A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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World's End (Sandman VIII), Neil Gaiman (1994), 162 pp (gn).
I enjoyed this compilation of the Sandman, certainly more than the last. Rather than a tight, volume-long story arc, it goes back to telling individual stories; five or six of them, this being a rather short volume. The tales are themselves circumscribed in a framing narrative. A couple of colleagues who are driving back home from a conference run into a freak storm (even freakier than they first realize, in fact), crash their car, and stumble into an inn called "World's End". There, a number of stranded travellers from various dimensions and realities (some of whom we've seen before) have taken refuge, and are taking turns telling stories to each other to pass the time.
There are some quirky, interesting stories told by the guests at the inn; in that sense, this volume is like Fables & Reflections. I don't think any of them considered separately quite reach the level of "Ramadan" from that volume, but they're still good. My favorite was probably the one titled "Cerements," about the Necropolis Litharge and the masters and apprentices there who deal with death and funeral arrangements. I suppose it appealed to my morbid curiosity, or something. As it happens, this volume also contains a good bit of foreshadowing for the winding up events of the series. Good stuff, and an appropriate title with which to end the year's reading....
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How to be Good, Nick Hornby (2001), 305 pp (tpb).
This book was a disappointment, at least in part because I had elevated expectations going in to it. Those elevated expectations arose not just as a result of respect accrued due to Hornby's previous two novels, but also because this book promised to explore a theme that seemed really interesting to me personally. It promised to focus on what happens when one half of a couple becomes fixated on being Good, while the other half is still muddling along trying to be more or less normal (not that I think the pursuit of goodness is necessarily abnormal, I hasten to add). I realize this is a topic that is perhaps deeply uninteresting to many people, but the notion of differing moral statures--whether real or perceived--between members in an intimate relationship is one upon which my mind is wont to dwell on diverse occasions. Unfortunately, I think Hornby muffs the execution. Oh, he still writes very well, and there are scattered nuggets of insight throughout the book, but I just don't think he ever really makes it to a level of either sustained or very penetrating insight. Hence the disappointment.
The narrative is told entirely from the point of view of Katie Carr, a doctor in London. After twenty-odd years of marriage to her husband David, she's arrived at a point of real dissatisfaction with her marriage. She's not really sure what the problem is, just that everything is in a rut, and she's fed up with it. So she has a dalliance with a guy she meets at a conference. Characters who do this sort of thing have an uphill climb to make it anywhere within shouting distance of my good graces to begin with, so I suppose Hornby deserves a little credit for the fact that by the middle of the novel, Katie's easily the most sympathetic figure. Or he would, if the sympathy weren't achieved by making everyone else look bad. David finds out, first about her general dissatisfaction, and then about the dalliance, and it works a real change in his behavior. After declining to go along with her divorce plans, he starts to look at his own conduct for signs of deficiencies. Then he encounters a goofy New Agey guru named GoodNews, who he eventually brings home to live with them, and settles down to try to "be Good."
Unfortunately, I don't think Hornby really does David much justice. I think he presents him as mostly a caricature of a sanctimonious do-gooder (David and GoodNews hatch a scheme to have every family on the block "adopt" an underprivileged juvenile delinquent or runaway, for instance), unconcerned with the immediate effect of his well-intended actions. Katie even to an extent buys into David's usurpation of the moral high ground, which really irritated me--I was saying things like, "girl, that's not Good, that's just a particular flavor of selfish combined with a particular flavor of stupid." So although the book is really about Katie trying to come to terms with her husband's turn towards a nominally altruistic path, it really lacks the punch that a more nuanced treatment of the protagonist's foil would have provided. How to be Good is alright, I suppose, but I'm sad that I didn't get to read the book that I wanted to read.
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By Honor Betray'd, Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald (1994), 407 pp (pb).
This is the third book in the Mageworlds' series, following on the heels of The Price of the Stars and Starpilot's Grave. In fact, although there are Mageworlds books that follow this one, this volume in a sense represents the conclusion of a trilogy (please, no arguments about the technical definition of trilogy: I just mean a relatively contained story arc that shares characters and narrative progression across all three parts). Again, spoilers for the first two books follow....
At the conclusion of our last exciting episode, the resurgent Mageworlds fleet was on the verge of sweeping down on a largely unsuspecting Republic and accomplishing a complete conquest. Only our brave band of heroes--Beka Rosselin-Metadi, her brothers Ari and Owen, her father Jos, and various allies, sidekicks, and hangers-on--stand a chance of averting that dire result. Will they triumph over adversity and win the day? What do you think?
I enjoyed this one too, although I was vaguely irritated by the last hundred pages or so, in ways that would require complete spoilage to elaborate upon. Part of it is that the resolution of some problems seemed just a bit too glibly deus ex machinistic for my taste. Since that sort of thing is more or less one of the cherished conventions of space opera in general, near as I can tell, I really shouldn't be complaining. Ah well. Still fun.
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About a Boy, Nick Hornby (1998), 307 pp (tpb).
I was sufficiently impressed earlier this year with Nick Hornby's High Fidelity to want to seek out his other novels, something I finally got around to with About a Boy. (No, I wasn't really influenced by the movie. I haven't seen it. I hear it's good, so I'll probably get around to seeing it at some point.) About a Boy is a variation on the "man-child struggles to find himself/grow up/become human" riff that played to such good effect in High Fidelity.
Will Freeman is in his mid-thirties, single, and living in London. He has never held a job, because his every financial need is covered by royalties from a hit song (a Christmas song, Santa's Super Sleigh, no less) his deceased father wrote decades ago. Will spends his time floating effortlessly through life and avoiding the merest hint of commitment or messy entanglement. Then he floats through a patch where his romantic mojo seems to be in a lull of sorts, and he hits on the bright idea of joining a single parent support group (inventing an imaginary child is easy enough, after all) in order to hit on the hot single moms. The plan goes tits-up fairly soon, but it does bring Will into contact with one Fiona and her twelve year old son Marcus. They've recently moved to London; Fiona is separated from Marcus's father, and is undergoing a slow, silent emotional implosion, while Marcus is tragically unhip and getting creamed at his new school. Somehow, Will and Marcus fall rather haphazardly into each other's orbits, although Fiona is none too thrilled when she first learns of it:
"I haven't finished yet, actually. Why did you buy him a pair of expensive sneakers?"
"Because...because look at him." They looked at him. Marcus even looked at himself.
"What's wrong with him?"
Will looked at her. "You haven't got a clue, have you? You really haven't got a clue."
"About what?"
"Marcus is being eaten alive at school, you know. They take him to pieces every single fucking day of the week, and you're worried about where his sneakers come from and whether I'm molesting him."
Marcus suddenly felt exhausted. He hadn't properly realized how bad things were until Will started shouting, but it was true, he really was being taken to pieces every single fucking day of the week. Up until now he hadn't linked the days of the week in that way: each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each bad day was somehow unconnected to the day before. Now he could see how stupid that was, and how shit everything was, and he wanted to go to bed and not get up until the weekend.
This contact and involvement with each other manages to get both Will and Marcus more or less straightened out (and as a bonus, stop Fiona's ongoing implosion). It isn't done in a particularly cheaply "heartwarming" fashion, either. For instance, it avoids the cliché of having Will and Fiona get romantically involved. I guess I've been so conditioned by Hollywood's notion of romantic formula that I was (pleasantly) surprised. Will does find himself able to finally start getting serious about someone, but it's kind of peripheral to the main story, and with someone besides Fiona. Marcus manages to find a few friends at school and start adjusting to life in the big city.
In the end, About a Boy is a satisfying read. Hornby is a good writer; even the structure he uses works well, as the chapters appear in alternating viewpoints between Will and Marcus. I remain ultimately more impressed by High Fidelity, but I think that's largely because Rob, its protagonist, seems to shed more insight, to be easier to identify with, for me personally.
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Practical Demonkeeping, Christopher Moore (1992), 243 pp (tpb).
This book was a bit of a disappointment, as were the last couple of Moore's books that I read. I believe this was his first novel, so perhaps some of its failure to measure up might be chalked up to that. I had thought that maybe waiting for a few months before trying Moore again might make a difference in how it read, but in the event, I doubt it really mattered.
Like all Christopher Moore novels, the plot and setting is pretty lunatic fringe. Way back around the time of WW I, a hapless seminary student named Travis managed to inadvertently conjure up a demon named Catch. In the decades since then (with Catch as a companion that he can't get rid of, Travis doesn't age), he's been travelling the country, trying to hunt down the relics he needs to de-conjure Catch and send him back to Hell, all the while doing his best to keep Catch from eating the various people they meet in their travels. Travis's quest ends in Pine Cove, California (also site of the later novel The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove), where he tries to banish Catch, various residents try to take over control of the demon, and the demon pursues his own agenda.
Novels like this have to play as either straight horror or as whimsy/comedy. The tone of Practical Demonkeeping is all wrong for horror; where it really fails is that it doesn't really make it as comedy, either. It just isn't that funny. A second problem is that I didn't find a single one of the characters really likeable or sympathetic. Most, in fact, are on the unsavory or distasteful side. So it was hard to really get behind or root for anyone. As a result, well...uninteresting characters, unfunny plot...not a very good novel.
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Starpilot's Grave, Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald (1993), 442 pp (pb).
This is the sequel to the first Mageworlds book, The Price of the Stars, and it pretty much picks up where the first left off. (I'll try not to be too specifically spoilerish for those who haven't yet read this series, but think they might at some point, but I probably won't avoid sketching the plot in a general sort of way). At the end of the first book, Beka and her posse had taken down one of the baddies responsible for the assassination of the clan matriarch, and thought they had the other in custody. As it happens, the one in custody manages to somehow escape, and the opening of this volume has Beka and friends heading across the barrier between the Republic and the Mageworlds to find where he's gone to ground. It's soon revealed that a lot more than a simple revenge hunt is at stake, and (of course) the very fate of the Republic may hang in the balance.
Stylistically, it's more of the same; multi-threaded plot, skipping around to various planets and characters; fast action that moves quickly along; mostly engaging, if not terribly deep, characters. Fun stuff.
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The Price of the Stars, Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald (1992), 440 pp (pb).
Somebody--it must have been either Kate or Chad--described this as "Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off," and that's pretty much as apt a one-line description as any. It has an old cruiser playing the Millenium Falcon role, from the deceptively fast speed and twin laser cannon turrets, all the way down to the cocky seat-of-the-pants captain. It takes place in a multi-planet Republic, and has an order of mystic-sounding monks (Adepts) who manipulate the underlying energy of the universe and wield staffs that sound as if they look a lot like lightsabers when they're used in combat. Think Jedi, in other words. I'm not a head-over-heels Star Wars fan--I have fond memories of seeing the first one in the theater when I was around ten, but I loathed the Ewoks and despised Jar-Jar, and thought the sheer visual splendor of the most recent installment barely sufficient to overcome its weak characters and horrendous dialogue--but this book takes what's good about its setting--the manic energy available to sprawling, "don't stop and think about it" space opera--and runs with it.
Our tale commences with the Republic at peace, having fought a victorious war against the "Mageworlds" a number of years ago. These Mageworlds are led by Magelords, who have a different view of using the universe's underlying energy than the Republic's Adepts do, and who tried to conquer the Republic in the earlier war. Think Sith (NB: I'm under the possible disadvantage of writing this review after having read a couple of the sequels, where it becomes clear that Mageworlds culture is a lot more nuanced and less of an Evil Empire, but it's a formulation that works well enough for this first book). A major political figure of the Republic is assassinated, and her husband, commanding general of Republic forces, tracks down his wayward youngest child, Beka Rosselin-Metadi, and offers her his old warship if she'll find the parties responsible for her mother's death. Off she goes. From there, it's adventure in several different locations and plot threads, as Beka's two older brothers, one an apprentice Adept, the other an officer in the Space Force's medical corps, get dragged into the hunt.
This is a fun tale. The narrative clips right along, providing a lot of entertainment and not demanding a lot of deep thinking. I don't particularly care for Beka, nominally the main character--her sort of "screw nuance," cut-the-Gordian-knot approach to problems irritates me--but it doesn't really matter in this sort of story. Recommended as quick and enjoyable space opera.
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God Stalk, P. C. Hodgell (1982), 275 pp (pb).
I'm poking around trying to hit on the best word to describe my truest impression of this book, and the best I can come up with is "disorganized." The various elements of plot and setting seem to me to be mostly a big jumble of nearly random elements. I don't mean this entirely as a criticism, since there's some decent stuff here, but it did make it hard for me to focus on and follow the narrative. Maybe part of my reaction is that my taste for this sort of high fantasy, "young unknown with mysterious past and powers embarks on quest of discovery" story has waned over the years.
God Stalk opens with young Jame fleeing to a large city, Tai-tastigon, where she just happens to show up on the night of a yearly festival where everyone is inside and all dwellings are boarded up, and strange and nasty things are wandering the streets. She manages to survive that, and stumbles into an inn whose inhabitants end up more or less adopting her. She also manages to aid an important member of the powerful Thieves' Guild, who takes her as an apprentice. From there, various adventures come along, in a way that, as I said, seemed kind of random to me. The backstory, the cosmology even, of the tale, gets sketched out over the course of the book--I thought it was a little bit haphazard, but clear enough, I suppose. As the book comes to a close, Jame says farewell to the city, and heads out to find out more about who she is and what part she has to play in the tale of her people and the plans of her people's god. I thought it was a decent read, but it didn't really overwhelm me.
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An Infamous Army, Georgette Heyer (1937), 421 pp (hb).
An Infamous Army is Heyer's stab at portraying the battle of Waterloo; the title is taken from a quote by the Duke of Wellington. I had not previously imagined that Heyer might recycle characters from other books of hers, but here she does it from not one, but two (okay, well, one and a half, really) previous stories. First we have the Earl of Worth and his wife, the former Judith Taverner, whose courtship was recounted in Regency Buck. Now married and with a young son, they are hanging out with the allied army on the Belgian frontier, waiting to see what the newly un-exiled Emperor of France is going to do. Worth's younger brother Charles is a Colonel who is attached to the Duke of Wellington's personal staff, and it is Charles who serves as the male lead of the story. On the other side, the female lead's antecedants are drawn from last month's These Old Shades. Since that tale was set several decades before the action of Waterloo, the Duke of Avon and his saucy French bride don't actually make an appearance. Rather, it is their great-granddaughter Lady Barbara who takes center stage, with her three brothers all on the scene in various capacities.
The story opens a couple of months before the actual engagement at Waterloo, with all of the social hustle and bustle occurring in Brussels. Charles Audley (the Colonel) and Lady Barbara Childe (Bab) fall quickly (rather unconvincingly so, in my opinion) in love; Lady Barbara is a young widow with a reputation for rather shocking, convention-flouting behaviour, and although Charles is an even-tempered, tolerant fellow, their courtship must weather a serious reversal or two before coming to safe harbor.
An Infamous Army suffers somewhat from trying to be two different things--a romance and a chronicle of a famous battle. The light social whirl keeps getting interrupted by what we might today glibly refer to as infodumps--page long disquisitions on the character of allied commanders and the state of public opinion in Paris, and so forth--and then the last half or third of the book is taken up with the actual battle itself, and the romance parts become the secondary interjections into the action. It's rather a difficult juggling act, and it doesn't quite come off, although Heyer makes a game attempt. She also does a decent job with the battle itself, but for my money, her talents don't really lie in that direction; Cornwell's Sharpe's Waterloo is a rather more sweaty, gritty, involving representation of the battle (to be fair, he falls down in the other direction, in that his pre-battle social and character interactions aren't terribly interesting). An Infamous Army is interesting enough to read, but it doesn't really transcend the sum of its parts--a rather sub-par romance on the one hand, and a description of a battle that's been more thrillingly chronicled elsewhere.
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The Nightingale, Kara Dalkey (1988), 215 pp (hb).
The Nightingale is another in the line of "modern re-tellings of fairy tales," and is patterned on the story of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen. Dalkey has chosen to place this telling of the story in Heian Japan, at least a couple of centuries before the action that she chronicles in her later novel Genpei. The provincial warrior clans have not yet risen to such prominence, but the powerful Fujiwara family has already become the power behind the throne, and exerts a strong influence over the actions of the emperor.
In this setting, Uguisu (literally, "nightingale" in Japanese), the daughter of a minor court official, is given a magic flute and taught to play it by certain ancestral spirits who have a rather unsavory goal in mind. In the course of events, Uguisu captivates the emperor with her playing, and then must decide whether she will protect his interests, or serve the goals of her ancestors.
This is a nice little story. Some of the same tropes and plot devices appear in it that turn up in the more recent novel Genpei. All in all, I think I prefer this story to Genpei; it's a cosier, more intimate tale, which I think better suits the style and makes it easier to like the characters.
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Cloud of Sparrows, Takashi Matsuoka (2002), 405 pp (hb).
This one looked mildly interesting when I saw it sitting on the forward display case at the library, with its nice big katana handle featured prominently on the front cover. It's about a period in Japanese history that I'm not as interested in as some others, set as it is roughly a decade after Commodore Perry's Black Ships sailed into Edo Bay, and thus shortly before the Meiji Restoration kicked off. What finally tipped me over into picking it up was a review I happened to run across in Entertainment Weekly that covered this book and Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor. The reviewer ended up rating this one as the slightly better one, which I think is exactly wrong. I'd say Nightingale Floor is clearly the better book; but then, I don't have the same aversion to fantasy cooties that the EW reviewer apparently does (a somewhat inconsistent aversion, in my view, since even though Cloud is set in the "real world," it has what I'd consider some clearly fantastic elements).
At any rate, Cloud of Sparrows is set in the early 1860s, near the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate's 250 or so year reign over Japan. Change, it is a' comin', in other words. The story focuses on one of the smaller of the great samurai clans, the Okumichi, led by the young and untested Okumichi Genji. His name is an immediate problem--naming him after the most famous ficitional character in Japanese literature was probably a mistake. Reference is made several times over the course of the book to his resemblance to his fictional namesake, but it's too much, in my opinion, and should have been avoided. Well. There's something peculiar about the Okumichi clan, and that is that each generation of their ruling family has a member who is touched with prophetic dreams. Genji has been told by his grandfather that he will be his generation's dreamer, but that he will have only three over the course of his life. His first one has involved a small group of foreign missionaries set to arrive soon.
Lord Genji arranges to meet the missionaries, who soon reduce to two, and take them under his wing. The first is a young woman running from a bad past, the second a man obsessed with a revenge quest and using his missionary guise as protective coloring. From there it's factional politics and events that can be seen as setting the stage for some of the sweeping changes and reforms that are soon to hit Japanese society. There are battles--nice and bloody, for those who like that sort of thing--journeys, ninja assassins (not magic, per se, but still preternaturally competent), and various intrigues.
Cloud of Sparrows has some decent material, and it's definitely worth reading to the end. Still, it fell somewhat flat for me. I found both of Genji's romances, the existing one and the nascent, hinted-at one, rather unconvincing, and I think I steadily lost sympathy for the characters in a sort of slow leak to the end. Worthy enough short-term entertainment, but I doubt I'll remember it for long (which, of course, is one of the points of doing a book log in the first place).
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Brief Lives (Sandman VII), Neil Gaiman (1994), 216 pp (gn).
This Sandman compilation returns to a single story arc format, and could as easily be subtitled "The Search for Destruction" (although accurate, it's admittedly pretty clunky; probably why they didn't do it that way). Earlier issues in the corpus have alluded to the fact that Destruction, one of the seven siblings that make up the Endless, has been missing for the last 300 years or so. Most of his siblings have been willing to let him stay missing, since it's apparently what he wants, but at the opening of Brief Lives, Delirium, youngest of the clan, decides that she really misses him and wants to go looking for him. Despair and Desire turn down her request for help, but Dream, laboring under a fairly specious ulterior motive, decides to go questing with her. They go a' road-trippin', have adventures, and, after Dream jetisons his ulterior motive and gets serious about looking, finally manage to locate their missing brother.
I dunno. Brief Lives was interesting enough, but it didn't really grab me. There were some decent bits sprinkled throughout while Dream and Delirium were on the road, but the story arc itself didn't strike me as anything really special. And maybe I was just feeling cranky when I read it, but the speechifying when they actually found Destruction struck me as late-night sophomore bull-session philosophizing at best. Not the highlight of the series so far.
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