Reading roundup
Trip to Oregon was good, but I'm too tired and braindead to talk about it at the moment. So, instead, reading roundup, which was all written up prior to today:
28. Sandman #11: Endless Nights (by Neil Gaiman) -- I hadn't realized this was written at such a remove after the original series. I enjoyed some of the chapters more than others, as expected, but overall liked it quite a lot. Mostly because I find Morpheus one of the less interesting Endless, and so it was nice to have some of the others take center stage for once.
Death ("Death and Venice") -- liked very much the conceit of the island reliving the same day over and over (it seems like something Borges would write about) and how it is revealed. Liked the interwoven story of the guy with a crush on Death, too. I keep trying to figure out what Sergei's background is. His name is obviously Russian, but he's got cousins in Italy, and he is now an assassin-soldier type for some military. Hm. Any thoughts? Also, totally randomly, the day the Count keeps reliving, May 23, is L's birthday. Freaky?
Desire ("What I've Tasted of Desire") -- I like the story, but I LOVE the art! It looks like an ornate Tarot deck! And it's perfect art for the Desire chapter. I very much like the story of the enemy "visitors" and how Kara takes care of them -- it sounds like a proper myth/saga.
Dream ("The Heart of a Star") -- eh. Figures, don't it, that the Dream chapter should be one of my least favorite. Not because of him, although I do tire of his constant woman troubles. More because the parliament of stars thing was kind of silly. Usually Gaiman can pull of silly just fine, but this just didn't work as well for me. I do like finding out why Dream has a problem with Desire (and am sort of amused Desire was his favorite sibling before that), and seeing Delirium as Delight, and meeting the first Despair. Those were the cool aspects. The rest of it -- eh. Having read some of the annotations, part of it might be that I'm missing some inside jokes, but that seems to be always the case with Gaiman and yet it never interfered with my enjoyment before.
Despair ("Fifteen Portraits of Despair") -- yeah, I'm glad they decided to do only 15 and not 25. The one that stands out the most is the one with the cats (dear god, EW), but also memorable was the one with the botched double suicide, and the priest, and the guy fired from his job, and OMGsodepressingallofthemWAH. I still don't care much for Despair herself, but Gaiman can certainly *write* despair.
Delirium -- the story's a bit madder than I prefer to follow, but it was neat enough, the collection and cavalcade of the delirious, and Barnabas humoring them. I don't really have much more to say. I do like the hopeful ending, though, with the catatnoic girl waking up as well as Delirium herself being rescued.
Destruction ("On the Peninsula") -- the idea of excavating the future is rather neat, but I find the actual plot a good deal less interesting than in, say, Death or Desire's stories. However, I do not care, because it's got Destruction being himself and I've got a massive crush on him, and more actual Delirium than the Delirium story. So it is quite lovely all the same.
Destiny -- well... I find Destiny the least interesting of the lot, and his story didn't intrigue me or endear him to me any further. It's all rather abstract, which just doesn't work for me. I read somewhere online that Destiny is the only one of the Endless who is not Gaiman's creation. I wonder if that's part of what fails to appeal to me about him -- not that he is not Gaiman's creation, which I didn't know before, but that maybe Gaiman treats him differently since he is a pre-established character. But I know that's the case with Cain and Abel, too, and I liked those guys quite a lot. So it's probably just an unexplained personal preference thing.
Not related to this particular volume, but the link I had for Sandman annotations went dead not long ago, so here's a live one.
29. Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead -- well, go figure, I didn't hate it. I don't know if this book really is that much better than >Predator (after which I'd pretty much decided to give up on the Kay Scarpetta books) or if my expectations were just so lowered by that book that Book of the Dead seemed readable by comparison. Anyway, I read it and kind of even enjoyed it, in spite of the continuing seas of angst. Scarpetta still irritates me, and I don't really get Benton -- I can't say that I had a particularly strong feel for him as a character ever, but he seemed to be doing and thinking things that didn't make much sense for a supposedly intelligent and perceptive individual. His jealousy of Captain Pomo didn't make any sense -- surely he should know Kay enough to be able to tell the Captain's advances were unwelcome, and how could he not understand, after all these years, that Scarpetta would naturally care about Marino a lot? I used to like Lucy a lot more when she was a seriously messed up little kid / young woman finding her way in the FBI -- the current Mary-Sue-ified, glamorous-independently-wealthy version has been annoying me for several books. Finding out (implied) that there's some childhood abuse in there (and Aunt Kay never knew) might have been interesting if I weren't so irritated with the character.
Which basically leaves Marino. I have always liked Marino best of the lot of them, I think, and his gradual... deconstruction in the last book(s) was pretty painful. I hated the way he was in the beginning of Book of the Dead and then came the attempted-rape scene and... I didn't hate it. I fully expected to, but, after several books of Scarpetta-induced angst and moping and resentment, it was almost a relief to have it finally come to a head. And, between all that, and Dr Self's manipulation and Shandy's goading, and the testosterone crap, and being drunk, I could kind of see how it would happen. I could buy the resolution and the aftermath (though Lucy's reaction to the whole thing made me like her even less), but I am kind of pissed that Cornwell left Marino's fate as a cliffhanger. Not that I think she would really kill him off, but I do want to know what's going on with him.
Oh, yeah, and Dr Self. You know, I really liked Temple Gault as a recurring villain/nemesis -- he was pretty damn scary. But Dr Self is just annoying. She is so obviously a psychopath, but a pretty boring one. One the one hand, she is too petty to be truly scary. On the other hand, she is way too far-fetched to be realistic. End result = boring.
I called Rose dying (and I liked the way Scarpetta dealt with it, by trying to do something, fix it somehow) and also Rose seeing the coroner before Scarpetta found out either. Pity -- I rather like Rose. I also figured out the bad guy's father was the McLean head honcho, pretty early on, and guessed his relationship with Dr Self, and thus more-or-less deduced the parentage of the bad guy. More or less, because I thought it was a pretty ridiculous setup and was hoping I was wrong. I didn't see Shandy and the dead little boy being connected to them, too -- but that's because it's a terribly ridiculous development.
I did like Bull, Scarpetta's new handyman, and thought the funeral parlour guy made a pretty good red herring.
30. Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty -- there are all kind of people whose taste I respect who rave about this book, and there are some other folks whose taste I also respect who hated it. I liked it, on the whole. Even I, knowing very little about Victorian England, could see all sorts of historical inaccuracies in there, but that's not the sort of thing that bugs me, so whatever. I liked Gemma well enough, and quite liked Felicity as a character. She "wish[es] to be too powerful to ignore," which is a neat sort of ambition in a teenage girl, and Gemma says of her: "It's a bit disconcerting, this side of Felicity, like having a pet shark that thinks itself a goldfish" and "I had thought Felicity dangerous a moment ago, when she felt powerful. I was wrong. Wounded and powerless, she is more dangerous than I could imagine."
And I liked the unlikely friendship that develops between the four girls -- less because it's unlikely and more because it really does take a long time for them to come together properly, and there is still jealousy between Pippa and Gemma for Felicity's affection and it takes a long time for Ann's outcast status to fade, and it's not an instant melding of four different people into BFFs. The plot is not the most original thing ever -- I easily foresaw Mary Dowd's and Circe's real identity, and the magic and conflict were pretty much run of the mill. But it was still quite an enjoyable book. Also, Gemma/Felicity apple scene... I wonder if that gets dealt with any further in the sequels (though I doubt it).
Speaking of sequels, they are Rebel Angels and The Sweet, Far Thing. I think our library has one of them, at least. I'd like to check them out.
31. Seena B. Frost, SoulCollage -- no need to review, as all my thoughts on this are tagged under soulcollage.
32. Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane -- etrangere, I've come to the conclusion that, the way some people have personal shoppers, you should be my personal reader :D. Which is to say, I really enjoyed this book, which I only read because of your rec.
The writing irritated me a bit -- Hambly seems to want to use the most obscure word she can find in this one for some reason (I mean, "salaam"? "cicisbeo" (I admit, I had to look that one up, though of course I could infer the meaning from context). That's just showing off). There was also quite a bit more repetition than necessary -- in the first two pages, we are told that Jenny lived her whole life in the Winterlands no less than three times, which is two times too many by my count -- and quite a bit more description, in general, and the prose was not so scintillating that it made me want to read all that stuff -- I had to constantly rein myself in when my natural tendency was just to skip to the next line of dialogue. The description of the battle between Jenny on dragonback and giant!cockroach!Zyerne was actually pretty boring. I also felt like the narration was not sufficiently tight third person -- not because we got other people's thoughts -- we didn't -- but because a lot of the vocabulary Jenny-narrator used I couldn't really see coming from Jenny. Would she (having grown up in the hardship and squalor of the Winterlands) really use "schoolboy" as a metaphor/simile/adjective? And what's with the bit of stray French towards the end? But that's relatively minor stuff -- I don't read fantasy for the luminous writing, unless it's Ursula LeGuin and Patricia McKillip. But there were two lines that stood out for me that I really liked: "boys she had borne without intention of raising, boys she should have loved, she thought, either more or less than she had" and "Grief closed her throat, the grief of roads untaken, of doors not opened, of songs unsung -- the human grief of choice."
The worldbuilding was fun if not deep across the board. The interratial relations aspect was actually handled rather well, I thought -- with the gnomes, primarily, with prejudice and suspicion on both sides, and also the horrible Meewinks (cannibalistic hobbits, OMG!). What I really, really liked was the pervasive sense of knowledge irretrievably lost, only available in semi-comprehensible snatches. There's a special kind of nostalgia that comes with that, and I thought it was really well realized. I do have one quibble with the worldbuilding -- well, it's actually less a quibble, even, than a pet peeve. So, with high fantasies, you get a whole continuum of degrees of correspondance to the real world. On the one hand, you have Guy Gavriel Kay's pseudo-histories and Carey's Kushiel Legacy books, which deal with real-world places reimaged as fantasy settings, with the world pretty much a real-world AU. On the other end, you've got worlds that bear no intentional resemblance to European politics and geography at all. And then you've got things like ASOIAF, which obviously connects with European history in some ways, but just as obviously is a different world entirely. It took me a while to get used to this with ASOIAF, btw, but I have now, and it doesn't bother me anymore. The path Dragonsbane takes still bothers me -- so Winterlands are Scotland, I guess, with the plaids and the accents and stuff. And there are Jews ("moneychangers in the black gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wanderer's Children, forbiddent o own land"), and, as I said, French, and it looks like the god Saramendes ("with his lyre and his bow") corresponds to Apollo, and the names of the ancient writers do all sound Latin and Greek like. But what it adds up to, it seemed to me, was too much correspondance to Europe in unrelated details, and not as much in the meat/feel of it. Like, the business with dying their hair -- that was a nice touch, but didn't seem to fit with all the real world elements that had been plunked down in the world. It just didn't feel... cohesive to me, which bugged me.
The plot... Well, king ensnared by evil enchantress is not exactly new, and the dragon thing is as old as Beowulf at least, but it was a pleasant enough twist on a well-trod path. Of course, I saw the revelation about Gareth's identity coming (and was a bit disappointed that neither John nor Jenny did -- come on, they are both pretty smart... I'm willing to cut them some slack for being preoccuppied, but still). The pacing was a bit odd in the second half of the book, and it dragged on for me (probably because John was mostly out of the action).
The thing I really, really liked though were the characters. Well, Zyerne is a stock villainess, and Gareth is a bit too bumbling and pathetic to be truly believable, but John and Jenny are great. John is extremely lovable -- I love his joyful geekiness and rock-solid decency and ready sense of humour, and the temper which prevents him from being too perfect. His willingness to play dancing bear for the court, his way with naming animals (especially the mule Clivy), all the little details are great. And of course, his willingness to let Jenny go, make her own decision, his choice not to 'bind' her with the names of their sons -- that earns a great deal of respect from me. His introduction -- quoting apocryphal texts and making kissy faces at pigs -- it, hands down, the best introduction of a hero EVER. (I also like that he is younger than Jenny by a few years -- you don't see enough couples with age difference going that way, if you ignore the mortal hero/Elf princess subst, anyway.) The only thing that felt like a false note to me was the running joke with the cooking -- too facile.
I don't love Jenny, but I find her a very interesting character. Not only is she a middle-aged woman, something you don't find often in fantasy, but the central tension that's set up between magic and love works very curiously. It's not a rare dichotomy in itself -- I mean, there's Ged and Tenar, off the top of my head, and all the other celibate wizards ever. But in Jenny's case, it's not resolved one way or another, in favor of magic or in favor of love, giving up the other, and it never finds a comfortable balance -- it's always a struggle for her. Demanding career vs stay-at-home motherhood and trying to balance the two? Pretty cool, in a fantasy novel. And because there's constantly that tension, it brings real anguish to the scenes where she is trying to second-guess whether if she had not loved John and "wasted" her time with him, she would have enough magic to save his life. Very, very interesting. Actually, the very fact that she feels herself insufficiently powerful (at least at first) -- after years of study and effort -- is very refreshing in a genre where the convention is for ingenues who find themselves with way more power than they know what to do with/how to control. More realistic, too. That's why I was more than a little disappointed where the dragon-healing woke all these mad skillz in her -- a mage painfully aware of his/her limitations is just more interesting. Also, Jenny's jealousy, residual bitterness from her childhood, her thoughts when John is lying near death after battle with the dragon ("For a moment she felt so tired that she almost wished for his death, because it would require no further striving from her and threaten her with no further failure") all give her more dimension than most fantasy heroes acquire. I have to admit, I had a hard time buying her decision to abandon John and their sons and play dragon for a while. I'll say it's nicely foreshadowed by the scene between her and Trey where Jenny demonstrates the seduction of giving consent for changing your shape. But even if I think of it in terms of, "I'll never forgive myself if I pass this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by" -- I just can't believe she would do something like that without losing respect for her. And the fact that she came back doesn't negate that loss of respect.
I also liked Morkeleb the dragon -- the haughtiness ("She did not summon me!") and anger and treachery, and the way he has to struggle with learning to feel love and loss. I'm not sure I totally buy the strength of his attachment to Jenny, but if I accept that, the consequences and reactions are really neat.
The other thing I really liked about this book is that it started in what would normally be the happily ever after, and really focused on the pesent lives and not the flashback of the first dragon defeat, when John and Jenny had just met, which would be the normal fantasy territory. It reads like a sequel, and it's sort of great that it's not.
33. Diana Wynne Jones, Conrad's Fate
34. Diana Wynne Jones, The Pinhoe Egg -- I'll just talk about them together, because they are both Chrestomanci books and I read them back-to-back, which was fun. I've never read these two, though I read the books set around them by internal chronology. I find that I like superior teenage Christopher and grown-up dandy Christopher more than I liked him as a kid protagonist in The Lives of Christopher Chant (though I liked him OK there, too). Also, it's more fun to see him through the eyes of other people, like Conrad or Cat. I always like it when secondary characters criticize the protagonist -- and while Christopher is not the protagonist of Conrad's Fate, he is of the series, sort of, so it was neat to read the "ragging on Christopher" session between Conrad and Millie. Especially Millie, since she marries Christopher later in the series (after scoffing at the idea of running away to live together with him in this book) and Conrad's occasional (and well-warranted desire to slug him. The plot was pretty cute, with all the ridiculous twists and zany characters (I especially liked "Boris Prendergast", the pretend actor). I did find it difficult to believe that Gabriel DeWitt would not have checked out Millie's boarding school more closely, which was why she ran away, setting the whole set of events on Christopher's side in motion -- but if he had, there wouldn't be half a story, so... ok.
In the Pinhoe Egg, Christopher (now referred to simply as the Chrestomanci) is still my favorite character, but I also really liked Marianne (she is one of those rare things, a girl heroine who is smart and brave but not "spunky" -- but actually quiet and obedient in general, except when it goes deeply against her morals), and her brother Joe (the talented slacker who pretends to be a "disappointment" so the family would leave him alone). I also rather liked Gammer, for all the terrible things she did -- I have a thing for cantankerous and downright dangerous old women. She certainly seemed the most interesting character of the older generation of dwimmer-folk. I liked Cat okay -- he didn't make a huge impression on me in Charmed Life, because he was sort of hapless and carried along by other people's schemes, and that's still more or less how I feel about him after The Pinhoe Egg. He is a good kid, but not very interesting. The baby griffin plot left me rather cold, but I did like the magical disappearing cat very much, and Irene's odd servants. Actually the whole plot with the critters hidden behind the curtain and the semi-forgotten/perverted purpose of the Pinhoes and Farleighs' duty felt like kind of a stretch, but I liked the book overall. It ends a bit oddly -- just sort of trails off once the climactic part is over, but that's not a serious complaint.
Anyway, these are really fun books, and I think I may want to reread Charmed Life or see what other books by DWJ the library has...
I'm also about 2/3 of the way through The Hallowed Hunt and -- you've guessed it -- enjoying it more than I thought I would, which seems to be the way with all of LMB's Chalion-world books (three for three so far). I wonder why that is?
28. Sandman #11: Endless Nights (by Neil Gaiman) -- I hadn't realized this was written at such a remove after the original series. I enjoyed some of the chapters more than others, as expected, but overall liked it quite a lot. Mostly because I find Morpheus one of the less interesting Endless, and so it was nice to have some of the others take center stage for once.
Death ("Death and Venice") -- liked very much the conceit of the island reliving the same day over and over (it seems like something Borges would write about) and how it is revealed. Liked the interwoven story of the guy with a crush on Death, too. I keep trying to figure out what Sergei's background is. His name is obviously Russian, but he's got cousins in Italy, and he is now an assassin-soldier type for some military. Hm. Any thoughts? Also, totally randomly, the day the Count keeps reliving, May 23, is L's birthday. Freaky?
Desire ("What I've Tasted of Desire") -- I like the story, but I LOVE the art! It looks like an ornate Tarot deck! And it's perfect art for the Desire chapter. I very much like the story of the enemy "visitors" and how Kara takes care of them -- it sounds like a proper myth/saga.
Dream ("The Heart of a Star") -- eh. Figures, don't it, that the Dream chapter should be one of my least favorite. Not because of him, although I do tire of his constant woman troubles. More because the parliament of stars thing was kind of silly. Usually Gaiman can pull of silly just fine, but this just didn't work as well for me. I do like finding out why Dream has a problem with Desire (and am sort of amused Desire was his favorite sibling before that), and seeing Delirium as Delight, and meeting the first Despair. Those were the cool aspects. The rest of it -- eh. Having read some of the annotations, part of it might be that I'm missing some inside jokes, but that seems to be always the case with Gaiman and yet it never interfered with my enjoyment before.
Despair ("Fifteen Portraits of Despair") -- yeah, I'm glad they decided to do only 15 and not 25. The one that stands out the most is the one with the cats (dear god, EW), but also memorable was the one with the botched double suicide, and the priest, and the guy fired from his job, and OMGsodepressingallofthemWAH. I still don't care much for Despair herself, but Gaiman can certainly *write* despair.
Delirium -- the story's a bit madder than I prefer to follow, but it was neat enough, the collection and cavalcade of the delirious, and Barnabas humoring them. I don't really have much more to say. I do like the hopeful ending, though, with the catatnoic girl waking up as well as Delirium herself being rescued.
Destruction ("On the Peninsula") -- the idea of excavating the future is rather neat, but I find the actual plot a good deal less interesting than in, say, Death or Desire's stories. However, I do not care, because it's got Destruction being himself and I've got a massive crush on him, and more actual Delirium than the Delirium story. So it is quite lovely all the same.
Destiny -- well... I find Destiny the least interesting of the lot, and his story didn't intrigue me or endear him to me any further. It's all rather abstract, which just doesn't work for me. I read somewhere online that Destiny is the only one of the Endless who is not Gaiman's creation. I wonder if that's part of what fails to appeal to me about him -- not that he is not Gaiman's creation, which I didn't know before, but that maybe Gaiman treats him differently since he is a pre-established character. But I know that's the case with Cain and Abel, too, and I liked those guys quite a lot. So it's probably just an unexplained personal preference thing.
Not related to this particular volume, but the link I had for Sandman annotations went dead not long ago, so here's a live one.
29. Patricia Cornwell, Book of the Dead -- well, go figure, I didn't hate it. I don't know if this book really is that much better than >Predator (after which I'd pretty much decided to give up on the Kay Scarpetta books) or if my expectations were just so lowered by that book that Book of the Dead seemed readable by comparison. Anyway, I read it and kind of even enjoyed it, in spite of the continuing seas of angst. Scarpetta still irritates me, and I don't really get Benton -- I can't say that I had a particularly strong feel for him as a character ever, but he seemed to be doing and thinking things that didn't make much sense for a supposedly intelligent and perceptive individual. His jealousy of Captain Pomo didn't make any sense -- surely he should know Kay enough to be able to tell the Captain's advances were unwelcome, and how could he not understand, after all these years, that Scarpetta would naturally care about Marino a lot? I used to like Lucy a lot more when she was a seriously messed up little kid / young woman finding her way in the FBI -- the current Mary-Sue-ified, glamorous-independently-wealthy version has been annoying me for several books. Finding out (implied) that there's some childhood abuse in there (and Aunt Kay never knew) might have been interesting if I weren't so irritated with the character.
Which basically leaves Marino. I have always liked Marino best of the lot of them, I think, and his gradual... deconstruction in the last book(s) was pretty painful. I hated the way he was in the beginning of Book of the Dead and then came the attempted-rape scene and... I didn't hate it. I fully expected to, but, after several books of Scarpetta-induced angst and moping and resentment, it was almost a relief to have it finally come to a head. And, between all that, and Dr Self's manipulation and Shandy's goading, and the testosterone crap, and being drunk, I could kind of see how it would happen. I could buy the resolution and the aftermath (though Lucy's reaction to the whole thing made me like her even less), but I am kind of pissed that Cornwell left Marino's fate as a cliffhanger. Not that I think she would really kill him off, but I do want to know what's going on with him.
Oh, yeah, and Dr Self. You know, I really liked Temple Gault as a recurring villain/nemesis -- he was pretty damn scary. But Dr Self is just annoying. She is so obviously a psychopath, but a pretty boring one. One the one hand, she is too petty to be truly scary. On the other hand, she is way too far-fetched to be realistic. End result = boring.
I called Rose dying (and I liked the way Scarpetta dealt with it, by trying to do something, fix it somehow) and also Rose seeing the coroner before Scarpetta found out either. Pity -- I rather like Rose. I also figured out the bad guy's father was the McLean head honcho, pretty early on, and guessed his relationship with Dr Self, and thus more-or-less deduced the parentage of the bad guy. More or less, because I thought it was a pretty ridiculous setup and was hoping I was wrong. I didn't see Shandy and the dead little boy being connected to them, too -- but that's because it's a terribly ridiculous development.
I did like Bull, Scarpetta's new handyman, and thought the funeral parlour guy made a pretty good red herring.
30. Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty -- there are all kind of people whose taste I respect who rave about this book, and there are some other folks whose taste I also respect who hated it. I liked it, on the whole. Even I, knowing very little about Victorian England, could see all sorts of historical inaccuracies in there, but that's not the sort of thing that bugs me, so whatever. I liked Gemma well enough, and quite liked Felicity as a character. She "wish[es] to be too powerful to ignore," which is a neat sort of ambition in a teenage girl, and Gemma says of her: "It's a bit disconcerting, this side of Felicity, like having a pet shark that thinks itself a goldfish" and "I had thought Felicity dangerous a moment ago, when she felt powerful. I was wrong. Wounded and powerless, she is more dangerous than I could imagine."
And I liked the unlikely friendship that develops between the four girls -- less because it's unlikely and more because it really does take a long time for them to come together properly, and there is still jealousy between Pippa and Gemma for Felicity's affection and it takes a long time for Ann's outcast status to fade, and it's not an instant melding of four different people into BFFs. The plot is not the most original thing ever -- I easily foresaw Mary Dowd's and Circe's real identity, and the magic and conflict were pretty much run of the mill. But it was still quite an enjoyable book. Also, Gemma/Felicity apple scene... I wonder if that gets dealt with any further in the sequels (though I doubt it).
Speaking of sequels, they are Rebel Angels and The Sweet, Far Thing. I think our library has one of them, at least. I'd like to check them out.
31. Seena B. Frost, SoulCollage -- no need to review, as all my thoughts on this are tagged under soulcollage.
32. Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane -- etrangere, I've come to the conclusion that, the way some people have personal shoppers, you should be my personal reader :D. Which is to say, I really enjoyed this book, which I only read because of your rec.
The writing irritated me a bit -- Hambly seems to want to use the most obscure word she can find in this one for some reason (I mean, "salaam"? "cicisbeo" (I admit, I had to look that one up, though of course I could infer the meaning from context). That's just showing off). There was also quite a bit more repetition than necessary -- in the first two pages, we are told that Jenny lived her whole life in the Winterlands no less than three times, which is two times too many by my count -- and quite a bit more description, in general, and the prose was not so scintillating that it made me want to read all that stuff -- I had to constantly rein myself in when my natural tendency was just to skip to the next line of dialogue. The description of the battle between Jenny on dragonback and giant!cockroach!Zyerne was actually pretty boring. I also felt like the narration was not sufficiently tight third person -- not because we got other people's thoughts -- we didn't -- but because a lot of the vocabulary Jenny-narrator used I couldn't really see coming from Jenny. Would she (having grown up in the hardship and squalor of the Winterlands) really use "schoolboy" as a metaphor/simile/adjective? And what's with the bit of stray French towards the end? But that's relatively minor stuff -- I don't read fantasy for the luminous writing, unless it's Ursula LeGuin and Patricia McKillip. But there were two lines that stood out for me that I really liked: "boys she had borne without intention of raising, boys she should have loved, she thought, either more or less than she had" and "Grief closed her throat, the grief of roads untaken, of doors not opened, of songs unsung -- the human grief of choice."
The worldbuilding was fun if not deep across the board. The interratial relations aspect was actually handled rather well, I thought -- with the gnomes, primarily, with prejudice and suspicion on both sides, and also the horrible Meewinks (cannibalistic hobbits, OMG!). What I really, really liked was the pervasive sense of knowledge irretrievably lost, only available in semi-comprehensible snatches. There's a special kind of nostalgia that comes with that, and I thought it was really well realized. I do have one quibble with the worldbuilding -- well, it's actually less a quibble, even, than a pet peeve. So, with high fantasies, you get a whole continuum of degrees of correspondance to the real world. On the one hand, you have Guy Gavriel Kay's pseudo-histories and Carey's Kushiel Legacy books, which deal with real-world places reimaged as fantasy settings, with the world pretty much a real-world AU. On the other end, you've got worlds that bear no intentional resemblance to European politics and geography at all. And then you've got things like ASOIAF, which obviously connects with European history in some ways, but just as obviously is a different world entirely. It took me a while to get used to this with ASOIAF, btw, but I have now, and it doesn't bother me anymore. The path Dragonsbane takes still bothers me -- so Winterlands are Scotland, I guess, with the plaids and the accents and stuff. And there are Jews ("moneychangers in the black gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wanderer's Children, forbiddent o own land"), and, as I said, French, and it looks like the god Saramendes ("with his lyre and his bow") corresponds to Apollo, and the names of the ancient writers do all sound Latin and Greek like. But what it adds up to, it seemed to me, was too much correspondance to Europe in unrelated details, and not as much in the meat/feel of it. Like, the business with dying their hair -- that was a nice touch, but didn't seem to fit with all the real world elements that had been plunked down in the world. It just didn't feel... cohesive to me, which bugged me.
The plot... Well, king ensnared by evil enchantress is not exactly new, and the dragon thing is as old as Beowulf at least, but it was a pleasant enough twist on a well-trod path. Of course, I saw the revelation about Gareth's identity coming (and was a bit disappointed that neither John nor Jenny did -- come on, they are both pretty smart... I'm willing to cut them some slack for being preoccuppied, but still). The pacing was a bit odd in the second half of the book, and it dragged on for me (probably because John was mostly out of the action).
The thing I really, really liked though were the characters. Well, Zyerne is a stock villainess, and Gareth is a bit too bumbling and pathetic to be truly believable, but John and Jenny are great. John is extremely lovable -- I love his joyful geekiness and rock-solid decency and ready sense of humour, and the temper which prevents him from being too perfect. His willingness to play dancing bear for the court, his way with naming animals (especially the mule Clivy), all the little details are great. And of course, his willingness to let Jenny go, make her own decision, his choice not to 'bind' her with the names of their sons -- that earns a great deal of respect from me. His introduction -- quoting apocryphal texts and making kissy faces at pigs -- it, hands down, the best introduction of a hero EVER. (I also like that he is younger than Jenny by a few years -- you don't see enough couples with age difference going that way, if you ignore the mortal hero/Elf princess subst, anyway.) The only thing that felt like a false note to me was the running joke with the cooking -- too facile.
I don't love Jenny, but I find her a very interesting character. Not only is she a middle-aged woman, something you don't find often in fantasy, but the central tension that's set up between magic and love works very curiously. It's not a rare dichotomy in itself -- I mean, there's Ged and Tenar, off the top of my head, and all the other celibate wizards ever. But in Jenny's case, it's not resolved one way or another, in favor of magic or in favor of love, giving up the other, and it never finds a comfortable balance -- it's always a struggle for her. Demanding career vs stay-at-home motherhood and trying to balance the two? Pretty cool, in a fantasy novel. And because there's constantly that tension, it brings real anguish to the scenes where she is trying to second-guess whether if she had not loved John and "wasted" her time with him, she would have enough magic to save his life. Very, very interesting. Actually, the very fact that she feels herself insufficiently powerful (at least at first) -- after years of study and effort -- is very refreshing in a genre where the convention is for ingenues who find themselves with way more power than they know what to do with/how to control. More realistic, too. That's why I was more than a little disappointed where the dragon-healing woke all these mad skillz in her -- a mage painfully aware of his/her limitations is just more interesting. Also, Jenny's jealousy, residual bitterness from her childhood, her thoughts when John is lying near death after battle with the dragon ("For a moment she felt so tired that she almost wished for his death, because it would require no further striving from her and threaten her with no further failure") all give her more dimension than most fantasy heroes acquire. I have to admit, I had a hard time buying her decision to abandon John and their sons and play dragon for a while. I'll say it's nicely foreshadowed by the scene between her and Trey where Jenny demonstrates the seduction of giving consent for changing your shape. But even if I think of it in terms of, "I'll never forgive myself if I pass this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by" -- I just can't believe she would do something like that without losing respect for her. And the fact that she came back doesn't negate that loss of respect.
I also liked Morkeleb the dragon -- the haughtiness ("She did not summon me!") and anger and treachery, and the way he has to struggle with learning to feel love and loss. I'm not sure I totally buy the strength of his attachment to Jenny, but if I accept that, the consequences and reactions are really neat.
The other thing I really liked about this book is that it started in what would normally be the happily ever after, and really focused on the pesent lives and not the flashback of the first dragon defeat, when John and Jenny had just met, which would be the normal fantasy territory. It reads like a sequel, and it's sort of great that it's not.
33. Diana Wynne Jones, Conrad's Fate
34. Diana Wynne Jones, The Pinhoe Egg -- I'll just talk about them together, because they are both Chrestomanci books and I read them back-to-back, which was fun. I've never read these two, though I read the books set around them by internal chronology. I find that I like superior teenage Christopher and grown-up dandy Christopher more than I liked him as a kid protagonist in The Lives of Christopher Chant (though I liked him OK there, too). Also, it's more fun to see him through the eyes of other people, like Conrad or Cat. I always like it when secondary characters criticize the protagonist -- and while Christopher is not the protagonist of Conrad's Fate, he is of the series, sort of, so it was neat to read the "ragging on Christopher" session between Conrad and Millie. Especially Millie, since she marries Christopher later in the series (after scoffing at the idea of running away to live together with him in this book) and Conrad's occasional (and well-warranted desire to slug him. The plot was pretty cute, with all the ridiculous twists and zany characters (I especially liked "Boris Prendergast", the pretend actor). I did find it difficult to believe that Gabriel DeWitt would not have checked out Millie's boarding school more closely, which was why she ran away, setting the whole set of events on Christopher's side in motion -- but if he had, there wouldn't be half a story, so... ok.
In the Pinhoe Egg, Christopher (now referred to simply as the Chrestomanci) is still my favorite character, but I also really liked Marianne (she is one of those rare things, a girl heroine who is smart and brave but not "spunky" -- but actually quiet and obedient in general, except when it goes deeply against her morals), and her brother Joe (the talented slacker who pretends to be a "disappointment" so the family would leave him alone). I also rather liked Gammer, for all the terrible things she did -- I have a thing for cantankerous and downright dangerous old women. She certainly seemed the most interesting character of the older generation of dwimmer-folk. I liked Cat okay -- he didn't make a huge impression on me in Charmed Life, because he was sort of hapless and carried along by other people's schemes, and that's still more or less how I feel about him after The Pinhoe Egg. He is a good kid, but not very interesting. The baby griffin plot left me rather cold, but I did like the magical disappearing cat very much, and Irene's odd servants. Actually the whole plot with the critters hidden behind the curtain and the semi-forgotten/perverted purpose of the Pinhoes and Farleighs' duty felt like kind of a stretch, but I liked the book overall. It ends a bit oddly -- just sort of trails off once the climactic part is over, but that's not a serious complaint.
Anyway, these are really fun books, and I think I may want to reread Charmed Life or see what other books by DWJ the library has...
I'm also about 2/3 of the way through The Hallowed Hunt and -- you've guessed it -- enjoying it more than I thought I would, which seems to be the way with all of LMB's Chalion-world books (three for three so far). I wonder why that is?