Weasel Words
A Book Log
July
28,
2003
I don't often reread books; since I have hundreds of unread books
floating around, it seems like a bit of a waste to read a book I've
already read -- what's the point of buying all these new books if I'm
just going to read old ones? Of course, I also have hundreds of read
books sitting around, and if I never re-read them, their utility
starts seeming questionable, so I suppose it's just as well that
(inspired by Chad's
re-read and review) I picked up Steven Brust's
Jhereg
for a reprise.
Jhereg is the first of the Vlad Taltos novels, and I'd only
read it once, back in 1996. Going back to it after having read all
the sequels promised to be a very different experience -- for one
thing, the Taltos books matured as they went along; for another, there
was a big plot revelation made in Orca that drastically altered
some things we thought we knew. So I was interested to see how
Jhereg looked in light of later events.
The answer turns out to be: amazingly well. I was surprised by the
depth of Jhereg -- I remembered it as a snappy, fast-paced, but
fluffy story; but there was already significant depth and emotion in
it. And I was enormously impressed by the world-building solidity;
quite often, when writers start a long series in a novel world, the
first book or two gets the world a bit uneven, but Brust had Dragaera
down from the first page. I was even more impressed by the
integration of Orca's revelation: Not only is it not
contradicted by anything in Jhereg, but events in the book
actually make more sense in light of it. I wonder now how I
missed those plot holes.
I'd already considered this a good book, but upon re-reading, I'm
forced to up my estimation of it. This is genuinely quality fantasy,
head and shoulders above most the stuff out there. Highly
recommended.
| :::
July
27,
2003
Though it's not by the same authors, isn't set in the same world,
has no characters in common, and isn't even especially similar in
tone, I can't help but think of Patricia Wrede and Caroline
Stevermer's Sorcery and Cecelia
as a companion to
Brust and Bull's Freedom and Necessity.
The biggest reason for this is that they had the same writing
method: The authors wrote in-character mail to each other (with no
extra-curricular plot conferencing), and published the result as an
epistolary novel. This leads, in both cases, to a slightly rambling
plot with oddly disjoint pacing. The secondary reason for the
similarity is that they're both set in 19th century England -- though
the England of Wrede and Stevermer is one with Wizards' Colleges and
working magic.
Still, they are very different books; the biggest difference is
that Sorcery and Cecelia has younger protagonists, two teen
girls who get mixed up in sorcerous affairs. This is, alas, the
reason why S&C didn't work for me as well as F&N -- at various points
in the book, the girls are stupid. They fail to put together
obvious clues ("Oh, the woman who tried to kill you is named Miranda?
Well, in completely unrelated news, a woman named Miranda came to town
today."), and behave like the empty-headed ditzes they believe
themselves not to be. I wanted to slap some sense into the silly
little geese.
But when they're not being irritating, they've got interesting and
distinctive narrative voices. Combine that with a setting I'm fond of
(I almost always enjoy post-medieval fantasy), a pleasantly convoluted
plot, and pacey writing; and it all makes for a very enjoyable
read.
| :::
July
21,
2003
Patricia Wrede's The Harp of Imach Thyssel
is the third
volume of the Shadows of Lyra omnibus, but it's not really a
sequel. It shares a setting with the two previous Lyra books, but has
no characters in common. The protagonist of this one is a journeyman
minstrel who comes upon the powerful magic artifact of the title, and
needs to handle the seduction of power, the betrayal of those who
desire the harp's power, the attention of dark forces, and the
uncertain intentions of mysterious characters.
It's all done quiet competently, and the story moves along nicely,
but the weaknesses of the earlier books are still present here.
There's one whallopingly unbelievable detail of world-building
(specifically: the protagonist still treats the non-human races as
legendary even though a) the first book was a big coming out party for
the non-humans, b) this takes place after the first book, and c) he's
familiar in detail with the events of the first book); more
irritating, the central romance is still arbitrary. It reads like
someone excised all the pages containing the romance itself, leaving
the reader to skip from initial unspoken interest-piqued attraction to
profession of undying love and marriage.
The Harp of Imach Thyssel isn't a bad book, but it's not as
much better as the previous books in the series as I might have hoped,
and has to be considered merely competent.
| :::
July
15,
2003
Carlton Egremont III's Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java
is, as you might guess from the title, not entirely a serious book about Java. The problem is, it's not entirely clear on what it really is. It tries to be a parody of technical books, a satirical criticism of Java, and a humorous fictional tale all at once; it's respectively mostly successful, partially successful, and not very successful.
The best parts in the book are the send-ups of tedious tech book conventions, like... well, the conventions:
Conventions Used in This Book
This book uses letters, numbers, punctuation, and diacritical marks to organize thoughts into words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Where appropriate, illustrations are used to organize important concepts into drawings of Mr. Bunny and Farmer Jake.
As I type that out, I realize it doesn't look very funny in isolation, but in context, it works. The bulk of the book, though, which uses Mr. Bunny and Farmer Jake to explore Java on a trip through an allegorical landscape, is a lot less interesting, with too many forced jokes and too much deliberate zaniness.
Amusing in parts, but unamusing in a lot more.
| :::
July
14,
2003
I seem to have somehow fallen behind in my bookloggly duties,
mostly because I've been reading up a storm. On the plus side, the
books I've fallen behind on are series books, so I can consolidate
what would otherwise have been repetitive reviews. It's all about the
efficiency, here at Weasel Words.
So, first up are Terry Moore's Brave New World and
Heart in Hand
, the eleventh and twelfth volumes of the
Strangers in Paradise graphic novel series. The series started out as
an interesting story focused on personal relationships and character
growth -- still something of a novelty in the action-packed world of
comics -- but its ongoing serial nature has turned it into a soap
opera. The story lines by now are convoluted, implausible,
repetitive, and inconsistent. I won't be reading any future volumes
of this series, and probably should have stopped earlier than I
did.
Next, we come to Patricia Wrede's Shadow Magic and
Daughter of Witches
, which comprise the first two thirds of
an omnibus entitled Shadows Over Lyra. With copyright dates in
the early 1980s, I'm guessing these are some of Wrede's earliest
works, and it shows.
Shadow Magic in particular is very first-novelish. The
rather generic story is about how a princess of peculiar ancestry (and
her elven buddies) search for the Magical Thingies that will allow
them to defeat The Ancient Evil Rising In The North. The
world-building is inconsistent (at the beginning, magic is a thing of
legend; halfway through, it's a commonplace thing that's been around
in well-documented ways forever), the obligatory romance abrupt, and
the resolution ex machina. Despite these flaws, though, it's
very readable; I breezed through it quickly and enjoyably enough.
Daughter of Witches is significantly better. The pace of
the story is still a bit uneven, but Wrede is a much more assured
writer. While it takes place after Shadow Magic, it's not a
direct sequel -- instead of being set in the Generic Medieval Kingdom
of Alkyra, it's set in the Generic Oppressive Religious Empire of
Chaldreth, and focuses on the liberation of a bonded servant girl who
had unwillingly drawn the attention of the Temple. In tone and broad
outline, it reminds me of Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan.
Compared to Shadow Magic, the characterization is more nuanced,
the plot solider, and the world-building more consistent. Daughter
of Witches is still not a great book, but it maintains the
readability of Shadow Magic and substantially improves on the
weaknesses of that first novel. If nothing else, the upward trend in
quality bodes well for the third volume of the trilogy (and Wrede's
subsequent output).
| :::
July
7,
2003
I'm actually recording this out of order -- I read
Ultimate X-Men, vol. 2
well before I picked up the Gene Wolfe book, but I forgot about it until now. Like the Ultimate Spider-Man volumes I talked about last month, this is a clean reboot of the X-Men continuity, updated and de-cheesed. In terms of quality, it's right up there with Ultimate Spider-Man in the upper echelon of traditional superhero books, though the tone of X-Men is (expectedly) a bit darker than that of Spider-Man.
This second volume does seem to point toward the inevitable problems of infinitely continuing serieses, though. In the first volume, Magneto was dealt with nicely; that should have been that, but a perpetual series can't ever get rid of a good villain permanently, so now he's back again. And he'll probably be defeated again, and return again, et cetera ad infinitum. The lack of conclusion is frustrating and leads to... well, the sort of structural story problems that necessitated these Ultimate reboots in the first place. But, really, what can you do? Making Spider-Man or The X-Men into a limited series a la Sandman isn't a particularly feasible solution.
At any rate, Ultimate X-Men is very much worth reading for superhero fans, as of now. But keep your eye out for seriesitis.
| :::
July
6,
2003
So here's the thing: The stories in Gene Wolfe's The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories
are all well-written and quality-laden and so forth. But they're also emotionally distant and unremittingly, unrelentingly bleak. They're stories in which people never smile or laugh, in which things are bad and getting worse, and in which the characters are utterly lacking in affect. And while this also describes the brilliant Book of the New Sun, the stories here lacked the compensatory sense-of-wonder of that series.
As I read TIoDDaOSaOS (and no, that title isn't a typo -- one of the stories in this volume is "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories"), I found myself getting increasingly depressed and lethargic, and I finally decided that, no matter how "good" the stories might be, they were making me miserable, and I'd be better off not reading them. So, I stopped. I've got my place marked with a bookmark, and theoretically someday I might come back and finish up the collection; but probably not.
| :::
July
1,
2003
For a few books there -- The Truth, The Fifth
Elephant, that neighborhood -- it looked like the Discworld series
was getting stale, and Pratchett had passed his writerly peak. Well,
in the light of Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men
, it now
seems that appearances were badly misleading. This is one of the best
Discworld books yet; and coming on the heels of the also-excellent
Night Watch, it appears Pratchett's found a second wind.
Wee Free Men is actually supposed to be a YA book, the
second Discworld book to be so labelled, after The Amazing Maurice
and His Educated Rodents. Like that book, the only things that
set it apart from the normal run of Discworld are chapter breaks and a
young protagonist. This doesn't read like a children's book at all;
which is just as well for other children's books, because if I were to
start comparing them to Wee Free Men, it wouldn't go well for
them. Any random sentence in the book shows more writerly skill than
J.K. Rowling has yet displayed in five increasingly-weighty tomes; any
character in the book is drawn with more nuance and depth than the
normal collection of stereotypes and caricatures; and any detail of
the setting is more original than the warmed-over cliches that
populate Hogwarts Castle.
I don't mean to pick on Harry Potter in particular, here; but what
with it just having come out in a blaze of attention, the comparison
seems inevitable. But as I say, it's not a fair comparison: I don't
think Wee Free Men is really a kids' book in the way that Harry
Potter is, and while that judgment might just be a sign of latent
prejudice on my part ("If it's good, it can't be a kids' book"), I
don't think so. I think Pratchett missed his intended audience.
Which is, really, just as well; because whatever he was trying to
do, he ended up writing a superb Discworld novel, one filled with
interesting people, a well-crafted plot, glittering writing, genuine
laugh-out-loud humor, and the sharp humanist observations that are
Pratchett's particular strength. And as a nice plus, this would make
an excellent starting point for Discworld newcomers.
| :::
Previous Entries...