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truepennySo, as those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember, I've been having trouble, the last year or five, with reading fiction. "Trouble" in the sense that I have been finding new narratives simply too mentally stressful to cope with (leading to the VERY WEIRD phenomenon of putting down a perfectly good book because I don't want to know what happens next). This has made me very sad, because reading has been my most favoritest thing to do since I learned to read at the age of three.
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coffeeem, if you're feeling modest today, you may want to avert your eyes.)
I love Emma Bull's books. I've reread Bone Dance more times than I can count, to the point that, as with Watership Down and Dog Wizard and Gaudy Night, I have to ration my rereading because the words are wearing out. So the fact that Emma has a new book out entailed obligate purchase. And then I faced up to myself and read the darn thing.
And then, in the past couple weeks, I've read four more books.
I'm not such a shining Pollyanna-ist as to think the fiction block is gone for good, but I am really enjoying reading for pleasure in the meantime.
I'm reserving judgment on Territory itself until I've got the rest of the story, (There is more story, right?) because the book feels very much like set-up--and like necessary brute-force hackwork at the Myth of Wyatt Earp to get everything pruned back to the point where actual storytelling can take place. I enjoyed it, but it felt very unfinished.
Next up was Halting State (Charles Stross), which I also enjoyed. I thought the second person point of view worked BRILLIANTLY with Jack--who is not only a gamer, but whose narrative gives the flavor of Jack talking to himself (it is possible that my approval comes from a certain amount of identification here)--intermittently with Elaine, and not at all with Sue, in whose chapters I kept getting dumped out of the story by the artificiality of the conceit. But I enjoyed the book a great deal regardless, in all its cracktastic whizz-bang glory.
Snake Agent (Liz Williams) was also great heaping wodges of fun, and I shall have to look for the other Detective Inspector Chen books. I loved the matter of fact mixture of sf and fantasy, and the way that Chen's universe is both rational and moral although it looks like exactly the opposite of both.
Blindsight (Peter Watts) . . . wow. If, as has been posited, in my books people have a bad day, and in Bear's books, people have a bad day and then the world blows up, in Peter Watts' books, people have a bad day, the world blows up, and the universe says vaguely, Standard operating procedure, eh? and goes on about its business with nary a hiccup. This is not a cheerful book. But it is amazingly good. It proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that hard sf can ALSO have characterization and prose style and all those other literary things, and can be COMPULSIVELY READABLE, all at the same time.
The Pinhoe Egg (Diana Wynne Jones). (Which is obviously being marketed as a J. K. Rowling clone. I object on principle, but I hope it's selling a lot of books for her.) This didn't boot the ending as painfully as The Merlin Conspiracy, but it has some of the same problem, wherein evil fails to have any real consequences. This is not true of Jones's earlier books--as for example, The Homeward Bounders, in which the POINT of the book is that you can't recover from having evil done to you. You can survive, and you can go on, but you can't get back to what you were before. Yes, Gammer Pinhoe is dealt with, and Gaffer Pinhoe is freed--and the great-uncles are banished to Brighton, sort of--but Gammer Pinhoe's sons get off essentially scot-free. (The only one who even loses his wife is Charles, and Charles really seems happier about it than otherwise.) And Gaffer Pinhoe doesn't even seem to MIND that he's been crippled and imprisoned for eight years. In Aunt Maria--which has a lot of similarities with this plotline of The Pinhoe Egg--Antony Green at least has lingering PTSD about his ordeal. It has changed him. Nobody in The Pinhoe Egg changes except for Marianne, who changes only for the better. (The other obvious comparison is The Magicians of Caprona, wherein the Montanas and the Petrocchis don't change either, except for cooperating with each other again, but the important thing there is that THEY HAVE NOT DONE EVIL. They've been stupid and childish and irresponsible, but the evil in Caprona is not their doing and they have not knowingly colluded with it.) It's not that I want a morality play in which good is rewarded and evil is punished; I just want evil not to be erasable or ignorable.
There's also a tendency I've noticed in her other recent books (most egregiously The Year of the Griffin) to tell rather than show, which I find lessens the impact of Cat as a viewpoint character. One of the wonderful things about Charmed Life is the way that, as a reader, you can tell there's something a little wrong with Cat, but you can't tell exactly what it is or how it happened. The Pinhoe Egg exposits it out and thereby makes it less compelling. I feel a link somehow with the oversimplification of the consequences of evil (what's wrong with Cat is a consequence of evil, and one of the things that is very interesting in Charmed Life, and which she sort of hints at here but doesn't develop, is whether Cat is an agent as much as a victim: his failure to turn Gaffer Farleigh back into a human being should resonate with his letting Gwendolen use his magic to seal herself in her chosen world, and it doesn't quite do it. Yes, you can argue that Stealer of Souls resolved this issue, but my point is that it SHOULDN'T resolve); she's making things plain and obvious that shouldn't be. And her books didn't used to do that.
And there was an overabundance of animals; I adored Nutcase (I love the way Jones writes cats and their recalcitrant insistence on following their own plots--Throgmorton is one of the best things about The Lives of Christopher Chant), and I liked the gender-reversal of Cat being the one who has the mystical bond with the horse, and the one the griffin loves, and so on, but she just didn't do ENOUGH with it. In particular the horse, who was a plot device, and kind of annoying in his own right. (And where was Fiddle?) And I am sad that Janet has become amalgamated with Julia, since one of the very good things about Charmed Life is the way that Gwendolen and Janet and Julia are all girls, but they're all quite different.
I set the bar very high with Jones's books, so the fact that I found The Pinhoe Egg a little disappointing does not mean that it's a bad book. I had a good time with it, and--unlike many sequels written years later--it did not ruin earlier Chrestomanci books for me.
(
coffeeem, if you're feeling modest today, you may want to avert your eyes.)I love Emma Bull's books. I've reread Bone Dance more times than I can count, to the point that, as with Watership Down and Dog Wizard and Gaudy Night, I have to ration my rereading because the words are wearing out. So the fact that Emma has a new book out entailed obligate purchase. And then I faced up to myself and read the darn thing.
And then, in the past couple weeks, I've read four more books.
I'm not such a shining Pollyanna-ist as to think the fiction block is gone for good, but I am really enjoying reading for pleasure in the meantime.
I'm reserving judgment on Territory itself until I've got the rest of the story, (There is more story, right?) because the book feels very much like set-up--and like necessary brute-force hackwork at the Myth of Wyatt Earp to get everything pruned back to the point where actual storytelling can take place. I enjoyed it, but it felt very unfinished.
Next up was Halting State (Charles Stross), which I also enjoyed. I thought the second person point of view worked BRILLIANTLY with Jack--who is not only a gamer, but whose narrative gives the flavor of Jack talking to himself (it is possible that my approval comes from a certain amount of identification here)--intermittently with Elaine, and not at all with Sue, in whose chapters I kept getting dumped out of the story by the artificiality of the conceit. But I enjoyed the book a great deal regardless, in all its cracktastic whizz-bang glory.
Snake Agent (Liz Williams) was also great heaping wodges of fun, and I shall have to look for the other Detective Inspector Chen books. I loved the matter of fact mixture of sf and fantasy, and the way that Chen's universe is both rational and moral although it looks like exactly the opposite of both.
Blindsight (Peter Watts) . . . wow. If, as has been posited, in my books people have a bad day, and in Bear's books, people have a bad day and then the world blows up, in Peter Watts' books, people have a bad day, the world blows up, and the universe says vaguely, Standard operating procedure, eh? and goes on about its business with nary a hiccup. This is not a cheerful book. But it is amazingly good. It proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that hard sf can ALSO have characterization and prose style and all those other literary things, and can be COMPULSIVELY READABLE, all at the same time.
The Pinhoe Egg (Diana Wynne Jones). (Which is obviously being marketed as a J. K. Rowling clone. I object on principle, but I hope it's selling a lot of books for her.) This didn't boot the ending as painfully as The Merlin Conspiracy, but it has some of the same problem, wherein evil fails to have any real consequences. This is not true of Jones's earlier books--as for example, The Homeward Bounders, in which the POINT of the book is that you can't recover from having evil done to you. You can survive, and you can go on, but you can't get back to what you were before. Yes, Gammer Pinhoe is dealt with, and Gaffer Pinhoe is freed--and the great-uncles are banished to Brighton, sort of--but Gammer Pinhoe's sons get off essentially scot-free. (The only one who even loses his wife is Charles, and Charles really seems happier about it than otherwise.) And Gaffer Pinhoe doesn't even seem to MIND that he's been crippled and imprisoned for eight years. In Aunt Maria--which has a lot of similarities with this plotline of The Pinhoe Egg--Antony Green at least has lingering PTSD about his ordeal. It has changed him. Nobody in The Pinhoe Egg changes except for Marianne, who changes only for the better. (The other obvious comparison is The Magicians of Caprona, wherein the Montanas and the Petrocchis don't change either, except for cooperating with each other again, but the important thing there is that THEY HAVE NOT DONE EVIL. They've been stupid and childish and irresponsible, but the evil in Caprona is not their doing and they have not knowingly colluded with it.) It's not that I want a morality play in which good is rewarded and evil is punished; I just want evil not to be erasable or ignorable.
There's also a tendency I've noticed in her other recent books (most egregiously The Year of the Griffin) to tell rather than show, which I find lessens the impact of Cat as a viewpoint character. One of the wonderful things about Charmed Life is the way that, as a reader, you can tell there's something a little wrong with Cat, but you can't tell exactly what it is or how it happened. The Pinhoe Egg exposits it out and thereby makes it less compelling. I feel a link somehow with the oversimplification of the consequences of evil (what's wrong with Cat is a consequence of evil, and one of the things that is very interesting in Charmed Life, and which she sort of hints at here but doesn't develop, is whether Cat is an agent as much as a victim: his failure to turn Gaffer Farleigh back into a human being should resonate with his letting Gwendolen use his magic to seal herself in her chosen world, and it doesn't quite do it. Yes, you can argue that Stealer of Souls resolved this issue, but my point is that it SHOULDN'T resolve); she's making things plain and obvious that shouldn't be. And her books didn't used to do that.
And there was an overabundance of animals; I adored Nutcase (I love the way Jones writes cats and their recalcitrant insistence on following their own plots--Throgmorton is one of the best things about The Lives of Christopher Chant), and I liked the gender-reversal of Cat being the one who has the mystical bond with the horse, and the one the griffin loves, and so on, but she just didn't do ENOUGH with it. In particular the horse, who was a plot device, and kind of annoying in his own right. (And where was Fiddle?) And I am sad that Janet has become amalgamated with Julia, since one of the very good things about Charmed Life is the way that Gwendolen and Janet and Julia are all girls, but they're all quite different.
I set the bar very high with Jones's books, so the fact that I found The Pinhoe Egg a little disappointing does not mean that it's a bad book. I had a good time with it, and--unlike many sequels written years later--it did not ruin earlier Chrestomanci books for me.
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Date: 2007-11-26 04:22 pm (UTC)Hooray, enjoying reading for pleasure!
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Date: 2007-11-26 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-11-26 04:49 pm (UTC)So, so long as everyone keeps writing, hopefully it'll all work out in the end...
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Date: 2007-11-26 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-26 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-26 06:00 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I'm disquieted by her occasional Absolutely Reliable and Benevolent Authorities like Chrestomanci and the government which shut down the travel agency in _Dark Lord of Derkholm_. (Jones is a read-once author for me, pretty much. I may have missed some details.)