Books read, October 2018

[swan_tower]

Shadow of the Fox, Julie Kagawa. YA epic fantasy with a Japanese-inspired setting, reviewed here at the New York Journal of Books. I liked the premise of this one, but it didn’t really deliver on the character front, which was a pity.

So You Want to Be a Wizard, Diane Duane. Somehow I missed these books back in the day. I’ve been hearing about them for years, but only just recently picked up the first one. It reminds me a lot of Madeleine L’Engle — a similar feeling to the magic, a similar vibe to the cosmological threat, and a similar impression of kindness and compassion on the character level. My library has all of them in ebook form, which really facilitates mainlining the whole series; I anticipate reading at least several more, though I’ve gotten the impression from friends that there’s a point at which the quality really tapers off.

(I’m also given to understand that the books were revised in recent years. Since I’m reading ebooks, I’m pretty sure it’s the revised version, but I don’t know what changes were made.)

Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa, trans. John Bester. Another one read for the New York Journal of Books, but that review isn’t live yet. It’s a collection of short stories by an author who lived in the early twentieth century; most of them have the feel of animal fables. On the whole I found them fairly slight, but as with the Duane, there’s a feeling of compassion that was very pleasant spend time with.

The Black Tides of Heaven, JY Yang. First in a series of epic fantasy novellas. I really liked the setting in this one, and the overall shape of the story, but . . . it read to me like the Cliff Notes of the story itself. There were so many things that got disposed of in a single scene, with no setup beforehand or development afterward, and things that got dropped in without prior context — like when one of the characters had to fight someone from their past, except this was the first we’d ever heard of that person, so it really didn’t carry much weight. The plot here elapses over a period of decades, and there’s enough raw material that it easily could have filled a novel. I didn’t dislike the novella, but that’s the problem: because I liked it, I wanted to see all the things in it get properly developed, rather than done on fast-forward.

A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny. Been meaning to read this one for ages, but I’d gotten it fixed in my head that I had to read it in October, and furthermore that I had to read it in “real time” — each chapter takes place on a different day in October, and I wanted to read it at that pace. Which is silly and unnecessary, and in fact I screwed up a few times and had to read two or three days’ worth in a sitting. But on the whole I (finally) accomplished what I wanted to. And I enjoyed the book; as my husband says, it does a lovely job with its canine protagonist (and does so while also having a decent feline character, which is a thing not all authors can manage), and I was glad it kept the Lovecraftian stuff mostly alluded to rather than shoving it up in your face. There were some amusing twists, too. And now I have read it, and there’s that small life goal checked off the list.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Comments

[julian]

I haven't re-read SYWTBAW carefully to track changes, but Duane's stated intent was to modernize it because kids kept getting thrown out of the books by, f'rex, lack of cell phones. (And apparently stopped reading them.) She's said SYWTBAW was one of the ones that had less modeablernization.

I'm of two minds about that, because I mean, I loved books where people didn't have *any kind of phone at all*, or used horses, or whatever, but on the other hand, if it was affecting kids, and she wanted to anyway, why not?

Anyway. Someone's review of the revised edition.

Also, I loved A Night In Lonesome October, though it was sort of slight. But very enjoyable!

[beccastareyes]

I also think Duane admitted that she didn't do a good job of keeping the timeline straight internally, and going back to set everything in a fixed year with known tech helped.

The 1980s and 1990s are also kind of a weird time interval: not old enough to pick up that 'historical' vibe, but clearly not modern. Or maybe I just think that because that's the boundary between 'stuff I wasn't alive for' and 'stuff I was'.

[julian]

The timeline issue is a reasonable point, too, though it seems as if that would bug her more than readers. (But that's a perfectly valid reason for her to want to re-jigger things.)

And yeah, it's sort-of-almost-current-but-not-really, which I suppose could lend a weird vibe. Shrug.

(Also, I mourn my typo. 'modeablernization'? Sheesh.)

[swan_tower]

I can see being a little disoriented if the book doesn't have clear markers of its time period -- if I'm reading a book set in Victorian times then I don't expect cell phones, but if it's close enough to the present day not to be obviously different, then I'm going to default to imagining a present-day setting. And as an adult I can think, okay, I know this book was published decades ago . . . but as a kid? I wouldn't even notice that, probably. So it's really that near-past zone where you're most likely to trip people up.

Edit: also, thanks for the link to the review. I remembered hearing something about that, but not which book it belonged to or what exactly had been changed.

[alfreda89]

I am weighing what to do with a mystery I wrote but never published for a similar reason. I only have to allude to cell phones, because there are (still) no towers on the island. But time marches on, and newer phones can ping off wifi, and of course a cable has been laid off phone lines.

I enjoy reading period--even the changing decades of the 20th century. But if kids can't see anything beyond Now, we have bigger problems than we knew.

[swan_tower]

I don't think it's that "kids can't see anything beyond Now." It's more like vision: there's a big swath of distances where you can see just fine, but if something gets too close then you can't quite focus on it and see it clearly. (Unless you're me, and you're so nearsighted that your focal range is about eight centimeters.) A book set in 2000 would read enough like today that I would default to processing it as today, unless something happened to make me realize that oh, right, it's set in the past. Whereas I'm not going to make that mistake with something set in the 1920s, or the eighteenth century, or ancient Rome. And I know that when I was a kid, I was prone to more or less inhaling books with barely a pause to look at the cover; the copyright date wasn't even on my radar. So yes, I could have been thrown by something that seemed like the world I knew but had these inexplicable-seeming gaps in it.

[alfreda89]

I agree that a writer has to lay out some of the serious changes that have happened from decade to decade--simply and yet from the first page. Or the reader will be confused, and possibly annoyed enough to set the story aside and grab something else. (Since this book was 1990s, pre-9/11, I feel like I would have to sit down and do some serious thinking about several things. We don't even deal with discoveries of early cultural artifacts or tribal burials in the same manner anymore. I would need another subplot, and that's a major rewrite, not tweaking to bring something "up to date."

[sovay]

My library has all of them in ebook form, which really facilitates mainlining the whole series; I anticipate reading at least several more, though I’ve gotten the impression from friends that there’s a point at which the quality really tapers off.

I imprinted very strongly on the first one and to a lesser degree on the second two. (The second has great sea-magic; the third has magical AI, which interested me less, but also one of the great avatars of light.) I bounced off the fourth at the time and never really got back into the series after that. I am under the impression the revisions mostly have to do with technology and internal chronology, except for the sixth book, which she extensively rewrote because of its well-intentioned but awful original portrayal of an autistic wizard. I have never read any of the revised versions.

[swan_tower]

Thanks -- I really don't recall if that review is what I read years ago that put these books on my radar, or if it was somebody else's post about the changes to that book, but either way that was what I was thinking of (apart from the technology changes and such others have mentioned). I will see what I think of the series as I go along.

[starlady]

Granted I am not objective about the Young Wizards, but I really strongly contest the idea that the quality tapers off. The fourth one is unquestionably the weakest, but after that low point the series makes a rapid recovery.

This review talks about the revisions in the Millennium Editions. If you're reading books with contemporary technology, you're reading the revised editions.

[julian]

I used to think the quality tapered off, and then I re-read them all in order and fairly close to each other, and wow does it not at all taper off.

They do become more serious and/or for a slightly older audience, though. SYWTBAW is certainly dealing with Issues, but it feels more like a kids' book, whereas _The Wizard's Dilemma_, say, doesn't. And that was what tripped me up, back when. But, when I came to it with fewer expectations, I enjoyed it more.

[swan_tower]

I've had that, too, with books where I bounced hard and then later thought, no, that's amazing. A lot of it is expectations, or just what you're ready for.

[swan_tower]

That's good to know -- if I find myself losing interest during #4, I will mush on rather than giving up.

[mrissa]

I think that the quality is inconsistent but most of them are quite readable until the most recent one, which wibbled and wibbled and WIBBLED.

Because of the series having its ups and downs before, I have hopes that this is not indicative of a larger-scale downturn but is just one of those things.

[conuly]

The eBooks off Diane Duane's website are the revised versions. The eBooks off of Amazon etc. are not.

[swan_tower]

Hmmm -- these are from the library, so I'm not sure. I might need to compare cover art to know for certain. (Or just wait until I've read far enough to hit #6 with the autistic wizard, or keep and eye out for cell phones. I don't remember if they had any in the first one, because I wasn't paying attention to that.)

[conuly]

High Wizardry is when it first is obvious. If the advanced computer is laughably primitive, you've got the old edition.

[swan_tower]

Noted! I'll keep watch for that. :-)

[davidgoldfarb]

Let me add my voice to those who say that the Young Wizards series remains readable up through the most recent volume.

I tried reading A Night in the Lonesome October at the chapter-a-day pace one time, and I really didn't feel that served the book terribly well. In a lot of the early chapters especially, rather little happens, which is fine when it's just a page or two and you're getting on with setup, but not so great when it's your ration of story for the day. And then I found that in the later parts I had some trouble remembering what some of the setup was because it had been weeks since I read the relevant bit.

[swan_tower]

I suspect you're a bit right about A Night in the Lonesome October; many of the early chapters are very brief. But I'd kinda gotten fixated on trying it this way, so. :-P (Maybe someday I will re-read it on a more condensed schedule.)

[mbernardi]

The other big issue was that the books were written & published over decades, but the internal chronology was almost immediately sequential. So either later books would have to be written as historical rather than current (possibly loosing her core audience) or revise the earlier stories inline with the later ones, also nailing down the actual time when set. Which is othe option chosen.

This is an issue with YA Fiction really, the children grow up at a certain speed, but the books take longer to produce.

[swan_tower]

Heh, yeah -- I mean, look at the Harry Potter series. If you stop and think about it, the story took place from 1997-2004, but was published 1997-2007. Only a three-year gap . . . but if you look at the years in question, that's when we went from "some people have cell phones" to "nearly everybody has a cell phone." And that's with a series whose in-story pace almost matched its publication pace. If George R.R. Martin's series were set in the real world, Arya Stark would be thirty-one years old by now. :-P

[mbernardi]

In The Dark is Rising series the first book published in 1965 used £sd while the later stories published after decimalisation after 1973 used £p (I wrote to the publisher at the time - I was in my early teens - and got a nice letter back). The current version has all decimal currency.

[landofnowhere]

I haven't read any of them in a long time, but Beverly Cleary's Ramona Books are an extreme case of this, with the first book written in 1955 and the last one in 1999, while the protagonist goes from pre-kindergarten to fourth grade -- though I don't think I found it that noticeable when I was a kid.

[julian]

I read a bunch of them at once, at one point, and it stuck out a bit, but mostly from a quality of writing POV. (I don't really recall any tech in there.)

[clhollandwriter]

Actually, that explains why I have such a problem with Order of the Phoenix. Sirius gives Harry a magic mirror - the wizarding equivalent of a mobile phone - and a big chunk of plot hangs on the fact that Harry promptly shoves it in his trunk and forgets about it. How many teenagers would do that with a mobile?

In 2003 we didn't know what most teenagers would do with a mobile. I read it in 2006, when most of them would try to call someone before rushing off to rescue them.

It doesn't make me like that plot development any more, but I can at least see why it might have happened that way.

[swan_tower]

Hah, good point!

[aishabintjamil]

It looks like there are 3 versions of ebook circulatingso which one your library has depends on when and where they purchased. TLDR version - if the publish is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, you have the original text. If it's Errantry Press, you almost certainly have the revised text.

There's the version on Amazon, which seems, based on the sample, to be the original text. Those, at least the first one, seem to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Initially, when I bought my copies from her web site five years or so ago, she offered two editions - the "International Edition", which was described as being the original text, with only minor formatting changes, and the "New Millenium Edition" with the updates people have been discussing. I chose the original text, so I can't speak to the details of the changes. It appears that she's now only offering the New Millenium edition.

The ones from her web site list the publisher as Errantry Press. My International Edition has a note on the copyright page saying "This 2010 Errantry Press international ebook edition follows the text of the 1980s and 1990s paperbacks published by Dell and Harcourt, and the SF Book Club editions of 1989 and 1996. Some formatting has been tweaked, but there have been no other significant changes to the original text except the addition of the author’s afterword from the Harcourt Trade Publishers 25th anniversary hardcover of 2003. This edition is for sale only to readers outside North America."

That last bit probably explains the difference in what she offers and what Amazon offers. At a guess, she got international rights back, but not US, and some technical glitch happened that let me purchase the International edition by mistake. She's located in Ireland, but the early versions of her web site may not have been good about checking location of the purchaser before making the transaction.

[swan_tower]

Thanks for the explanation! When I check out the next one I'll take a look at who the publisher is.

[alfreda89]

I can never re-read Lonesome October without hearing Roger telling me that he was currently writing a book about the champions of the Light narrated by Jack the Ripper's dog.

Good for you keeping up with new reading. I have so much Life, Interrupted going on right now that re-reads are what's happening.

[swan_tower]

Having read it, I'm honestly a little dubious about the decision to position Jack the Ripper as the champion of Light. Mostly because the story doesn't do anything with it -- it feels to me like he's included because all the other characters are either specific or general monsters of the nineteenth century, so sure, let's have the hero's master be the world's most famous serial killer. But it doesn't address the serial killing, either by trying to justify it as necessary for the good of the world, or as not actually what it looked like, or . . . anything, so far as I can tell.

[alfreda89]

I think Roger started the book as a whimsical thing/change of pace. He was doing juxtaposition of Who is the Light and Who the Dark, are there threats worth doing anything to stop? Why would people see this issue differently?

Now I look at it and think that a woman would not have let his being a psychopath trying to stop the Elder Gods by mostly killing women slide by. Possibly Roger would not let it slide by, were he writing the book today.

But I agree that he grabbed a bunch of familiar tropes and dumped when into a lagniappe stew. He could have drilled down a few more layers and still kept the absurd tone.

(We also can admit that by that time, the editors knew this book, with Wilson illustrations, would sell itself. Famous authors often don't get edited. I don't remember who edited it--if we could ask the editor about the choices?)