Engine Summer

Light, M. John Harrison (365 Books, Day 365)

2011-08-30T08:52:22Z

On the strength of two novels, M. John Harrison is really, really high on my list of favorite writers now working. I was blown away by The Course of the Heart, and I am blown away by Light. The ways Harrison uses structure make me cry. Literally.

On the surface, Light is a pretty complicated novel: three-stranded narration with no obvious connections between the strands, at least at first. Kearney is a physicist in late-twentieth-century England, a man broken in complex ways for complex reasons who is running fervently from everything and maintaining a mutually damaging-but-helpful relationship with his ex-wife. Seria Mau Genlicher is a spaceship, her body wired into state-of-the-art-for-the-far-future alien technology-- she can navigate in quantum dimensions and see particles no detector can register, but she desperately wants to be human again. And Ed Chianese, in that same far future, is addicted to a particular form of sensory-immersive virtual reality, and owes money to the wrong people about that.

The two future strands take place on the edge of the Kefahuchi Tract, a singularity so incomprehensible, so powerful, that its entire circumference (the Beach) is one giant layer of the detritus of observation stations from millions of years of now-extinct alien civilizations focused on understanding it. Artificial suns support wormholes aimed into the Tract, entire cultures subsist on the mining of the artifacts that can be found around the rim, the rather dystopian descendants of Earth military forces will experiment on anything or anybody to get one toehold of knowledge farther-- and the one thing that remains true of the Kefahuchi Tract, through the aeons, is that no one who goes into it ever comes out.

The obvious questions, of course, are why the modern strand, and what is actually going on, and whether anyone is going to make it into the Tract; but honestly these are the questions that one would expect to have come together in a moderately competent novel, the things which would break the book if they weren't present. The reason I love this book so much is that Harrison goes so far beyond that. This book is so much more complicated than it initially appears, and beautifully subtle.

For one thing, as he did in The Course of the Heart he is still working with myth. There's a white cat/black cat motif running through the book that is, I think, a loaded allusion to the old fairytale of the White Cat. It's no coincidence that Seria's ship's name is White Cat and her middle name is Mau, she the transformed lady, looking for the prince to turn her back again: then the fairytale eats itself, in a way that also serves as a beautifully upraised middle finger to Anne McCaffrey's Ship Who Sang books, and I laughed even as I sympathized and winced. (Those books deserve it.)

There's also a well-placed haunting that made me blink because the last time I saw that particular folkloric beastie it was in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, which is not what one might expect. The image works without knowing that set of folklore, I think, but the resonance made the entire thing spine-deep effective for me.

And in addition to the echoes and allusions and the outright criss-crosses between strand and strand, this is also one of those novels in which the strands parallel each other; the three protagonists are going through the same journey in some ways, and being asked the same question, and pass through geographical locations and encounters that are suspiciously similar to each other but different in outward detail and in the ways that the characters react. There is a set of scenes where two of the threads are at a place called Monster Beach, and they are not the two threads you would expect. That sort of thing. I think, based on the two books I've read of his, that Harrison loves this sort of deep underlying parallelism, throwing different types of characters at the same thing to see what they do, and I love him for it. (He also has a dislike of pretention that I am pretty down with; in both novels there's a self-described magician who dies in a totally pointless way after making nothing of his life, and each magician is tagged as one of the five best magicians in London. Am now vaguely wondering whether he kills the other three off as background in other books. I would find that really kind of hilarious.)

So yet again, this is an intricate, precise, beautiful, layered, caring, wise, sympathetic, funny novel which I enjoyed immoderately and which a lot of the reviewers seem to think is really depressing for reasons that totally and completely escape me. I think I like The Course of the Heart better because secret histories and magic ping me harder than space opera, but they're about equal in technical virtuosity, and I'm really looking forward to Nova Swing. (Light ends satisfyingly as a stand-alone, but for thematic reasons requires a sequel; it's the white cat book and needs a black cat book to go with it. I will be interested to see whether the rest of the motifs invert or reverse or what.)

And that's a year. Thank you all very much for reading. It means a great deal to me that so many people have read and enjoyed these reviews. Later in the week I hope to run some numbers on things like how many books I tagged as what genre, and maybe some general reflections on what the whole experience was like; in about a month, when I can stand to think about it, I'll start putting a manuscript of the reviews together, in hopes that someday they'll appear in book form. Here on this journal I will definitely keep reviewing books, when I come across books I would like to review-- it simply won't be as frequent, and I'll have more time to write about movies and travel and some other things that have gotten totally sidelined in the past year. And I'll keep writing reviews for Strange Horizons and linking to those as they go up.

Again, thank you. Without the book recommendations, boxes of books in the mail, encouragement, factual research, people who actually came to my reading at Readercon, and endlessly enjoyable comments this would have been a much more difficult and much less enjoyable thing to do. As it is, I'm glad it's over, I'm glad I proved to myself that I could do this, and I did enjoy a lot of it-- though it was a lot of work.

I'm going to go reread The Book of the New Sun. And see if my brain can process the idea of not writing a review tomorrow.

Happy birthday, me, from my past self. I picked a decade-closing year for this, birthday to birthday. It was a good birthday present and I'm glad I thought to give it.

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A Rope of Thorns, Gemma Files (365 Books, Day 363)

2011-08-28T07:57:11Z

Obligatory disclaimer: author is a friend.

There are ways in which I've been waiting to read this, because the third one's not out yet, and therefore reading this one means there isn't going to be any more for a while, but Ruth is most of the way through the first one, and upon finishing it would be several thousand miles from our copy of the second if I waited longer. I try not to be cruel like that.

Anyway, this is the direct sequel to A Book of Tongues, and is, as that one was, a violent and glorious alternate-history Western in which magic has more prices that anybody particularly wants to pay. For one thing, it's never a good idea to plot Things To Do To Make Your Lover Insanely Powerful without asking first, no matter how pure your intentions, and the fallout of that ricochets all over this book. There's also a lot of Aztec mythology done in a way that doesn't make me want to throw things and scream, which is... really, really rare and before this series was basically restricted to three issues of The Invisibles (of all things).

I can't talk too much about the plot here, because it really is very dependent on the first book, and one ought to start reading there. But I can say that I find it just as good, a little less tightly structured but for good reason (protagonist running around not knowing what the hell to do about the fact that everything has gone horribly wrong, and it's interesting enough confusion that I can forgive him for not working out a plan, especially since he's not the sort of person who plans much in advance anyway).

I just... really, really love these books. I don't have much to say about them because they hit everything my id wants in a book so hard. Okay, maybe this one had slightly less sex, but, you know, this is writing to all my particular narrative kinks and I want the third and I want it now and I want more people to go out and read these so I have a lot of people to talk them over with and basically this is my favorite series now running and that's all there is to it. They're dark and they're lovely and they're chock full of people one doesn't usually see in this kind of Western; this one, for instance, has a neat little instance of characters Doing Poly Right, possibly to show up how thoroughly the main set are failing at it, although they aren't failing at it for anything like the usual reasons...

So yeah. You need something of a gore tolerance, I suppose, I never know how to calibrate that kind of thing. But if you have ever been violently aggravated by some things about the entire genre of the Western, this is a good antidote, and if you are annoyed that there's not enough gay in fantasy, this helps there too.

Thank you, Gemma. Thank you very much.

Ordinarily I'd use my Twilight Sparkle icon here, which I've been saving for books I think are really good, but the character in my default icon would get along so well with the entire cast of this series I can't even tell you, so there it is.

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Above, Leah Bobet (365 Books, Day 353)

2011-08-18T06:40:03Z

Obligatory disclaimers: Author is a friend of mine. Also, the book isn't out yet, although you can pre-order it on Amazon, and I read it in an advance review copy.

This book starts with a situation that has been done by everyone up to and including the X-Men and then makes it work by dint of tone and a willingness to let things have consequences. Matthew, also called Teller, lives in Safe, which is a haven carved out of various sewers in Toronto by people who have odd powers and odd appearances. His mother had gills and his father had the feet of a lion; Matthew has scales down his back and clawed toenails, but he can pass in the world Above. Or he could, if he knew one thing about how it works apart from the fear-laden oral histories of his people. The one he loves, Ariel, has bee wings; one of the images I liked most, near the beginning, is of their room, layered in her shed wings, and the way they cloud the light.

The thing is, Safe is not necessarily Safe for everyone. Some years previously the leader of Safe threw out a resident, called Corner, on accusation of murder. Corner did not leave the underground, although sie wasn't allowed in Safe, and that is beginning to make things happen.

This book wouldn't work at all if it weren't willing to let itself contain ambiguities to the point of contradiction, but it does. It's true, for instance, both that doctors and psychiatrists have badly, badly hurt the people of Safe, to the point where Matthew is unable to trust them to behave like human beings and doesn't really see medical staff in aggregate as people, and that this fear has to be put aside in times of great danger and of illness, and that maybe there are some kinds of illness, physical or otherwise, that simply being Safe does not do much for. It's true that Matthew will protect Ariel and give her anything, and that that is not necessarily the best thing for either of them, and that it's a love that is one of the lights of both of their lives.

In short, it's three-dimensional.

I also like the voice, which is first-person, and distinctive. Matthew is called Teller because his function in his community is as storyteller, but words aren't his usual medium of choice, so he has a perfect idea of the way a story is meant to go and the shape of it and how to get people to tell him stories and how to tell truth from falsehood and what details are important, but he is maybe not so clear on grammar, and the idiosyncratic formalities of his home weave in and out. It's a very well-done extrapolation of a voice that is perceptibly contemporary but from a completely different cultural background from anyone who, well, doesn't live in a sewer. (One thing that comes up tangentially is that his father was from India. Matthew has no consciousness whatsoever of the ways this may affect how people Above treat him, and it doesn't come up overtly, but I found it interesting to try to figure out whether that is a factor in any of the times he thinks Above people are reacting oddly to him; I suspect it is.)

This is a first novel, and as we all know a novel is a verbal narrative which has something wrong with it. There is one very specific plot thing in this book that-- it's not that it didn't work for me, but it felt, very slightly, rushed. I don't want to go into it in detail because no one else has access to the book yet. However, it's nothing that severely bothers me or even changes how things work out; it's more like 'I would have had five more pages of discussion first'. Apart from that, this is a really awesome book. It's different, it's very much itself, and I could see some people not liking the voice because voice is a subtle and taste-laden thing, but I personally love it. And this is urban fantasy in a way that has nothing to do with most of what is called urban fantasy nowadays: it's urban fantasy because it is fantasy that takes place in a city.

For some reason the publishers appear to think it is YA. I am not entirely certain as to why. No, seriously, I don't get it. Not everything with a teenage protagonist is automatically YA. At any rate, when it comes out, that is the section you should look in. And you should look.

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Disturbed By Her Song, Tanith Lee (365 Books, Day 349)

2011-08-14T06:17:58Z

Review copy sent by the publisher.

Okay, so. There is one way in which this book is one of the most pretentious things that has come by me in some while, although there is also a way in which I understand what the author is trying to do. Only it doesn't work. Mostly.

Tanith Lee has in the past written under the pseudonym Esther Garber. In this collection, she claims to be writing both as and with Esther Garber, and both as and with Esther's half-brother, Judas Garbah. The foreword goes into this a bit: it's one of those things where these aren't really pseudonyms to her, but rather characters, since the stories she's written under those names are (mostly) autobiography of the pseudonyms. This, combined with the power that a pseudonym can have to change a writer's voice, allow them to free themselves of various inhibitions etc., means that she wants to allow the pseudonyms full authorial credit while nonetheless admitting to them as pseudonyms.

As I've said, I kind of get this. Except for how it comes across, which is, well, pretentious beyond imagination. Because, the thing is, if you the author are going to insist that I suspend my disbelief in this particular set of directions, then you the author must have a sufficiently different authorial voice, a set of things that cannot be said other than in this way, in short must have a sufficiently different set of actual personae to justify it. And while this collection is not, in fact, in the voice I mentally think of as 'usual Tanith Lee', it is not in anyone else's voice either. Except a sort of sub-Angela-Carter something-or-other. Also, as far as I can tell, the things she can't say except in this way involve a lot of semi-explicit gay and lesbian sex.

... I must have missed something. How is it that Tanith Lee requires pseudonymity to write, semi-explicitly, about gay and lesbian sex, in a book whose foreword is dated 2009? Tanith Lee was writing kinkier things than this in the 1970s and I have read them.

In short, this collection is centered around a gimmick which does not work, and which fails to support stories that do not work either. Esther's pieces are mostly about Unattainable Women Who Might Be Ghosts Or Something, and Judas's are about Dangerous Young Men Who Throw Him Down Stairways; there is a lot of weirdness about the way people are about the ethnic backgrounds of the pseudonyms in a way that just feels off to me in some direction (exoticizing?), and I think it says something that the one (one) readable story in the collection is credited to both Esther and... Tanith Lee.

That said, if the one readable story in here has been anthologized elsewhere, it's actually pretty good. It's called 'Death and the Maiden', and involves a young woman who gets picked up by the wife of a famous pre-Raphaelite-type painter, only to discover that she's been picked up to seduce the woman's daughter. The painter has spent years instilling in his daughter an ideal of Pure Womanhood stolen from Coventry Patmore by way of The Taming of the Shrew, and the mother will at this point do quite a lot to get her daughter to break her self-and-parentally-imposed role and think for herself for a minute. As it turns out, things are extremely much more perverse than anyone, including me, expected, and not in the directions you are thinking of or I was thinking of. In fact, I sat back and blinked at the end of the story and said 'huh, I haven't seen that one before and it was genuinely vaguely creepy'.

But it is not worth picking up the rest of the collection to get. Maybe if you see it in a library. The rest of the collection ranged from 'boring' to 'I think Colette already wrote that' to 'I think Angela Carter already wrote a parody of Colette writing that', to, in one impressive case, 'I think Angela Carter already wrote a pastiche of Isak Dinesen writing a paraphrase of Colette writing that', which is to say seen it, and, I guarantee, so has everybody else, even if you have not read the specific works to which I'm referring, because cliche can be a very universal language.

Does anybody want this book? I'll mail it to you.

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The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss (365 Books, Day 348)

2011-08-13T08:48:34Z

You know a thing I really like?

When a person writes a very good first novel, and then the sequel is better.

The first was a glorious dive through conflicting mythologies seen through the lens of one of the most unreliable narrators who ever unreliabled, and I liked it very much but wanted to remove a great many of its adjectives. With prejudice.

This one complicates the mythology, fleshes out the characters even more, has a ton of cool plot stuff, and fixes the adjectives.

I don't want to say too much about the plot, because I know some people haven't read the first one. But Kvothe, our protagonist, is still telling his life story to a scribe-- this is the second day on which he is telling it-- and it's still an interesting exercise to compare the world, and Kvothe, as they are now, with the world, and Kvothe, as they were then. This book has more of fantasy's most insane magical university; a culture where women are much more highly regarded then men, but no outsider has noticed because their men will say things like, to the opponent in a bar fight, 'bring as many women as you need' and everyone takes that for sexism; the creepiest tree ever; the most entertaining sacred tree ever; a metaphysical description of why the moon waxes and wanes, and a story about the man who stole the moon; people speaking in rhyme in a way that does not make me want to throw things, and a character who has an interesting typographical trick that does not make me want to throw anything either; and a man in legends who is canonically described as having 'a cloak of no particular color', which people then sit down and have a conversation about, involving what it might actually have looked like and how they have always seen it in their heads when they hear the story and the obvious questions people in books like this don't traditionally ask.

There is a chapter involving a game of cards and a long con and a lost ring that left me gasping in delight at its structure.

If I have a problem, it's that everything happens within too short a span of time, that things are always happening in weeks that ought to be months and months that ought to be years. The amount of time it takes Kvothe to become reasonable at fighting is, frankly, ridiculously short, I don't care what a genius he is. But this is minor, and at least this isn't one of those books that forgets about distance: travel is messy, inconvenient, dangerous, and takes longer than you want it to (one of the book's most hilarious sequences is about that).

It's also a book that spent a lot of time skirting the edge of my massive embarrassment squick but never, thank fortune, falling over into it, mostly because Kvothe is really, really hard to embarrass.

This is one of those books also that is long enough to have phases, to be extremely immersive. I read it on B.'s Kindle so I wouldn't hurt my wrists, but I read for sixteen straight hours today. That probably puts it somewhere over fifteen hundred pages, and it has comedy, tragedy, violence, unexpected peace, bad puns, good worldbuilding, and the sheer and certain knowledge that next book things are going to get pretty damn dark and I cannot predict how. And enough revelation that I want to go back and read the first one again.

In short, this is a damn good fantasy series doing exactly the things I would like fantasy to do, in an intelligent and interesting manner, and I want more of it yesterday, and now I'm going to go read all Jo Walton's chapter-by-chapter analyses.

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The Pollinators of Eden, John Boyd (365 Books, Day 347)

2011-08-12T07:27:14Z

Recommended by / lent to me by Thrud's father. I should have remembered maybe that the last book he lent me was Samuel R. Delany's Hogg*.

So.

There is this short story by Joanna Russ called 'The Clichés from Outer Space', in which she gives an example of the Weird Ways Of Getting Pregnant plotline. Here is the beginning of that example:

"Eegh! Argh! Argh! Eegh!" cried Sheila Sue Hateman in uncontrollable ecstasy as the giant alien male orchid arched over her, pollinating her every orifice. She-- yes, she-- she, Sheila Sue Hateman, who had always been frigid, nasty, and unresponsive! She remembered how at parties she had avoided men who were attracted by her bee-stung, pouting, red mouth, long, honey-colored hair, luscious behind and proud, up-thrusting breasts (they were a nuisance, those breasts, they sometimes got so proud and thrust up so far that they knocked her in the chin. She always pushed them down again). How she hated and avoided men! ...But this was different.

I swear to God until I sat down with The Pollinators of Eden I didn't know she was talking about a specific book. That paragraph serves as a far, far better review than I am personally capable of; I can only bow to the master. Russ has even gotten the tone of the novel right. And the prose style.

EVERY SINGLE WORD OF THAT HAPPENS except her breasts hitting her in the chin, which only happens figuratively, in that her breasts are what the Senate Judiciary Committee chooses to find memorable about her.

Oh, and her name is actually Freda. Not that that matters.

The thing is... I didn't hate this book. At first, I was confused, in that way where nothing that was going on made any sense because it was all based on cultural assumptions that have vanished into the mists of the aether (publication date 1969, extrapolation of the fictional 2200s, heavily pun-based language centered around stuff that must have been current at publication date, might as well have been written in Indo-European except I have more theoretical background on that). Then I was incredulous, in that way where you see what a person is getting at but cannot quite believe that they mean it, because seriously.

THEN THERE WAS GIANT ORCHID TENTACLE PORN and after that I was just laughing too hard to find any of it anything other than delightful.

I would like to apologize in advance for lapsing randomly into capital letters for the rest of this review.

People. She gives birth to a seedpod. SHE GIVES BIRTH TO A SEEDPOD. While she's in the mental institution she's been clapped in for plant-related nymphomania. Her doctor hates her because she is AN UNWED MOTHER despite the fact that this is THE YEAR 2230-SOMETHING and CASUAL SEX IS TOTES ACCEPTABLE but THERE ARE LIMITS, and he is a total dick to her throughout her pregnancy, and then she gives birth TO THE SEEDPOD which HAS BLOND HAIR because her HUSBAND HAD SEX WITH THE FEMALE ORCHID AND THERE WAS CROSS-POLLINATION. And then after the delivery the doctor is all 'I am so sorry you gave birth to this whatever it is, should we burn it?' and she is all 'NO IT IS BEAUTIFUL I HEAR A HEARTBEAT WE MUST PLANT IT' and then he has a MYSTICAL CONVERSION BECAUSE OF THE DEPTHS OF HER MATERNAL LOVE and SEES HER AS THE DIVINE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH MOTHER and is consequently willing to break her out of the mental institution and send her back to the alien space orchids. After having sex with her a lot.

At this point I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt, and it had become obvious that about the last fifty pages of this book are one of the great stupid dénouements in the history of fiction, the kind of thing that elevates a book to legendary status, the kind of thing that made it entirely worth the previous hundred and fifty pages of administrative one-uppery, bureaucratic fuckery, homicidal ultrasonic space tulips (HOMICIDAL ULTRASONIC SPACE TULIPS which, I would like to point out, CALL HER THEIR MOTHER) and Freudianism. My affection for this book knows, I tell you, no bounds. I mean, after the thing with the space orchid, her husband, who has been standing there nodding approvingly the whole time (he's been seeing the female orchid for a while now) informs her that that was very pretty AND COMPARES HER TO LEDA AND THE SWAN. How can you not love that? I would say they should film this and show it every Christmas, but I think I saw that hentai once.

In conclusion: glorious beyond the wildest dreams of a reader who walked into it cold. I knew nothing about this going in except that Thrud's dad sent it and I didn't read the flap. At about page fifty I couldn't figure out why he had. At about page one hundred I was starting to wonder if I'd done something to offend him. As it turned out... I must write him a thank-you note. And see if he's aware of the Joanna Russ story.

* He wanted someone to discuss its philosophical themes with. If any of you have actually managed to finish reading it, he is still in need of someone for this purpose, and I can put you guys in touch; I understand that he is sad about not having anyone with whom he can talk about the book, but it is not merely a case of not my kink, it is a case of I find this kink actively boring to read about. In Thrud's dad's case, it is, and I guarantee this absolutely, a case of 'I didn't notice the kink because I was thinking about the metaphysics'.

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Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami (365 Books, Day 343)

2011-08-10T04:55:15Z

Read August 7th. Via B., who has been suggesting I read some Murakami for uh some time now, and who wanted me to start with Wild Sheep Chase but figured this was reasonable.

This was a very odd book for me, because at least one and possibly two of my favorite anime series swiped elements from it wholesale, and in the more impressive case they admit it. The map and tone of one of the threads here (although, and this is major, not the metaphysics or character development or What Is Actually Going On) turned into Haibane Renmei (the director says so), and as the End of the World is a place/complicated spoilery concept, I cannot help thinking of Revolutionary Girl Utena. This made the tone of the book read strangely in ways I am sure were not intended by the author.

However, those of you who are not interested in anime will still find this a very good book; for those of you who are, it's an interesting resonance.

There are two threads going on here: one is set in the Hardboiled Wonderland, and one in the End of the World. In the first, the protagonist is a technician whose brain has been modified to enable him to do a specific kind of unbreakable data encoding, and he's facing confusion from things up to and including a mad scientist and his beautiful granddaughter; the people who want to steal the data; a kind of kappa he's never heard of previously who live underneath Tokyo and are vaguely Lovecraftian; and the people he works for, who aren't so nice either. This is a slightly cyberpunky but actually pretty realistic Tokyo with a tech level just a notch above ours, and a lot of pop culture references to things that do exist, which makes its mad plunge through the tropes of Golden Age SF and some horror extremely entertaining.

In the second, the protagonist is in a town surrounded by a Wall, where he has become the Dreamreader, who reads old dreams at the town library and cannot bear the light of day. The town is full of abandoned industry, quiet people, afternoon streets, and unicorns. The Wall watches. So do the Woods. He had to leave his shadow behind to come into the town, and he would like to find a way to get it back before it dies in prison.

The threads alternate chapter-by-chapter, and Murakami is good at finding places to break off and switch that do not make me want to throttle him. I mean he is not addicted to end-of-chapter cliffhangers, and both threads are sufficiently involving that you enjoy seeing the people again when you get there. This is unusual. Much of the time I hate multiple-thread books, because the author is always jerking you away from people you find interesting to people you do not. This one never jerks. It eases.

The question, of course, is how the threads are related, and whether they have the same protagonist, and so on. The possible answers to this are even more impressive, interesting, and complicated than I had been expecting. This is one of those books where the aesthetic resolution is the glorious profusion of metaphysical and other possibilities that could be implied by what happened, although I suspect people will also find it a satisfying enough ending on more usual terms.

In short, this is just very good, well-woven, compelling, likable, referential to other things without being obnoxious about it, beautifully translated by a translator who clearly had fun (acronym! so many bonus points for the acronym!). I look forward to more Murakami in future, and to seeing what elements of this are things that crop up in his work over and over and which are one-offs, as B. says he's one of those writers where things recur in slightly different forms and permutations throughout his entire body of work.

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Living Alone, Stella Benson (365 Books, Day 341)

2011-08-09T05:24:19Z

Read August 5th. Via nineweaving, who heard about it at Readercon.

This 1920 novel is an odd and beautiful thing. It reads as fantasy from some kind of parallel dimension. If I had to give it a subgenre, I would call it 'urban fantasy', but that term is too loaded nowadays in a lot of directions I don't want. It is fantasy about the city of London, set during a Great War that has gone on a bit longer, so that it's a book that happens both when it was written and during the time that just ended. It is a book in which women are so central that it's hard to remember how central they usually aren't in fantasy from that time period, and its slantwise epigrammatic good-humor hides a remorseless subversion-- hitched oddly with an unironic love for the numinous.

Here the protagonist has been handed the prospectus of a roominghouse run by a witch:

The name of this house is Living Alone.

It is meant to provide for the needs of those who dislike hotels, clubs, settlements, hostels, boarding-houses, and lodgings only less than their own homes; who detest landladies, waiters, husbands and wives, charwomen, and all forms of lookers after. This house is a monastery and a convent for monks and nuns dedicated to unknown gods. Men and women who are tired of being laboriously kind to their bodies, who like to be a little uncomfortable and quite uncared for, who love to live from week to week without speaking, except to confide their destinations to 'bus-conductors, who are weary of woolly decorations, aspidistras, and the eternal two generations of roses which riot among blue ribbons on hireling wall-papers, who are ignorant of the science of tipping and thanking, who do not know how to cook yet hate to be cooked for, will here find the thing they have desired, and something else as well.

There are six cells in this house, and no common sitting-room. Guests wishing to address each other must do so on the stairs, or in the shop. Each cell has whitewashed walls, and contains a small deal table, one wooden chair, a hard bed, a tin bath, and a little inconvenient fireplace. No guest may bring into the house more than can be carried out again in one large suit-case. Carpets, rugs, mirrors, and any single garment costing more than three guineas, are prohibited. Any guest proved to have made use of a taxi, or to have travelled anywhere first class, or to have bought cigarettes or sweets costing more than three shillings a hundred or eighteenpence a pound respectively, or to have paid more than three and sixpence (war-tax included) for a seat in any place of entertainment, will be instantly expelled. Dogs, cats, goldfish, and other superhuman companions are encouraged.

Working guests are preferred, but if not at work, guests must spend at least eighteen hours out of the twenty-four entirely alone. No guest may entertain or be entertained except under special license obtainable from the Superintendent.

There is a pump in the back yard. There is no telephone, no electric light, no hot water system, no attendance, and no modern comfort whatever. Tradesmen are forbidden to call. There is no charge for residence in this house.

"It certainly sounds an unusual place," admitted Sarah Brown. "Is the house always full?"

"Never," said the witch. "A lot of people can swallow everything but the last clause."

There have been times in my life when this would have been a desperate blessing. That is, of course, the point. Sarah Brown is over-committeed, over-committed, put-upon, and unaware of her own imposed-on condition. The witch keeps that house, and cannot imagine why anyone would live any way else.

The book is walking a thin line, of course, between irony and twee, between parody and cutesiness. I do not think it errs much, though I could understand finding it occasionally oversweet on a sentence-by-sentence level. But on a plot level, it has fairies doing Land Work like anybody else, and enchanted ham sandwiches, and True Love in its finest form for the protagonist (one-sided, in her head, and never mentioned to anyone, exactly as she always wanted). And the witches of the war duel over London, though the English witch can't figure out what the point is; and the noise of the bombs is loud enough to wake the dead.

I mean, this is the sort of book in which one of the characters has an accent so posh that she refers to her son, at all times, as Rrchud. For the first half, until someone else addressed him, I could not figure out whether that was actually his name. (Thankfully, it is Richard.) It reminds me equally of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Cold Comfort Farm.

This is the sort of novel that has fallen through the cracks of the histories of fantasy, because it is so little related to the things that got into the histories. It deserves to be read more, now that it has all unknowing produced sideways children-- as I said, I'd call this urban fantasy, except that those words don't mean what I want anymore.

And hey, it's at Gutenberg, so you can go read it whenever you like.

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Star Rangers, Andre Norton (365 Books, Day 339)

2011-08-08T05:17:46Z

Read August 3rd.

This is an odd book for Norton, because it's an ensemble cast from the beginning and it stays that way; it never slips into what I think of as her default, which is the single person with telepathic animal having to trek across rough country to avoid some kind of nasty threat.

No, this is an entire spaceship's crew, wrecked, and they remain, basically, one party, and a lot of the conflict in the book is factionalism in the party and the difficult relationships in it caused by differences in rank, species, and ability. The ship is split down the middle into Patrol officers, who are human, and who are aristocratic and have a tendency towards xenophobia and are good at tech, and Rangers, who are sometimes human and sometimes other sapients and are good at things you do on a planet when you get there and need to survive. The protagonist is sort-of-human and a Ranger, so he's in an odd position where he has firm sympathies and friendships in the direction of his affiliation, but is also uniquely equipped to get concessions and decent behavior out of the other side (and feels obliged to try to keep them alive).

Things I liked: when I say sort-of-human, I do mean sort of; he's believably psychologically not-quite in ways I haven't seen Norton do before, mostly focused around his telepathy. I liked his Ranger team, who are snarky as hell and also think that most human priorities are pointless when you could be, you know, sitting on a rock and estivating. I liked that there are times the infighting can be set aside for survival and times it cannot.

However, plotwise this was trying to be about seven books at once. I mean, it has that much plot. There's the thread about where they've crashed, and the one about who else has crashed there, and the one about who else might crash there, and the one about the possible natives, and about three different things related to the infighting, plus it's a book where every single character has an arc, which is usually a good thing but here feels... crowded, because, as I said, about twenty-seven things going on every second. One of those books where nobody ever sits down, and you the reader do not, mentally, either.

I am therefore of two minds about it, because on the one hand the thing where it's ninety pounds of plot in a twenty-pound container and the complex three-dimensional character interactions are not standard Norton and mean that bits of this are good in directions that she doesn't usually hit. It also means that bits of it are bad in directions she doesn't usually hit. It was an early-fifties book, which Baen has just reprinted in one of those omnibuses they've been so nice with lately, and I can't tell whether I'm sad that this isn't a direction she really ran with or not. I mean, if she'd gotten control of the ensemble-cast-plus-complex-outer-plot thing that would have been awesome. On the other hand Norton is one of the great writers I know on the subject of people alone or in small groups or with animals surviving in hostile landscapes and it's one of the things I read her for. So... well, as with all roads not taken, I don't know. This book was fun, although fun in that way where it is frustrating to be able to see exactly what I would have changed in edit.

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Between Planets, Robert Heinlein (365 Books, Day 338)

2011-08-07T05:55:08Z

Read August 2nd.

When I was growing up, my father had a large collection of Golden Age science fiction and fantasy, starting circa E.E. Smith and cutting off, very short, at Dangerous Visions, which was where he decided the field had gotten too post-modern and depressing for him. (Not for me.) So we had in the house Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke-Anderson-etc., and when I got to the point in life where I started looking for lists of Writers In This Genre I Should Know About, we had all of them-- before 1970.

What it took me longer to learn was that my father is not a completist. When you've had the work of an author sitting on shelves in your house for eighteen years, and there are a whole bunch of books by said author on those shelves to boot, it does not, necessarily, occur to you that maybe you should go the library and make sure there isn't more.

So I have some weird holes. And despite having been handed Have Space Suit, Will Travel at six, I had never read this particular Heinlein juvenile.

It's not bad. It feels scraped to the bone, edited to the point where some of what should be actual story is elided, but I think this is because of the limits of YA publishing at the time.

The protagonist is attending school on Earth when a war seems likely to break out between Earth and Venus (which has a Terran colony, but is also the home of its own intelligent species). He has dual citizenship, having been born in a spaceship near the Moon, and his parents are on Mars, so they send for him to get him out of the combat zone. Unfortunately, the fighting blocks all transport to Mars, the government of Earth is very interested in something his parents wanted him to bring them, and he winds up a hundred million miles out of his way washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant near the Venerian pole.

The parts of this story that are most interesting to me are the ones you can't get into a juvenile in the fifties: the mode-switch between frightened and displaced refugee kid to a man with a job and a livelihood is covered reasonably well, but he doesn't fall as far as he would, and bounces a lot more quickly than most people might on discovering that they're on the wrong planet and the currency all their funds are in is illegal. And the further mode-switch between man with a job and a livelihood to guerilla soldier in a nasty jungle war is really, really elided, because the narrative is not going to tell you what he did to gain his combat reflexes. This is a book that would be a lot different if it had been written in the last few years.

But it does have things I like in it, specifically the Venerian dragons, who are wonderful, and there isn't enough of them; and the way it becomes slowly obvious to the protagonist that war is real and he is in it; and the way that there are few women, but they are as competent or more than the men, and it's his mother who's the more important scientist/spy.

This feels like a bridge between the juvenilia and the later stuff, to me, and has the flaws I'd expect of that, but I'm glad to have read it, because it fills a hole in Heinlein's work I'd theorized might be have something in it but not been certain about. And it brings back the nostalgia of being very small and reading all these books for the first time, the same now, but different.

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Lifelode, Jo Walton (365 Books, Day 336)

2011-08-06T06:22:39Z

Read July 31st. Obligatory disclaimer: the author is a very dear friend of mine.

It took me longer to find this book than I'd have liked, because NESFA Press put it out and therefore libraries elsewhere in the country do not seem to have it. But I bought one at Readercon, and I asked at the press table and they do still have some left.

This is the sort of fantasy novel that sounds much, much more complicated when you explain it than it does when you read it, because when you read it it is all plain and natural and the way the world works and everyone takes it for granted. But when you explain it you have to say, well, the world works in this kind of belt of cohesiveness, where the further West you go the more orderly and routine and uninspired and clockwork everything becomes until you reach the areas where there is no thought possible at all, and the further East you go the more quicksilver and magical and fluid and changeable everything becomes until you reach the areas where there is no thought possible at all (and just before those dwell the gods). Time is affected by this, too; easterly is faster travel than west. And of course this is all perfectly normal, is the thing. You can go east and come back a few generations later. It happens. Why not?

And another perfectly normal thing is that the protagonist has the ability to see all the different versions of people through time, the bits of themselves at different ages that they leave around in the places they've lived and also project into the future. So she's always seeing shadows of what people might mean now underneath, or would have meant when they were teenagers, or what have you, and again since this is how she has always lived the sliding tenses are simply how it is. This is one of those books that sounds overly complex, sounds difficult to get a footing in, but it isn't. It's a domestic fantasy and it's incredibly readable. It's about, among other things, the work of keeping house, and why that's worth doing and the ways people do and don't value it as it deserves; and it's about the complexities of having multiple adults in a household, who have children in various combinations; and it's about archaeology and sex and cooking and harvest and, in the way they always happen to people, the gods. (Never trust a god as far as you can throw it. Not that far.)

This is that rarity, a book which has a plot which is, actually, world-changing and complex, but where that is not, necessarily, the point. Most of these people are not out to change the world. They are out to put dinner on the table and run the village and estate and follow their lifelodes, that thing in them that is what they most truly want to do. It can be difficult for you if your lifelode is yeya, magic, which will make you want to go east.

I enjoyed this, in a way where bits of it were happy and reassuring, and bits were melancholy, and some was downright tragic, and all of it was very much one flowing whole, a book like water, a book which makes you realize how inclusive the term slice of life ought to be. It is clearly one of those books I am going to come back to; there is a lot in it. It is very much worth tracking down. It was very much worth looking for. I have never read anything else quite like it.

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In the House of the Worm, George R.R. Martin (365 Books, Day 335)

2011-08-06T06:02:51Z

Read July 30th, in a hallway at Otakon, while B. and Mobiuswolf played Race for the Galaxy. This 1975 novella is available by itself as an ebook and I read it on B.'s Kindle.

I confess that I have never read Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm, so I don't know how much of a riff on it this is, but I suspect there of being a connection. In an unthinkably old Earth, a warren of interwoven passages too old for anyone to tell whether they are natural or artificial, the yaga-la-hai live at the top, and once a year they look out at the dying sun. They are at war with, and feed on, the night-sighted grouns who live below, but they are dependent for groun meat mostly on the Meatbringer, who travels suspiciously easily back and forth between the two worlds.

This is science fiction disguised as Lovecraftian horror: there is nothing supernatural in it, but miles and miles of dark and decaying tunnels filled with worms genetically engineered as the food source, and predator, of the end of days. It's also not a book where you are particularly meant to like the characters; the viewpoint character is a shallow, selfish beast of a spoiled teenager, and learning how his world really works does not improve him any.

No, this carries itself almost entirely on atmosphere, and there it does work. There's an amazing sense of deep time here, beginning with the opening image of the dying sun and carrying on through all those miles of pitch-dark lost technology. The yaga-la-hai, who worship the White Worm, are barbaric and cruel in that way people are who never think about anything, and decadent in the way people are when there is no goal even possibly worth consideration. The plot is fairly conventional and expected, really, but the emotional climax for me was effective, when the young protagonist, to give himself strength, recites the litany that is his people's deepest creed, and it contains the line 'all the ships have left long ago; therefore let us dance'. It hits that these are the ones who chose to stay when the world ended. They'd only like to be Wells' Eloi, and that's who they think they are. In fact, they are disturbingly human.

This is an odd piece, and I'm not sure what its goals are, except to provide a string of indelible images. Well, Martin certainly succeeds at that, and if you like Lovecraft, or Tanith Lee, or watching people disguise science fiction as fantasy, this is the sort of thing you may like. But I do not think I would call it a major work, because it is a world-portrait more than a story, and a mood piece more even than a world-portrait; and while major work is possible in the fields of both world-portrait and mood piece, this one is a kind of thing that, though it is well done here, I have seen before.

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A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, Victor Pelevin (365 Books, Day 334)

2011-08-05T04:03:14Z

Read July 29th, in a hallway at Otakon, dressed as a My Little Pony (Twilight Sparkle). There are probably pictures of me reading this somewhere on the internet, as people kept asking to take photos of the costume and then saying I shouldn't look up from my book as reading was very much in character for Twilight.

This is early Pelevin, earlier than either of the novels of his I've read, and it feels like a writer trying to find, not his voice, but his genre. The voice is there all right, ironic, snarky, obscene, catching at pop culture from odd angles but with surprising bitter dignity when the time calls for it. The genre here vacillates between relatively straightforward fantasy such as the title story, which is as straightforward and friendly a story about werewolves in central Russia as you can get (not very: I... think there may be a political point about collective farming in it I am not culturally equipped to get), through outright and rather dull allegory (yes, the protagonist has spent his whole life in a prison, we get it, life is a prison, done now), into wildly subjective first-person hallucination, out-and-out surrealism in the classical sense, and something I can best describe as post-modernist post-Soviet up-yours bricolage.

There are werewolves and they are very neat; there are Soviet towns full of unreasoning bureaucracy, fear, confusion, griminess; there is a men's toilet which the Committee transforms into a palace when the cleaning woman discovers radical solipsism. There is an incident in which a man working on an assembly line catches a nuclear bomb when it would have fallen from the conveyor belt, preventing it from going off, and is told that he will be commended in the paper, except that the bomb will of course be described as a large container of creamed corn and his name is going to be changed to be more mediagenic. There's an entire version of the Soviet Union which turns out to be literally taking place in an anthill. Some of this is more effective and some less. All of it is wildly inventive, never trying the same thing twice, grabbing any technique that goes by and testing to see if any of this is working, mercilessly throwing out any gambit that looks like it doesn't.

And then there's the last story, 'Prince of Gosplan', where it all snaps into place, and this is the genre I've seen Pelevin in before, the fully mature writer confident enough to do whatever the hell he wants. There isn't a word for what he's doing here. It's not surrealism, quite, it's not allegory, quite, it's definitely not magical realism; but it pays no attention to the structures and tropes of fantasy as one sees them elsewhere.

The concept of the story is so simple it is laughable, and also brilliant: everyone in the story, employees at various perestroika-era Russian companies, is also engaged in playing, all their lives, a video game. Which game varies with which person. The protagonist is in a Prince-of-Persia-type RPG in which he climbs things and ducks traps, looking for the princess, but he rises so slowly up the bureaucracy what with all the requisition forms, he's been working here for years and is only on level two and he hates those damn body-shears on the escalators and what if he forgot to save last night? Anyone can run out of lives and vanish at any moment, after all... It's an amazing piece of work, funny, touching, bitter, and with an odd coherency to its incredibly insane worldbuilding. The rest of the book is fun and interesting. This one is unmissable.

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The Serial Garden, Joan Aiken (365 Books, Day 333)

2011-08-05T03:38:14Z

Review of the book I read on July 28th.

Joan Aiken, over the course of a long and illustrious career, wrote so many books that I have lost track of them, but is probably best known among my acquaintance for the Dido Twite series, a YA alternate-universe Victorian-era-except-she-didn't-reign fantasy romp that charms everyone else much more than it charms me. She also wrote Gothics, which I haven't read.

My problem with Joan Aiken is an unusual one, so unusual that it took me some time to identify it. I realized immediately that I found her work boring, but I couldn't figure out why, because on the surface it is just the sort of thing I ought to like.

The problem is that we think the same way. Someone will mention a plot point in one of her novels, and I will say 'but that was so dull, it was obvious that that was going to happen from page six', and the person will stare at me. And after several years it became obvious that it is not that her plots are predictable, it is that it is always what I would have done if I were plotting the book, and so I expect it and therefore find it predictable.

Therefore I have kept reading Joan Aiken, because on two separate occasions now I have run across things of hers which do do exactly what I would have done in the circumstances, but which are so much more impressively executed than I was expecting that I know they are better than I could have done them. And that is a rare treasure, if you have ever run into someone who thinks the same way you do, to get to see them do something better sharper shinier more. It gives the reading effect of eucatastrophe: I thought this would be the same old thing, but it isn't. It is almost as pleasant as surprising oneself.

The first of the two Joan Aiken things I like is The Stolen Lake, which I will defend against all comers as the most insane Arthurian novel ever written, and desperately treasure. I don't want to tell you anything else about it. It is too gloriously weird.

The second is the short story 'The Land of Trees and Heroes', which, as it is an Armitage family story, has been reprinted by Small Beer Press in this collection, The Serial Garden, along with all the other Armitage stories.

The deal with the Armitages is that, while they were on their honeymoon, Mrs. Armitage worried that their life might be boring, and wished for magical and exceptional things to happen to them. But only-- well, mostly-- on Mondays, so as not to make too much of a mess. The first and seminal Armitage story, which Aiken wrote at the age of sixteen (it reads as though she'd been a pro for decades) is called 'Yes, But Today Is Tuesday', in which the Armitage children inform their parents that there is a unicorn in the garden and this is incredibly confusing and upsetting because it is, in fact, Tuesday. The world has therefore slipped its natural courses. Unicorns are fine on Mondays, but Tuesday is just beyond the pale...

At their best, the Armitage stories, which Aiken wrote throughout her multi-decade career, walk a thin and lovely balance between the kind of domestic comedy in which odd magical happenings are taken completely for granted and the kind of domestic comedy in which odd magical happenings are, well, extremely peculiar. The Armitages are perfectly capable of dealing with anything whatsoever, as long as it happens on a Monday and everyone gets turned back into their natural shapes before teatime. This must have been an influence on Diana Wynne Jones, I can't see it not being.

At their worst, the stories fall off one side or the other of that tightrope. When everyone is too blasé about magic, there's little sense of danger, and when they're too confused, there's little sense of the unflappability that really makes the humor. But at least half the stories do walk that line adequately.

And 'The Land of Trees and Heroes' throws in the numinous. It is, as far as I can tell, an Armitage retelling (with alterations) of At the Back of the North Wind, without the bad poetry and Victorian philosophizing. It's funny (there is one segment that makes me laugh every single time), mythic, odd, pragmatic, and manages to feel nothing at all like E. Nesbit (which, by virtue of subject matter, it should; I love E. Nesbit but sometimes she is a magnetic force).

So I bought the collection for that one story, really, but it is a good collection, a good read-aloud book for a rainy night, full of wizards who practice eminent domain, church fetes to buy new wands for retired fairies, and the unicorns eating the azaleas. And, thank heaven, it is never, ever twee; sometimes flat, but never over-sentimental, purple, or treacly.

Maybe in another decade or so I'll run into another Joan Aiken I like.

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Ghost Story, Jim Butcher (365 Books, Day 331)

2011-07-28T05:12:46Z

Read yesterday, Tuesday, July 26th.

The latest novel of the Dresden Files, urban fantasy starring Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard. The Dresden books are a lot of fun, have moments of genuine good and moments of genuine suck, and do try not to be the same book every time. If you don't already read them, this is not where you come in. Too much backstory. This is like book eleven or twelve and while book one is not great, starting somewhere in the three-four range will do you better.

A non-spoilery assessment: Fascinating. This is definitely Butcher trying new things in several directions, some of which I like immensely and some of which I would like him to stop immediately. It has one of the tighter plots I've seen Butcher handle, interwoven with entirely too much in the way of brooding about previous moral decisions and backstory. It feels like a transitional book to me, old series status quo becoming a different thing emerging (hey, the last book was called Changes), and the new voice hasn't settled in solidly but is definitely present. On the structural level, it's kind of weirdly paced; there's so much going on that I suspect that part of the reason for the aforementioned brooding is to give the reader a breathing space. There aren't many natural pauses in the plot, and Butcher knows that there need to be lulls but is obviously fighting his page count to get all the plot into it. In the past, he's done a lot of A-plot, B-plot, and one plot would provide distraction/rest when the other one was slow/heated up. This book is not run that way and consequently needed to have the pauses built into the main thread. The couple of natural pauses that aren't brooding are actually very good, though.

And this is a more ambitious novel, structurally and in several other ways, than I've seen out of him before. I admire his determination not to let his series sit where it was-- honestly, I suspect he could have written the previous sort of book forever and people would have kept buying them. So I think that despite the occasional shakiness, this is a good direction, and it's certainly an entertaining book (he got the entertaining down a while ago and it hasn't gone away, which is always the danger when you hit slice-and-dice on your series' core concepts).

Do I think this is great literature, or going to be? Oh fuck no. But this series is some of the most enjoyable idfic I read, and the better he gets at it, the happier I'll be. And this is a clear sign that he's working really hard at getting better at it, and pretty much succeeding. I'll take it.

( Spoilery thoughts. )

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The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares (365 Books, Day 328)

2011-07-26T17:42:47Z

Review of the book I read Saturday, July 23rd.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was Jorge Luis Borges' best friend. The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel), published in 1940, was the first novel Casares felt was really successful. He'd been publishing for several years at that point-- in fact he started in the late 1920s, with short stories-- but Morel was where his style came into its own. The introduction is by Borges and the cover of the first edition by Borges' sister Norah. It is, however, definitely a book to be appreciated for itself, rather than for its connection with a writer who turned out to be more famous.

Morel comes from Casares' lasting obsession with the film star Louise Brooks, and his meditations on the philosophical implications of the cinema.

A man, a fugitive, escapes to a deserted island, which has on it only a chapel, a museum, and a swimming pool. The island is generally shunned because it is supposed to be the incubation ground of a terrible and deadly disease, but the fugitive prefers the possibility of illness to the certainty of life in prison. One day, he sees a beautiful woman sitting on the rocks and watching the sunset, despite the fact that no boat has come to the island. A large party of tourists appear to have taken up residence in the museum: they dance on the lawn, they swim in the pool. They have conversations which repeat in a strange way. They play the same two records over and over again, annoyingly. Gradually the fugitive realizes that they are images, the simulacra of people who came to this island at some point previously. But what caused the images? What is making them repeat? And is there any way for him to find out whether the image of the woman (whom he has grown to love) is capable of seeing and understanding him?

This is a novel which knows something about the science fiction tradition-- the name Morel is meant to recall Moreau-- but which is working in what at first appears to be an almost surrealist mode. The viewpoint is tightly confined, and one is never quite certain about the narrator's sanity. The language is spare and taut, and the logic has both the inexorable building of fact on fact that one expects from hard SF and the flowing image-linkages of a dream. It's quite short, more novella length than novel, but it packs a lot in.

Alain Robbe-Grillet would later fall in love with it and cite it as the work that directly produced his Last Year at Marienbad. I am inexpressibly charmed to know that there is a causal link between the career of Louise Brooks and Last Year at Marienbad.

The Invention of Morel is a quiet masterpiece, without a sentence out of place. It's available now from the New York Review of Books press, as are so many wonderful things. It deserves to be read more by science fiction readers and by persons who write about the history of science fiction; it also deserves to be read by people who enjoy suspense novels, or surrealism, or trying to understand odd first-person narratives. In short, it ought to have a wide audience; I never heard of it when I was going through my adolescent readings of all the criticism I could find. This is one of those books that still reads as though it was written yesterday.

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Faerie Winter, Janni Lee Simner (365 Books, Day 327)

2011-07-26T03:33:00Z

Review of the book I read on Friday, July 22nd. Obligatory disclaimer: author is a friend.

This sequel to Bones of Faerie continues that novel's taut writing, interestingly post-apocalyptic worldbuilding, and complicated character dynamics. The war between Faerie and the human world came very close to destroying both: plants are hostile, spring continued without the season changing for decades, and humans eke out a precarious existence battling their own food sources. Children have started to be born with magic. In Liza's village, for many years, that was grounds for exposure on the hillside, but, partly due to Liza's efforts, things are beginning to change. Liza's own magic involves summoning, calling, and being able to tell things what to do.

Because of Liza, winter has come for the first time in her lifetime. The worrisome thing is that it doesn't seem to want to leave again-- how long is winter supposed to last, anyway? And although some of the Fae have begun to view humans as sentient, including the one who has become Liza's teacher, not all of the great Fae think the war is even over. One in particular sees winter as a sign that both worlds are, inevitably, dying...

I enjoy the characters in this; it makes a fine followup to the first. I found the dynamic between Liza and her shapeshifter boyfriend Matthew somewhat too similar to the dynamic between the protagonist and her shapeshifter boyfriend in Simner's earlier Thief Eyes, but hey, I like shapechangers as much as the next person, and at least Simner is managing to avoid the new tropes of teen paranormal romance nicely. I also find it moderately coincidental that Liza's family is so tied up with the causes and duration of the War, but this is the sort of coincidence people have been using for plot purposes forever, so mostly it just causes me to sigh slightly and go well, I suppose one wants to tell stories about people who are close to important historical events.

And I really love the uneasy blend of trust and distrust that Liza has for her mentor figures: she's just not able to trust anyone fully, and she wouldn't actually be right to do so, even the ones who love her, because people do just keep lying to her. The adults are all morally ambiguous in ways adults don't often get in YA.

So I recommend this. I don't know whether you'd have to read the first book for it to make sense, but I read the first when it came out and haven't reread, meaning I don't have a sharp memory of the details, and this worked anyway. It would therefore probably stand alone reasonably well. I think there's going to be a third? This certainly ends in a way that does not require a sequel while still allowing one, as did the first book.

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Redemption in Indigo, Karen Lord (365 Books, Day 322)

2011-07-24T05:50:19Z

Review of the book I read on Sunday, July 17th.

This fascinating first novel is based on a Senegalese folktale with which I am not familiar. The world is full of djombi, who are mostly somewhat immaterial, and who have things they do-- there's a benevolent kind, who help humans, and a trickster kind. Djombi can borrow the forms of human beings and also craft shadow-shapes that they use to move in the world. The protagonist, a woman who has just gracefully left a marriage which was failing to work in some awkward directions, winds up with a chaos stick, a powerful thing belonging to an extremely powerful djombi who is not remotely happy that she has it.

I am not entirely sure that everything in this book feels as though it is in the same book, but all of it is very interesting. Lord has definitely mastered slapstick comedy; the sequences involving the woman's husband and her village would go beautifully in silent film. But the book changes gears rather abruptly from humor into drama, and I don't think there is as much of a sense of danger to the protagonist as is really necessary to make a change like that feel like the shock it would be for her. She is dumped out of a milieu she can handle perfectly (domestic comedy) into one she is not equipped for (spiritual tragedy) and I think it needs to be more brutal than it is. Also, I can't tell whether it's first-novel syndrome or whether it's because this is a book that is being orally narrated by one of its characters, but there are portions of the prose that don't feel either told or shown to me so much as summarized. If it's because of the oral narrative I think I'm all right with it, but those passages aren't long enough for me to be able to tell.

That said, though, this is eminently readable, funny, human and sympathetic. The worldbuilding is unique, Anansi has a series of pleasing cameos, the characters have some depth when they need to and not when they don't. It is the sort of book that makes me mark it down in my head as charming and different, though flawed, and remember that I should look for the author's next books when they appear, because she definitely has potential.

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Devil's Tor, David Lindsay (365 Books, Day 318)

2011-07-20T05:08:40Z

Review for the book I read Wednesday, July 13th, on the plane on the way to Boston.

Oh dear.

So, you know how I've been reading David Lindsay in aggregate, because some part of my brain suddenly went oh hey he must have written something other than Voyage to Arcturus and there was this university library sitting right there?

I am SO GLAD I left this one to last. SO SO GLAD. Because Sphinx was one of the best fantasy novels I have read in some time, and if I had read Devil's Tor before getting hold of Lindsay's other work I would never have read any David Lindsay ever ever ever again. I am going to find it very hard to explain to you exactly how terrible this book is. It is bad in the simple, basic, ordinary ways-- prose, construction, over-wordiness-- and then it is bad in a dimension I can only call world-historical, a dimension which makes me both sorrowful and angry. And yet there are ways in which I can't blame Lindsay specifically for its badness (I'll get into that), though there are ways in which I can AND DO. It is so bad I have not tagged it in this entry with the 'genre: awesomely terrible' tag, because there is nothing awesome about it. I think it is the worst book I have read this year.

One thing that I appreciate about Lindsay: he was always trying something new. He would write a book, and it would sell three copies (every single one to a future famous author), and it would make no money, and he would write another book that was totally different, in hopes that it would sell more. In fact the one novel of his that I have not yet managed to track down is a blood-and-thunder swashbuckling serial along the lines of, say, The Prisoner of Zenda (I can't picture what this could be like). He was always changing, both for artistic reasons, in that his philosophy grew and matured and shifted, but also because he was looking for the main chance, the publisher's check at the end of the rainbow. He tried straightforward fantasy epic (Arcturus) and a mode resembling early British ballad (The Haunted Woman) and drawing-room tragedy (Sphinx) and none of it got anywhere.

So Devil's Tor is David Lindsay doing Thomas Hardy.

NO, REALLY. Stylistically that is exactly what it is. I cannot imagine why he thought this was a good idea. He hasn't the ear. I don't like Hardy at all, but I will admit he had some ear; this reads more like the parodies of Hardy one gets in something like Cold Comfort Farm. Paragraphs and paragraphs of the moor being emotionally reflective of everyone's dully inarticulate unspoken feelings. Symbolic lightning. Symbolic sunrises. It is the most melodramatic geography. And it blows the pacing of the book all to hell, because whenever there's an emotional effect or something that's meant to be moving we get two goddamn pages of landscape portraiture. It's repetitive, too, because the book takes place in a quite limited geographic area, and there is only so much one can say about any given rock. I had the feeling by the end of the novel that I could have drawn a topographical surveyor's map of the titular tor at about one-inch resolution. I will not say no writer could pull that off without being boring, because there are more things in heaven and earth, but that writer is not Lindsay. Of a five hundred page novel, I would have cut half the length if I were editor; and that, the lesser of the book's disastrous flaws, is why I fell asleep reading it six separate times on the airplane. (I'd nothing else I hadn't read with me that wasn't in checked baggage. Silly, I know, but it was a five hundred page novel by a writer whose other work I've liked.) I could only take it for so long and then my brain would refuse.

( As for the greater of the book's flaws, this is the thing that's going to take some time to explain. UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS THIS WAY. )

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The Helmet of Horror, Victor Pelevin (365 Books, Day 310)

2011-07-06T07:45:31Z

Based on this and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Victor Pelevin ought to be a goddamn rockstar. Maybe he is and I just haven't heard?

Seriously, though, this is a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as an internet chatroom. Thread started by Ariadne, of course.

This is the kind of book about which I make incoherent flaily-hands. I wrote a short story some time ago called 'The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur', which I need to recall from the market I have to admit to myself is never going to get back to me and send somewhere else, and which is a postmodernist reworking of this myth. I'm fairly fond of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves*, which is a postmodernist reworking of this myth. Maybe there is something about it which attracts them. At any rate, what I'm saying here is that this is a story I care about deeply, which has already been done pretty well and which I spent a while doing as well as I could myself, and Pelevin's version is totally unlike anything I have ever seen or imagined.

The people who are contributing to the chatroom introduce themselves one by one. They write that they have all found themselves in identical keyboard-equipped bedrooms. Their nicknames are preset, and their conversations are heavily moderated: swearing and any references to real names or occupations are replaced by xxxxing. Outside each bedroom is a different portion of the labyrinth, with personalized symbology appropriate to the person whose room it is, so that you get the bit that looks like an old maze screensaver (all brick walls and felt fake rats), the bit that's a church full of displays of every labyrinth that has ever appeared in a church, the bit that's just a bedroom where Ariadne dreams of metaphysics and paradoxes.

There are two obvious questions: which is Theseus? And which is the Minotaur? A non-obvious question: do Theseus and the Minotaur know who they are themselves, if this is an enacted myth, where ordinary people take on the preset roles?

This being a Pelevin novel, the attempts to find out ramble through surrealism, pop culture references, parable, something I swear is Borges' garden of forking paths, discussion of emoticons, discussion of where everyone's handles come from, roundabout revelation of past lives and histories, and dirty jokes.

The thing is, the answers aren't what you expect. I don't care what you're expecting. It's not that. This novel is intentionally trying to confuse you-- that is part of what labyrinths are for-- and it's very hard to write about, therefore, because a lot of the point is the ways it's confusing, the blind alleys and wrong turnings Pelevin works so hard at setting up. I don't want to write the kind of analysis that pins it all down on a cork-board. But I can also see this being a book that is confusing as fuck to a lot of people. It would probably have confused me if it weren't one of my central stories.

I recommend it very highly. Remember that people do not ever have to tell the truth on the internet; remember not to get too attached to any single theory; and above all remember who made the thread and notice who carries it, concentrate on what actually happens in the myth, and it should all make perfect sense.

Pelevin is brilliant. Seriously, I need to read everything he's ever written immediately.

* I'm sorry! I don't know how to make the word house blue! I know it existentially should be.

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A Game of Cages, Harry Connolly (365 Books, Day 308)

2011-07-05T09:22:43Z

Yesterday's review.

The second of the Twenty Palace books continues to follow Ray Lilly, an ex-con who now works for a society of extremely ruthless magicians who are trying to keep the world safe from Lovecraftian ex-dimensional predatory monstrosities. Ray is too low on the totem pole to be told anything about anything, which makes the worldbuilding a fun mental jigsaw.

I was not as pleased with this book as I was with the first, Child of Fire, because this was too much like the first: small town under siege because of the actions of the wealthy and ruthless, which becomes blockaded from the greater world, and in which Ray is the person who cares the most about mitigating the damage to civilians. And the predator was creepier in the first book.

Still, this is perfectly competent fantasy of a kind I would call 'urban' except that it's kind of semi-rural, with an enjoyable Twin Peaks vibe. I will definitely give the series a third book, to see whether any of the various pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together and whether the setting and plot are sufficiently different. At the moment, things could go either way.

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Two by Jill Paton Walsh (365 Books, Day 307)

2011-07-04T09:13:48Z

Review from July 3rd.

You get two books today, because I found Jill Paton Walsh's Birdy and the Ghosties and Matthew and the Sea Singer together at the library and they're both short. Jill Paton Walsh really came to my attention when papersky gave me a copy of Knowledge of Angels, a staggeringly brilliant medieval theological fantasy which is one of the few books I know that really captures the way in which people in the past simply did not think the way people in the present think. In the process of my mentioning to sovay that everyone in the world ought to read Knowledge of Angels, sovay looked up Walsh's bibliography. I discovered I'd had The Green Book read to me in elementary school and had read about six of her others, in that way where one reads things as a young teenager and promptly forgets the title and author but can recite sentences word-perfect a decade later. Then sovay discovered that she'd been looking for the titles and author of Birdy and the Ghosties and Matthew and the Sea Singer for the last twenty years, because they were formative, so I read them.

Wow.

You can read each of these in about ten minutes, even if you aren't me, because they are very short, but they will stick with you. They have the kind of language that feels hewed out of solid oral tradition, found or grown rather than designed, and yet constructed with a layer of novelistic care as well as the classical pattern of the folktale. If I am reminded of anything, which I'm not, really, it's Alan Garner's Stone Book Quartet, except that these are for anybody from about the age of four up.

Birdie, Bird Janet, lives with her mother and father in a hut where a road meets a river and the river meets the sea. Her father is a ferryman, mostly rowing across the river but sometimes taking people to the nearest sea island. In Birdie and the Ghosties, Birdie learns that she has second sight (delightfully and pragmatically expressed as looking at everything twice), which becomes useful when her father gets asked to ferry three ghosts across to the second sea island, the one that wasn't there until that morning, and Birdie has to sit in the bows to even out the weight of the boat. Her father can't see the ghosts at all. This is one of those books that has a surface plot, which is perfect, and then another set of things going on which are more concealed, which are also perfect, and which rose up and smacked me on the last page so I had to sit blinking and contemplating for longer than it had taken to read the book. Astonishing.

Matthew and the Sea Singer is slightly less complex, but funnier: Matthew is an orphan Birdie buys from a cruel master, who is taken by a sea queen because he has a voice that sounds like heaven. She won't give him back unless they teach one of her sea creatures to sing just as well as he can, which is not an easy proposition; for one thing, it has to stay wet, and the parson is the choirmaster, and nobody's quite certain it's right to have it flopping about in the font like that... According to sovay this one is a real folktale, although not one I'd heard before. It's also basically perfect. I can't figure out how either of these books could possibly be improved on. They have good illustrations, even, watercolor over pen-and-ink with a slightly smudgey feel that works well for both funny and numinous.

These are utterly spectacular and I urge you not to miss them if you like folktale retellings at all even a little bit. They're out of print, but I had no trouble at the library, and it was the town library, not the university, so they shouldn't be that hard to track down. Buying them, on the other hand, well, going to have to work on that, I think. It will be worth it.

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Storm Over Warlock, Andre Norton (365 Books, Day 306)

2011-07-04T08:45:32Z

Review from July 2nd.

I'm not entirely sure how I missed this book, because I've read both the sequels (Ordeal in Otherwhere and Forerunner Foray) multiple times. I put it down to Norton's huge bibliography-- seriously, every time I go to a good used bookstore I turn up something of hers I have never heard of, let alone read-- and the fact that several of her series are structured to be so independent of one another that I once went fifteen years without noticing that I missed a book that came between two other books. (To be specific, I read Moon of Three Rings and Dare to Go A-Hunting as a kid and found out about Exiles of the Stars when Baen put out the omnibus. Uh, oops. Actually I didn't find out about Storm Over Warlock until the omnibus came out either, but I think there's a bit more excuse for missing the beginning of a series than the middle.)

This has a very typical Norton setup, young man on the run on an alien planet with telepathic wolverines as his companions. One reason I love Andre Norton so much is that that is absolutely a typical Norton setup. Anyway, the wrinkles this time around are that the things chasing him are insectoid aliens who really cannot be communicated with in any way, and the alien planet is inhabited by matriarchal telepathic sea-dwelling reptiles who don't like him because he is confusingly both male and telepathic, a thing that doesn't happen in their species. It's a pretty standard protagonist-running-away-from-things book, mostly, but the sea-dwelling culture is really fun and convincingly alien, and the way in which the protagonist keeps spending immense time and effort to stop being trapped on small islands without food or water only to then find himself trapped on different small islands without food or water is structurally more enjoyable than it sounds.

Solidly second-tier Norton-- in a year or so it is going to blend in my head with her other sixty-three books about people running away from danger with telepathic animals. The sequels are much better, more complex and less standardized. But I felt no urge to walk away in the middle; Norton is always readable even when she's not impressive.

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The Violet Apple and The Witch, David Lindsay (365 Books, Day 303)

2011-07-03T09:20:59Z

Review from June 29th.

This is actually an omnibus of two novels: The Violet Apple and The Witch.

The Violet Apple, written in 1924, was Lindsay's last completed novel, and was never published during his lifetime. I am not certain why, as Charles Williams seems to have managed to begin a career writing the same kind of book during the time Lindsay's manuscript was bouncing from publisher after publisher.

And Charles Williams is the correct and direct comparison here: this is explicitly theological fantasy and though I know it would have been impossible for C.S. Lewis to have read it (it was not published till 1976), maybe there was something in the water, for The Violet Apple is an unorthodox and fantastical retelling of the myth of Eden. The protagonist, Anthony Kerr, a successful playwright, has a family heirloom which has been passed down for centuries, a Venetian glass dragon of great beauty and immense value, hollow and containing a seed which is supposed to be from the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The dragon is broken; Anthony plants the seed; the tree grows; there are two fruits. But the tree is a miniature and stunted thing, dying even as it bears, and the apples don't look a thing like apples as anyone knows them. Meanwhile, circumstances keep conspiring to throw Kerr together with his oldest friend's fiancée Haidee, although he himself is engaged to marry that friend's sister. In a moment of spite at the web of jealousy and confusion the four of them find themselves in, Haidee picks the fruit.

As with Sphinx, this is an odd fusion of the appearance of a drawing-room tragedy with a deeper level of allegory and the fantastical, but I think it is a lesser work than Sphinx. Sphinx is one of those novels in which every incident plays into the main theme, whereas The Violet Apple really has two plots, and the surface difficulties of social convention and which set of couples will marry are just as pointless and irrelevant as Anthony and Haidee, under the influence of the knowledge of the angels, find them to be. That may be the point, but it makes for an actually boring overlayer. The fantastical content, while more overt than in Sphinx, is consequently less menacing, more predictable. Sphinx is a book I recommend to anyone who likes complex fantasy, but this is specifically a book for those who like theological fantasy, to whom the argument is as interesting as the characters and images.

And yet, as a work of theological fantasy it is fascinating, because while it uses the story of Adam and Eve and has a resolution that appears at first glance Christian, it is not a Christian philosophy that Lindsay is arguing. It is the same complex not-quite-Buddhism not-quite-Calvinism that he always does hold, and it is odd to see these symbols used this way. That may have something to do with why the book was not published. Or it may just be the dullness of the domestic portions. It is also marred by a glaring sexism, of the sort at which one sighs and says 'par for the course for an author born in the 1880s, but'. I found it a rewarding read, mostly, although I got through parts of it with great impatience, but then I am a sucker for theological fantasy.

The Witch is another animal entirely. It is the novel Lindsay was working on when he died, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable, the one in which he was trying to synthesize absolutely all of his thoughts into one book written at the height of his power, the one he wanted to make a Great Novel and place among the immortals.

If he had finished it, he might have done so. I have certainly read nothing remotely like it. The protagonist is haunted before we even meet him, haunted from the book's first sentence, though that dawns on the reader gradually: he has heard a rumor that a young lady who is at a party he is attending is a witch. He does not meet her at the party. He questions what his acquaintances could mean by saying that. He meets with friends, receives business letters. But no interaction he has with anybody goes as expected, nothing is normal, his family break out into odd disquisitions, persons in the street tell him dreams they have had. The entirety of the world around him and everyone he knows seem to be conspiring to bring him, as if by coincidence, to a certain spot, whose history he is being told before he gets there, a spot known for centuries as a place of danger and sacrifice. There has never been any 'reality' in the book at all; he lost that when he began to fall down the walls of the world. She will be there, of course, waiting, at the bottom. He cannot tell whether she means him good or ill, or why she decided on him.

She means, it turns out, to send him in the flesh through the outer precincts of Heaven. This is not a benevolent motive, or, if it is, it is an incomprehensible and inhuman benevolence, because the metaphysics of that universe are such that it is pointless trying to distinguish between Heaven and Hell.

You can tell exactly where Lindsay got to, before becoming ill. It is a brilliant book, almost as good as he thinks it is, genuinely frightening and stirring and extremely unusual in the way that reality fractures and reshapes around the protagonist so that the reader can notice it and he can't. The philosophy of what Lindsay thinks this Heaven is is worked into the fiction indissolubly, and then, suddenly, it isn't, and the whole thing collapses into a bald statement of the philosophy involved, a lecture and no longer a novel at all, and then cuts off. I cannot recommend the lecture. It is boring and dry and repetitive and exhausting and syntactically crazy. The book before it is so good, and stops so quickly, and I can see why it was published, because it is not losable, but it has the eternal frustration of something that is never going to hit what it was aiming at. It is lovely and infuriating and I doubt he'd have finished it if he lived another twenty years, because the hundred pages here took him twenty-five. I can't in good conscience suggest anybody read it, but I also can't suggest not. Consider your annoyance threshold, and how sad you become at things that break off in the middle.

I am in no doubt, now, that Lindsay was a major fantasy writer, and that the majority of his reputation depends on his least characteristic book. A Voyage to Arcturus has impressive weirdness value, but it simply is not as good as The Haunted Woman, or Sphinx, or the non-disintegrated portion of The Witch. He was a genuine novelist, and could use both symbol and subtlety; I disagree with his metaphysics and cosmology so thoroughly that I understand why C.S. Lewis considered them actively blasphemous, but I certainly know what they are, and his innumerable fine shadings of worldbuilding thought; he had ideas about women that make me want to throw things, an innate class bias I doubt he ever once noticed, an unparalleled way with a visual image, and no sense of humor whatsoever. I do not think he will ever be popular, because if he had a time it has passed, but I could wish for him to have literary descendants, if they could learn to laugh at themselves a bit while still maintaining that amazing unsettling quality he has where you think you know where the next step is, and it isn't, and you put your foot on empty air and stumble. I have remaining to read that I can get of him only Devil's Tor, which should be interesting.

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Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, Bertrand Russell (365 Books, Day 298)

2011-06-24T09:02:35Z

Things I did not know before today: apparently Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize in Literature. ... okey-dokey then. Not the field I would have guessed. (How about, I don't know, math?)

Anyway, I read part of this excerpted yesterday in Clifton Fadiman's anthology The Mathematical Magpie, and such is the power of the internet that today I could sit down and read it in its entirety, for all things out of copyright come into the demesne of Google someday. How is it?

... fascinating. (Picture me saying this with a slightly quirked eyebrow and a tone of very mild sarcasm.)

So this is an almost entirely didactic book, a series of nightmares attributed to famous people or famous classes of people; it's not satirical, because it is not necessarily trying to satirize anyone involved, but it's also not quite allegorical. Parable, I guess. Most of it has become irrelevant, because the Cold War is over and this came out in 1952, though I did like the one where Stalin has a terrible nightmare about being very politely held prisoner by a group of Quakers who feed him toast and cocoa, allow him stimulating and healthful exercise, and attempt gently to explain to him that in order to be set free he must learn to love his fellow man. The ironic humor of that has held.

The best story was in fact the mathematician's nightmare I read yesterday, but I have to say, that one is very good. The master of ceremonies who introduces the mathematician to the numbers is Pi, for instance, who goes masked, and any who look on his whole face will die. Perfect numbers go crowned. It just all works, it's a real fantasy story.

And, oddly enough, several of the others are real science fiction; while Eisenhower's nightmare reads like a bad knockoff of 1984, there's a nightmare belonging to some senator or other which reads like a runup to The Man in the High Castle. A couple of non-nightmare stories included are dystopian extrapolations based on Russell's conviction that blind faith in anything except physically provable fact will lead inexorably to atrocities. I am not entirely certain what to think of his technique of setting all of these dystopias among South American and African peoples; his point seems to be that a) they are, of course, people and that therefore b) any system of religious government, no matter its culture of origin, will be just as stupid as any other, but his portrayals bear no relation at all to the actual cultures of, say, South America. While saying that any culture is as likely to make terrible mistakes as any other is an interesting and arguable point, I am not sure that portraying only cultures making the mistakes who were already not thought terribly well of by the white, mostly male audience I suspect he was anticipating would have done much to help that audience conclude that these mistakes were ones they, personally, were engaging in, which is clearly the conclusion the reader is meant to draw by analogy. There is a novel-length story here in which no white people appear. I suspect that this was radical. It does not read that way today.

Also, the unconscious sexism, and the didacticism as of a sledgehammer. It is sad, because if he'd stopped being so ideologically pointed the man could have been a brilliant fiction writer; his language is lucid, his concepts are interesting. As it is, it was like reading an incredibly odd fusion of Isak Dinesen (bright language, brilliant figures of speech, flashes of numinous) and Ayn Rand (characters as points of engagement with sections of ideology rather than as people, grinding of plot wheels clearly audible in background, mystifying sexual politics).

I am not sorry to have read the good parts-- there is a bit with a metaphysician in Hell which is also spectacular, in which he explains that in fact Hell is a selection of improbabilities, so that the deeper into Hell you go the more improbable things become without becoming impossible. The body of Satan consists entirely of nothingness, because, against all probability, every atom that approaches the area where his mind resides collides with another atom in such a way as to be deflected. And so the devil is a constantly moving gap in the substance of all real things, shaped like an anti-matter angel, outlined in the consistently exploding armor of light caused by the continuous bombardment of particles. I mean, that is pretty awesome. As cool as that Mark Twain story where the devil's made of radium and so can wither you by touching you and glows in the dark.

But I really cannot recommend this to those of you who are not willing to wade through a lot of annoyance. If you are ever in the mood to read a bad book, for its occasional moments of interest, this will reward you a great deal more than many of them, but it is still a bad book.

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