Author: katenepveu

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Snicket, Lemony: (04-06) The Miserable Mill (audio); The Austere Academy (audio); The Ersatz Elevator

In late January, I drove to Massachusetts for two baby showers in two days. As is my wont, I listened in the car to Lemony Snicket audiobooks, in this case The Miserable Mill and The Austere Academy. Mill, the fourth book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, is almost entirely to pattern. The only change is that Violet, normally the inventor, has to read something to help them escape the latest series of unfortunate events, and Klaus, normally the reader, has to invent something; alas, it’s something that breaks my suspension of disbelief—which is very, very generous for these books.

Academy is much more interesting, because for the first time, we have an ongoing plot. In the present, we meet the Quagmire triplets, Isadora and Duncan (their sibling, Quigley, was killed in a mysterious fire), who fall victim to a series of unfortunate events that will carry over at least the next two books. And our narrator discloses more about his past, suggesting that he has a more-than-academic interest in researching and documenting the story of the Baudelaire orphans. (Also, Sunny’s getting better at talking!)

These audiobooks are read by the author, who isn’t as good at is as Tim Curry—but “not as good as Tim Curry” still leaves a lot of room, and I fell into them sufficiently that I had to suppress the urge to call people “cakesniffers” for a couple of days.

When I got back from my trip, I wanted to find out what happened next, and Chad just happened to have the next book, The Ersatz Elevator, out from the library. More tantalizing hints, no resolutions yet, but ends with the series taking a slightly different direction. In our near future is a trip to the library to get the next ones.

(Occasionally, I admit to wanting a little more complexity than I’m going to get out of these. In Mill, for instance, I badly wanted to know what was up with Charles. I could spin half-baked psychological theories out of perceived subtext: but ultimately, I just don’t think there’s that kind of subtext in these books. Terrible puns made literal, sure; meta-narrative, absolutely; but psychological depth, not so much. Oh well, one can’t have everything.)

(Though, speaking of subtext, did anyone else read the Quagmires as being set up as future romantic interests for the Baudelaires? [Violet/Duncan and Klaus/Isadora, I feel the need to specify.] And was anyone else bothered by this? I mean, they’re pre-pubescent.)

Finally, I would normally end these entries with quotations, but the items have gone back to the library. Fortunately, one can rely on Chad for these things: The Miserable Mill, The Austere Academy, and The Ersatz Elevator.

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (01) Whose Body?

Some time ago, I needed a novel to read at lunch, and found Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy Sayers, in the work paperback exchange. “Ah-ha!” I said, “I will start re-reading Sayers over lunches when I need a break, and this will give me an excuse to fill the inexplicable holes in my collection: as I get to a book I don’t own, I can buy it.” And that is just what I did.

I’d read this before, of course, and so whodunnit was blindingly obvious from the very beginning. I suspect it would be a fairly obvious mystery to new readers, too, even if their edition didn’t have a spoilery blurb. I was more interested in how different this book is from later ones, such as Gaudy Night, which I re-read not so long ago. The main thing, of course, is Peter, who is much less rounded than he becomes. I don’t say that he’s flat, because I liked him from the start and he does have the shell-shock; and I utterly deny that he’s a Mary Sue (per some at a Boskone panel), because to include him in the category renders the term nearly meaningless. But the strong prominence of his verbal tics makes him appear rather more a caricature than in later books. (I’d noted this with reference to Strong Poison as well, but I think it’s even more pronounced here.)

The other major difference I noticed—even different from Strong Poison, I think—is the narration. Or, rather, the narrator, who is a palpable presence: footnotes, for goodness’ sake, as well as that odd dip into second-person towards the end (which chapter I really like). I’ll be interested to see how this evolves over my re-reads.

(The only problem with my lunchtime-reading plan is that I was given a copy of The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion as a birthday present last year. On one hand, it rather defeats the purpose to not have it at hand when reading the books, but on the other, I really don’t want to bring it into work. I suppose I shall just have to make notes or use sticky-flags when necessary; I didn’t really see anything in Whose Body? that I wanted to look up.)

[ For excellent, very spoilery commentary on Whose Body?, I recommend Truepenny’s LiveJournal post; all of her thoughts on re-reading Sayers are linked to from this “memories” page. ]

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Kelly, Carla: Miss Grimsley’s Oxford Career

And now for something completely different: Carla Kelly’s Miss Grimsley’s Oxford Career (recently reprinted with Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand). This is a Regency romance, via an author recommendation from Melymbrosia on LiveJournal.

This was charming, warm fun; I can tell it’s flawed and I don’t really care. Partly I’m well-disposed towards it because it was clearly written by an author who’s read and loved Gaudy Night—not, I hasten to add, that they are particularly comparable works, except that they’re set at Oxford and are suffused with a love of reading and a respect for intellectual endeavor. Partly it’s because it takes the plot furniture of the genre and tweaks it: the “girl in disguise as a boy” doesn’t fool the hero for a minute; the “noble hero comes in and fixes lives of everyone in heroine’s family” is nicely modulated; and the plot-driving secondary characters are given touches of nuance. So yeah, the plot’s overstuffed, and it’s anachronistic, and there’s bits of stupid deception, but the characters are just nice people and I really enjoyed reading about them.

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Tolkien, J.R.R.: Silmarillion, The

I started re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion on January 3, Tolkien’s birthday, on the theory that hobbits give presents to others on their birthdays and his books are the best presents he could give (if he were still with us, of course). I’m a couple re-reads past the point where I started understanding and enjoying the book; like a lot of people, I tried reading it too young (or soon) and bounced hard off it. Before this re-read, I appreciated it as mythology, with many wonderful stories sketched in a remote and stylized manner. This time, I discovered a number of new reactions, a few years after the last re-read.

[ There will be spoilers below, vaguely phrased but present nonetheless. ]

First, I don’t recall it raising the hairs on the back of my neck before. I did most of my re-reading in exceedingly mundane environments—my office, a car dealership while my car’s oil was changed—and even there, things like the Doom of the Noldor, or the host of Fingolfin blowing their silver trumpets at the first rising of the Moon, send actual chills up my spine. The early parts seemed much more likely to do this than the later, and also stick with me more between reads. (Even the first two portions stick with me, about the creation of the world and the Valar and Maiar, but I’m weird and used to re-read them to relax and go to sleep. I did, however, skip the geography chapter with no feelings of guilt whatsoever.) It’s possible that the sheer density might have come into play: I’m more able to infer emotion from this style now than when I first read this book, but I may have gotten tired of doing so by the end. I think it’s more likely that a problem with the content of the later stuff, though, of which more below.

Second, speaking of Fingolfin, something I’d known but had forgotten the extent: I read by word recognition, rather than phonetics, and as a result the names are very difficult. For instance, so many people have names of the form F—— that I had a little slip of paper marking the first of the family trees, the House of Finwë, and referred to it nearly every time an F—— name appeared. Keep this in mind when creating your own languages, writers.

Third, I either hadn’t registered or hadn’t remembered the underlying ethical or moral decisions that structure all the history. That’s a very cumbersome way of putting it, so let me give examples. I spent a bit of time trying to classify the two major falls of the work, Melkor’s and Feanor’s (and much of the Noldor with him). There must be dozens of papers exploring this in much more depth than my lunchtime musing—all the same, they seem to both be ambition thwarted and thereby twisted into selfishness and coveting. And while they didn’t have to react in those ways to being thwarted, I can’t help but having a little bit of sympathy for their ambition—the summons of the Valar never seemed that wise to me, and if I were told that “hey, you think you’re doing your own thing, but it’s all My Ineffable Plan after all,” well, I’d get a bit cranky too.

Free will is a very problematic thing in The Silmarillion, it seems to me. Textually, no-one but Men (sic) have it, and it’s a gift inextricably tied with their mortality. Which sounds all well and good, until one sees how the deck is very carefully stacked against Men in every possible way to make them lesser. I could go on at length, but the opening pages of the chapter “Of Men” will suffice: “The Valar sat now behind their mountains at peace, and having given light to Middle-earth they left it for long untended, and the lordship of Morgoth was uncontested save by the valour of the Noldor. . . . To Hildórien there came no Vala to guide Men, or to summon them to dwell in Valinor; and Men have feared the Valar, rather than loved them, and have not understood the purposes of the Powers, being at variance with them, and at strife with the world.”

Apparently Men get free will, but don’t get the information they need to exercise it wisely. (There should probably be a reference to Freedom and Necessity in here somewhere, but this entry has languished unfinished long enough.) Really, I finished the book feeling small and unenlightened and dirt-grubbing and just unworthy; and very cross thereby, because that is not at all my normal state. I want to ask Tolkien, “Did you intend to create an elaborate mythology just to explain why humans suck?”

No wonder there are so many Elf fangirls.

Ahem. Anyway. Last time I re-read The Lord of the Rings, I didn’t have this reaction, and I think I probably won’t next time, because the time scale is smaller and it ends on a more optimistic note. I’m rather sorry to have discovered that The Silmarillion makes me cross, as it has much that I love. Maybe I’ll just re-read the Appendices to LotR next time I need my fix.

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Eager, Edward: (03-04) Knight’s Castle; The Time Garden

For Christmas, Chad got me some Edward Eager books, including Knight’s Castle and The Time Garden, which I read New Year’s Eve and Day. I loved Half Magic as a kid, and read its sequel, Magic by the Lake, two summers ago. The rest of Eager’s books, though, were the kind of thing I just never got around to buying, so these were a perfect gift.

Knight’s Castle and The Time Garden feature the kids of the Half Magic protagonists; there’s one or two connections between the two sets of books, but you needn’t read them in any particular order. In each of these books, as in the prior two, the kids come upon a form of magic, have adventures, and grow up a bit (though not too pedantically).

(I have another Eager, Seven Day Magic, which doesn’t appear to be connected to any of the rest of his books. Magic or Not? and The Well-Wishers appear to a set, and somewhat unlike his other books, so they may be library material.)

For absolutely no reason that I can think of, I keep wanting to compare these to food. The dessert that always reminds you of childhood? The lemon ice that some restaurants bring you to clear your palate for the main course? Hot sweet roasted cashews from a street vendor, the kind that are only good if they’re eaten hot? They bubble along putting me in a better mood, washing away any bad tastes left by prior books, and are best gulped down at once—they might lend themselves to slow thoughtful reading, I suppose, but I’ve no inclination to try. I like them too much to risk it.

Another fun thing is how book-oriented they are. Knight’s Castle is the most obvious example of this, being basically Ivanhoe fanfic, but the joy of reading pervades the works, as part of the overall theme of imagination and willingness to consider impossible things before breakfast. (I was a little troubled by the oldest protagonist in The Time Garden, thinking that his teen preoccupation with romance was going to turn him into a Susan-out-of-Narnia, but the narrative ends up treating him more kindly than that.) I’ve downloaded three Nesbit books as a result of reading these, for my later reading pleasure (print copies being apparently hard to come by). Should I get Ivanhoe, too? The author and all of the kids in the books are of the opinion that the romance comes out wrong.

Ahem. Anyway. Start with Half Magic, but definitely read these too.

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Eddings, David: Belgariad series; Malloreon series

I have a confession to make.

I, um, well,

I voluntarily re-read David Eddings.

Oh, all right. This month, I re-read The Belgariad and The Malloreon, of my own free will and with other books available.

So there.

In my defense, I must say that I was so stressed out earlier this month that I could not cope with anything new or in the least demanding. And they’d been mentioned by some unexpected people in the discussions about favorite books (kicked off in my LiveJournal and spreading to Usenet from there). So when I needed something mindless and comforting, they naturally came to mind.

[ I do occasionally post book-related things over in my LJ; if you don’t want to wade through all the personal stuff for the book talk, you might find this “ memories list” useful. ]

Positive things first: there is a certain charm to the narration, especially early in the series. They’re well-worn and familiar, flowing right past my eyes in a soothing manner that required the minimum number of synapses to fire. I like many of the characters, though reluctantly in some cases.

Negative things: last time I read these, several years ago, I appeared not to have noticed how incredibly abhorrent this universe is. It is, in a nutshell, a universe where history is deterministic not chaotic, where genetics is destiny, and where race and gender impart immutable personality characteristics. It’s a universe where one can meaningfully talk about establishing families over thousands of years, just to produce a destined individual with specific characteristics who will do a particular thing; where the whole point of ten long books is to restore the purpose of the universe (the universe has a purpose!); and where the worst kind of “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” crap appears to be uniformly true. (The only slogan button I have says “Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it.”)

It’s a good thing that I didn’t have to engage many brain cells for these, because otherwise they might have melted in disgust.

They did prompt me to think a bit about prophecy, specifically whether a deterministic universe is required. I don’t think so, at least not for all prophecies. Some are really just instructions or if-then statements, such as the one in Curse of Chalion, or possibly Will’s wyrd as quoted below (he interprets it as if-then, anyway). Some are self-fulfilling, and gain their interest from the debate over what role is played by free will or chance. It’s only a subset of prophecies that require a deterministic universe, and I think most authors (wisely) don’t make an issue of it, or leave the prophecy’s mechanism vague enough that the readers aren’t forced to wonder. (Someone must have written stories exploring prophecy and the many-worlds hypothesis?)

So I did actually get a teeny tiny bit of thought out of re-reading Eddings, once my brain was capable of it again. And now I know I won’t ever read these again. I guess you really do learn something every day.

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Doyle, Debra, and James D. Macdonald: Knight’s Wyrd

Knight’s Wyrd is a YA novel by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald; it won a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature in 1993. Will is the heir to a barony; on the eve of his knighting, Will is told his wyrd: “You can take up the sword and be Sir William Odosson all your life long. But you’ll meet death before any other title come to you.”

We-the-readers recognize the ambiguity of that phrasing, but Will doesn’t. However, that’s about the only thing that this reader, at least, recognized before its revelation. As always, Doyle and Macdonald take their stories in interesting and unexpected directions, to the point that practically anything else I could say about the plot feels like a spoiler. Much more high-fantasy than the Circle of Magic series, this is nevertheless grounded by its characters and pleasingly tense. Recommended.

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Pratchett, Terry: (03) Equal Rites

I was looking for something fast and light about the time I finished Monstrous Regiment, so I decided to re-read Equal Rites to see how Pratchett dealt with gender issues in a very early Discworld novel. In Equal Rites, a dying wizard passes his staff on to the eighth son of an eighth son—well, to what he assumes is an eighth son.

I can’t say I noticed much difference in the treatment of gender—people are people to Pratchett, no matter the composition of their bodies. I did notice an incredible difference in the style: the prose has become much less obtrusive. In the early books, there are jokes in the narration, like

Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

Whether or not you find that funny, it reminds you that you’re being told a story. In the later books, the narration is much closer to tight-third, and humor arises from situations and the way that viewpoint characters see events, not from puns or jokes by an omniscient narrator. People who find the earlier Discworlds annoying because of the style might like some of the later ones, though I can’t say now where the transition occurs.

Equal Rites is a fairly slight story by overall Discworld standards, and Granny Weatherwax is much different in subsequent books. It holds up reasonably well, however, and Granny does get some good moments.

“Let’s find this Great Hall, then. No time to waste.”

“Um, women aren’t allowed in,” said Esk.

Granny stopped in the doorway. Her shoulders rose. She turned around very slowly.

“What did you say?” . . .

“Sorry,” said Esk. “Force of habit.”

“I can see you’ve been getting ideas below your station,” said Granny coldly.

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Pratchett, Terry: (31) Monstrous Regiment

Monstrous Regiment is the latest Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, in which a woman joins the army in disguise and learns much in the process. I think I can best sum up my attitude toward this book by saying that Chad suggested a strong criticism of the ending, and I just don’t feel like re-reading to see whether I think he’s correct. (As a plot matter, the ending is rather over the top. Chad’s criticism is on the story level.)

It’s not a bad book by any means. I didn’t hate it, and it didn’t actively annoy me. But little things poked at me all the way through, and at the end, I had a strong feeling of artifice. Things served obvious plot purposes, and that plot function was my strongest impression of them: “oh, that’s why this is here, it gives them the way to escape” (or whatever). Their existence made sense independent of their plot function, when I stopped and thought, but I had to stop and think—I didn’t instinctively feel like they were an organic part of the whole. Put another way, I saw the book as a jigsaw puzzle rather than a painting—a completed jigsaw puzzle, to be sure, but with the lines between the pieces still visible.

I have no idea if that makes sense.

There are good things about the book. I really like the very ending, the last couple of pages. Some of the characters are very engaging; there was one in particular that I was pleased to see given more dimension than I expected. But overall Monstrous Regiment makes me want to re-read Night Watch and see why I thought it didn’t quite cohere, because right now the two don’t seem comparable at all.

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Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: (08) Balance of Trade

Balance of Trade is the latest novel by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, currently available in electronic form from Embiid Publishing. (A hardcover will be out in February 2004.)

I have decided that Lee and Miller have lost their ability to confine their plots to the boundaries of their books. Though all their prior books have been parts of series, it’s not that they never had the ability: Conflict of Honors (collected in Partners in Necessity) stands alone perfectly well, for instance. But their last two, I Dare and The Tomorrow Log, both ended on cliffhangers. The Tomorrow Log is the start of a new series—mind, there was no obvious indication that it was a series novel on the packaging or promotion, and the earliest a sequel could appear would be after three already-scheduled novels. But I Dare was supposed to wrap up a sequence! And the cliffhanger shows up out of nowhere two pages from the end, displacing a perfectly good life-goes-on ending.

There’s nothing to indicate that Balance of Trade is meant to be part of a sub-series (it’s set in the Liaden universe), though as we’ve seen, this doesn’t mean anything in particular. The story is coming-of-age, and a perfectly serviceable version thereof. The plot is both jumbled, with several different threads mixing uneasily, and overflowing, with a thread raised towards the end apparently just to get people in the right geographical locations, because its substance isn’t addressed. The pacing is also a little strange: there’s intercutting between different characters through nearly all of the book, but the frequency of the cuts jumps suddenly partway through, which I found disorienting.

I bought the electronic version because it was much cheaper, and I’m glad I did. I will read more Lee and Miller books, because they do provide a certain kind of comfort reading for me (and no predestined mystical love in this one, yay), but I won’t be paying hardcover prices for them.

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