Books read, October 2011
Nov. 3rd, 2011 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerTwo cons ate into my reading time a fair bit, but I still made it through a decent number of books.
A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan. As usual, my own work doesn't count. (But this was for editing purposes, if you're curious.)
Freedom and Necessity, Steven Brust and Emma Bull. A historical novel set in 1849, about (at least to begin with) a man thought to be dead, who has no memory of what happened to him. The novel is epistolary -- that is, told via letters, and the occasional newspaper excerpt or such -- and although it takes a little while to build up momentum, from the start the characterization is superb. All four of the main letter-writers are very vivid and distinct, with complexity that unfolds beautifully as the novel goes on. I particularly loved Susan (which will surprise no one); she says things at various points which struck me as addressing the issue of feminism in the nineteenth century from an angle that is not the same one I've seen over and over again in other books. A sample quote:
Her life is infinitely more dangerous once she gets involved with the plot, but the sense that she is truly living for the first time is striking.
(Also, if you tell me Brust and/or Bull imprinted hard on the Lymond Chronicles, I will be not at all surprised. James bears many interesting resemblances to him -- and this book has a similar-ish Richard, too.)
The only reason I am not head-over-heels in love with this book is that I felt a little bit let down at the end. Some of that, I think, is the fault of the cover copy, which promised me "a magical conspiracy," and didn't quite deliver the way I wanted. I'm fine with the book being largely mundane, but there came a point where I really expected fantasy to break through much more strongly than it did, and the lack disappointed me. Related to that, the plot strand involving the Trotter's Club never integrated with the rest in the way I really wanted. Saying more would involve spoilers, though, so if you want to know what I mean, e-mail me or ask me in person.
Still and all -- a very, very good book. My complaints above keep it from being perfect (for my tastes); they don't make it bad. Not by a long stretch.
A Sudden Wild Magic, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
another book of mine, but I'm not going to tell you which one or why Yeah, I'm being mysterious. Deal with it.
House of Mystery: Room and Boredom, Jill Thompson et al. First volume of a graphic novel series, about a place I almost want to call the Hotel California -- which may well have inspired it. There's a bar in a house that can be accessed from many different places, but not everyone who comes to it is allowed to leave again. It's hard to properly judge a comic on this small of a dose, but I liked how it began.
Hexwood, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Wild Robert, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Last Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko. Russian urban fantasy, and final volume of the series that began with Night Watch (also made into a very attractive movie). It's been long enough since I read the first three volumes that I had to refresh my memory on Wikipedia, but it made for a pretty solid ending. The biggest weakness, I would say, is that each novel is more like three loosely connected novellas, which somewhat undermines the sense of forward movement. But it does a decent job of finding a transformative note to end on, which is something I really look for in the conclusion of a series like this.
Castle in the Air, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Freedom and Necessity, Steven Brust and Emma Bull. A historical novel set in 1849, about (at least to begin with) a man thought to be dead, who has no memory of what happened to him. The novel is epistolary -- that is, told via letters, and the occasional newspaper excerpt or such -- and although it takes a little while to build up momentum, from the start the characterization is superb. All four of the main letter-writers are very vivid and distinct, with complexity that unfolds beautifully as the novel goes on. I particularly loved Susan (which will surprise no one); she says things at various points which struck me as addressing the issue of feminism in the nineteenth century from an angle that is not the same one I've seen over and over again in other books. A sample quote:
I'm doing this mostly because it's opened wide a door to a room inside me that before I could only guess at by the light along the sill and through the keyhole. It's a room in which all those things in me that, living the normal life of a well-bred woman, I could never use -- strength and speed and hardiness; command over my mind and body; respect for the language of my senses; a certain ferocity of the spirit -- are not only useful but essential. In that place life is lived as if in mid-air over an obstacle, between leap and landing, with everything committed and nothing certain.
Her life is infinitely more dangerous once she gets involved with the plot, but the sense that she is truly living for the first time is striking.
(Also, if you tell me Brust and/or Bull imprinted hard on the Lymond Chronicles, I will be not at all surprised. James bears many interesting resemblances to him -- and this book has a similar-ish Richard, too.)
The only reason I am not head-over-heels in love with this book is that I felt a little bit let down at the end. Some of that, I think, is the fault of the cover copy, which promised me "a magical conspiracy," and didn't quite deliver the way I wanted. I'm fine with the book being largely mundane, but there came a point where I really expected fantasy to break through much more strongly than it did, and the lack disappointed me. Related to that, the plot strand involving the Trotter's Club never integrated with the rest in the way I really wanted. Saying more would involve spoilers, though, so if you want to know what I mean, e-mail me or ask me in person.
Still and all -- a very, very good book. My complaints above keep it from being perfect (for my tastes); they don't make it bad. Not by a long stretch.
A Sudden Wild Magic, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
House of Mystery: Room and Boredom, Jill Thompson et al. First volume of a graphic novel series, about a place I almost want to call the Hotel California -- which may well have inspired it. There's a bar in a house that can be accessed from many different places, but not everyone who comes to it is allowed to leave again. It's hard to properly judge a comic on this small of a dose, but I liked how it began.
Hexwood, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Wild Robert, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
Last Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko. Russian urban fantasy, and final volume of the series that began with Night Watch (also made into a very attractive movie). It's been long enough since I read the first three volumes that I had to refresh my memory on Wikipedia, but it made for a pretty solid ending. The biggest weakness, I would say, is that each novel is more like three loosely connected novellas, which somewhat undermines the sense of forward movement. But it does a decent job of finding a transformative note to end on, which is something I really look for in the conclusion of a series like this.
Castle in the Air, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 03:33 am (UTC)I re-read Freedom and Necessity last month. Yep, still good. I think I noticed more odd things this time around, but yeah, the fantasy is a bit too low-key. Or something.
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Date: 2011-11-04 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 05:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 05:23 am (UTC)The thing for me with the fantasy was, I could see a space in the narrative for it to somehow tie the Trotters' Club and the Chartist thing together . . . and then it didn't. And so I was left with both Not Enough Fantasy and Not Enough Integration.
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Date: 2011-11-04 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 05:25 am (UTC)(In the closest thing to a defense I can mount for Lymond, you are clearly supposed to want to stab him in the face sometimes, and his arrogance is, as you go along, counterbalanced by other things. But he's not the easiest character to like, no.)
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Date: 2011-11-04 05:42 am (UTC)(Yeah, I've heard that Lymond later reveals Depths and I totally acknowledge that he's a worthwhile character--he just happens to push all my buttons in the very worst way.)
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Date: 2011-11-04 05:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 02:13 pm (UTC)America wasn't magic so much as free from extradition treaties.
(I've seen it pointed out recently that for much of the 19th century, American exceptionalism was simple fact, not posing. The only democracy (for white men), big economic opportunity, vs. constrained aristocratic monarchies. Slavery and imperialism sure, but there was a real difference between the US and everywhere else, then between the US+Switzerland and everywhere else...)
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Date: 2011-11-04 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 06:05 pm (UTC)And slavery is a big deal, it really is. I can't dismiss or ignore it in any nineteenth century narrative, so America as 'land of the free' at that period has a weird ring for me. (Not that I'm claiming the UK was perfect. Far from it. The evils of empire are many and still spreading and our hands are very dirty indeed.)
('Magic America' is a quotation from a song by UK band Blur.)
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Date: 2011-11-04 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 06:30 pm (UTC)Edited to add: Also, it bugs me that right at the start, Richard is advising James to keep certain things with him, that is clearly intended as supernatural protection; but a) it never really becomes relevant and b) why the heck is Richard the one giving that advice? Chekhov's mistletoe, man.
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Date: 2011-11-04 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 06:45 pm (UTC)I had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree; on the other hand, it would have been a cop-out to say that everything's okay and the characters don't pay any price for their actions. The logical conclusion of certain events, both in story and backstory, would be imprisonment, execution, or transportation, which is a) even more of a downer (since I read having to flee as something of a downer to begin with) and b) not something the characters would voluntarily stand still for, so making it happen = making them lose, on some level.
And then, as a Briton, I was always taught that the Puritans were the purveyors of religious and social repression, who sought to impose their values on everyone, and I am always slightly surprised when I'm reminded that in the US they are remembered as fleeing oppression.
This is true; having read about 17th century Puritans, I see the ones who sailed over here in a much less charitable light. On the other hand, the Bill of Rights is a pretty big freaking deal. 1850s America was not at all a flawless promised land, even when it comes to upholding that same Bill of Rights, but it did have some notable things going for it.
. . . until about ten years later, and the fanfic for that writes itself. Probably ending with both parties getting shot for seditious activities. I mean, okay, they intend to go on to Wisconsin, but they start in Baltimore, and it's not like there's anything there that might fire up their activist instincts . . . .
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Date: 2011-11-04 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 06:48 pm (UTC)Of course, explicit magic would falsify Marx's materialism, at least in a simple reading.
Did I tell you about my working through the fairy tale retelling novels?
In sequence,
Briar Rose -- Holocaust/Sleeping Beauty metaphor
Sun, Moon, and the Stars -- there are artists, and there's a Hungarian fairy tale. God knows what they have to do with each other.
Then Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. "Wait, the Classics department *isn't* just a bunch of weirdos? Actual fairy tale elements? So shocking!"
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Date: 2011-11-04 06:50 pm (UTC)But yeah. Voluntary exile seems a fine if bittersweet way of avoiding the jaws of the law by that point.
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Date: 2011-11-04 06:54 pm (UTC)Which bugged me because I tend to not like fantasy used primarily as metaphor -- but on the other hand, injecting actual fantasy into that bit of history sets off warning sirens, so.
Sun, Moon, and the Stars -- there are artists, and there's a Hungarian fairy tale. God knows what they have to do with each other.
Oh hallelujah I'm not the only one who reacted that way.
Then Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. "Wait, the Classics department *isn't* just a bunch of weirdos? Actual fairy tale elements? So shocking!"
<lol> Whereas I, having read them in the opposite order (well, I don't remember whether the Yolen came before the Brust or vice versa), was sorely disappointed by the lack of actual folklore-in-real-world elements of the others.
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Date: 2011-11-04 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 06:59 pm (UTC)Yeah, the Puritans came to America to establish their own theocracy, but that was 200 years of subsequent mellowing before the time of the book, and the US is more than Puritans and slavery. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were founded on actual religious freedom for Quakers and refugees from the Massachusetts Puritans respectively, New Amsterdam was founded on commerce and didn't care, Maryland was a Catholic haven...
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Date: 2011-11-04 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 07:04 pm (UTC)Ooh, yeah, my order is definitely better, or less disappointing. It was a neat accidental setup, though; I might have been more suspicious had I read Tam Lin cold, but after the other two I was really explaining odd things away, right until just before the climax, if not the climax itself.
Don't think I did read anything else in the series, come to think of it, though I read a lot of the Datlow-Windling collections.
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Date: 2011-11-04 07:15 pm (UTC)But the 1848 revolutions had failed and the constitutions won that year revoked everywhere but Denmark and Piedmont (which didn't even have that liberal of a constitution).
Whereas several of the Chartist demands were already law in the US.
This isn't to be all "yay USA!" because slavery was an abomination and one that had already been abolished by a number of European countries. But a number of people involved in the revolutions did end up fleeing to America, so the ending does have some justification.
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Date: 2011-11-04 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 07:55 pm (UTC)As a lifelong feminist and socialist, though, I don't consider the 1850 version of universal suffrage any closer to Marx's definition than the UK one. I'm not saying Europe is better, I'm saying that it has its own contexts, and that a simple comparison is just that, simple. In my view, there is a lot of disingenuousness about slavery in your argument. You may well -- possibly correctly -- feel that I am too soft on my own kind.
But, y'know, all I said was that the ending didn't really work for me. That's allowed. Even for non-Americans.
I'm backing off now, because it's mid-evening here and I have other stuff to do. I respect your views, certainly. But I am rather over having to defend having different ones to Americans.
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Date: 2011-11-04 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 08:04 pm (UTC)It's not just you, I think Jo Walton had the same problem with the ending.
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Date: 2011-11-04 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 08:54 pm (UTC)One of my favorite parts of that book on reread is Richard's low-key character development; his unorthodox triage method at the end is disturbing (though necessary), but in retrospect completely in character.
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Date: 2011-11-04 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-04 09:32 pm (UTC)As for your question -- probably not, no; the political issue I'm grappling with this time around is colonialism, because the story will spend relatively little time in the protagonist's home country. I might try to mention something of the sort, but ultimately it doesn't really figure into the story.
F&N spoiler in here
Date: 2011-11-05 03:47 pm (UTC)I wouldn't have been irked by the supernatural stuff if it had been entirely in the POV of people who believed in the supernatural (the Trotters Club folks), but there are a couple of passages in the climactic scene that are authorial POV, which makes the magic real. Since there was no magic until then, it smelled like a deus ex machina to me.
I loved, loved, loved the serious attention given to the politics and history of the Chartist movement. I've rarely seen a romantic historical novel do such a good job of making a rather dry historical episode come alive. The scenes with Engels were especially good, and the accuracy of the evocation of period was fantastic. Also the use of the epistolary form, which is so difficult to pull off.
So, if the hero and heroine were going to have an Escape to America happy ending (all too common in bodice ripper romances), I'd really have liked the political thread to be carried through. America was, in 1847, potentially the Chartists' dream - or at any rate it was still seen as a kind of tabula rasa in which the workers' revolution could occur. James, surely, would have been excited to be in that milieu. But the setting would have had to be urban: New York, Philadelphia, Boston - where the floods of Irish famine immigrants were transforming the politics of labor. That would have required quite a lot of additional research and scene-setting, and the book was anxious to be done, by then, so they gave the lovers a rural, arcadian closing scene. It was too romance-novelly for my taste.
But these are minor points in a book I otherwise liked enormously.
And I forget where I read it, but I'm pretty sure that the Lymond influence on James is directly acknowledged by the authors. It's a clever answer to the question: what would Lymond look like in a more modern context? What cause would he champion?
In the Lymond Chronicles he's an unblinking apologist for the nobility; that's his world, that's where power resides, and the role of a nobleman is to be a good and just leader. James lives in a world where the nobility is no longer in absolute command of politics, and though he is a son of that class, he is not loyal to it.
Re: F&N spoiler in here
Date: 2011-11-05 03:48 pm (UTC)Re: F&N spoiler in here
Date: 2011-11-05 07:11 pm (UTC)Interesting -- I view it from a slightly different angle, which is that it wasn't real enough. Especially given the perspective character for that bit, I wanted it to break through a lot more. (But yes, that would have required more setup beforehand, and more denoument aimed at addressing it afterward.)
As for the Escape to America, it isn't really rural; they're in Baltimore, or at least just outside it. Susan only talks about going to Wisconsin, and does mention that they'd like to go to New York and Boston and so on first. Which is why I personally assume they never make it to Wisconsin; I would be sadly disappointed if they didn't get caught up in politics first.
What bugged me, honestly, was the very romance novel-y pregnancy. Especially since if you look at the timeline, Susan somehow magically knows she's pregnant when she's, like, two weeks along.
But yes, it's a novel that actually managed to make the Chartist movement interesting to me! (Like so many things in history, I support its goals, but am bored by practically everything I've read about it.) And yes, it did the epistolary format very well. Your comments about the comparison with Lymond are interesting, too.
Re: F&N spoiler in here
Date: 2011-11-05 07:28 pm (UTC)I guess they are not far from Baltimore, but the scene is in the country, under a tree, with fields all around and a rustic farmhouse home. The reference is to America as Rousseauvian natural paradise, in contrast to England, home of the Industrial Revolution and Blake's dark satanic mills. Which is a common trope of historical romances.
And yes: Susan's pregnancy, which is cast as a sign of her emancipated nature, was an unfortunate lapse into romance noveldom. And not needed: her emancipation was already well-established and the couple's mutual happiness was already fixed in the fact of their mutual escape. Still, the romance itself was very compelling, James and Richard are a great pair, and the book had some nice new twists on the Gothick tradition of haunted stately home.
Re: F&N spoiler in here
Date: 2011-11-05 08:17 pm (UTC)All of the pairs are great, really. James and Richard, James and Susan, Susan and Kitty, Kitty and Richard. Such fabulous characterization, in so many places.