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.
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.
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?)
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.
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:
- Power and Energy Sources
- Water Supplies and Engineering
- Water Pumps
- Cranes and Hoists
- Catapults
- Ships and Sea Transport
- Land Transport
- The Progress of Theoretical Knowledge
- The Principal Greek and Roman Writers on Technological Subjects
- Appendix: The Reconstruction of a Trireme
- 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.
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.
Brust, Steven: (110) Dzur
Fans of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series: do not read any review of Dzur (out in August) other than this one. There are two surprises in the Prologue, one small and one big, and while it’s hard to call them spoilers since they’re in the Prologue, it’s so much fun to experience them as surprises. (The jacket copy is safe.)
Fortunately, the basic plot can be sketched without revealing these surprises. After the series-changing events of Issola, Vlad has gone for a meal at Valabar’s in Adrilankha. There, he finds that his estranged wife Cawti is having problems: they were both in the Organization (think Mafia); he’d left her the Organization’s interests in South Adrilankha when he left town several books back; and now the Left Hand of the Jhereg, a sorcerous organization, is moving in. (As the Organization is also known as the Right Hand, this allows the utterly deadpan statement, “It’s unfortunate, how little the Right Hand knows what the Left Hand is doing.”) For various reasons, Vlad agrees to help Cawti, despite the personal danger to himself (he didn’t leave town for a vacation, several books back).
Actually, if you need that backstory, you shouldn’t be reading this book. Start with Jhereg and go forward in publication order.
If you don’t need that backstory, just go buy the book when it comes out in August. It has all the stuff you read a Vlad novel for: old friends; enjoyable new characters; loving descriptions of food (the meal at Valabar’s is spread out over the remaining chapters as the opening section); snark; and using one’s wits to get out of desparate situations. And it’s really good to see how Vlad is growing and changing; this book is a very interesting contrast to Dragon, the book before Issola and also named after a very war-inclined House. (It’s killing me that I can’t say more about it than that. But, interesting contrast; watch for it.)
At this point in the series, there are a number of long-term plot issues waiting to be resolved. I suspect that some people will want more movement on these than they’re going to get; but I think enough happens in this book to be a book, and I’m willing to trust Brust on the pacing of the series overall. And I very much enjoyed and appreciated what happens here—all I really want is for August to hurry up and get here so I can discuss it!
Many thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden for the Advance Uncorrected Proof.
White, James: (07-12) Code Blue—Emergency through Double Contact
I was home sick Thursday, without sufficient brain power to read anything new or difficult, but wanting something I could dive into to take my mind off being sick. I started with the seventh and eighth of James White’s Sector General novels, Code Blue—Emergency and The Genocidal Healer (in the omnibus General Practice), and ended up plowing my way through all the rest of them: The Galactic Gourmet, Final Diagnosis, Mind Changer, and Double Contact.
They are, as you can see, very fast re-reads for me.
One thing I noticed on this re-read is the voice. Though the trappings of tight-third POV are there, such as a non-Earth-human noticing that an Earth-human’s face “deepened in color” instead of “reddened with anger,” the tone of the narration seems basically constant to me. This isn’t a criticism, just something that contributes to the speed of my re-reading.
I’m inclined to call Code Blue—Emergency and The Genocidal Healer the series’ high point. Previously, the principal POV character was Peter Conway, an Earth-human doctor; and while I like Conway fine, the two POV characters here are much more interesting (as I’ve discussed previously). After these two books, the series starts getting a trifle repetitive. The Galactic Gourmet is fun, told from the POV of a famous chef who decides to make Sector General’s hospital food good; but its ending section feels a bit overlong. The last three all revisit or repeat prior books; unfortunately, it would be spoilery to say how except for the middle one, Mind Changer, which is O’Mara reflecting on his career as Chief Psychologist of Sector General.
Even with the repetition of exposition as well as plot (and the uncomfortable sexist bits), they’re still great comfort reads, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have blown through six of them in a day. I didn’t even think about the curing-the-sick aspect when I picked them up; it’s how the characters make the universe better through determination, intelligence, and empathy.
Christie, Agatha: Five Little Pigs (radio play)
Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs presents Hercule Poirot with a particular challenge: find out the truth of a sixteen-year-old murder. Amyas Crale was poisoned and his wife convicted; shortly before she died in prison, she wrote their daughter a letter swearing that she was innocent. The daughter is now of age and wants her mother cleared. The title refers to the five surviving witnesses interviewed by Poirot.
This was a pretty good radio play. I expected to doubt that the witnesses remembered enough to be useful, but as presented, it makes sense that they remember the important things—they’re tied into the existing conceptions of the murder. The solution is not terribly difficult, but turns on a satisfying mix of psychological deduction and logical re-examination of the facts. I’d prefer a different title, but one can’t have everything.
Novik, Naomi: (03) Black Powder War
Objectively speaking, the plot of Black Powder War, by Naomi Novik, is probably just as good as its predecessor, Throne of Jade; it just happens to spend more time on something that doesn’t interest me as much. It’s also another journey novel, but without the deep threat to Laurence and Temeraire’s relationship to tie it together emotionally [*]. As a result, though it’s still quite enjoyable, it’s somewhat less fulfilling on its own, feeling more like a transitional piece.
[*] Regarding which I have a LJ post; warning, spoilers for the first two books.
(In case that didn’t make it clear, the three books that have been published close together are not a trilogy, but the first three books in a longer series. See this LJ post by the author for a bit more information.)
Right. So, Throne of Jade was about going to China; Black Powder War is about coming back. And it’s still the Napoleonic Wars (in a slightly alternate version), and the closer they get to Europe, the more those Wars come to the forefront (rather than being background context as in Throne of Jade). Those who wanted to hurry the journey in Throne may well have a similar reaction here: exciting things happen along the way, that are significant for the characters or for world-building, but the journey is tolerably long. When we hit the land war in Asia Europe, I had to really force myself to pay attention—this is not the book’s fault, when I hit battle scenes it’s my default reaction to flip through trying to figure out who won. (It took going to audiobooks to get me to concentrate on to the battles in Patrick O’Brian’s books.) The battle scenes are quite clear and comprehensible, once I focused, but it’s 1806, and as the historically-minded know, that’s not a great time to be an opponent of Napoleon. Even less so, I must say, with the new elements introduced here . . .
There are bright spots, of course. Just as one example, I absolutely adore a new character who’s introduced near the end. And I’m fascinated by where things might go in the future (I recommend, by the way, not reading the sample chapter of the fourth book at the end, as the book won’t be out for some time). But this is definitely a middle book, with all the perils attendant thereon.
(In a LiveJournal post, cofax says interesting and very SPOILERY things about the three books’ pacing; I don’t go quite as far, but the remarks are worth reading if you’ve read all three books.)