October
29,
2004
So, the second and third book of the Enchanted Forest series, Patricia Wrede’s Searching for Dragons and Calling on Dragons
. Here we have the series problem again — everything I said about the first book is still true of these. They’re interesting, light fare that feel both genuinely YA yet somehow magically non-annoying, and they haven’t worn their welcome out in three books.
One joke has, though: A character in the book is a magic scholar, and talks about magic technically, using “big words.” This is always done for laughs, with the other characters continually failing to understand what he’s saying, and someone restating it in simpler language for the reader. Which is fine, except that the words aren’t big enough to feel actually obscure. The guy talks like somebody talking about, oh, computers. So a) every time the characters react with incomprehension, it jolts me, because I had no problem understanding it, and b) it makes me associate them with those willfully-ignorant “Oh, I don’t understand computers!” people who don’t even attempt to grasp explanations of moderately complex concepts. This is an artifact of the YA thing, obviously, but it’s only a mild irritant at this point.
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October
22,
2004
One of the advantages of reading comic books in graphic novel form
is that you can get reviews from those who read the monthly fascicles.
So I knew going in that Neil Gaiman’s 1602
had gotten
pretty mediocre reviews; I also knew that those reviews wouldn’t stop
me from buying it, because 1602 is Gaiman writing in the Marvel
Universe, setting the heroes in Elizabethan times. As a fan of 1) the
glorious, messy mass of twisted interconnection and
inconsistent-but-voluminous history that is the Marvel Universe; 2)
Gaiman’s writing; and 3) comic book stories that reconceive the
characters in a different setting (whether that be the Ultimate
titles, which move 1950s origin stories into the 1990s; or Bendis’
Alias, which recasts Marvel heroes as characters in private-eye
comic book noir), I pretty much had this down as an automatic buy.
And as a fan of all those things, I enjoyed the book reasonably
well; but I suspect that if I weren’t so enamored of the background
and the premise, I’d’ve been unimpressed. This is to Sandman
what Kurt Busiek’s Avengers Forever is to his Astro City
— an above-average, but conventional, comic book story that utterly
fails to shine with the great writing and originality of the more
famous work. If 1602 didn’t have Gaiman’s name plastered all
over it, you’d never guess he wrote it; you’d probably expect that it
was penned by some no-name corporate scribe at Marvel who was
deliberately trying to do something vaguely Gaiman-esque with the
corporate properties.
And my advice to the potential reader is to pretend that’s actually
the case; forget that Gaiman wrote it. If you wouldn’t buy a graphic
novel with Marvel characters transplanted to the 17th century that
wasn’t written by a super-famous writer, don’t buy this one. And if
you do read it, don’t compare it to Gaiman’s better works, because
it’ll suffer badly in that comparison; instead, compare it to other
Marvel comics, where it’ll rank in the upper echelons — not as good as
Busiek’s Marvels, but probably on par with Bendis’ stuff,
say.
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October
11,
2004
If you ever find yourself looking at your booklog archive and thinking, “Gosh, I haven’t really been reading very much, have I?”, I highly advise taking a nice long vacation, where you will almost certainly remedy the situation. So, here’s my report on Books I Read On My Vacation.
First, I needed something for a long plane ride, and what could be
better than a Discworld book? Fortunately, Terry Pratchett’s
Going Postal
was released just in time for the flight.
Fortunatelier, it’s a good Discworld book. Not that there are bad
ones, really, but there are mediocre ones, and it seems to be even
odds as to whether you’re going to get inspired Pratchett (Night
Watch) or phoning-it-in Pratchett (Monstrous Regiment)
these days.
Going Postal isn’t super-brilliant in the way that Night
Watch was, but it’s definitely good. The protagonist is a con
artist who’s been Vetinaried into taking a job as the head of the
long-defunct post office. You get some standard Pratchett thematic
stuff — magic piling up in unexpected places, SFnal exploration of the
consequences of technology — but there’s also some new stuff mixed in
to keep it from feeling stale. Insights on the privatization of
infrastructure, and the opaqueness of complex, Enron-esque financial
dealings might not be what you’d expect from Discworld, but they fit
in well. Combined with a protagonist who doesn’t feel like a reprise
of other members of Pratchett’s extended cast, you’ve got an enjoyable
and fresh entry in the series.
That got me most of the way through the flight, but a bit more
light reading was called for, so Rosemary Kirstein’s The
Language of Power
was next out of the bag. This is the third
or fourth (depending on how you count the first omnibus) entry in her
hitherto-brilliant Steerswoman series, and it maintains the series’
level of quality. Engrossing plotting, a likable and distinctive
protagonist, interesting mysteries, and pacey writing keep things
moving along enjoyably. If I were to offer any criticism, it’d be
that this feels a bit middle-booky — there’s less overt sensawunda
than in the first few books, but neither is there a feeling of
incipient wrapping-up. That’s probably inevitable in any middle book
of a long series; and things are building interestingly, so as middle
books go, it’s quite strong.
That took me through the initial settling-in period, after which I
was ready for something weightier, and it doesn’t get much weightier
than Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World
, as
measured in sheer poundage. I was nervously anticipatory about this
book. On the plus side, Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle has ranged from
very good to great so far; on the minus side, he’s famously bad at
endings, and the second book was a bit worse than the first, so it was
possible that the series just fell off a cliff in the third book.
Possible, but not actually the case. The System of the
World is superb, probably the best book of the trilogy. It pulls
everything together into a well-formed package, provides the heavy
sense of closure that’s necessary at the end of such a long trilogy,
and is just generally excellent. On the stock list of Stephenson’s
weaknesses, we can officially cross off the “bad at endings” thing.
Readers who favor tight plots and concision will want to leave
“sprawling and digressive” on there, though — while things are tied
together well, it’s easy to imagine 1000 pages being trimmed out of
the trilogy without materially affecting the main story. But that
misses the point, which is that these books are about the world as
much as the story, and that the digressive and sprawling nature is
necessary to immerse the reader in the world.
When Cryptonomicon came out, it was so much better than what
Stephenson had written before that it retroactively diminished his
prior work — Snow Crash had seemed excellent, but
Cryptonomicon was so much better that Snow Crash now
looked like juvenilia in comparison. With the full trilogy now
complete, the Baroque Cycle is so impressive that it diminishes
Cryptonomicon in the same way. This is perhaps the best
fantasy trilogy since Tolkien’s. (Also, it totally vindicates my
then-idiosyncratic reading of Cryptonomicon as a fantasy
novel.)
Moving along, since Stephenson’s brick took up most of the vacation
proper, it was time for more airplane reading. First up: The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart’s America: The Book
, a mock civics
textbook of sorts. It’s occasionally generically and predictably funny
in that Dave Barry sort of way, but it’s occasionally hilarious, too.
Net verdict is that it’s reasonably funny and probably worth reading
if you’re a Daily Show fan.
For the rest of the flight, I read Patricia Wrede’s Dealing
With Dragons
, which is the first of her Enchanted Forest YA
series. I’d read some of Wrede’s
books before and been moderately unimpressed, as they were just
generically competent. Given my general antipathy toward YA books,
it’s entirely reasonable to expect that I’d care for this even less.
But, somewhat surprisingly, that’s not the case — I really enjoyed
this book. Whereas her adult books (at least, those of them that I
read) were set in Generic Medieval Fantasyworld, this one’s set in a
unique and interesting quasi-fairytale world that has some of the feel
of The Princess Bride or One For the Morning Glory
(though without the narrative playfulness of those books). The
characters still feel a bit stock, but instead of being problematic,
it just fits into the formal constraints of YA literature — all YA
protagonists feel somewhat generic, so if Wrede’s princess is awfully
like Coraline or Hermione or Sally Kimball, well, that’s to be
expected. If we except Pratchett’s allegedly-YA Discworld books and
Pullman’s not-at-all-YA trilogy, this is clearly the best YA fantasy
I’ve read. Which probably means kids would hate it.
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