Author: katenepveu

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[2001] Two-month roundup

It’s been two months since I started this book log, and I thought it might be amusing to pull out some statistics.

In two months, I’ve read forty-one books (some of these were omnibuses or collections, but I’m not counting their components) and three short stories. This figure is probably higher that it would usually be because I was commuting or on vacation for one of those months. Of these, twenty-three were new and twenty-one were re-reads. These books were by twenty-six different authors (counting the Lee & Miller collaborations as one author), plus a serial novel.

The log was updated about four times a week (mean: 4.2, median: 4); the most it was updated was six times in a week, and the least was two. This is slightly lower than the average number of things read per week, 4.9; while a few posts were unrelated to books, several posts were about more than one book.

The log has gone through a number of changes since it started, including small adjustments to its appearance and the addition of the index by author, but should be fairly stable now.

Finally, I think I’ve counted all this right, and gosh, I do read a lot of books . . .

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Stout, Rex: (13) And Be a Villain

For some reason, I’m curiously reluctant to pick up the sequel to Outlander; if I remember correctly, some particularly rotten things happen in it, so maybe that’s why. Or maybe it’s just the length. Anyway, instead I ended up re-reading another Rex Stout mystery, And Be a Villain. This is the first of the loose trilogy regarding Zeck that In the Best Families concludes; I realized that I’d re-read the end without refreshing my memory on the beginning, so I decided to remedy that.

I’ve discovered that since the A&E series, I have an even stronger tendency to imagine these books filmed. I’d like to see A&E take a crack at the Zeck books; they might be a bit trickier because I think they have more plot than your average Wolfe book, but they are some of the better ones in the oeuvre. Zeck’s only slightly involved in this one, but the murders are baffling and the killer is, indeed, quite villainous. (I know it’s a quote from Hamlet, but it’s still an awfully unmemorable title. The Second Confession, the middle Zeck book, at least has a title with some reference to the plot.)

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Gabaldon, Diana: (101) Outlander

I’m re-reading Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series in preparation for the release of the fifth, The Fiery Cross. These are, I think, some of the rare books that don’t fit in any category. They’re big fat historical time-travel fantasy adventure mystery romance—novels, for lack of a more precise term. They’re also hugely engrossing and seriously addicting.

Outlander, the first in the series, was originally shelved in the romance section, apparently for lack of a better place to put it. While this was probably a good marketing decision (romance readers are more tolerant than one might think of history, time-travel, fantasy, adventure, and mystery), they’re no more genre romances than anything else. (This is not an “Eww, girl cooties” response. Regular readers of this book log know perfectly well that I like good genre romances.)

[The existing volumes have been repackaged as mainstream fiction in trade paperback; unfortunately, the new covers are so plain that they look more like pre-publication proof copies than anything else. I liked the old covers, particularly the one for Drums of Autumn.]

Claire Randall is a nurse who has recently been reunited with her husband, Frank, after World War II. They are in the Scottish Highlands for a sort of second honeymoon, Frank digging into his family tree and Claire learning botany, when Claire stumbles into a stone circle and finds herself in 1743, smack in the middle of a minor skirmish between English soldiers and Scottish raiders. She has a very unpleasant run-in with Frank’s ancestor, Jack Randall (who, let me assure you, only gets more unpleasant upon further acquaintance), is rescued by the MacKenzies, and gets taken along because she can treat things like musket ball wounds and dislocated shoulders. And also, of course, because she’s damned odd and they think she might be an English spy. Claire eventually ends up marrying, and then falling in love with, Jamie Fraser, a relative of the MacKenzie clan. Jamie is presently an outlaw, which is only part of the unfinished business he has with Randall, who in turn is only part of the complications that will greet Claire & Jamie.

The difference from genre romances isn’t that Claire and Jamie are three-dimensional, stubborn, outspoken, complicated people; contrary to public perception, that’s not unusual. What is different is that Claire is not only married when they meet, but is in love with her husband; that Jamie’s younger than she is and a virgin; and that the story doesn’t end when they eventually declare their love for each other. (Of course, the story hasn’t ended yet, period; there’s to be six of these in all.) And then there’s the historical bits, and the worries about time-travel and affecting history and if Claire can (and whether she should) go back, and the families, and the sword-play and dramatic rescues and politicking, and the Loch Ness monster, and . . .

Like I said, hard to classify. But also fabulously entertaining. I forced myself to only read pre-determined chunks of chapters at a time, lest I stay up all night (which I’ve done before). The plot tends to be a bit episodic, but all of the characters and dialogue are so vivid that you’re pulled along regardless.

It’s true that Outlander is Gabaldon’s first novel, and it shows. For instance, Claire has a tendency to think at the end of chapters, “I went away, and it only occurred to me after to wonder why . . .”; once I noticed this, it was one of those minor irritants that kept standing out. Also, a few scenes strike me as a bit much, particularly some of the sex scenes (okay, they’re newlyweds, but still . . . ). But it’s a book and a series far rich enough to overcome these minor defects.

[Claire is at Loch Ness.]

A great flat head broke the surface not ten feet away. . . . Oddly enough, I was not really afraid. I felt some faint kinship with it, a creature further from its own time than I, the flat eyes old as its ancient Eocene seas, eyes grown dim in the murky depths of its shrunken refuge. . . .

A man was standing at the top of the slope. I was startled at first, then recognized him as one of the drovers from our party. . . . “It’s all right,” I said, as I came up to him. “It’s gone.”

Instead of finding this statement reassuring, it seemed occasion for fresh alarm. He dropped the bucket, fell to his knees before me and crossed himself.

“Ha-have mercy, lady,” he stammered. To my extreme embarrassment, he then flung himself flat on his face and clutched at the hem of my dress.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said with some asperity. “Get up.” I prodded him gently with my toe, but he only quivered and stayed pressed to the ground like a flattened fungus. “Get up,” I repeated. “Stupid man, it’s only a . . .” I paused, trying to think. Telling him its Latin name was unlikely to help.

“It’s only a wee monster,” I said at last, and grabbing his hand, tugged him to his feet.

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Talley, Marcia (ed.): Naked Came the Phoenix

I borrowed Naked Came the Phoenix, edited by Marcia Talley, mostly on a whim. It’s a serial novel, à la The Floating Admiral, by a group of female mystery writers; a portion of the proceeds go to breast cancer research.

One of the authors, Diana Gabaldon, mentioned it on her web page, and since the library had it, I thought it was worth a try. The pleasure in reading a serial novel is watching one author leave a bombshell at the end of her chapter for the next to deal with, and seeing how the next person turns the bombshell into her own. I don’t read chapter-by-chapter, though: I usually plow straight ahead, barely noticing divisions like chapters, to find out what happens next. Judged that way, this is pretty goofy (as I suspect many such efforts are). Judged as a serial novel . . . well, it’s still pretty goofy.

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De Lint, Charles: Ivory and the Horn, The

I picked up a used copy of Charles de Lint’s The Ivory and the Horn for a friend. This and an earlier collection, Dreams Underfoot, consist of urban fantasy stories set in the fictional city of Newford; I’d read them both several years earlier and then stopped reading Newford stuff, because they’d just gotten too preachy for me. (Admittedly, the stories in Dreams Underfoot had Messages too, but there were enough that were really good in spite of that to make it worth while.) I flipped through it today to see if my memory was correct; alas, it was. However, I was pleased to discover that I continue to like “Coyote Stories” because of its narrative voices.

This Coyote he’s not too smart sometimes. One day he gets into a fight with a biker, says he going to count coup like his plains brothers, knock that biker all over the street, only the biker’s got himself a big hickory-handled hunting knife and he cuts Coyote’s head right off. Puts a quick end to that fight, I’ll tell you. Coyote he spends the rest of the afternoon running around, trying to find someone to sew his head back on again.

“That Coyote,” Jimmy Coldwater says, “he’s always losing his head over one thing or another.”

I tell you we laughed.

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Stout, Rex: (37) Homicide Trinity

Enough of this imitation Archie Goodwin; I want the real thing. So I got a couple of books out of Yale’s library, including the collection Homicide Trinity (one of the more generically named ones). I grabbed this because it has “Counterfeit for Murder,” which has Hattie Annis, who is one of my favorite characters ever in a Nero Wolfe book. (How can you not like someone who calls Wolfe Falstaff?) I’d forgotten, though, that the other two stories are quite good too. The first is the hideously named “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo,” a satisfying little story about yet another person killed in Wolfe’s office. (This was adapted by A&E recently, though annoyingly I can’t remember if the denouement was presented the same way.) The other is “Death of a Demon,” which starts with a woman telling Wolfe, “That’s the gun I’m not going to shoot my husband with”—except that he’s already been shot, by someone else. This was a pleasant surprise with which to pass dinner.

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Crusie, Jennifer: Cinderella Deal, The

I got a copy of Jennifer Crusie’s The Cinderella Deal recently; Crusie is a great author I discovered in the last year or so, and I’ve been trying to pick up her out-of-print category romances used. This isn’t the best one of hers I’ve read, but I liked it very much.

There’s a bit of similarity to her Strange Bedpersons, which is unsurprising as that started out as a re-write of The Cinderella Deal, but developed into a different book; The Cinderella Deal was eventually published a couple years later. The main resemblance is the protagonists, but I like the ones here better. Linc is a college professor who really wants a particular faculty position, and in a moment of insanity tells his interviewer that he’s engaged. Of course, now he needs to produce a fiancée when he goes back to give a talk on his research. He asks Daisy, his downstairs neighbor, because the card over her mailbox reads “Stories Told, Ideas Illuminated; Unreal but Not Untrue.” (Also, she’s friends with one of his ex-girlfriends, who vouches for her. He hasn’t lost his mind that badly.) Daisy’s broke and stuck in a rut with her painting, and agrees to help to get her back rent paid.

Pretending to be a couple is of course one of the standard ways romances throw together their protagonists, and there’s nothing wrong with that when it’s well done, as it is here. Crusie often paces her stories differently than other category romances (the general rule is, when in doubt, flip to the very middle of the book, because that’s probably where the characters go to bed for the first time), letting the story develop around the characters and their relationship with each other. Linc gets the job, Daisy goes home, and that would have been the end of it, even though they miss each other:

. . . Daisy would have loved the house. As he worked patching and painting the walls, he could see her trailing her long skirts across the gleaming living room floor . . . , sitting on the solid oak stairs and explaining the world to him through the ornate railing. Once he found himself holding an imaginary argument with her as he painted, convincing her that it was practical to paint all the walls white. The really irritating thing about that hadn’t so much been that he caught himself doing it as it was that she’d been winning. . . . And it was his fault; he’d started it with that first dumb story he’d told about his fiancée. Everything Daisy had said about stories came back to him: the stories you told were unreal but not untrue; she wasn’t really there, but she was everywhere.

He sighed and kept on painting, and when he moved his chrome and leather furniture into the big old rooms, he knew what Daisy would say, and he had a feeling she was right, so it was a damn good thing she wasn’t there to say it.

But of course circumstances bring them back together, and they learn about themselves and each other and how to accommodate their differences, and about the power and danger of the stories that people create about their lives. And there’s humor and good friendships and the trademark slightly deranged animals and a happy ending, and it’s all good.

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Block, Lawrence: Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, The

Another early Lawrence Block book, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. This is the first Evan Tanner novel, and as the title suggests, a head injury in the Korean War means that Tanner doesn’t sleep. He spends his time reading, learning, and writing people’s theses and dissertations for them to earn money. He is also a hopeless devotee of lost causes. From a conversation with a girlfriend and a thesis he’s writing, he puts together a plan to recover $3 million in hidden gold from Armenia.

It’s a daft premise, but an amusing one, though the books aren’t humorous the way the Bernie ones are. Alas, this was another example of books being wrong for people through no fault of their own: Tanner’s hopeless causes include things like the Flat Earth Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Libertarian League—but also include the Society for a Free Croatia, the Serbian Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, etc., etc., and he ends up calling on most of them to get across Europe. At one point he talks of intending to bestow some of the gold on the IRA (despite a Republican sympathizer telling him “You’ll want to think that over. What would those bloody fools do with so much gold? They’d be after blowing up all of Belfast, and all be getting into trouble”), and at another he unwittingly foments a short-lived revolution in Macedonia.

This is not exactly the kind of thing I was looking to read about. (I’d decided to save the re-reads of the other Liaden books for when the next one came out.)

There were several Tanner books written in the 1960s, and then another one a few years ago; I might pick up the most recent, but probably not for a while.

[Addendum: I picked this up to bring it back to the library and noticed the back cover copy. Boy, who writes these things? Unlike No Score, this at least gets the genre right, but it was apparently written by someone who’d never actually read the book. “Smuggling [a ravishing blonde] across the border of her native country”? I don’t think the girlfriend is even mentioned again after Tanner decides to go after the gold; she certainly doesn’t come with him.]

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Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: (05-06) Pilots Choice (omnibus of Local Custom and Scout’s Progress)

Another Liaden omnibus, Pilots Choice by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. This is two novels about the parents of some of the protagonists in Partners in Necessity and Plan B.

First, let me say that I can’t look at the cover of this book. While I like the cover for Partners far & away the best of the reprints, it’s not so much the image as the grating lack of an apostrophe anywhere in the title (choice of a pilot, or of pilots, it’s possessive, damnit).

Second, readers of the previously-published volumes should be aware these are more like Conflict of Honors than the others, being standalones concerned, in varying degrees, with a romance and with someone coming into their own. Local Custom opens with Er Thom yos’Galan being told that he must enter into an arranged marriage to produce his heir, for the good of the clan. (A particularly absurd two-part first name; I can deal with Val Con, but Er Thom sounds like his parents were afflicted with indecision at the naming ceremony.) He goes to find the woman he met three years ago, Anne Davis, and has never forgotten—intending only to tell her that he loved her, before he has the memory of her removed. To find out that she had a son from their relationship.

Much cultural baggage is added to the plot at this point, as the lovers agonize over what’s going to happen to Shan, their son, and to them. Personally, I found some of the agonizing a bit overwrought at times, especially when I wanted to shake them and say, “Just talk to each other!”—though to be fair, a lot of the misunderstandings sprung from the sort of cultural baggage you hardly know is there.

I enjoyed Scout’s Progress more. Aelliana Caylon is a brilliant mathematician who teaches Scouts (explorers) about the practical implications of the math behind piloting and the faster-than-light drive. She’s also abused and thoroughly cowed by her brother, a nasty cruel piece of work who is unfortunately heir to the clan. Realizing at the start of the book she has to leave, she finds herself winning a Jumpship in a card game. She meets Daav yos’Phelium while working for her Pilot’s license, so she can escape the planet. The focus of the book is on Aelliana coming out of her shell and learning to excel at piloting and having friends; the romance is well done and far less wrenching.

I liked this one a lot, but unfortunately, my knowledge of subsequent events put a bit of a damper on things (Aelliana get assassinated while Val Con is still fairly young, and Daav disappears). Also, the lifemates things that I complained about in Plan B is here as well, in both stories, and it still bothers me: it seems to be a manifestation of One True Destined Love of a Lifetime, which I frankly regard as a dangerous myth. (Then again, I might be reacting more than I would normally to this because having my best-beloved 200 miles away makes me cranky . . . )

One last thing. Er Thom and Daav seem to me to sound awfully like their sons (or rather the other way ’round, I suppose); it was a bit disconcerting at times. I guess I’ll have to re-read the other two volumes to check. Oh, what a burden. *grin*

(I meant to add this to the note on Plan B and forgot. At the end of that book is a copy of Clan Korval’s Tree and Dragon seal (also visible at the authors’ website). It’s a perfectly nice seal, of course, and it’s not its fault that the Dragon looks like Aylee, an alien in the comic Sluggy Freelance. In her most recent phase, she eats potatoes (she used to eat humans) and then when she’s full, she changes shape—oh, and releases an EMP, too. She looks fairly like the Dragon in the strip with her first flight, and rather a lot like in the second-to-last panel of this strip, where she attacks a demon-possesed Gwynn. But Korval’s Dragon probably never went water-skiing . . . )

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Block, Lawrence: (204) The Topless Tulip Caper

Lawrence Block’s The Topless Tulip Caper is an affectionate homage to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books. Chip Harrison (first seen in No Score, a non-mystery) has been hired by Leo Haig, reclusive genius detective, to be his Archie:

“Simon What’s-his-name—”

“Barckover.”

“Barckover, right.” I was supposed to remember things like Barckover’s last name, Haig had told me, just as I was supposed to be able to repeat all conversations verbatim. If Archie Goodwin can do something, I’m supposed to train myself to do it, too. (Sometimes, let me tell you, Archie Goodwin gives me a stiff pain.) “Barckover,” I said again, carefully training my memory. “And Andrew Merganser—”

“You mean Mallard.”

“Well, I knew it was some kind of duck. The hell with Archie Goodwin, anyway.”

Indeed, Haig’s hired Chip in part because Chip’s a writer: “If it weren’t for Dr. Watson, he says, who would have heard of Sherlock Holmes? If Archie Goodwin never sat down at a typewriter, who would be aware of Nero Wolfe? Anyway, that’s why he hired me, to make Leo Haig The Detective a household phrase, and that’s how come you get to read all this.”

The first half or so of the book is quite amusing, laying out the conceit of the book and introducing the characters. (It’s a murder of tropical fish, which turns into a murder of a person. Did I mention that fish : Haig :: orchids : Nero Wolfe?) The second half is less so, as the freshness wears off. I think the weird little interlude with Ruthellen marked the turning point for me; I was going to say that it left a bad taste in my mouth, but that would be a really unfortunate phrase, so I’ll just say that I found it unpleasant. (There was something like it in No Score, which I forgot to mention then. Chip, perhaps because he’s a 1970s kind of guy, has an attitude towards sex that I’m just not so comfortable with.)

More importantly, as the book goes on Haig gets more and more like Nero Wolfe, which just points up the inescapable fact: Chip Harrison is no Archie Goodwin.

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