gazillion volumes before it really gets good, but it’s worth it!”, but, well, the first volume in particular is not very strong. We get hints about the depths of the characters, but not more than that until the end of volume 2. Since the plots tend to be very character-centered, they aren’t that strong in the early volumes either.

(Also, the art in the early volumes isn’t exactly bad, but it also gets noticeably better in the later volumes: the lines are cleaner and the characters’ jaws get much less pointy. As I said in the original post, however, the page layouts are quite easy to follow—Minekura is very good at composing panels and pages so that the text and shapes naturally drawn the reader’s eye in the direction it ought to go. Since manga is read right-to-left, and since Minekura’s layouts are rarely rectangular boxes in succession, this is not insignificant.)

Right. I think those are all the caveats: on to the gushing.

Since, as I said, this is an ultimately character-centered story, the characters are naturally the main attraction for me. Like a lot of people, I started by liking one character best, but very shortly I found myself liking them all equally, and then loving them all. The characterizations are angst balanced by humor, threaded through with complex relationships, and anchored by really distinct voices (Tokyopop’s translation is apparently quite good), all wrapped around running themes of independence/dependence, attachment/detachment, Buddhism, and moving forward (there’s a reason this is a road trip). The series doesn’t have the deliberate and thorough worldbuilding of Fullmetal Alchemist—indeed, the world is deliberately anachronistic and the epic nature of the quest is frequently undercut—but it shares the virtue of carrying out sustained examination of themes through putting the characters in difficult positions.

The plots get better as the series goes along, partly because they are so strongly character-centered, and partly because they start inverting and subverting prior understandings in fun and interesting ways. I haven’t been panting after reading Reload because I knew it wasn’t complete yet, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing where Minekura takes things after the happenings of volume 9.

Anyway. As suggested by the fact that I wrote several posts analyzing just the art of the series, I really enjoyed this, both in itself and as an introduction to manga. If it sounds at all interesting, give it a browse.

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Friesner, Esther M.: Druid’s Blood

Thanks to Mely’s discussion of Esther M. Friesner’s works, I checked Druid’s Blood out of the library. This was an agreeable way to pass a couple of hours, though I’ve no strong urge to seek out the rest of Friesner’s work.

Druid’s Blood is an alternate history of the “let’s have fun with historical characters” type rather than the “let’s rigorously work out the implications of a divergence” type. That is, in a world where Britain’s rulers are Druids chosen by winning magical battles for the throne and where a magical shieldwall encircles Britain, it defies probability that the same monarchs should have sat on the throne, and that Wellington, Kitchener, Byron, Lovelace, and Wilde should exist, let alone be pretty much as they were in history (except for the oh-so-minor fact of not all being alive at the same time). It is also a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, narrated by the Watson-equivalent, “Weston,” except for a short prologue, which reveals that the Holmes-equivalent is actually an actor who made himself over into the character depicted in a few short stories published in the Strand. (Which is kind of interesting, though less is made of this than I thought might’ve been.)

Like most (all?) interesting Holmes pastiches, the focus is someone other than Holmes, namely Weston, who finds himself caught up in a plot against Queen Victoria and the foundations of organized British magic. My impression of the plot—and again, this may be the fatigue talking—is that it’s less a coherent thing than an excuse for playing with various historical figures. However, the development of Weston is done nicely and keeps the book from falling apart.

There is an unfortunately stereotypical portrayal of a non-British deity in the book. I can somewhat rationalize the portrayal as being consistent with the character who invoked the deity, but I’m not sure that’s supported by the text, and regardless I found it irksome.

Finally, Friesner has a reputation for writing humorous novels, but I can’t say if this was funny, because I’m deficient at spotting humor in novels (you have no idea how many jokes I missed in the Aubrey-Maturin novels before I started listening to the audiobooks). I remember being amused on a couple of occasions, but my general impression is that this isn’t a farce, for whatever that’s worth.

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November, Sharyn, ed., Firebirds

I have a tentative thesis after reading Firebirds, an anthology edited by Sharyn November that’s made up of original fantasy and science fiction and meant for a YA audience: one of the main failure modes of short fiction is didacticism. That is, when a short story doesn’t work, my reaction tends to be “Oh look, A Message” or, less often, “oh look, a story where nothing happens.” I don’t know if YA stories are more prone to didacticism than others, but a number of the stories in Firebirds that didn’t quite work for me also seemed to have A Message. To be clear, the existence of the didacticism isn’t usually why the stories don’t work for me; it’s that the characters, plot, or prose didn’t grab me enough to outweigh the didacticism.

I don’t have much to say about the stories that weren’t bad, but didn’t grab me, and also seemed to have something of A Message, so I’ll just list them with brief descriptions:

  • “Cotillion,” by Delia Sherman, is a “Tam Lin” variant set in late 1960s New York City.
  • “Mariposa,” by Nancy Springer. “‘I’ve lost my soul?’ . . . The doctor nodded. ‘I think so. Probably in early adolesence. It happens more commonly than you might think.'”
  • “Medusa,” by Michael Cadnun, is pretty much what the title says.
  • “Chasing the Wind,” by Elizabeth E. Wein, is set in 1950 Africa with no apparent sf or fantasy content.
  • “Remember Me,” by Nancy Farmer, is a changeling story.
  • “Flotsam,” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, is about various people who are lost—between worlds, in grief—and help each other become found.

Laurel Winter’s “The Flying Woman” doesn’t have quite as explicit a message as the stories above, but something about its tone failed to grab me. Then there are two odd, dark stories, which have compelling images though I don’t exactly like them, Lloyd Alexander’s “Max Mondrosch” and Garth Nix’s “Hope Chest.”

Diana Wynne Jones’ “Little Dot” is a cat story. If you don’t like cats, it will have no appeal for you whatsoever; and even to me, it feels more like an excuse to tell cute cat anecdotes than an actual story. In contrast, Sherwood Smith’s “Beauty” is an actual story, one I rather like, but I suspect that its effectiveness is limited to those who’ve read Crown Duel. (Chad’s reaction is consistent with this suspicion.)

Then we have two feminist retellings of fairy tales, “The Fall of Ys” by Meredith Ann Pierce and “The Lady of the Ice Garden” by Kara Dalkey, both of which effectively evoke the mythic feel of the original tales even as they rewrite them.

Finally, my three favorite stories in the collection. I’ve already written about Emma Bull and Charles Vess’s “The Black Fox” in talking about Vess’s collection Book of Ballads, so I’ll steal what I wrote there:

This is actually a recent (1974) ballad by Graham Pratt, based on a fragment of a Yorkshire folktale; it tells of a fox hunt that’s not finding any foxes, until someone injudiciously remarks that they’d chase the Devil himself if he appeared. Out pops a black fox, and the chase is on. I like this one because in its sixteen pages, it has vivid characters, humor, sense of wonder, and an interesting little twist on the ballad. To my mind it’s the most satisfactory as a standalone story; the tension with the ballad is a bonus.

Megan Whalen Turner’s “The Baby in the Night Deposit Box” also has a good bit of humor. Someone takes a small-town bank’s new slogan, “Your treasure will be safe with us,” quite seriously, and leaves the baby of the title in the bank’s custody. The tone is perfectly charming and makes me smile every time I think of it.

The tone of Patricia A. McKillip’s “Byndley” is perfectly elegant—well, almost. It’s the tale of a wizard who stole something from the Queen of Faerie and now is trying to return it. It’s a really gorgeous story, vivid and dreamlike at once, and it’s probably only me who thinks that the last two lines of dialogue clunk inexplicably. Regardless, it’s very much worth reading.

By my standards, that’s a pretty good batting average for a collection. I have the next one, Firebirds Rising, in the to-be-read bookcase and look forward to it.

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Palin, Michael: Full Circle (audio)

In Full Circle, Michael Palin goes around the Pacific counter-clockwise for a BBC documentary and book. NetFlix doesn’t have the documentary, so I just listened to Palin read the book (as with his others, you can read the full text online).

I enjoyed this, but it doesn’t really lend itself to booklogging [*]. About my only comment is that I’m glad that the odds are vanishingly small that I will ever be famous, because that means I won’t have to learn how to deal with things like this:

I’m on my way to meet Mayumi Nobetsu, a girl from Tokyo whom I’ve exchanged letters with for more than twenty years without ever meeting. She first wrote to me in 1974 when, to everyone’s surprise, Monty Python briefly reared its head on Japanese television. The handwriting and spelling of her first letter were immaculate, the grammar ambitious. ‘I am fourteen years old Japanese girl,’ it had begun. She kept writing to me, sending protestations of love and valuable information on the erratic affair between Monty Python and the Japanese public. Now in her thirties, she is managing a hotel.

 . . . I have had a lurking worry that she may have got the wrong Python, but she opens the locket around her neck and there is a picture of me as a thirty-one-year-old Sir Galahad in The Holy Grail.

[*] Or maybe it’s just that I was really exhausted all the time I was listening to it. I keep finding text in the online book that I’d swear I’d never heard, even though I’m sure it was there: I must have just briefly zoned out for that paragraph.

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Pierce, Tamora: (206) Street Magic (audio)

Full Cast Audio has, for some reason, skipped over the fifth of Tamora Pierce’s Circle-universe books in its audio adaptations of the series and gone straight to the sixth, Street Magic. The actor who played Briar in the first three books, Spencer Murphy, is back, which is wonderful because his portrayal is Briar, period, end of discussion. The voice given to Evvy, the other principal character, makes sense for the character, but I find it difficult to listen to. Apparently Evvy is the first-person narrator of the forthcoming Melting Stones, which will appear first as an audiobook; as much as I like Full Cast Audio’s productions, I may need to wait on the text version of this story.

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Site feed note

I’ve switched the feeds for this site to be full-text, and apologize for the resulting flood of old posts (though there are some new ones, too). In Bloglines (and I hope other newsreaders), there’s now also a “leave a comment” link and a “read more” link for spoiler-cut posts. These don’t seem to come through on the LJ syndicated feed, unfortunately, so you’ll still just have to click on the link at the top of the post to read the full post or comments.

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