Author: katenepveu

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[personal] September 11, 2001

I was unable to get a phone call through to the local Red Cross here in New Haven this afternoon, so I thought I’d just go up there after class, if I ended up having class, and see if they were able to deal with the undoubted influx of volunteers right now. I went to grab the book I’d been reading last night, because I never go anywhere without a book if a wait is expected, when I realized that I just couldn’t read it anymore. Not because it wasn’t a good book, but because the main characters are fending off planetary invasion and serious combat looked to be imminent when I put it down last night. I was simply unable to deal with that right now, or possibly for a while. (The book is Plan B by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, sequel to Partners in Necessity, and if being unable to read it were the worst effect today’s had on my life, I would be thrilled. Needless to say, this is not the case, though I am fortunate in that most people I know seem to be accounted for, and the few I haven’t heard from yet are unlikely to have been hurt, as they weren’t that near the World Trade Center. I hope.)

This book log is going to divert abruptly now into a journal, because I feel like it. If you don’t like it, go away and come back some other time. And anyway, I didn’t end up reading anything fiction today because I found out in the meantime that two blood drives will be going on tomorrow.

An hour ago, I was curled up on a couch in the law school dining hall, eating a comfort bar of Haagen-Dazs and trying to decide if I was angry or not. I feel like I ought to be, but I can’t seem to get past the sick sinking feeling in my stomach every time those horrible images of the Towers collapsing replayed in my head. Which is often. (I stopped watching the TV news after about 11 a.m., because I could not bear to see that footage one more time. Even Challenger was not so sickening to me. Truly, I can only think of one or two other sights that would be so horrible—the main being watching various loved ones die in front of me while I was helpless, that level of horrible—and I can only hope with all the fervency I can muster that I never see anything like that again in my life.)

I don’t think I’m angry. It’s hard to say, because all the various bits of me seem to be in disarray. It’s almost a physical feeling of discomfort, as though nerve connections have loosened and my stomach has hopped onto a roller coaster just at free-fall and my lungs have shifted around to be pressed on by my rib cage and my heart is laboring under being squished by something else nearby. Concentrating has become the kind of effort I experience during migraines, and my eyes are showing a tendency to water for no apparent (immediate) reason.

When I manage to piece together my emotions, I think I’m scared and upset rather than angry. I’m upset at what’s already happened—I don’t think I need to elaborate on that—and I’m scared at what might happen next. Call me a pessimist, but even if, by some miracle, cool heads manage to prevail enough that retaliation is not taken out on innocent people—the least I think we will see is further shrinking of civil rights in America, as well as increased prejudice against people with Arab or Islamic origins. The last time we had federal “anti-terrorism” legislation, we ended up seriously curtailing the rights of convicted prisoners to seek post-conviction relief from the courts. Given the number of innocent people who have been recently exonerated while on death row, this should not be considered a good thing, even by those who would be happy to see the people behind today’s attacks executed. And that’s not even considering the further powers investigative agencies might gain, powers that might start out in use against terrorists, but if history is any guide, will be expanded to deal with all manner of domestic crime.

I want nothing more than to see the people responsible for today’s horrors brought to justice. I want this never to happen again. But I am scared of so many things: that this signals a new era of terrorist attacks on the U.S. (as far as I know, it’s damn hard to prevent attacks by people who are willing to die in the process), that the country will bomb someone innocent in the haste to show that we will not take this lightly (if anyone could doubt it!), that any last shred of hope for peace in the Middle East will vanish if this turns out to be related to the region, that the Constitution will get further trampled on in efforts to prevent more attacks (see “suicide attacks,” above), and that I will never feel safe again flying.

Looking at that list (I’m sure I could come up with more, too), I really ought to be angry at the people who have brought this upon all of us. But I can’t seem to be, yet. Perhaps later I will be able to move past the sickness and fear.

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McKinley, Robin: Spindle’s End

As promised, a review of Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley is now up.

I’d said that Spindle’s End was working in something of the same area as Howl’s Moving Castle, which probably deserves explaining. They’re both doing a low-key version of One for the Morning Glory‘s attitude toward stories; in this case, it’s that fairy tales have actual practical lessons to be learned. Thus, the second quote in the Spindle’s End review mentions bread turning into starlings, and in Howl’s Moving Castle “everyone knows” that the oldest of three children (such as Sophie) is doomed to fail when she sets out to seek her fortune. Of course, the plots are also based on fairy-tale-like situations, but with atypical elements stirred in.

For some reason, the prose also felt a bit similar to me. Upon thumbing through Howl’s Moving Castle, though, I can’t figure out why. Spindle’s End tends toward rich, long sentences, while Sophie’s narration doesn’t. I may have been misremembering Spindle’s End, or thinking of something else.

Perhaps now that I’ve got Spindle’s End out of my system (though it was enjoyable to do so, as I really like that book), I can get back to reducing my to-be-read pile . . .

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Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: (03.5) “Changeling”

I’m in the process of writing a review of Spindle’s End, which I finished last night, so more on that anon.

In the meantime, I read “Changeling,” by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, set in the same universe as Partners in Necessity. This is a short story originally printed in Absolute Magnitude and available electronically from Embiid Publishing; it tells the story of Ren Zel and how he came to be a pilot on the Dutiful Passage. It’s a perfectly fine story, and, well, I don’t have much more to say about it than that.

I do hope, though, that the numerous Liaden stories currently available in chapbook form will eventually be made available through electronic versions, or, preferably, a print collection (the chapbooks being considerably out of my price range). They apparently fill in some of the gaps I’d noticed in Partners in Necessity (like what the heck Priscilla’s exile was about), and while I still wish the authors had done a smoother job papering over those holes in the background, it’s nice to know that the stories exist somewhere.

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Jones, Diana Wynne: Howl’s Moving Castle

I wanted to like Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. A friend recommended it to me, the bit of the beginning I read in the bookstore had charm and felt a bit like John Barnes’ wonderful One for the Morning Glory, and having the protagonist turned into an old woman by an evil witch seemed like a promising start for a fantasy novel.

Unfortunately, there’s too much about this book that I just don’t believe. The first example came just a few hours after Sophie is enchanted:

A countryman came whistling down the lane toward her. A shepherd, Sophie thought, going home after seeing to his sheep. He was a well-set-up young fellow of forty or so. “Gracious!” Sophie said to herself. “This morning I’d have seen him as an old man. How one’s point of view does alter!”

I don’t know about anyone else, but if I were magically transformed into an elderly woman by an evil witch, I don’t think I’d be already thinking like an old woman on the very same day. I’d be much more likely to be surprised and offended when the shepherd called me “Mother”; even if my joints creak now, I’ve still got the same mind and experiences—twenty-odd years worth—as ever.

But that’s a small point, and I’m sure that I could have enjoyed the book as a whole if that were the only thing. It’s the ending that’s the real problem for me: I just don’t believe it. As those characters were written, the ending simply refuses to ring true for me. Which is a pity.

Perhaps I’ll re-read Spindle’s End next. McKinley’s working in something of the same area in that book, only in a way that I find much more satisfying.

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Pierce, Tamora: (203) Circle of Magic: Daja’s Book

I’d resolved, when I got back to school and moved my stuff out of storage, that I would start making a dent in the pile of unread books I owned. However, it’s not really the best time to read new things when you’ve had a migraine since Monday, are very tired, but can’t sleep yet because your thoughts are going around and around on a friggin’ hamster wheel of pain. (I actually read most of a book once while coming down with a migraine, Pat Murphy’s There and Back Again. I don’t think it would have been very good even without the migraine, though.)

Thus, I grabbed Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic: Daja’s Book nearly at random last night. As the title suggests, this is part of a series. At the beginning, four children (around 9 or 10 years old, I think) are rescued from various situations (Daja was the sole survivor of a shipwreck that killed her entire family, for instance) by a mage who realizes that they have undetected magical talents. Misfits in the temple community where they’re brought, they are moved into a cottage together with two of the temple dedicates. There, they become friends and start to explore their magic.

It sounds pretty generic put that way (and the titles don’t help), but these are really very well done. The four friends have craft or nature talents—Daja’s is metal work, Briar’s is plants, for instance—which are a nice change and quite soothing to read about. Pierce’s very earliest books (the Alanna series) had a whiff of Extruded Fantasy Product about them (mostly in the worldbuilding); the books quickly found their own voice, though, and the world here is concrete and well-realized. Pierce’s characters are always vivid and engaging, and I particularly enjoy the tight, central friendships in these books. Daja’s Book is the third of four in the series; there’s another series set a few years later, The Circle Opens, which is still in progress. Since the Circle books all stand alone, I’ve managed not to get sucked into buying these in hardcover, just for the sake of my budget (I admit, I did have to buy the latest in her other ongoing series, Squire, as soon as it hit the shelf). I do recommend all of Pierce’s books, though.

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Pratchett, Terry: (26) Thief of Time

I’d read Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time before when it came out, but I’d had the Apocalypse on my mind because of Good Omens, and as Thief features the Fifth Horseman, it seemed like a good pick.

This is the most recent of Pratchett’s many Discworld books and one of my favorites. The Discworld books are comfort books for me; they take our world and history, twist it X number of degrees (Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city, is about what London might have been around the Industrial Revolution, if, sometime prior, all the fantasy creatures had said, “Hey, we’re here and we want jobs.”), point up the absurdities inherent therein and then add some more, but—and this is the key point—as part of good stories with funny bits. The books can be loosely divided up into sub-series based on the main characters; this one is a Death/Susan book (Susan is the daughter of Death’s adopted daughter, and has stood in for Death in prior books. Genetics are a funny thing on the Discworld.). Death, on the Discworld, is your traditional skeleton with a scythe and a big white horse; the horse’s name is Binky, though, and Death is much more sympathetic to living things than some of the other things in the Discworld. Like the Auditors.

He recognized them. They were not life-forms. They were . . . nonlife-forms. They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell.

And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history, and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.

Intelligent life was, therefore, an anomaly. It made the filing untidy. The Auditors hated things like that. Periodically, they tried to tidy things up a little.

This time, they’ve found a human to make the first truly accurate clock. Why this means the Apocalypse, and who the Fifth Horseman is, and what the History Monks are going to do about it, and what happens when an Auditor takes on flesh, and why Nanny Ogg thinks it’s all gone myffic (“‘Mythic?’ said schoolteacher Susan. ‘Yep. With extra myff.'”), and whether there can be a perfect moment even with nougat (“a terrible thing to cover with chocolate, where it can ambush the unsuspecting”) . . . well, you’ll have to read it to find out.

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Wrede, Patricia C.: Mairelon the Magician; Magician’s Ward

After finishing The Grand Sophy, I was in the mood for more Regency novels, but didn’t have the energy for something new (between dreading the upcoming move back into school, moving, fretting about the mold on my stuff that had been in “climate controlled” storage, and being just plain tired). Patricia C. Wrede’s Mairelon the Magician and Magician’s Ward were just the thing.

These are set in the same Regency-London-with-magic as her charming Sorcery and Cecelia, co-written with Caroline Stevermer (a notoriously difficult to find book; if you find a copy cheap, grab it, because someone will want it, even if you don’t.). In Mairelon, the title character is a real magician pretending to be a fake one. He was framed for a theft from the Royal College of Wizards, and he’s trying to track down the items—with the help of Kim, a thief he caught breaking into his wagon and enlisted in the charade. A lot of other people also want to find the missing items, generating a number of absurd encounters where imposter upon thief upon eavesdropper upon plain old homicidal maniac all turn up and chase after a big silver platter. Oh, and did I mention that there are an unknown number of forgeries floating around as well?

This is a very silly and enjoyable book, and though I couldn’t quite keep track of everyone on the first time ’round, at the end there’s a “the detective solves the mystery and gives a speech to the parties explaining it all,” so fear not. At the end, Kim learns she has an aptitude for magic, and agrees to shed her boy’s disguise and become Mairelon’s ward and apprentice.

The sequel, Magician’s Ward, is both a more straightfoward story and a more typical Regency plot. A number of elements will be familiar to Heyer readers: the heroine with an unusual background being introduced to Society; the horrible straight-laced female relative to whom propriety is everything; and even a monkey (what is it about Regencies and monkeys?). Kim gets to manage all this while trying to help Mairelon figure out why someone keeps trying to break into his library, and how it’s connected to a mysterious attack on Mairelon . . .

These are both highly entertaining, with strong main characters, interesting details about the world and the magical system, and wit and charm. Heyer fans could do worse than to pick them up. (Mairelon is to be reprinted soon, but the books stand alone fairly well.)

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Heyer, Georgette: Grand Sophy, The

I sometimes say that a willingness to pore over the shelves of used bookstores is the surest sign that one is an optimist. Well, sometimes one’s optimism is rewarded. I visited some of my favorite stores in Boston today, and came away with 10 paperbacks for something around $20—including copies of Mirabile and Hellspark (I’m particularly pleased about Mirabile, as it’s already become one of my comfort books), a few hard-to-find things for friends, and the first of Elizabeth Moon’s Serrano series, Hunting Party (I’d read a few of the sequels and enjoyed them, though not enough to buy the first new).

I also picked up Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy, along with another Heyer, and read it on the subway & train on the way back. I’d often heard that this was a favorite of Heyer fans, and I certainly enjoyed it more than some of her others (say, Regency Buck), though not as much as The Unknown Ajax. Sophy puts the lie to the cliché that romance heroines are little weak-willed simpering things. Upon arriving in the Rivenhall family home and discovering that everyone, more or less, is unhappy, she promptly sets about rearranging things; it’s rather like watching a card trick, at the end of which the original relationships have been reshuffled into several different, and much happier, singles and couples. It’s a tribute to the skill of Heyer’s characterization that Sophy doesn’t become incredibly annoying while doing so. There is an unfortunate interlude with a Jewish moneylender; whatever the stereotype in Regency times may have been, Heyer was writing in 1950. Other than that, The Grand Sophy is very funny, with vivid characters and a nice, but not overwhelming, eye for period detail.

(Note to sf fans visiting Boston: if you stop in at Avenue Victor Hugo, take a minute to walk down Newbury to Spenser’s Mystery Bookshop. It has only a very small sf collection, but I seem to have good luck there; for instance, today I bought for a friend, very cheaply, one of Sheri Tepper’s very hard-to-find Marianne books, and a nice copy of The Face in the Frost to give to someone who’d like it. Also, the proprietor has been extremely helpful whenever I’ve been in.)

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Allston, Aaron: Doc Sidhe

Sometimes a book just happens to be wrong for a reader, through no fault of its own. Aaron Allston’s Doc Sidhe is one of those books.

I got this book on the strength of a review on rec.arts.sf.written. (I probably never would have picked it up otherwise, as the cover is terrible and the back copy isn’t so good, either.) It’s a fantasy homage to 1930’s pulp adventures, with elves and snappy clothes and big cars with running boards and something like tommy guns, and with the title character as the wise leader of a band of variously skilled people who are On the Side of Right. Harris Greene gets pulled from our world into the elven one, and falls in with Doc and his band.

Unfortunately, I kept mentally banging straight into another book when reading this, John M. Ford’s very excellent The Last Hot Time (which I will write a review of one of these days, honest). In that fantasy novel, a young man gets pulled into the household and employ of a wise leader in a place where there are elves and gangs and cool big cars and snappy clothes. Except that in The Last Hot Time, the young man’s referred to as Doc. And so, half the time we got a point of view from Doc Sidhe, usually just identified in the text as “Doc,” I’d get all confused and think he was the young outsider, not the wise leader.

This was not the best way to read a book. Especially since they’re not at all similar, otherwise.

This may indeed be a perfectly good book, but I was too distracted to really get involved. I may try it again. But first I’ll get this review of The Last Hot Time out of my system . . .

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Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: (01-03) Partners in Necessity (omnibus of Conflict of Honors; Agent of Change; Carpe Diem)

Finished the fat omnibus, Partners in Necessity by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. This consists of three previously-published novels in the Liaden universe, Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change, and Carpe Diem.

These remind me a little bit of the Mageworlds books, in that they’re (co-written) family-centered space opera with magic/paranormal bits. They aren’t exactly like, as they’re more, hmmm, straightforward than Mageworlds—that is, so far all of the people who look like bad guys, are. They also focus a bit more heavily on the emotional wounds and scars of the main characters. I really enjoyed them, though (as I do the Mageworlds books).

Conflict of Honors is first in chronological order, second in publication order, and a standalone about how two of the characters met. The next two, Agent of Change and Carpe Diem, start a sequence which is not yet completed (the next one, Plan B, is out now, and apparently the forthcoming I Dare will complete this sequence). I just have to quote from this review of Plan B by Christina Schulman, because I don’t think I can do better in giving the flavor:

These books, collectively known as the Liaden series, were full of shooting, being shot at, running away, suddenly pulling new psychic powers out of one’s ear to avoid being shot, and lots of whimsical dialog and passionate kissing in between the shooting bits. And giant turtles.

This sort of thing is a great deal of fun to read about (especially the giant turtles) . . .

Indeed, I strongly suspect the turtles are reader favorites; they’re certainly my favorites.

Anyway, the story started in Agent of Change focuses on Val Con, a Liaden deep-cover operative who has got some serious problems with his head, and Miri, a Terran ex-mercenary who’s fallen afoul of organized crime. Evil-doers are revealed, some of them are thwarted, plots and dangers ensue, and much fun is had by the reader. There are a few minor problems; once in a while, the background material isn’t as clear as it could be, and the dreaded Foreign Language Apostrophes appear, and every so often the prose clunks a bit (I’d been putting off buying this for a while, because every time I flipped it open in the bookstore, I couldn’t quite get into it. Mostly this goes away once you get into the story.). Also, be aware the omnibus does end on somewhat of a cliffhanger (“Plan B in now in effect.”). These are minor quibbles, though; they’re great fun and I recommend them.

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