Books read, late December

[mrissa]

A. S. Byatt, The Game. I bumped this up my list after I loved The Children's Book, and I was dreadfully disappointed. I am a sucker for complicated imagination games played by children in literature, also for those games reconsidered or revisited once the children are a bit older. The title and the jacket copy promised me that. This...was not that. The game was barely touched upon in the earlier sections of the book, only obliquely referenced in the later ones. Two unpleasant sisters dislike each other, and it ends badly for all concerned. It seems to have been her second novel; I'm glad she's improved since.

Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising. Reread for the nth time, but only the second time as an adult, I think. I like Merriman a great deal less as an adult, and I like him a great deal less having Silver on the Tree in front of me. I appreciate that Cooper does not confuse "good" with "likeable," though.

Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants. Slight and pleasant.

Carolyn Ives Gilman, Halfway Human. This was science fiction in a fairly classic mode: an exploration of the intersection of two cultures. The "aliens" in this case are humans with a social divergence of quite some time from the other humans in the book, but it still works like a Planets And People book is supposed to work, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to, though I can't articulate any reason why I shouldn't have expected to.

Barbara Hamilton, The Ninth Daughter. For some reason I had not processed that the detective in this book would be Abigail Adams until it turned up from the library and the cover made that abundantly clear. I was skeptical but plunged in anyway: I hate books with well-known historical figures as detectives, as a general rule. They tend to strike me as gimmicky and false. In this case, much less so. I found the resolution of the mystery rather trite, but for once having half the figures of the American Revolution traipse in and out of the book did not annoy me, which is quite a feat. For people who do not have my distaste for this category of mysteries, I'd recommend it highly.

Reginald Hill, Asking for the Moon and Death's Jest Book. wshaffer told me that the Dalziel and Pascoe books do not have to be read in order, and that is quite true, but here are two exceptions: do not read Death's Jest Book before Dialogues of the Dead, and do not read Asking for the Moon first. Dialogues of the Dead and Death's Jest Book are in some plot ways more like one long novel split (although in other important stylistic ways not). Asking for the Moon is a collection of four shorter works, and it will be far better if you already know and love the characters when you read it. I am still loving this series. I am also amused that in 1990, twenty years after he started publishing Dalziel and Pascoe stories, Mr. Hill decided that he didn't want to leave his characters hanging in weird mystery series dilating time if he stopped suddenly, so he wrote a definitive last one, set on the moon base. I have great sympathy for this impulse, as mystery series dilating time sometimes bothers me, but it was particularly amusing because I was reading that story a few days from 2010, which is when it's set. With the moon base. Far, far in the future to be the definitive end--and as far as I've been able to tell, Hill is still alive and well and writing Dalziel and Pascoe stories. Moral here: the future is closer than you think. Much closer.

Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory. This is the result of successfully baiting my in-laws: I knew if I put this book on my wishlist, I'd get it from some member of the (Dutch-Michigander) Gritter family for Christmas or my birthday. And lo and behold, I was right. It is, first thing, a really nice physical object. It's full-color throughout, and Jardine makes abundant use of that, so instead of flipping back and forth to look at the Dutch Masterwork or piece of propaganda or map she's talking about, they're all right there. I also like Jardine's approach to looking at science, engineering, and the arts as major forces for cultural interplay, and not just politics and economics (though she doesn't neglect those). "Plundered" is probably her editor's choice--it's a bit more one-sided than the case Jardine presents. Still, 17th century fun. Recommended if you have any interest in either of the countries involved, or in the 17th century, or in the escapades of scientists and artificers.

Justine Larbalestier, Liar. For me this was a book that got in its own way too much. It will not be too big a spoiler, one hopes, to say that it is narrated by a self-described compulsive liar. First-person narrative. I don't have problems with the unreliable narrator per se, but what I need is something to grab onto, something not given to the reader/viewer by the unreliable narrator. Take The Usual Suspects, for example: some parts of it are not stories told by the unreliable narrator, so even once you've seen the ending, there is some question of picking apart what's internally real to the story and what's made up. Liar's Micah takes the opportunity on more than one occasion to harangue the reader for being gullible, but unfortunately for my enjoyment of Liar, I wasn't gullible in the ways Micah was saying, and it interfered. I always had the running "if that even happened, if that person is still alive or ever existed" going in my head. So despite the smooth prose that really pulled me through the story, I was, in the end, not the right reader for this book.

James MacDonald, The Apocalypse Door. Holy crud. Even for someone whose acquaintance with Jim MacDonald has been a few cordial panel interactions at cons and reading online posts, it is abundantly clear that this book could not be any more written by him if they had chosen to have LEDs highlighting the author's name on the even pages, doing a little blinky LED dance of MacDonaldness. Some books have a seamless feel to them, as though the author's powers of invention never had to back up and make another go at a scene, even though that might not actually be the case in the creative process. I don't know whether it was for this one, but it sure felt like it. It zipped right along from guns to demon mushrooms to brazen heads. Good fun. Recommended.

Nevil Shute, Trustee from the Toolroom. This was a present, and I wasn't at all sure what it was going to be about. When I started reading it, I was pretty sure I knew the plot, and I did, mostly, sort of: it skipped all the nastier pitfalls of this particular plot. It was just lovely. Bad things happen enough in the universe, this book seems to say, without people adding to them. And so it's full of people creating beautiful, functional things, and it's full of people trying to behave in honest, honorable, and considerate ways as best they can. It is just plain lovely. Also it has the engineer nature. Highly recommended if you can find it--I'm not sure if it even came out in the US. It's very mid-century British. But sometimes I really like mid-century British. I wish Grandpa could have borrowed this from me. It would have been just his sort of thing.

Comments

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Why do you like Merriman less as an adult? (After Silver on the Tree makes perfect sense to me.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I think as a child there were things he did that seemed kind of iffy to me that I assumed would make sense to adults, and now that I'm an adult I don't have that to lean on.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Huh. Okay, I buy that. I haven't re-read those books in a long time but yeah, I remember a lot of reliance on "you don't know enough yet to understand this." Though I don't know that I attributed it to adulthood exactly? But I see it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also I think I was less patient as a child. So when Merriman was stern with Hawkin when he could have been loving instead, I was much more willing as a kid to go, "Yeah, get with the program, dude!" than I am now.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Me too. I always felt sorry for Hawkin, but the last time I read it, I felt like Merriman was setting him up to fail.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think that particular interaction comes off very well, unless the reader is willing to believe that plot necessity is the same as providential necessity within the context of the book.

I'm rarely willing to make that sort of concession any more.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I must have had the "this is just authorial convenience" reaction to books as a teenager, though probably not as a little kid, but I don't really remember when it started up. Probably it grew slowly.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I think I started having it a bit after I'd read enough genre fantasy to recognize things as tropes, instead of thinking of them in reference to "that one time Gandalf/Dallben/Merriman did X." Not 100% on that, though; it might've had something to do with reading writing books as well.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Having just reread TDIR (yesterday)( I can totally see it. He spends a lot of time saying "you're safer if you don't know much yet," but then he tells Will stuff anyway. And then Will does stuff totally innocently that gets him in trouble, because no one told him clearly not to. And then at some point Will learns Everything (the gift of Gramarye) but there's no apparent reason he's learning it then except that circumstances are favorable. So basically Merriman comes off as the worst kind of autocratic adult, who conceals information from children just because he wants to.

Also there's the logic issue: OK, birthrates have decreased, but surely Will is not the first seventh son of a seventh son to be born in 500 years? Especially if predeceased brothers count. I can think of two offhand even just in YA lit: Alvin Maker and the heroine of Alma Alexander's Spellspam books (though she's the 7th *child* of two 7th children).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The question is not whether you can think of them in YA lit, but whether you can think of them in real life. It's a lot easier for someone to decree that there will be seven boys and three girls born to the Stanton family than for it to actually work out that way without Boy #7 being the one to die, without one of the parents dying along the way, without one of the parents saying, "Bugger all this for a lark, eight kids is quite enough thanks," etc.

Changing it to seventh child instead of seventh child of a particular sex is a major statistical change. The families I can think of with eleven children do not have seventh sons or seventh daughters but do, of course, have seventh children.

My grandmother's birth family of thirteen did have a seventh son, my uncle Dud, who died last year. But he "only" had six kids, and one of them was adopted, which probably doesn't count in birth-order essentialist systems. Getting to the seventh son of the seventh son is hard. One in five hundred years seems somewhat implausible, but "two offhand in YA lit" does not make sense as a method of calculating that implausibility.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping that Macdonald writes more Templar stories.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Three-story chapbook at Lulu!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I've already got the original publications those appeared in. (Longtime fan here!)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I came late to the party. But I did give my dad a copy of the reissue for Xmas!

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Trustee from the Toolroom is one of my favorite of Nevil Shute's--the hero (because he is, when it come right down to it, heroic in his efforts to do what needs doing) is so unlikely, and so right at the same time. Also, what you said about all the rest of it? Yes.

[coalboy.livejournal.com]

I too love this book; prompted me to get copies of most of his books, mostly mass market paper, not just get them from the library. Trustee I have in hardcover, published by Morrow back before Morrow was bought by Harper.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Dark is Rising in a very long time, but I find that my feelings about adults in children's fantasy has dramatically shifted in perspective now that I have children under my protection. I really resent the way the children are groomed to be heroes rather than protected by the adults who should not put them into peril. This was one of the things I found incredibly disturbing about Harry Potter, especially in the movies.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. On the one hand, adults shoving kids directly into peril really sucks, and I do think writers of children's and YA work should be aware of this. On the other hand, I think we're seeing this type of story in part because our culture errs on the side of overprotecting kids from a lot of things. I think the "orphan finds a loving home" type of story would be a lot more popular than "orphan or kid whose parents are otherwise weirdly absent goes out on an awesome quest" stories if kids were mostly feeling shoved out of the nest into the wide world at that age. I think it's good for kids to have someone believe they can do something awesome, because mostly the things they can do are explicitly devalued because they're kids. So it's a fine line to walk.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed by how little I remember of The Dark is Rising series. Though I often forget much of what I read/see/hear. Fortunately, I made a few notes here (http://careswen.livejournal.com/3872.html). Kind of makes me want to read it again.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

...so he wrote a definitive last one, set on the moon base.

That sounds awesome. I don't suppose it can be read separately from the rest of the series?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't recommend it, no. It depends on the two detectives having a dynamic that's already well-established with the reader, I think.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, and I really felt that in order to be interesting in that line, you'd have to have more of the original game in the first place. I mean, with the battles obliquely referred to in the game you can look at the bits with their interpersonal fights as expanded game, too, but it's expanded and less interesting game, from where I sit.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I feel less guilty for objecting to books that are Not What I Was Expecting when the presentation of the book clearly led the expectations, and when what they were instead is something I wouldn't have liked anyway.

And yes, Cassandra had the queen and the snake there, and she...wandered around painting things and spoilered herspoiler? Meh. Meh, I say!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It reminded me very much of some of the people I went to school with, where my mother said, "They've grown up, and they're not the people you didn't like in high school." The options are that they have changed so drastically that they are people I don't know at all, or that they still resemble the people I dislike. In either case not a big win.

I felt greatly sorry for Thor, because he was in many ways very sensible to me early in the book, and she was getting all upset because he didn't emote enough at her, and I was like, lady, you marry one and you know what you're getting. His name was Thor, for the love of Mike. You do not marry a guy named Thor and expect affect.

In some ways it reminded me of The Philadelphia Story: I wanted somebody to kidnap the teenage girl and take her away where there might be sane people. Only in TPS she has a big sister to do that, and also Jimmy Stewart, and in The Game there was no one.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

What is a Planets and People book, please?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know that anybody else uses this term. I think it's all me. Anyway: in a Planets and People book you may have an actual plot, or you may have some figleaf of a plot, but the main point is getting to contrast between at least two and possibly more planets' worth of culture. They can either be alien or human, but the main focus of the book is sorta "look, we do it this way, and they do it that way!" That makes it sound boring, but I don't find them at all boring.