Books read, early August

[mrissa]

I sometimes have a hard time figuring out how to figure out whether friends will think something is a fun thing for them to read or a tedious obligation for them to deal with. Ah well; one does the best one can under the circumstances at hand, and changes it for later circumstances.

W. H. Auden, Collected Poems. Ohhhh. Such a thing. Obviously not every poem the man wrote was completely wonderful, but so many of them were. Auden can take subjects seriously and be funny about them at the same time. Loved it. This was a library book, and I know I'll want to own a copy so I can reread several of the poems again and again. One of the things that startled me was that Auden wrote a poem for Oliver Sacks. I had so thoroughly associated him with the pre-1960s world, and Oliver Sacks with my own world, that having the gap of history so sharply narrowed was astonishing. He also wrote one for Charles Williams, which made me think more highly of Charles Williams.

Elizabeth Bear (matociquala), Ink and Steel. Okay, so: I am a really tough sell on Elizabethan fantasies. A really tough sell. And on books featuring Shakespeare as a character. But the previous two Promethean Age books are my favorite of Bear's books, and this one had Marlowe as well as Shakespeare, so what else could I do? And I have the second half of this coming in the mail, so I will say something of more substance when it arrives. But as with swan_tower's Midnight Never Come, I was justified in my trust that the sources would be well-integrated and many. Looking forward to seeing how it ends.

Amanda Cross, An Imperfect Spy, A Trap for Fools, and The Players Come Again. I still love this series. Love. An Imperfect Spy is probably my least favorite of recent volumes, but that still makes it a good, solid read. I liked the other two very much. For anyone interested in this series, I'd say it's gotten less traditionally murder mystery-ish in structure with later volumes, but for me this is not a good thing or a bad thing, just a thing.

Charles de Lint, Dingo. Hmmm. Well, I definitely support de Lint doing things a little differently -- getting out of Newford, not just writing about Native Americans and Celts. And the main character and his...counterpart, is I guess how I'd describe the other young man in the book...were a pretty good contrast and a good set of surprises for each other. On the other hand, there were some moments of pretty blatant clumsiness: for one 17-year-old to explain the idea of MMORPGs to another as if it would be news without knowing that she'd been raised under a rock was just unbelievable to me. It read like a 1950s teenager explaining earnestly to another 1950s teenager that if you could find a coin of some sort, you could feed it into a slot and choose a grooved disc which would play the music of your choice from a list of choices. And even the stuff that wasn't unbelievable was often very blatant: the message that YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL IF YOU HAVE SUPPORTIVE PARENTS, for example, was written on a 2x4 for reader bludgeoning. Not a bad idea, being grateful of supportive family. But...yah. Maybe just a tiny bit more subtlety would be in order one of these days.

Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever. I wish there had been some focused people who were actually happy in this book. It's mainstream YA, and it had some really good elements. But it seemed like there was a dichotomy between people who had fun and people who had goals, and that bothered me.

Rumer Godden, China Court. The last two pages of this book so disturb me that I'm not sure I'm processing them yet at all. I loved the generations, the homely details of the house and the food, the way Tracy learns to stick up for herself. And I loved that the horrible relatives weren't really horrible in the end, that they rallied to support Tracy when her path became clear. It's just the last two pages I'm having trouble with.

Diana Wynne Jones, House of Many Ways. It feels to me like Diana Wynne Jones has settled into sort of a routine in her last few books, but this was a very well-executed version of that, and I had fun with it. It's listed as a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, but I'm pretty sure you could start with House of Many Ways and not miss too very much of what was going on.

Sarah Prineas, The Magic Thief. Fun children's fantasy that made me want biscuits. Biscuits! So many biscuits! There were biscuit recipes in the back of the book, but I'm still not baking, and I have not yet found the time to ask for biscuit help. Sigh.

Ruth Rendell, Murder Being Once Done and No More Dying Then. These are both in a long series, but the latter is, I think, a better example of it. It was one of my favorites in the series so far. The other was fine, entertaining but not nearly as outstanding -- although it may look like the beginning of a character development arc in retrospect when I've read the next few.

Robert Rummel-Hudson, Schuyler's Monster. Edging into nonfiction again, a little at a time. Some of you have been reading Rob's blog for years now. I haven't. I came to Schuyler's Monster having read a few entries when friends linked them. It's a father's memoir of his daughter's early years. She has a congenital brain condition that keeps her from speaking, but she's learning to use an electronic aid to let her communicate her thoughts. Reading this, I was so glad she wasn't born much earlier. I remember one of the daughters of some friends of my parents, a girl a few years older than me, who had to communicate with a word board, and it looked so frustrating, even when I was small. It also got me thinking: there's a freshness to a memoir that's written as quickly as this one was (Schuyler is not yet out of grade school), but I'm wondering how differently it would read with another ten or twenty years' perspective. I'm not sure how memoirists decide whether to try to get something into polished form right away or whether to write what they're thinking at the moment and then see what time makes of it. Anybody have personal experience of this?

Sherwood Smith (sartorias), King's Shield. This is one of the few fantasy series that's allowing me to completely immerse on the first page. I'm bouncing impatiently while I wait for the last volume. Bouncebounce! Bounce! (More Tdor! Bounce!)

Helene Tursten, The Torso. Swedish murder mystery in translation, second in a series. Better balanced than its predecessor, I think. I would only recommend it carefully, though: it is fairly graphic, gruesome with disturbing elements of sexuality -- and somewhat disturbing handling of them in spots. I think in some ways it's an interesting exercise to read a very graphic book in translation, but it's certainly not an interesting exercise of universal interest.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Hee! Fourth opens with Tdor.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Omg! Omg! I did not realize there was a fourth!
*runs in circles*

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

4th and last.

[pameladean]

I am so happy that you continue to love Amanda Cross. I was rather put out by each of the ones you list this time, but upon rereading (because that was the only way to get more Amanda Cross, after all) I began to love them.

No More Dying Then is among my favorites of the early Wexfords. Rendell continually amazes me with her growth.

P.

[biguglymandoll.livejournal.com]

>> One of the things that startled me was that Auden wrote a poem for Oliver Sacks. I had so thoroughly associated him with the pre-1960s world, and Oliver Sacks with my own world, that having the gap of history so sharply narrowed was astonishing.

I had no idea. I'm going to have to look that one up. I like Sacks!

I had the same thing happen to me a few days ago, reading Rudyard Kipling's From Sea to Sea. (If you haven't read it, it reads a lot like a blog of his travels in America and other places.) He wrote about meeting and interviewing Mark Twain, and how blown away he felt in Twain's presence. I so firmly think of Twain in the mid-1800s and Kipling in the turn of the century 1900s, that I had to look up the year Twain died (1910) to be sure Kipling hadn't made it up. ;-)

Back on Sacks, that reminds me - have you ever read Richard Powers? His latest, The Echo Maker, is a good deep read, as well as a bit of a send-up of Sacks - there's a very deliberate shout-out at the end. His Galatea 2.2 is probably my favorite, a classic Pygmalion story.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Indeed I have read Richard Powers -- all of his novels, in fact. The first time I read Galatea 2.2 in college, I was delighted because I live in a world where a book about AI could be not science fiction.

I was far, far less impressed with The Echo Maker than it sounds like you were. I think I do better with Richard Powers books when they have at least one element that's unfamiliar to me: cognitive neurology and Nebraska were neither of them new to me, and I didn't think they were particularly well-handled. The climactic revelation fell completely flat for me, and I spent most of the book worrying about the dog.

[biguglymandoll.livejournal.com]

I keep forgetting we have Omaha in common - you've spent much more recent time by the wide slow Platte than I have. For me, it was a return to the carefree days of my youth, 35 years gone (god I've always wanted to say that! LOL), and I didn't know *that* much of cognitive neurolgy. So yes, I enjoyed it. But it's Galatea that I re-read. ;-)

Mostly I got a copy of Echo Maker as soon as I could because that's the one I mentioned to you a while ago, that he'd written by speaking it aloud to his MacBook and having the PC do the speech-to-text work. I wanted to see how it came out via that kind of process.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Dingo felt off to me. A friend of mine said once that De Lint wants everyone to be safe, and that is definitely true. On two levels, even; nothing terribly bad happens to anyone, and no one is dangerous to bystanders. I was happy that it wasn't the same batch of people, disappointed that it was kind of the same batch of story, and then... okay, I will suspend my disbelief about human-dingo shapeshifters. That's fine. I am curiously unwilling to accept that the most pure-blooded human-dingo shapeshifters will have red hair.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Eek, forgot a bit. The Magic Thief made me laugh so much because Conn is self-centered in a way I probably wouldn't have noticed, were I younger, and it doesn't affect the plot at all. He makes mistakes and bad assumptions, and that's that-- no repercussions, no explosions. I haven't noticed that a lot in books. Usually, there's character-acting-appropriately, character-socially-embarrassed, and then character-makes-mistake-and-plot-happens.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, and the adults make mistakes and bad assumptions, too. So that's good.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I guess after I had a moment to think about it, my question was: why are these "pure-blooded dingo shapeshifters" not...Aboriginal Australian? Maybe? You know how a certain group of people complain about gratuitous gayness in books? I think this was gratuitous white redheadedness.

And yes: it seems like most of the really horrible things in de Lint books have already happened by the time the book comes around. This is on casual memory; counterexamples welcome of course.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

The Onion Girl has a fair amount of trauma in it, but that's the only one I can think of. Even that is undone eventually. I haven't read enough recently to say whether the books try to be about recovery from trauma, but I'm leaning toward not. De Lint was one of the first writers I burned out on via short story collection, so it's been a while since I read enough to compare.

A microcosm: in Widdershins, Joe? gets big and bad, extra-dangerous, quite nifty. Later, he has no memory of it. He's just a regular guy, right? Nothing special about him. He is not required to deal with the repercussions of his big-and-badness, nor is anyone else.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For an antidote to this, try Adam Stemple. Uff da.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

My very general understanding of the timing of Schuyler's Monster: as you say, he's been writing that story since it began, and moving out into wider publication, and I think his main concern has been telling her story, rather than "writing memoir" if you see what I mean. Memoir/autobiography and its associated genres have been exploding over the last couple of decades--I imagine thirty years ago it wouldn't be called a memoir.

I also imagine he will keep writing this story for a long time, so there might be the twenty-years-perspective version too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah: so it's a decent question to ask a memoirist, but that's not really what he means to be doing. Got it.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

According to my complete knowledge of the brain of Rob Rummel-Hudson!

By the way, the cook does not appear until the second book (Earth Logic) of Laurie Marks's series. Looking through them I recall that that's when it really kicked into high gear for me. You might be able to start there? At least as a trial? If you thought it was worth it. I just read two P.D. James novels in a row with very serious descriptions of food and meals, and have it on the brain.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I will ponder it. On the one hand, I don't like starting in the middle of series; on the other hand, I also didn't like starting at the beginning of this series, and several people I like liked it. So.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have had problems with that too. I think the last two pages of _China Court_ are a response (a weird response) to the expectations of romance. There's that very romantic situation and the wedding and all of that and these people do not know each other, and we're supposed to believe they'll live happily ever after and keep the house, and another however many generations, and we do and we don't. I think the events of the last two pages are supposed to say that nobody lives happily ever after and that sometimes people do something wrong, and the sheer awkwardness of that situation in realism would lead to it, and that sometimes you can break something and it'll still be all right. Only personally I'd have been on the next plane back to America, because there's a limit to what one can sacrifice to keep a house and that would be well over the line. But think of Mrs Quin, and Lady Patrick. If you want the same level of reality and a happy ending, it's very hard.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, and the porcelain bit made me feel like the sacrifice to keep the house was not going to succeed even in keeping the house. I see the idea that breaking something can still be all right, but...there was more than one thing broken in that scene, and one of them would have been irrevocable for me, as you say: on the plane, off you go.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Fun children's fantasy that made me want biscuits.

It did that to me, too.