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3rdragonOne of the things that I do over vacations is read voraciously. This past week has been no exception. I'm not about to list everything I read, but here's a sampling:
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
This book reminded me of a cross between those Jasper Fforde Eyre Affair books and a book I got a small child in which the protagonists flew to the moon in an orange box and discovered an entire civilization on the dark side of the moon. It has the same interesting use of Story and the fourth wall as the Fforde books, and a similar sense of whimsy to The Magical Land of Noom, but it's a bit more consciously literary than either of those.
A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
I read this ages ago; I think that I was only sort-of old enough for it. My main memory of it is that it's about an unusual school of magic and it got pretty weird. It's still a decent summary, but I appreciated it a lot more this time around. I'll be looking for the sequel after my five book requests come in and I can ask for more.
Lord John and the Hand of Devils by Diana Gabaldan
I listed to this book (correction: I listed to the first novella of three) with my dad on the last leg of my ride home from school. Before I start, I should say that I hold audiobooks to a different standard than other books. In many ways it's a higher standard - it takes longer to listen than it does to read, and I can't skip over any narrative traits that I find annoying. At the same time, for a car audiobook, at least, I'm willing to listen to all sorts of stuff that I wouldn't bother to read - the Quillerin Cat books, for example, or the later Mrs. Pollifaxes - so long as it has decent characters and a gripping plot, and isn't actively annoying, it will do to pass the time on a long trip. (Also, can I just state, for the record, that once I am listening to an audiobook, IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO READ ME A BLURB ABOUT THE BOOK I AM ABOUT TO LISTEN TO! Especially not if you put it on the same track as the first part of the story, so I can't even skip over it without missing bits of narrative.)
I will admit that I was a little leery of this one. It sounded like detective fiction in Victorian times, which is generally a worthwhile setting, but it looked like it might verge into the supernatural, and I'm leery of supernatural detective fiction (it can be quite good; I've read some that I enjoyed very much. But detective fiction needs a strong amount of cohesion in the world, and sometimes loses that if you start sticking in too much fantasy - please see Little Green Alien Cats Do Not Constitute Resolution Of Plot-Points). But it came in novellas, unlike the other option, which was ten hours long.
It was fairly unsatisfactory. The first annoying trait of the main character was to get distracted by the memory of a former lover and stop paying attention to what was going on around him. Or not even a former lover. Any pretty young man would do. It got to the point where I couldn't see how he functioned in normal society, he started off into space and missed what people were saying to him so frequently. The man was an officer of a regiment, for goodness's sake! He would have spent his life in a perpetual daze because of the constant infusion of well-turned-out pairs of legs in tight knickers. And we never did get any sort of information on the (presumed) former lover beyond "he was a political prisoner in Scotland. And we're now going to imply that he killed someone in another regiment before maincharacter showed up."
And the descriptions. By the end of the novella, I did not want to hear another word about hair or eyes. Here, have a few quotes, courtesy of Amazon:
"He wore his own hair, dark and shining, and the chilly breeze stroked strands of it across his cheeks," or "the soft fall of his hair vivid against his blue cloak," or "the flames of Robert Gerald's hair kindled embers he had thought safely smothered." And so on. And I haven't even started on the "luminous brown eyes," etc.
I found the ending unsatisfactory, too. Instead of figuring anything out, the hero goes off to a house party in the country with people he's vaguely suspicious of, and nothing at all happens until one night he gets roused from his bed to go to a satanic rite, he spends a while being monologued at by FormerLover2 (the one who, the second time he was mentioned, I turned to my dad and said, "What do you want to bet that the climax of this story involves confronting this guy about the murder of Guy3?"), they fight, and then the friend who was hiding in the woods this whole time rushed in and stabs FormerLover2 in the nick of time. And then they have this ambiguous conversation for which there is absolutely no closure in which it's revealed that the friend may or may not have overheard enough of the monologing to have figured out that these two were lovers.
In its favor, I didn't actually stop listening halfway through the book. But I certainly wasn't inclined to start the next novella, either.
Click by David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Margo Langan, Gregory Maguire, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Sue Park, and Tim Wynne-Jones
Told in ten chapters, each by a different author (which were, for the most part, from the perspective of different people), Click is the story of a girl who loses her grandfather. It's about grief and healing, and the way that lives are interconnected, and the power of the photographic image. I picked it up because of the name Wynne-Jones on the spine. I couldn't put it down because the disparate tales merged into a fascinating and cohesive whole.
The Blue Girl by Charles de Lint
I thought that I was probably going to like Imogene when her preferred method of greeting a prospective friend at a new school was "You look just like the imaginary friend I had when I was a kid. Only older, you know?" to see if the girl could handle the level of weird. I decided on page eight that even if the book stopped having anything going for it on page nine, it would be worth it for this character, based on the imaginary friend conversation and this encounter with the Popular Girl:
'Her perfect lips formed a perfect moue. She was quite amazing really. A Living, breathing stereotype of an in-crowd teenage girl. I wondered if she practiced expressions in front of her mirror at home.
"You think you're so smart," she said, "but you're no different than Chancy. You're both just dumb."
Wow. Great with the image, but not so big in the eloquency department. Though maybe I was missing something, because all her clones began to giggle. As if.
"Who's Chancy?" I asked.
"Your loser lunch buddy."
"Oh, you mean Maxine."
"You deserve each other."
"Good. I like her."
"What are you--gay?"
"What are you--homophobic?"
"Jesus, you're weird."
I nodded. "I'm definitely more weird than gay. Unless you meant cheerful. Then sometimes I'm more gay than weird."'
It was a good book. Weird (like other de Lints I have read, goes into the dark side of Faerie), but good. And Imogene is definitely worth it.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
This book reminded me of a cross between those Jasper Fforde Eyre Affair books and a book I got a small child in which the protagonists flew to the moon in an orange box and discovered an entire civilization on the dark side of the moon. It has the same interesting use of Story and the fourth wall as the Fforde books, and a similar sense of whimsy to The Magical Land of Noom, but it's a bit more consciously literary than either of those.
A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
I read this ages ago; I think that I was only sort-of old enough for it. My main memory of it is that it's about an unusual school of magic and it got pretty weird. It's still a decent summary, but I appreciated it a lot more this time around. I'll be looking for the sequel after my five book requests come in and I can ask for more.
Lord John and the Hand of Devils by Diana Gabaldan
I listed to this book (correction: I listed to the first novella of three) with my dad on the last leg of my ride home from school. Before I start, I should say that I hold audiobooks to a different standard than other books. In many ways it's a higher standard - it takes longer to listen than it does to read, and I can't skip over any narrative traits that I find annoying. At the same time, for a car audiobook, at least, I'm willing to listen to all sorts of stuff that I wouldn't bother to read - the Quillerin Cat books, for example, or the later Mrs. Pollifaxes - so long as it has decent characters and a gripping plot, and isn't actively annoying, it will do to pass the time on a long trip. (Also, can I just state, for the record, that once I am listening to an audiobook, IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO READ ME A BLURB ABOUT THE BOOK I AM ABOUT TO LISTEN TO! Especially not if you put it on the same track as the first part of the story, so I can't even skip over it without missing bits of narrative.)
I will admit that I was a little leery of this one. It sounded like detective fiction in Victorian times, which is generally a worthwhile setting, but it looked like it might verge into the supernatural, and I'm leery of supernatural detective fiction (it can be quite good; I've read some that I enjoyed very much. But detective fiction needs a strong amount of cohesion in the world, and sometimes loses that if you start sticking in too much fantasy - please see Little Green Alien Cats Do Not Constitute Resolution Of Plot-Points). But it came in novellas, unlike the other option, which was ten hours long.
It was fairly unsatisfactory. The first annoying trait of the main character was to get distracted by the memory of a former lover and stop paying attention to what was going on around him. Or not even a former lover. Any pretty young man would do. It got to the point where I couldn't see how he functioned in normal society, he started off into space and missed what people were saying to him so frequently. The man was an officer of a regiment, for goodness's sake! He would have spent his life in a perpetual daze because of the constant infusion of well-turned-out pairs of legs in tight knickers. And we never did get any sort of information on the (presumed) former lover beyond "he was a political prisoner in Scotland. And we're now going to imply that he killed someone in another regiment before maincharacter showed up."
And the descriptions. By the end of the novella, I did not want to hear another word about hair or eyes. Here, have a few quotes, courtesy of Amazon:
"He wore his own hair, dark and shining, and the chilly breeze stroked strands of it across his cheeks," or "the soft fall of his hair vivid against his blue cloak," or "the flames of Robert Gerald's hair kindled embers he had thought safely smothered." And so on. And I haven't even started on the "luminous brown eyes," etc.
I found the ending unsatisfactory, too. Instead of figuring anything out, the hero goes off to a house party in the country with people he's vaguely suspicious of, and nothing at all happens until one night he gets roused from his bed to go to a satanic rite, he spends a while being monologued at by FormerLover2 (the one who, the second time he was mentioned, I turned to my dad and said, "What do you want to bet that the climax of this story involves confronting this guy about the murder of Guy3?"), they fight, and then the friend who was hiding in the woods this whole time rushed in and stabs FormerLover2 in the nick of time. And then they have this ambiguous conversation for which there is absolutely no closure in which it's revealed that the friend may or may not have overheard enough of the monologing to have figured out that these two were lovers.
In its favor, I didn't actually stop listening halfway through the book. But I certainly wasn't inclined to start the next novella, either.
Click by David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Margo Langan, Gregory Maguire, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Sue Park, and Tim Wynne-Jones
Told in ten chapters, each by a different author (which were, for the most part, from the perspective of different people), Click is the story of a girl who loses her grandfather. It's about grief and healing, and the way that lives are interconnected, and the power of the photographic image. I picked it up because of the name Wynne-Jones on the spine. I couldn't put it down because the disparate tales merged into a fascinating and cohesive whole.
The Blue Girl by Charles de Lint
I thought that I was probably going to like Imogene when her preferred method of greeting a prospective friend at a new school was "You look just like the imaginary friend I had when I was a kid. Only older, you know?" to see if the girl could handle the level of weird. I decided on page eight that even if the book stopped having anything going for it on page nine, it would be worth it for this character, based on the imaginary friend conversation and this encounter with the Popular Girl:
'Her perfect lips formed a perfect moue. She was quite amazing really. A Living, breathing stereotype of an in-crowd teenage girl. I wondered if she practiced expressions in front of her mirror at home.
"You think you're so smart," she said, "but you're no different than Chancy. You're both just dumb."
Wow. Great with the image, but not so big in the eloquency department. Though maybe I was missing something, because all her clones began to giggle. As if.
"Who's Chancy?" I asked.
"Your loser lunch buddy."
"Oh, you mean Maxine."
"You deserve each other."
"Good. I like her."
"What are you--gay?"
"What are you--homophobic?"
"Jesus, you're weird."
I nodded. "I'm definitely more weird than gay. Unless you meant cheerful. Then sometimes I'm more gay than weird."'
It was a good book. Weird (like other de Lints I have read, goes into the dark side of Faerie), but good. And Imogene is definitely worth it.
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Date: 1 Jun 2009 01:54 am (UTC)I must work this statement into conversation!
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Date: 1 Jun 2009 01:59 pm (UTC)