Author: katenepveu

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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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Pierce, Tamora: (113) Trickster’s Choice

Trickster’s Choice, by Tamora Pierce, is the first of a new duology set in Pierce’s popular Tortall world. Pierce’s first books in this universe followed Alanna, who disguised herself as a boy to become a knight. Alanna’s daughter, Alianne (Aly), is the protagonist of these books; she’s been been captured by raiders, sold into slavery, and bet by a local god that she can’t keep a family’s children alive through the summer.

Most of this book is perfectly good, the kind of how-to story that Pierce does well—in this case, how to keep a family alive through intrigue and assassins—peopled with interesting characters and some social commentary. (There is a clumsy expositional prologue that I wish had been left out, but apparently readers of Young Adult novels aren’t expected to be that good at picking up on incluing, or waiting for the plot to develop, or something.) However, the book opens with some family conflicts that, frankly, make absolutely no sense to me. (No spoilers, this is all in the first chapter.)

(1) Aly is set up as the odd duck of her family, with an incredibly driven mother, a hyper-competent father, and two brothers who are very involved in learning their chosen professions. She, in contrast, professes to want to do nothing but have fun—which apparent lack of ambition drives her parents nuts.

(2) Aly really, really wants to be a spy out in the field. And she’d be good at it, as we see over the course of the novel. Her parents refuse, saying they don’t want that kind of life for her.

Okay. For starters, Aly’s parents don’t appear to notice that (1) and (2) are mutually exclusive. In fact, Aly herself doesn’t appear to notice. She does come to some insight about her conflicts with her parents over the course of the novel, but not about this. And more importantly: Aly’s father is the one who trained her, over her entire life, to be a spy! Not just as a decoder of reports or an analyst, but an actual in-the-field spy. And then he says that he doesn’t want to risk his daughter as a spy. He’s not a stupid character, but this really does not put him in a good light.

Really, here’s what this feels like to me: Pierce said, last Boskone, that someone (her editor?) suggested she try writing a more laid-back character. Even if Pierce is comfortable with that (as that suggestion indicates, it’s not something she’s done before), the plot requires someone hyper-competent. So this family stuff feels like an unsuccessful attempt at a non-ambitious character—plus an easy way of getting the plot in motion by making Aly avoid her mother by taking a sail, during which she gets captured, but still letting the rest of the plot happen by having Aly be very well-trained in intrigue.

There’s still time for Aly to realize either that her goal in life isn’t just having fun, or that she’s never really meant it but uses the attitude to disarm people. Maybe that’s planned for the second and final book. And heck, we might even get an explanation for her father’s behavior, not that I can think what it would be. I hope so, because this is an interesting story otherwise, but my opinion of it is unfavorably colored by the oddities of the premise.

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Gabaldon, Diana: (201) Lord John and the Private Matter

Lord John and the Private Matter is the latest novel by Diana Gabaldon, and set in the same world as her Outlander series. Lord John Grey is a secondary character in that series, and one of my favorites, so I was quite looking forward to this mystery, set off-stage during the Outlander series.

Unfortunately, this failed to live up to my expectations, for two reasons. First, I wasn’t impressed with it as a mystery. Obvious conclusions seemed not to be followed up, a key obfuscating detail appears to exist just to obfuscate, and overall I found it hard to follow and unengaging. Second, there’s very little development or growth of our protagonist—which I don’t think is an inevitable result of its interstitial nature, because there are hints at the end that some relationships might develop in the next book (apparently there are to be three). Here, John is worried and runs around trying to figure things out, and that’s about it. I really like his character when he appears in other books, but here, there just wasn’t enough tension on a personal level to draw me in.

Also, I know the title is appropriate on several levels, but I still don’t like it.

I hope my suspicions about the path of the second book are correct and we get a story about Lord John, not just a plot. This first one was rather a disappointment.

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Duane, Diane: (107) Wizard’s Holiday

Diane Duane’s Wizard’s Holiday is the most recent book in the Young Wizards series and the sequel to A Wizard Alone. The title is after “Busman’s Holiday,” and should give you a reasonable idea of the plot: Kit and Nita go on a wizardly exchange program to another planet for vacation but have adventures, and their exchange counterparts come stay with Dairine and also have adventures.

The first portion of the book is a welcome lighter look at being on holiday in a strange place, after the darker turns of the last two books. We also get to see more of our Earth wizards’ families, which I enjoyed. The second part doesn’t work as well; one plot thread doesn’t seem to be fully tied off, the other was somewhat disturbing to me, and the thematic attempts to tie the two together were a bit forced. The plot does get points for giving us a much different incarnation of The Lone Power than we’ve seen before, however.

This feels rather like an interlude book, something like A Wizard Abroad, but not as static—there is emotional progress from the last two books, after all. The interlude nature is enhanced by the very tantalizing hints about serious troubles afoot for the next book, Wizards at War (currently in progress). I am looking forward to it, though I greatly doubt that Duane will actually make good on the truth in the Lone Power’s taunts to Nita about getting other people to die for her. (Oh, and there had better be something more about the Ponch stuff in that book, or I shall be Most Annoyed.)

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Duane, Diane: (106) A Wizard Alone (re-read)

I re-read A Wizard Alone, by Diane Duane (prior booklog entry), on a warm fall afternoon as the dog romped in the backyard. I didn’t feel quite awake enough to read the new book (Wizard’s Holiday, in the next entry), but I was in the mood for that kind of thing, and decided to refresh my memory on the prior book.

Things I noticed on this re-read: we get more of Kit and Nita’s families, Kit’s in particular. I still want to know where the stuff with Ponch is going. This is a much shorter book than I’d remembered. And I still like it quite a bit.

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Bujold, Lois McMaster: (202) Paladin of Souls

I have semi-resolved to get caught up on the book log by New Year’s. It’ll be a good trick if I can pull it off, since I am a dozen entries behind.

In fact, I’m so behind that I was reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls back at the start of October. In a way, the very fact that this was first in the queue has added to the delay: I really liked it and want to do it justice, which I haven’t felt capable recently. However, I shall take my cue from the deities of the novel, who seek not perfection, and make an attempt.

Paladin is set in the same world as The Curse of Chalion, several years later, but is not a direct sequel. Its protagonist is a minor character from Chalion, Ista dy Chalion, an ex-saint who was embittered and broken by her divinely-directed attempt to break the titular curse. As Paladin opens, Ista resolves to go on a pilgrimage to escape from the prison of her life. Events, of course, overtake her—though not in the direction I thought when I finished the sample chapters online, which I really should have resisted reading. For that reason, I’m not sure how obvious the plot is; I didn’t spot it, but I was disoriented because of my expectations based on the sample chapters. I can say that it’s precisely paced (my favorite line, for instance, comes almost exactly halfway through). The story is obvious from the start: it’s the healing and rehabilitation of Ista.

The novel is told from Ista’s point of view, in the tight-third that Bujold does so well. The narration makes it retroactively clear just how much Chalion was the Daughter’s book, as Paladin is the Bastard’s; Paladin‘s drier, more cynical tone contrasts nicely with the more idealistic and romantic attitude in Chalion. (The Bastard also gets a lot more screen time than the Daughter did, which is a tricky thing to manage but works because He has so much personality.) The book explores some further ramifications of the world’s history and theology, beyond what we first learned in Chalion; I thought that the added layers to the story of dy Lutez worked particularly well.

The plot of Paladin is driven exclusively by women, two of which get a lot of screen time. One is Ista, of course, and I found her a refreshing change from Ekaterin, Bujold’s most recent female point-of-view character. (Don’t get me wrong, I like Ekaterin; but she’s so reserved that it’s rather fun to have a snarly outspoken protagonist.) Also, as pointed out in comments to a LiveJournal post filled with SPOILERS, Ista’s role in the book has very little to do with being a mother, which is again a nice change from Ekaterin and Cordelia both. The other major female character is more complex than I first expected, which I appreciated.

I found this a very satisfying, engaging book. There’s one bit of dialogue, clearly meant as an emotional climax, that inexplicably goes clunk in my head; but other than that, I’ve no other complaints. (I’ve seen other people comment that they thought the plot was predictable, but as I’ve said, I can’t speak to that.) I greatly enjoyed it and continue to offer up thanks that Bujold has not fallen prey to the Brain Eater.

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