So much for my obviously failing memory...
Apr. 3rd, 2007 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI found the notebook. It listed a whole bunch of other books I'd forgotten I'd read, which is why I keep this thing in the first place...
Anyway, first up is the one I liked best. Excellent children's fantasy/historical, with a detailed world, in depth characterisation, and completely lacking in easy and simplistic answers. The Sea of Trolls, Nancy Farmer. This starts with Jack, a farmboy, failing to live up to his father's expectations and taking a definite second place to his spoilt younger sister, Lucy. Then, however, he gets taken on by the village Bard as an apprentice - and is just beginning to realise he may not be hopeless when the Northmen beserkers come raiding. Jack and Lucy are captured and taken to the Northmen's court, where the half-Troll queen takes a dangerous interest in Lucy, and Jack's attempt to defend her sees him - and a bitter, suicidal shield maiden - travelling even further away from home, into the land of the trolls.
Arrgh. It's much better than that, really, and it's hard to get across the character stuff that makes it so good. Jack's relationship with Olaf, the beserker who captures him and then goes with him to the trolls, is eventually one of friendship, but it's a friendship that has to, somehow, acknowledge Olaf's behaviour as a beserker, and someone more than capable of killing children or defenseless monks. The Northmen are terrified of the trolls, but in many ways worse than them in their sheer unpredictability, Jack's fellow villagers are not entirely sunshine and light, Thorgil, the shield maiden desperate to die in battle is not just another spunky tomboy with a sword; there's space for readers to consider things, as well as a careful explication of issues that might otherwise grate, such as Lucy's princess fantasies. Very well done.
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman. I like Gaiman as a writer of comics much more than as a writer of unillustrated prose, with the honorable exception of Good Omens, but this was pretty good (better than American Gods, at least). Fat Charlie goes to his somewhat difficult and estranged father's funeral, to find out that he was not exactly human. Nice nonEuropean fantasy elements (his father is Anansi, the west African spider god) and race is present through without ever feeling overwhelming (only white characters have their colour mentioned, for example). The ending didn't quite work - too obvious and not big enough - but enjoyable overall.
. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam. Linked stories about a group of medical students/doctors in Toronto. Uneven. Some good, some bad (or unlikely - the Caesarean section without anaesthetic springs to mind), and if it weren't for the SARS epidemic hitting Toronto this wouldn't have had much of an ending, because the characters themselves have become too leaden by that stage to generate any heat. There's no humour either - Scrubs and M*A*S*H are the only exceptions I can think of to the rather po-faced seriousness of North American fictional medicine, and they're both TV. And yes, I am excluding Samuel Shem's House of God, because the moderate amount of amusement I got out of it was completely drowned out by the rampant sexism.
. Almost French, Sarah Turnbull. An Australian journalist heads off to live in Paris with a (French) guy she's met once. Culture clash story, and the city setting at least makes a nice change from all those mid-life Provence crises. Her descriptions of living in Paris - the community feel to a big city, the ridiculous bureaucracies, the social mores she trips over and stumbles into - are very nicely done. The agonising over her interactions with Frederick's family and friends doesn't quite work for me, and Frederick himself is an oddly absent presence from the book - he comes across as a friend or flatmate, rather than a lover, and though I think this is a perfectly reasonable way of protecting his privacy I did keep having moments of startled realisation about them actually being in a relationship. I think this would make a deeply strange double read with Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance.
After some mild agonising, I've decided not to routinely count graphic novels, but I'll note them here anyway.
Deadline, Bill Rosemann. Marvel, about a journalist who dislikes superheroes but gets stuck doing a story about them. I liked the ghost city – much of the rest now escapes me, and the main character is less endearing than I think the author would like me to find her.
Superman-Secret Identity, Kurt Busiek. I do like Kurt Busiek, and I have Astro City on standing order, but after a strong start it felt like he'd run out of things to say. The relationship between Superman and his government observers is nicely done, but the hints at obligations to nonAmericans tails out, and the ending is weak.
David’s Story, Terry Moore. Strangers in Paradise is the sort of series that men recommend to me as having "really realistic women". I think this may be a case of wishful thinking. Anyway, this is backstory for one of the male characters. Startlingly unrealistic, in my admittedly limited experience of yakuza in incestuous relationships who give it all up after accidentally killing asthmatic teenagers, take on their victim's name and then fall hopelessly in love with one of the female protagonists at a Rodin exhibition...
Anyway, first up is the one I liked best. Excellent children's fantasy/historical, with a detailed world, in depth characterisation, and completely lacking in easy and simplistic answers. The Sea of Trolls, Nancy Farmer. This starts with Jack, a farmboy, failing to live up to his father's expectations and taking a definite second place to his spoilt younger sister, Lucy. Then, however, he gets taken on by the village Bard as an apprentice - and is just beginning to realise he may not be hopeless when the Northmen beserkers come raiding. Jack and Lucy are captured and taken to the Northmen's court, where the half-Troll queen takes a dangerous interest in Lucy, and Jack's attempt to defend her sees him - and a bitter, suicidal shield maiden - travelling even further away from home, into the land of the trolls.
Arrgh. It's much better than that, really, and it's hard to get across the character stuff that makes it so good. Jack's relationship with Olaf, the beserker who captures him and then goes with him to the trolls, is eventually one of friendship, but it's a friendship that has to, somehow, acknowledge Olaf's behaviour as a beserker, and someone more than capable of killing children or defenseless monks. The Northmen are terrified of the trolls, but in many ways worse than them in their sheer unpredictability, Jack's fellow villagers are not entirely sunshine and light, Thorgil, the shield maiden desperate to die in battle is not just another spunky tomboy with a sword; there's space for readers to consider things, as well as a careful explication of issues that might otherwise grate, such as Lucy's princess fantasies. Very well done.
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman. I like Gaiman as a writer of comics much more than as a writer of unillustrated prose, with the honorable exception of Good Omens, but this was pretty good (better than American Gods, at least). Fat Charlie goes to his somewhat difficult and estranged father's funeral, to find out that he was not exactly human. Nice nonEuropean fantasy elements (his father is Anansi, the west African spider god) and race is present through without ever feeling overwhelming (only white characters have their colour mentioned, for example). The ending didn't quite work - too obvious and not big enough - but enjoyable overall.
. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam. Linked stories about a group of medical students/doctors in Toronto. Uneven. Some good, some bad (or unlikely - the Caesarean section without anaesthetic springs to mind), and if it weren't for the SARS epidemic hitting Toronto this wouldn't have had much of an ending, because the characters themselves have become too leaden by that stage to generate any heat. There's no humour either - Scrubs and M*A*S*H are the only exceptions I can think of to the rather po-faced seriousness of North American fictional medicine, and they're both TV. And yes, I am excluding Samuel Shem's House of God, because the moderate amount of amusement I got out of it was completely drowned out by the rampant sexism.
. Almost French, Sarah Turnbull. An Australian journalist heads off to live in Paris with a (French) guy she's met once. Culture clash story, and the city setting at least makes a nice change from all those mid-life Provence crises. Her descriptions of living in Paris - the community feel to a big city, the ridiculous bureaucracies, the social mores she trips over and stumbles into - are very nicely done. The agonising over her interactions with Frederick's family and friends doesn't quite work for me, and Frederick himself is an oddly absent presence from the book - he comes across as a friend or flatmate, rather than a lover, and though I think this is a perfectly reasonable way of protecting his privacy I did keep having moments of startled realisation about them actually being in a relationship. I think this would make a deeply strange double read with Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance.
After some mild agonising, I've decided not to routinely count graphic novels, but I'll note them here anyway.
Deadline, Bill Rosemann. Marvel, about a journalist who dislikes superheroes but gets stuck doing a story about them. I liked the ghost city – much of the rest now escapes me, and the main character is less endearing than I think the author would like me to find her.
Superman-Secret Identity, Kurt Busiek. I do like Kurt Busiek, and I have Astro City on standing order, but after a strong start it felt like he'd run out of things to say. The relationship between Superman and his government observers is nicely done, but the hints at obligations to nonAmericans tails out, and the ending is weak.
David’s Story, Terry Moore. Strangers in Paradise is the sort of series that men recommend to me as having "really realistic women". I think this may be a case of wishful thinking. Anyway, this is backstory for one of the male characters. Startlingly unrealistic, in my admittedly limited experience of yakuza in incestuous relationships who give it all up after accidentally killing asthmatic teenagers, take on their victim's name and then fall hopelessly in love with one of the female protagonists at a Rodin exhibition...
