March
24,
2003
Of the half-dozen types of magic in the Ethshar books, warlockry is the most mysterious -- it first appeared (in recent historical time, in the context of most of the other Ethshar novels) during the Night of Madness, when thousands of people all over the world woke up with screaming nightmares and inexplicable new powers. With that minimal background, you can probably guess what events are covered in Lawrence Watt-Evans' Night of Madness
.
The book suffers a bit from prequelitis, the almost inevitable problem that when you read a book set before its postcessors (note: having determined that there's no good word to refer to the inverse of a prequel, I have decided to create one; so, for example, A Fire Upon the Deep is the postcessor to the prequel A Deepness in the Sky) you know how things end up, so some of the suspense is gone. The problem is largely ameliorated here, though; because while we know how the world turns out, we have no idea what happens to the particular characters.
Another very solid entry in the series, and another one that kept me up reading until ridiculous hours of the night. As of now, there's only one more Ethshar book written (and I don't own it yet -- it's in hardcover, and I'll buy it on my next Amazon splurge), so I'm nearly to the end of my binge. Thankfully, the series isn't over -- Watt-Evans has plans to write at least another half-dozen Ethshar novels. If that sounds bad to you, do remember that these are entirely standalone novels without even an overarching plot; there's no need to wait for the series to be finished before starting, and only normal levels of impatience accompany an intra-book wait.
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March
16,
2003
So does anyone even read what I have to say about Ethshar books anymore? Because I just finished Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Spell of the Black Dagger
, and I'm sitting here wracking my esophagus (my brain being all wracked out) trying to come up with something to say about it that I haven't already said about the umpteen billion previous entries in the series.
"Well," I thought, "What did Trent say about Book MCMLXVII of that Sharpe's Something-Or-Other series?" And I realized: I had no idea, because I hadn't read it. I was at first discouraged at not having an answer to the question of what to write, but then realized that I'd gotten an answer after all: If nobody's going to bother reading my comments on this book, then I hardly see any reason to write them.
I feel vaguely uneasy about this, like the Booklog Council of Elders is going to come swooping in and issue a judgment against me, compelling me to read and write long critical essays of all the DragonLance novels or something; but what the hell. I can take those bastards.
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March
13,
2003
Jonathan Carroll's Bones of the Moon
, like all his books, starts out as mainstream fiction, dealing with the personal interrelations and emotional states of regular people, but eventually takes a turn to the fantastic. The fantastic element this time 'round is a dream world reminiscent of the "A Game of You" arc in Neil Gaiman's Sandman -- you've got your basic fantasy geography, your giant talking animals, your important personal quest, and so on.
The problem with this setup is that Carroll leans far too heavily
on dream logic. The dream world he sets up is random and arbitrary,
and nothing it in makes even internal sense. In small doses, this is
excellent and inventive; but Carroll gives us huge, horse-choking
doses, whereupon it just gets frustrating. Listening to someone
else's incoherent dream at length isn't fun in reality, and it's not
fun in fiction, either.
The real-world portion of this novel was solid and interesting, but
the fantastic elements were a chore to slog through. I'm beginning to
wish that Carroll would abandon the genre and just write a straight-up
novel with no fantastic elements.
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March
11,
2003
Steven Brust's The Paths of the Dead
at once reminds me of why I hate series, and why I love them.
I hate them because there's just too damn much to remember. Brust's Dragaeran novels all share a complex world with complexly interrelated characters, with secrets and mysteries galore; finding out about these mysteries is half the fun of the books. That's all well and good, but, well, it's been a long time since I read these books. Issola was pretty recent, but I read all of the books before Orca back in 1996. If you can remember fiddly details from books you read seven years ago, you have a better memory than I do.
So right away, I feel like I'm missing out. I'm sure this
book had significant revelations about Dragaera and the characters
within it, but I don't know what they were. I really hate this -- so
much so, that I put off reading The Paths of the Dead for
months, because I didn't want to go to the effort of ramping up on the
background.
When I finally did start it, though, I got absorbed quickly enough. Brust writes a heck of a story, and I absolutely love Paarfi's distinctive narrative voice. I giggled repeatedly at passages in the book, and even read several of them aloud to Anne. The book was over far too quickly for my liking.
And now, curse my fickle soul, I'm sitting here begging for the sequel. Sigh.
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March
8,
2003
Those who are interested in such things might want to know that I now have a general-purpose blog. For the last few weeks, I've been fighting with my desire to post blatantly non-book-related things here; I figured that meant it was time to get a new place to stuff non-book topics that pique my interest.
Go ahead and check out Unmistakable Marks if you want to. Or, if you're just here for the books, don't do anything, because all my book-related content will continue to appear here.
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March
2,
2003
I have a theory about poetry. (This should come as no great
surprise; I have a theory about pretty much everything.) My theory is
that poetry is verbal music -- a concerto for the English language, if
you will. Like music, poetry is free of meaning and is therefore free
to strive for aesthetic effect with sound, rhythm and composition.
Some people disagree with this, but then, some people will disagree
with anything.
(I'll note parenthetically that some people even disagree with my
theory of music, and believe that song lyrics aren't disposable, and
that a lousy song is good because the lyrics allegedly have some sort
of meaning. I had a rather involved discussion on this topic with a
friend in college, and it ended with him trying to justify the
undisputed excellence of the Mortal Kombat theme song by appealing to
the brilliance of its lyrics, which I excerpt here: "Test your might.
Test your might. Mortal Kombat! Fight! Mortal Kombat!" It takes
all sorts, I suppose.)
Anyway, my theory of poetry perhaps explains why I absolutely love
T.S. Eliot -- more than anyone this side of Lewis Carroll, Eliot
writes poems that are bursting with brilliant micro-composition. It's
no accident that so many novels use Eliot lines as titles. So when I
stumbled on the Norton Critical Edition of T.S. Eliot's The
Waste Land
at Barnes and Noble one day, I just had to pick it
up.
The Waste Land is, perhaps even more than the rest of
Eliot's poetry, famously incomprehensible. To fully understand the
dedication alone requires one to be fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian,
and English; to recognize quotes from Dante; and to have a familiarity
with Greek myth. And then there's the poem itself, which is rather
more wide-ranging in its literary borrowing, and adds the additional
lingual requirement of German.
The Norton edition does its best to demystify the poem. It has, of
course, the de rigeur explanatory footnotes; but it goes rather beyond
that by also including substantial excerpts of the material to which
Eliot alludes. The book has excerpts from the Bible, St. Augustine,
Dante, Buddha, Ovid, a host of 19th/20th century works which have
passed into obscurity, and a bunch of other stuff. The amount of
excerpted text far dwarfs the poem itself. Following those source
excerpts, there are a ton of critical reviews and essays about the
poem. In short, if you want to understand this poem (to the extent to
which it's unambiguously understandable, anyway), this is the edition
to get.
For my own part, I quickly realized that I really had minimal
desire to do so. Reading some of the source material for allusion
context was interesting and illuminating -- but the critical essays
held absolutely no attraction to me. There is a reason that I did my
best to weasel out of college literature courses, despite my love of
reading (and general fondness for capital-L Literature) and it's that
I despise critical essays. So, I'm afraid that I still have no
advanced comprehension of The Waste Land, alas -- but I can
report that it's a beautiful piece of textual music.
And if I might briefly depart from commentary to share a bit of
prospective amusement with you: When I look at my server logs, I see
that a lot of people find their way to my archives by searching for an
analysis of the themes and motifs of The Canterbury Tales; I
can't help but imagine that a whole bunch of helpless students are
going to find their way to this entry, particularly ones who are
searching for information about the use of Christian and Buddhist
themes in Eliot's poetry, and those who are interested in the
interrelationship of Modernism, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. To these
students, I say: The Internet can really suck sometimes, huh?
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March
2,
2003
R.A. Lafferty's Nine Hundred Grandmothers
was a
nostalgic read for me, even though I'd never read it (or anything
quite like it) before. Because, see, the publisher -- coincidentally,
the same Wildside Press that republished the Ethshar books I've been
devouring lately -- typeset the book straight from the 1970 edition.
Which means that it has the exact same typeface as all the Asimov
collections I devoured from the library back in my teens.
It has another similarity to those Asimov collections: The short
stories are actually short. Like novels, short stories have
grown longer over the years, so that a book of short stories these
days seemingly consists of a half-dozen fifty page pieces. Not here,
though: Lafferty crams a full twenty-one stories into a mere 300-odd
pages.
So we've got story length and typefaces, but that's about where the
similarities to Asimov end, because Lafferty isn't writing straight
science fiction in the Asimov/Clarke mold. Instead he's
writing... well, it's hard to pigeonhole him, exactly. There's a
strong element of science fantasy to it, spiced occasionally with
mysticism and folktale elements, and often covered with a veneer of
spaceship 'n' computer SF -- as if he were trying to fool the editors
at Analog into publishing his stories (which appear to have
been mostly published in Galaxy). The best I can come up with
for a comparison is Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad.
It took me a bit to warm to Lafferty, primarily because the
Asimov-reminiscent typeface and some false story cues led me to expect
science-heavy SF; but once I realized what Lafferty was actually
doing, I thoroughly enjoyed the stories. Highly recommended to fans
of Lem, Jack Vance, or Avram Davidson.
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