books I have read since coming home
or, alternate title, Still Not the Graduation Post
anyway I have read some books since coming home! None of them are the books I meant to read. Some of them I read years and years ago (heading into that scary "ten years ago" category that is starting to take over my life), some of them were new to me! One was even a translation of a French YA fantasy novel. They were all weirdly similar, as you will see by the cut tags.
I have discovered that I have trouble picking books off the shelves in the library unless I know the author or have heard good things about the author. This multiplies times a thousand bazillion when I leave the YA section and head for the adult fiction section. (Also, the adult fiction section seems to have more disguised-cover romance novels than previously expected.) I hit the jackpot yesterday--the little itty bitty library near my house had both How to Ditch Your Fairy and Liar, which I have been looking for FOREVER. Now, if only one of the branches would get in some of Maureen Johnson's books...
Anyway, Books I Have Read This Summer, Possible Spoilers Ahead, I Will Try to Warn You
Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
Zel is a retelling of, well, Rapunzel, and I can assure you that the upcoming made-for-boys-lulz Tangled will not resemble it in the slightest. It's a very short novel, but beautifully told, another example of how POV shifts (first to third, third to other third, Mother to Zel to Konrad and back) can work within a novel.
I first read this book in middle school and actually loved it, but failed to understand that it was taking place in Switzerland during the Reformation. So reading it again, it not only stood up to the test of time (one of those scary tests that some books, like QoA, can survive, while things like Hawksong don't quite make it), but was even better than I remembered, thanks to the subtle ways she ties in the surroundings, the seamless way she weaves the magic into the history. And Switzerland! Also the way it made me curious to know what rapunzel actually tastes like.
It is short, not entirely sweet, but very worth the reading.
The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
Dashti comes to the royal palace an orphan, her mother recently dead on the steppes and her yak sold to earn her a position. She gets swept up to being Lady Saren's maidservant on the same day Lady Saren's father exiles her to a tower for the next seven years, a situation Saren faces with tears and Dashti with spirited ways of killing the rats in their foodstores. Hint: The book covers more than a thousand days, but it doesn't quite reach the 2,500 or so days that seven years would take.
I am still on the fence with this book, and I read it like three weeks ago so I don't remember exact moments that bothered me, but overall it was good. I liked the way Hale used the diary format, and the attention she kept to explaining how and why Dashti had the time to write. The worldbuilding was fun--the nonsense healing songs, the lands each named for a god, and Dashti's strong faith in the gods and her awareness of each of them and their aspects at all time--I really enjoyed that. And I liked Dashti's way of looking at the world well enough, but I didn't really like the prose of the book. Like, on the one hand, the book had everything I needed to love it, and the ideas and worldbuilding and story were great, but overall I thought eh, it is all right. And it wasn't like eh, it is all right but really I am jealous of everything she did here, because while I admired it I just didn't feel wholly caught up in it.
On the plus side, if you buy the book, some of the proceeds go to the Heifer Project. And it really is well-done, my lack of absolutely loving it aside.
Quest for a Maid by Frances Mary Hendry
More historical fantasy, this time in medieval Scotland. Meg, daughter of a shipbuilder, opens the novel with a much-discussed opening line, grows up, and finds herself part of the entourage sent to fetch the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, the little Maid of Norway, which promises to be no easy thing.
A friend of mine made me read this book in fifth grade, and I was scared to reread it because I couldn't remember how it ended (hint: people die), but I picked it back up for the same reasons I picked Zel up, and it more than held up to rereading. As with Zel, I hadn't realized that the book took place in a historical setting--this one, around the same period as the film Braveheart, which led to me going NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NOT DE BRUS NOOOOOOOOOOOO within the first fifty pages--which made it even more compelling. The pace of the novel is steady, no faster than it needs to be, because Meg's world is whole and complete and everything that happens builds upon itself.
It's a wonderful book well-worth the reading of it,* and I highly recommend it for sinking your teeth into on a rainy day.
*for phrasing issues, see this novel and Rosemary Sutcliff
The Princetta [and the Captain] par Anne-Laure Bondoux
So this review on Amazon.com basically sums up my feelings about this novel, but I will give you my less coherent thoughts about it anyway. Malva, princetta of Galnicia (the only creatively-named location in the book), doesn't want to get married, she wants to have adventures! So she and her maidservant run away. But then it turns out they were betrayed, and so they have to survive a shipwreck, and then they find themselves in the mountains? And the maidservant falls in love with the chief and disappears for over half the novel, while Malva ends up in a harem. Meanwhile there's this guy named Orpheus who thought he had a brain condition that would keep him from being on a boat, but then it turns out his dad was lying about that because he's a treasonous pirate and thought if Orpheus find out he might report the old man to the king, which Orpheus would have done because he's a Nice Guy, so anyway his old man dies and people are sent out to find the Princetta, and eventually they rescue her from the harem and so then Malva and Orpheus and a lot of side characters who have the potential to be interesting have to sail through some mystical archipelago and I just wanted to follow the Hari-esque story of that maidservant that disappeared two hundred fifty pages ago, I'm sorry what's happening? Oh, more people are dying.
I finished this book out of stubbornness, and to see if perhaps the ending would be worth it (hint: Quark would have put it down about fifty pages in and never regretted it). It's about fifty potential novels crammed into one centered around a completely unlikeable heroine who basically abdicates her throne and then still expects to be treated like a princess (hint: they still treat her like a princess, and it never really occurs to her that maybe, just maybe, if she gave it up she should act like it). It was just frustrating to see so many wildly good ideas reduced to what the story ended up being. Although I was comforted to know that the trap of creating a fictional world analogous to this one via changing a couple letters in the names of things is not only an American problem. (Hands-down winner was the twin constellation of Astor and Ollux, I kid you not.) The author couldn't really make any characters into something fully-realized, so while I theoretically cared more about the side characters' storylines, I wouldn't have enjoyed reading about them in the author's hands.
Hey. Sometimes I read so you don't have to.
The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff
Prosper, son of Gerontius, is living in his father's house when Prince Gorthyn rides through seeking a white hart seen on their lands. Drawn to the prince, Prosper follows him to the hall of King Whose Name Has That "Double-D-Means-Th" Thing That I Always Forget, Frickin' Celtic/Welsh/Fffdlyrd Languages, where they discover that King Myndodd...og is mustering a Shining Company of Three Hundred Horseman in case the Saxons attack. Because, as Prosper points out on I kid you not page two, Companies of Three Hundred have had such luck in the past.
Aside from the part where I kept forgetting Prosper's name and am even now still dealing with residual speech patterns in my head, I LOVED THIS BOOK. I've never read Rosemary Sutcliff before because I've never been able to find her books before but oh my goodness, I finished it a couple of hours ago and it was so good. Thick and meaty and, first person but of course he notices the landscape it's not weird that he describes stuff so lovingly, especially when you have the sense that it has been so long since he's actually seen it. It's like sitting down at a tavern and listening to people trading tales to pass the time and then this veteran gets up and tells his story and everyone listens and. The characters and the language and the style and the setting and. I will now go onto the next paragraph, which I wrote earlier and which is more coherent than my non-spoiler-y flailing.
Reading this one, I was aware that it was historical fiction with that touch of fantasy, whereas when I read Zel and Quest for a Maid all those years ago I thought they were both taking place in my favorite kind of fantasy land, perhaps the hardest to achieve: the subtly-shifted reality. Because really, pre-Saxon Britain and medieval Scotland and even Reformation Switzlerand are as fantastic a setting as any made-up country you might create, if they are done well, if the mentalities and details of the people and places and things involved are portrayed in that real, thick, flesh-and-blood way that these three authors portray them. Prosper has side notes explaining why his people are so much more advanced than the Saxons, when it's something like eating oats instead of wheat; Konrad is restless in his castle, music and dancing forbidden by the new religious leaders; both Meg and Prosper accept the side-by-side, mostly peaceful existence of druids and priests, though Meg wonders if her sister may be forgiven, because it is of real concern. Sutcliff and Hendry also both excel at sinking into the language of their characters until I couldn't come away from the novel without minding to watch things or telling off the bairns for their foolishness when there's work that needs doing.
READ THIS BOOK, WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS POST.
I did take a detour, as part of my I Will Get My History From Biographies quest, and read
Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman by Donald Spoto
Spoto is very thorough, and I learned all sorts of cool things about Ingrid Bergman (there were home movies of her when she was three, which was, by the way, in 1918. Wild!), and he takes the time to look at situations and hypothesize, based on human nature as well as what her friends said, but occasionally he veers into apologist territory. I mean this is my first biography; we'll see how others go over the summer, as I learn more about the genre.
But anyway I learned more about Notorious the movie that I love so very very much (as does Robert Osborne, judging by how often they play it--Ingrid Bergman? Cary Grant? Alfred Hitchcock? Suspense films? Movies about Nazis? Post WWII movies? Movies that got investigated? IF THEY FIND A CONNECTION, THEY PLAY IT) and, like, it's fun to learn things that back up one's initial intuition of this is a great movie. I mean, I did have to learn how to catch things in it, but the first time I saw it I just knew, in my gut, that it was brilliant. AND THE KEY. CARY GRANT KEPT THE KEY, AND THEN HE GAVE IT TO INGRID, AND THEN THE SCENE IN THE BOOK WHERE INGRID GAVE IT TO HITCHCOCK HAD ME CRYING. Is it weird to cry when reading biographies? I will let you know.
Anyway, I'm an Ingrid Bergman geek, I loved it, it was very readable and accessible, so read it if you like.
I also got about forty pages into
Ranger's Apprentice: Book One: The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan
Note: For the longest time I thought these books were the Rick Riordan series everyone was talking about. Sorry, Rick. You deserve better.
Man I tried to give this book a chance. I gave it like five more chapters than it deserved. I mean, the first sentence is "Morgarath, Lord of the Mountains of Rain and Night, former Baron of Gorlan in the Kingdom of Araluen, looked out over his bleak, rainswept domain and, for perhaps the thousandth time, cursed." I mean, that's a ballsy, full-of-made-up-words opening. I couldn't not give it a shot.
The plot is good generic fantasy, which I am perfectly fine with/a total fan of/one day I will write a fantasy set in a D&D cutout world and you will like it anyway, and the characters are fine, whatever, but the prose just keeps tripping itself up to the point where I couldn't keep going. Most Glaring Example Which Made Me Put Down the Book, I'm Sure There Would Be Others:
The baron looked at the Faceless Protagonist. The baron likes to make jokes. Unfortunately he is the baron so no one ever gets that he is joking!
"Joke," said the baron.
"Sir?" said Faceless Protagonist, confused.
The baron sighed. No one ever got his jokes. "Serious Dismissal."
"Yes sir," said FP. He heard the baron muttering about jokes as he left.
Like, the basic idea that no one ever gets the baron's jokes, that's funny. Just having it happen repeatedly in conversation without ever explicitly pointing it out, ha-ha. Explaining it once, okay ha. But spending a sentence or more on it every time it happens is not funny. Also, why is Morgarath named Morgarath when everyone else in the book is named Will and Jenny and Alix and Bruce? Come on, people.
Anyway, skip it. I just thought I would reiterate that I enjoy Generic Fantasy and would like to write one and feel perfectly fine about it, as long as the prose doesn't get in the way.
phew that took a long time.
on my to-read list are the aforementioned Justine Larbalestier books, Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin (overall I am wary of the books my mom checks out, novelizations famous women in history/literature, because they usually turn out to be giant sexfests, but I trust LeGuin--see, cannot pick a book up off a shelf anymore), and Lauren Bacall and Steve Martin's autobiographies (see: Biographies Quest). Oh and I picked up Allegiance because it was made of love and I felt like reading a SW book I knew ended well. Oh and I should read The Great Gatsby. And Jane Eyre. And maybe work on my own novel.
You know, life as usual.
anyway I have read some books since coming home! None of them are the books I meant to read. Some of them I read years and years ago (heading into that scary "ten years ago" category that is starting to take over my life), some of them were new to me! One was even a translation of a French YA fantasy novel. They were all weirdly similar, as you will see by the cut tags.
I have discovered that I have trouble picking books off the shelves in the library unless I know the author or have heard good things about the author. This multiplies times a thousand bazillion when I leave the YA section and head for the adult fiction section. (Also, the adult fiction section seems to have more disguised-cover romance novels than previously expected.) I hit the jackpot yesterday--the little itty bitty library near my house had both How to Ditch Your Fairy and Liar, which I have been looking for FOREVER. Now, if only one of the branches would get in some of Maureen Johnson's books...
Anyway, Books I Have Read This Summer, Possible Spoilers Ahead, I Will Try to Warn You
Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
Zel is a retelling of, well, Rapunzel, and I can assure you that the upcoming made-for-boys-lulz Tangled will not resemble it in the slightest. It's a very short novel, but beautifully told, another example of how POV shifts (first to third, third to other third, Mother to Zel to Konrad and back) can work within a novel.
I first read this book in middle school and actually loved it, but failed to understand that it was taking place in Switzerland during the Reformation. So reading it again, it not only stood up to the test of time (one of those scary tests that some books, like QoA, can survive, while things like Hawksong don't quite make it), but was even better than I remembered, thanks to the subtle ways she ties in the surroundings, the seamless way she weaves the magic into the history. And Switzerland! Also the way it made me curious to know what rapunzel actually tastes like.
It is short, not entirely sweet, but very worth the reading.
The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
Dashti comes to the royal palace an orphan, her mother recently dead on the steppes and her yak sold to earn her a position. She gets swept up to being Lady Saren's maidservant on the same day Lady Saren's father exiles her to a tower for the next seven years, a situation Saren faces with tears and Dashti with spirited ways of killing the rats in their foodstores. Hint: The book covers more than a thousand days, but it doesn't quite reach the 2,500 or so days that seven years would take.
I am still on the fence with this book, and I read it like three weeks ago so I don't remember exact moments that bothered me, but overall it was good. I liked the way Hale used the diary format, and the attention she kept to explaining how and why Dashti had the time to write. The worldbuilding was fun--the nonsense healing songs, the lands each named for a god, and Dashti's strong faith in the gods and her awareness of each of them and their aspects at all time--I really enjoyed that. And I liked Dashti's way of looking at the world well enough, but I didn't really like the prose of the book. Like, on the one hand, the book had everything I needed to love it, and the ideas and worldbuilding and story were great, but overall I thought eh, it is all right. And it wasn't like eh, it is all right but really I am jealous of everything she did here, because while I admired it I just didn't feel wholly caught up in it.
On the plus side, if you buy the book, some of the proceeds go to the Heifer Project. And it really is well-done, my lack of absolutely loving it aside.
Quest for a Maid by Frances Mary Hendry
More historical fantasy, this time in medieval Scotland. Meg, daughter of a shipbuilder, opens the novel with a much-discussed opening line, grows up, and finds herself part of the entourage sent to fetch the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, the little Maid of Norway, which promises to be no easy thing.
A friend of mine made me read this book in fifth grade, and I was scared to reread it because I couldn't remember how it ended (hint: people die), but I picked it back up for the same reasons I picked Zel up, and it more than held up to rereading. As with Zel, I hadn't realized that the book took place in a historical setting--this one, around the same period as the film Braveheart, which led to me going NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NOT DE BRUS NOOOOOOOOOOOO within the first fifty pages--which made it even more compelling. The pace of the novel is steady, no faster than it needs to be, because Meg's world is whole and complete and everything that happens builds upon itself.
It's a wonderful book well-worth the reading of it,* and I highly recommend it for sinking your teeth into on a rainy day.
*for phrasing issues, see this novel and Rosemary Sutcliff
The Princetta [and the Captain] par Anne-Laure Bondoux
So this review on Amazon.com basically sums up my feelings about this novel, but I will give you my less coherent thoughts about it anyway. Malva, princetta of Galnicia (the only creatively-named location in the book), doesn't want to get married, she wants to have adventures! So she and her maidservant run away. But then it turns out they were betrayed, and so they have to survive a shipwreck, and then they find themselves in the mountains? And the maidservant falls in love with the chief and disappears for over half the novel, while Malva ends up in a harem. Meanwhile there's this guy named Orpheus who thought he had a brain condition that would keep him from being on a boat, but then it turns out his dad was lying about that because he's a treasonous pirate and thought if Orpheus find out he might report the old man to the king, which Orpheus would have done because he's a Nice Guy, so anyway his old man dies and people are sent out to find the Princetta, and eventually they rescue her from the harem and so then Malva and Orpheus and a lot of side characters who have the potential to be interesting have to sail through some mystical archipelago and I just wanted to follow the Hari-esque story of that maidservant that disappeared two hundred fifty pages ago, I'm sorry what's happening? Oh, more people are dying.
I finished this book out of stubbornness, and to see if perhaps the ending would be worth it (hint: Quark would have put it down about fifty pages in and never regretted it). It's about fifty potential novels crammed into one centered around a completely unlikeable heroine who basically abdicates her throne and then still expects to be treated like a princess (hint: they still treat her like a princess, and it never really occurs to her that maybe, just maybe, if she gave it up she should act like it). It was just frustrating to see so many wildly good ideas reduced to what the story ended up being. Although I was comforted to know that the trap of creating a fictional world analogous to this one via changing a couple letters in the names of things is not only an American problem. (Hands-down winner was the twin constellation of Astor and Ollux, I kid you not.) The author couldn't really make any characters into something fully-realized, so while I theoretically cared more about the side characters' storylines, I wouldn't have enjoyed reading about them in the author's hands.
Hey. Sometimes I read so you don't have to.
The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff
Prosper, son of Gerontius, is living in his father's house when Prince Gorthyn rides through seeking a white hart seen on their lands. Drawn to the prince, Prosper follows him to the hall of King Whose Name Has That "Double-D-Means-Th" Thing That I Always Forget, Frickin' Celtic/Welsh/Fffdlyrd Languages, where they discover that King Myndodd...og is mustering a Shining Company of Three Hundred Horseman in case the Saxons attack. Because, as Prosper points out on I kid you not page two, Companies of Three Hundred have had such luck in the past.
Aside from the part where I kept forgetting Prosper's name and am even now still dealing with residual speech patterns in my head, I LOVED THIS BOOK. I've never read Rosemary Sutcliff before because I've never been able to find her books before but oh my goodness, I finished it a couple of hours ago and it was so good. Thick and meaty and, first person but of course he notices the landscape it's not weird that he describes stuff so lovingly, especially when you have the sense that it has been so long since he's actually seen it. It's like sitting down at a tavern and listening to people trading tales to pass the time and then this veteran gets up and tells his story and everyone listens and. The characters and the language and the style and the setting and. I will now go onto the next paragraph, which I wrote earlier and which is more coherent than my non-spoiler-y flailing.
Reading this one, I was aware that it was historical fiction with that touch of fantasy, whereas when I read Zel and Quest for a Maid all those years ago I thought they were both taking place in my favorite kind of fantasy land, perhaps the hardest to achieve: the subtly-shifted reality. Because really, pre-Saxon Britain and medieval Scotland and even Reformation Switzlerand are as fantastic a setting as any made-up country you might create, if they are done well, if the mentalities and details of the people and places and things involved are portrayed in that real, thick, flesh-and-blood way that these three authors portray them. Prosper has side notes explaining why his people are so much more advanced than the Saxons, when it's something like eating oats instead of wheat; Konrad is restless in his castle, music and dancing forbidden by the new religious leaders; both Meg and Prosper accept the side-by-side, mostly peaceful existence of druids and priests, though Meg wonders if her sister may be forgiven, because it is of real concern. Sutcliff and Hendry also both excel at sinking into the language of their characters until I couldn't come away from the novel without minding to watch things or telling off the bairns for their foolishness when there's work that needs doing.
READ THIS BOOK, WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS POST.
I did take a detour, as part of my I Will Get My History From Biographies quest, and read
Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman by Donald Spoto
Spoto is very thorough, and I learned all sorts of cool things about Ingrid Bergman (there were home movies of her when she was three, which was, by the way, in 1918. Wild!), and he takes the time to look at situations and hypothesize, based on human nature as well as what her friends said, but occasionally he veers into apologist territory. I mean this is my first biography; we'll see how others go over the summer, as I learn more about the genre.
But anyway I learned more about Notorious the movie that I love so very very much (as does Robert Osborne, judging by how often they play it--Ingrid Bergman? Cary Grant? Alfred Hitchcock? Suspense films? Movies about Nazis? Post WWII movies? Movies that got investigated? IF THEY FIND A CONNECTION, THEY PLAY IT) and, like, it's fun to learn things that back up one's initial intuition of this is a great movie. I mean, I did have to learn how to catch things in it, but the first time I saw it I just knew, in my gut, that it was brilliant. AND THE KEY. CARY GRANT KEPT THE KEY, AND THEN HE GAVE IT TO INGRID, AND THEN THE SCENE IN THE BOOK WHERE INGRID GAVE IT TO HITCHCOCK HAD ME CRYING. Is it weird to cry when reading biographies? I will let you know.
Anyway, I'm an Ingrid Bergman geek, I loved it, it was very readable and accessible, so read it if you like.
I also got about forty pages into
Ranger's Apprentice: Book One: The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan
Note: For the longest time I thought these books were the Rick Riordan series everyone was talking about. Sorry, Rick. You deserve better.
Man I tried to give this book a chance. I gave it like five more chapters than it deserved. I mean, the first sentence is "Morgarath, Lord of the Mountains of Rain and Night, former Baron of Gorlan in the Kingdom of Araluen, looked out over his bleak, rainswept domain and, for perhaps the thousandth time, cursed." I mean, that's a ballsy, full-of-made-up-words opening. I couldn't not give it a shot.
The plot is good generic fantasy, which I am perfectly fine with/a total fan of/one day I will write a fantasy set in a D&D cutout world and you will like it anyway, and the characters are fine, whatever, but the prose just keeps tripping itself up to the point where I couldn't keep going. Most Glaring Example Which Made Me Put Down the Book, I'm Sure There Would Be Others:
The baron looked at the Faceless Protagonist. The baron likes to make jokes. Unfortunately he is the baron so no one ever gets that he is joking!
"Joke," said the baron.
"Sir?" said Faceless Protagonist, confused.
The baron sighed. No one ever got his jokes. "Serious Dismissal."
"Yes sir," said FP. He heard the baron muttering about jokes as he left.
Like, the basic idea that no one ever gets the baron's jokes, that's funny. Just having it happen repeatedly in conversation without ever explicitly pointing it out, ha-ha. Explaining it once, okay ha. But spending a sentence or more on it every time it happens is not funny. Also, why is Morgarath named Morgarath when everyone else in the book is named Will and Jenny and Alix and Bruce? Come on, people.
Anyway, skip it. I just thought I would reiterate that I enjoy Generic Fantasy and would like to write one and feel perfectly fine about it, as long as the prose doesn't get in the way.
phew that took a long time.
on my to-read list are the aforementioned Justine Larbalestier books, Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin (overall I am wary of the books my mom checks out, novelizations famous women in history/literature, because they usually turn out to be giant sexfests, but I trust LeGuin--see, cannot pick a book up off a shelf anymore), and Lauren Bacall and Steve Martin's autobiographies (see: Biographies Quest). Oh and I picked up Allegiance because it was made of love and I felt like reading a SW book I knew ended well. Oh and I should read The Great Gatsby. And Jane Eyre. And maybe work on my own novel.
You know, life as usual.