Author: katenepveu

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (02) The Sign of Four

Read a few things over the weekend. First, I finished The Sign of Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle. This is the second Holmes/Watson novel, and considerably better than the first, as it doesn’t derail in the middle for unnecessary exposition. I’m a little puzzled by the title, since most of the time the phrase appears in the story, it’s as the Sign of the Four. Doyle definitely likes the sensational; the introduction calls it “a rousing Grand Guignol of a mystery involving lost treasure, grotesque twins, [and other things that are spoilers].” My understanding of “Grand Guignol” is that it’s even more over the top than this, but one can’t dispute the characterization otherwise. I should note that it’s an ongoing explanation type of mystery, however, not the one-big-revelation sort. (I don’t think the chase scene is as good as the writer of the introduction does, though.)

In character news: Holmes, still sporadically annoying. Watson, still a pretty good bloke. Mary, Watson’s eventual wife: does, indeed, possess a name, though barely has a personality, though Holmes does give her something of a compliment at the end (I note that Irene Adler makes her appearance in the very next story). Somehow, it fails to surprise me that Doyle should not do romance well.

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (01) A Study in Scarlet

Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet is the first Sherlock Holmes story and kind of an odd one. The title refers to the famous image of “Rache” written on the wall in blood above a murdered man, which I imagine any number of writers have borrowed over the years (I seem to recall Diana Gabaldon doing so in Drums of Autumn, for instance, though I don’t have my copy to check).

Though I believed this is considered a novel, it’s really more a novella, running to a hundred pages in my paperback copy. What’s more, nearly half of it is a strange interlude, which provides the backstory for one of the characters. It strikes me as a poor narrative choice; not only does it kill the momentum of the story, but it’s presented in a very awkward omniscient voice. (It also contains a highly unflattering portrait of the early days of the Mormon Church, if that matters. I have no idea how accurate it is [a quick Google mostly turns up sources with axes to grind], but I wouldn’t be surprised if Doyle had taken some liberties; “The Five Orange Pips,” for instance, struck me as rather too sensational to be based in fact.)

I did get more of a sense of Watson’s character from this book, as I’d hoped. He seems like a reasonably decent sort, for his time and place. What’s more, the introduction to this edition (“On the Significance of Boswells,” by Loren D. Estleman; it’s the Bantam Classic two-volume complete collection, those very brown paperbacks) indicates that Holmes continues to evolve as a character over the series (and not just in how many times he’s been married). I’m looking forward to seeing that, because Holmes really is a jerk at times—more noticeably so in this story. Then again, I suppose the drugs may have something to do with that (having just read the first page or two of The Sign of Four) . . .

I note in passing that it’s interesting that, in this story, Holmes speaks of actually earning money from his detecting. In the short stories in Adventures, I recall nary a mention of Holmes pocketing any fees, and indeed, a few people say they’ve come to him because they’ve heard he’ll help poor people for free. I wonder if the few wealthy clients paid him off-camera, or maybe he’d amassed a private fortune in the meantime?

Going back to the story: I think A Study in Scarlet is a perfectly good fifty page story with an unfortunate growth in its middle. I imagine one could skip the historical digression entirely and not miss much, and I rather recommend doing so.

[ In other news, I’ve installed a new version of BlogKomm. You can now subscribe to comments threads that you’ve posted to—just check the appropriate box, and you’ll get any new comments in the thread via e-mail. (Of course, this means you have to 1) post and 2) leave your e-mail address when you do so, so not everyone will be able to use it.) Do let me know what you think of it, and please send me any bugs or issues. The developer is very responsive and I’ll pass your comments along.

(The new version also has an alternative notify feature, where you can e-mail a particular person to tell them that you’ve responded to their comment. I’ve chosen to enable the subscription instead, since comments threads on this book log tend to be fairly focused, but again, I’m open to feedback.) ]

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Robb, J.D.: (07) Holiday in Death

A little while ago, when I was wandering around trying to decide what to read (and eventually settling on Lords and Ladies), I thought to myself, “Gee, a J.D. Robb book would really hit the spot. Too bad I don’t have any on hand besides Purity in Death, which I just read.” The next day, I went looking for a lunchtime book at work, and lo and behold, there on the shelves of the paperback exchange was a copy of Holiday in Death. Handy, that.

I read this over lunches and finished it today; it’s a pretty standard sexual-serial-killer episode. I particularly like the bits with Eve buying presents (shudders at having to soon start thinking of ideas for Christmas presents; just about everyone on my list is impossible to buy for . . . ).

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Duane, Diane: (103) High Wizardry

A few days ago, I was in mourning for my copy of High Wizardry, by Diane Duane, which is in storage somewhere. Yesterday, what should I see in the library but High Wizardry? Clearly, it was A Sign, so I checked it out and did a fast re-read yesterday and today.

This is definitely my favorite of the series, and probably its high point too (no pun intended). Nita’s kid sister Dairine (and if anyone can tell me how you pronounce that, I’ll be very grateful) has been offered wizardry at a very young age. The younger the wizard, the more vulnerable—but also the more powerful. The Powers clearly want Dairine to tackle a very big problem . . .

I love the last hundred pages of this—sense-of-wonder at its finest—so much that I can forget, between readings, the blatant scientific error behind one of the cool plot devices. [1] However, reconciling the end of this with the subsequent books is something of a dubious proposition. After this re-read, I suspect more strongly than ever that this was meant to be the last book in a trilogy (as I speculated a few days ago, in a post about A Wizard Alone). To me, this isn’t a book-destroying kind of problem, but it is a minor annoyance to have to pretend that subsequent books take place in a slightly alternate universe.

[1] If you’ve read the book and are curious, I posted about this to Usenet a while ago. Warning: these naturally contain spoilers. Here’s my original post, and some follow-ups that didn’t thread properly.

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (03) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Several months ago, I was browsing our Local Independent Bookstore with Chad and his parents, and discovered a rather nifty trade paperback, The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a reproduction of all of the Holmes stories that originally appeared in The Strand magazine, together with their illustrations. I thought this was kind of a neat way to read the stories, and it was fairly cheap ($8 for what was effectively four volumes), but for some reason I was dithering over whether to buy it. Chad’s mom asked to see it as I was wandering around looking at other things; I, thinking nothing of it, handed it over. Five minutes later she walked up and handed it back to me, in a store bag, and said, “Happy Easter, Kate.” I was impressed—I had no idea she could be that sneaky . . .

Anyway, I appreciated the thought then, and now that I’ve actually got around to reading some of it, I appreciate the fact, too. Believe it or not, these are the first Sherlock Holmes stories I’ve read. (I may have read one of the novels when I was far too young to appreciate it, but I don’t really recall anything about it.) I have no idea how I managed to get this far without doing so, but I’m definitely enjoying them now.

The first set of stories was apparently collected as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and includes some fairly famous ones. The first, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” is apparently our only in-canon glimpse of Irene Adler, who was always the woman to Holmes, probably because she managed to outwit him. She is the heroine of a series by Carole Nelson Douglas, which I may have to try after I’m done with the Holmes canon; I wasn’t impressed by her cat mysteries, but I think I have heard good things about these. A friend tells me that someone has advanced the meta-fictional theory that she and Holmes had an off-camera liaison which produced Nero Wolfe. I rather wish I hadn’t heard that before my first encounter with Holmes, because it was quite distracting . . .

These were mostly fun puzzles, though in a few places, I couldn’t help but remember Samuel Vimes’ famous opinion on Clues:

He distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. (Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)

However, the puzzles were enjoyably imaginative and bizarre, even if they stretch credulity here and there. (For instance, I don’t buy that she would have called it a “speckled band.”) The odd thing is that I presently have very little sense of Watson’s personality. (And nevermind personality—as far as I can tell from these, Watson’s wife doesn’t have a name . . . ) I suppose this is the problem with starting with short stories; I’ve picked up A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four and will read those before going back to my nifty Strand collection. I’m looking forward to them.

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Pratchett, Terry: (14) Lords and Ladies

I spent a lot of time over the weekend wandering around trying to figure out what I was in the mood for. Watching The Last Seduction wasn’t it; though it’s pretty amazing to watch Linda Fiorentino’s character and how her brain works, she’s so thoroughly amoral that it’s hard to feel good about it, at least in the mood I was in Saturday. (It did net me an amusing half-an-hour where I contemplated how I would handle the trial that’s pending at the end of the movie; there’s definitely a possibility or two there, though I’d still do my best to avoid going to trial.) Re-reading The Lady’s Not For Burning wasn’t it; I got through the first act and realized that I hadn’t been paying attention for the last ten pages. Watching The Hunt for Red October was almost it, but I didn’t see the whole thing.

After eventually determining that I was looking for was the equivalent of “things go fast and blow up,” I ended up with Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies—in which some things do go fast, and I suppose some thing probably blows up, but which is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of “things go fast and blow up.” However, I was after something fast-paced, vigorous, lively, and with some righteous butt-kicking. (The “righteous” bit being where The Last Seduction falls short.) All of the Discworld books are lively and fast-paced, and Lords and Ladies has some of the most enjoyable showdowns of the series. Of the books focusing on the Lancre witches, I still have a soft spot for Witches Abroad, but I think this one is the high point to date. (I re-read Carpe Jugulum a while ago and now think that it’s a little too similar to Lords and Ladies after all.)

I think I once had, or read, an edition with the following quote on the back, which makes for much better cover copy than that on the US HarperPrism trade paperback edition we currently have on hand:

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

Granny facing down the Queen of the Elves: great stuff and particularly recommended.

(The next Discworld book, The Night Watch, should be out in a few weeks, and I’m quite looking forward to it.)

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Peters, Ellis: (12) The Raven in the Foregate

Time to take a break from Ellis Peters’ Cadfael novels, after the twelfth, The Raven in the Foregate. Some of the characters are starting to sound all too familiar: “Oh look, another Young Person In Disguise.” And I know I wanted to see Cadfael wrong at some point, but I meant wrong about who he decides to trust; in this one he’s just slow to notice crucial details, for no reason than to draw the plot out, as far as I can tell.

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Duane, Diane: (106) A Wizard Alone

A Wizard Alone is the latest book in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, and a welcome return to form after the disappointing The Wizard’s Dilemma. That book suffered from the “A Plot, B Plot” problem; what’s more, both of the plots seem, to my memory now, to not cohere very well even to themselves. The author has stated that it was the beginning of a larger plot arc, which is quite evident in A Wizard Alone. This doesn’t retroactively make The Wizard’s Dilemma a better book, unfortunately, but at least it wasn’t in vain.

[ As an aside, I wonder if the series was originally meant to be a trilogy? The first three are much more of a set, to my mind; the stakes and questions steadily ramp up throughout, and the end of High Wizardry, the third and my favorite, really feels like it could be an end to the series. The fourth book, A Wizard Abroad, seems quite slight in comparison, more an Ireland book than a Wizardry book, and then we have this new story arc starting up after it.

*pauses to mourn her copy of High Wizardry, temporarily buried in a box somewhere inaccessible* ]

In this book, there is no “A Plot, B Plot” problem, though Kit and Nita start out trying to address different situations. These initial problems turn out to be related, and with the effects of last book quite clear, we get a really interesting exploration of the question, why would a person with autism be offered wizardry?—particularly since wizardry is inherently outward-directed: the fight against entropy, on behalf of the universe and everything in it. What problem is there, that this person is the answer to?

Some of the threads begun in the last book aren’t yet complete, but this book ends in a much more satisfactory place than the last. There’s one piece of the worldbuilding that I have a problem with, specifically that Order of Being we learn about; I couldn’t help but say to myself, “Surely the One could have come up with a less perilous arrangement . . . ” Beyond that, though, I quite enjoyed this book; it’s not the best book of the series, but it’s a solid entry all the same.

[ Oh yes: the offer on the house was accepted, so barring disaster, we’re buying a house . . . ]

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McKinley, Robin: Knot in the Grain and Other Stories, A

I picked up A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories, by Robin McKinley, Thursday night because I still was experiencing leftover hyperactivity from the trial at the start of the week. Fairy tales seemed like a good way to calm down enough to go to sleep. (The hyper feeling is gone, by the way; I walked around Friday like a zombie, and was hardly better Saturday, despite having done basically nothing all day. Well, besides making an offer on a house.)

There are five stories in this collection; the first two are explicitly set in Damar, since Luthe appears, and the last is set our world or something like it. “The Healer” is the first story, about a woman who has never been able to speak and a man who has lost his magecraft. It’s an odd story because the text leaves it ambiguous as to whether it’s meant to have a happy ending. The second, “The Stagman,” is a look at the subtle damage a wicked uncle can inflict on a princess and at what Luthe can and can’t do.

“Touk’s House” is the third; it starts out as Rapunzel, and comes full circle by the end, but all the same I think it would be inaccurate to call it a Rapunzel story. Which is a good trick, and I enjoyed it. I also liked “Buttercups” for the imagery and the characters; it, oddly, has moral to spare—perhaps making up for “The Healer”?

I was quite close to really liking the title story. It has dead-on descriptions of not knowing anyone and feeling socially awkward. At one point, the protagonist thinks how weeding the garden “didn’t go in a letter very well. It was what kept Annabelle going, but it wasn’t anything she could talk about. This seemed to be part of not having anyone to talk to. It was very confusing.” I knew the feeling; when I was studying for the bar, I usually wouldn’t have an actual conversation until dinnertime, and by then I would have literally lost nouns in all that silence. (“You know, the, the thing.”) However, the event that kicks off the plot is the proposed construction of a highway through the small upstate New York town where the protagonist has moved. The characters all oppose it, and I’m quite sure the reader is supposed to agree. However, Chad’s family is from a small upstate town that had a highway put through it, and they tell me how much a difference the highway has made to the local economy. So when the developers appears at the town meeting and are described as knowing “how to talk about ‘helping the economic profile of this rather depressed area.’ They made the highway sound like a slight inconvenience for a good cause—what were a few meadows and trees one way or another?”, I’m nodding along with the developers, because there is a lot of rural poverty in upstate New York. In other words, I am pretty thoroughly not the audience McKinley was intending for this story. Other people would probably like it just fine, though.

Overall I like this collection better than The Door in the Hedge, because the stories are considerably more concrete. Worth reading.

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Peters, Ellis: (11) An Excellent Mystery

An Excellent Mystery is the eleventh of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels and the first in the series that I’ve read for a while. It’s also the first one that I can’t say I actually like. Of course, saying why would require explaining the whole story; if you’ve read it, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that the plot turns on a mindset that I find just weird, somewhat uncomfortably so.

(Oh, and the title is actually not generic.)

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