Catching up
Jun. 9th, 2007 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI lost internet access for a week, which was good in overall terms of getting work done, but less good in the specific work I needed internet access for, which is now somewhat imminent. To deal with this stress I read more books. This post gets me down to a backlog of three, although an anime/manga post is definitely lurking in my future.
The best we can do, Sybille Bedford. Documentation of a murder trial - a British doctor, accused of murdering patients after getting them to make their wills in his favour. No, not Shipman - John Bodkin Adams, in the 50s. Fascinating. I would have made the same decision as the jury - the defence has a very strong case, as even the judge states - and I would have felt even more disturbed than I did afterwards, looking at the Wikipaedia page with the rest of his cases.
Holocaust Tours, Julian Novitz. New Zealand first novel. Not written (mostly) in present tense and not solely about 20 somethings leading boring relationship-driven lives, so two plus points. The intersecting stories of a group of friends and former friends, linked by the Holocaust - an English historian researching the representations of the Holocaust in museums leaves her NZ boyfriend, Daniel, for another man who offers to fund her trips, and show her how much more he knows about them; an old friend of the NZ boyfriend writes a book about whether the ovens could have really burned that many bodies, which is published by a vanity press publisher and funded by an Australian Holocaust denier; Daniel returns to NZ and gets a job on a computer game, becoming tangled in both the other stories in the process.
It's got a strong beginning, and there's some very interesting stuff going on here, but the ending falls apart, unfortunately. There are a few too many reflections by the characters on the meaninglessness of events (which always annoys me in fiction), and the computer game really doesn't work for me - firstly, I don't think you can just make what sounds like a city-specific Second Life clone into a Nazi-hunting first person story by putting in a few extra weeks before deadline, and secondly the glimpses we get are text-based encounters where Daniel tries, and fails, to replay past interactions with his girlfriend). The Listener review calls Novitz a revisionist, which seems an unfair conflation of the author with only one of his character, and the Salient one has a comment which, in amongst some valid points (weak setting, for example) suggests a similar interpretation. I disagree, but I think that there is a lack of direction (or follow-through) in the second half of the book that is leading to these interpretations.
The Demon and the City, Liz Williams. Second in the Inspector Chen series, although Chen himself only shows up halfway through (and the novel doesn’t really go into his viewpoint, although the bonus short story – “No Logo” does). I really like these books; great world, great characters, and the events in this one (where Zhu Irzh becomes involved in a case involving dead socialites, pharmaceutical experiments and devas) suggest interesting developments ahead. I do like Chen best as a point of view character (I like characters who are defined by their sense of responsibility), but it is interesting to see how a demon sees him.
Death of a Murderer, Rupert Thomson. A policeman is called to watch the body of Myra Hindley, the last night before she's finally cremated. He thinks about her, and his family, and his past, growing up in the area. A finely written, careful story, and the more I think about where it ends (inside a very specific flashback) the more disturbed I get. I had doubts about anyone doing this when I heard about the subject matter, but this is exactly right.
On, Off, Colleen McCullough. I've enjoyed a few of her books, and at some stage in the future I may get around to reading her Caesar series. This is a fairly archetypal thriller/serial killer novel, unusual for being set in Connecticut in 1965 and for not (until the final chapter) going into the pov of either the serial killer(s) or their victims, a change so refreshing that I got to page 300 and realised I had no idea who’d done it. It’s competently written, the research institute background is both believable and so obviously 1960s America that it hurts, there’s a racial strand (all victims are of white/black mixed parentage) I liked and there’s a scene – where Desdemona wakes up to find someone in her apartment – where the whole story came alive for me. But the trouble with serial killer novels is gimmickry (Mo Hayden being possibly the worst I’ve encountered), and this, though as effective as I think it could be given what she's chosen, is still a flaw in the book.
Phoenix and Ashes, Mercedes Lackey. Yes, I complained bitterly about the last one I read in this series (Wizard of London) and now I’m reading another one. Um. In my defence it is a better book. Surprising, really, as the fairytale this one spins off is Cinderella, and the Cinderella plot is responsible for more irritating stories about inherent nobility and specialness than you can shake a raven-haired violet-eyed magic-using half-elven scion of the aristocracy at. After her father dies, Eleanor's stepmother casts a spell on her to bind her to the house as a servant (burying her severed finger under the kitchen hearth); however, Eleanor is a Fire Master, and her godmother helps her develop her powers. Meanwhile, an Air Master shot down over France and suffering from shellshock is rehabilitating in the local manor... yes, yes, it's all very obvious, and I still don't understand why magic hasn't changed history in this series (and why it's all so secret), but it wasn't irritatingly obvious, and it's hard to take all power out of a magical training involving a journey through the Tarot.
How Ethel Hollister became a Campfire Girl, Irene Elliot Benson. From Project Gutenberg. Pretty much what you'd expect, only with less camp stuff and more pointedly moral backstory.
Moroccan Traffic, Dorothy Dunnett. And I am going to do a post about this series, of which this is the last. Nicely antagonistic relationship between Johnson Johnson and Wendy, this book's narrator, and I was pleased to see Rita again. The ending worked; not as well as the endings of her historical series, but enough.
The best we can do, Sybille Bedford. Documentation of a murder trial - a British doctor, accused of murdering patients after getting them to make their wills in his favour. No, not Shipman - John Bodkin Adams, in the 50s. Fascinating. I would have made the same decision as the jury - the defence has a very strong case, as even the judge states - and I would have felt even more disturbed than I did afterwards, looking at the Wikipaedia page with the rest of his cases.
Holocaust Tours, Julian Novitz. New Zealand first novel. Not written (mostly) in present tense and not solely about 20 somethings leading boring relationship-driven lives, so two plus points. The intersecting stories of a group of friends and former friends, linked by the Holocaust - an English historian researching the representations of the Holocaust in museums leaves her NZ boyfriend, Daniel, for another man who offers to fund her trips, and show her how much more he knows about them; an old friend of the NZ boyfriend writes a book about whether the ovens could have really burned that many bodies, which is published by a vanity press publisher and funded by an Australian Holocaust denier; Daniel returns to NZ and gets a job on a computer game, becoming tangled in both the other stories in the process.
It's got a strong beginning, and there's some very interesting stuff going on here, but the ending falls apart, unfortunately. There are a few too many reflections by the characters on the meaninglessness of events (which always annoys me in fiction), and the computer game really doesn't work for me - firstly, I don't think you can just make what sounds like a city-specific Second Life clone into a Nazi-hunting first person story by putting in a few extra weeks before deadline, and secondly the glimpses we get are text-based encounters where Daniel tries, and fails, to replay past interactions with his girlfriend). The Listener review calls Novitz a revisionist, which seems an unfair conflation of the author with only one of his character, and the Salient one has a comment which, in amongst some valid points (weak setting, for example) suggests a similar interpretation. I disagree, but I think that there is a lack of direction (or follow-through) in the second half of the book that is leading to these interpretations.
The Demon and the City, Liz Williams. Second in the Inspector Chen series, although Chen himself only shows up halfway through (and the novel doesn’t really go into his viewpoint, although the bonus short story – “No Logo” does). I really like these books; great world, great characters, and the events in this one (where Zhu Irzh becomes involved in a case involving dead socialites, pharmaceutical experiments and devas) suggest interesting developments ahead. I do like Chen best as a point of view character (I like characters who are defined by their sense of responsibility), but it is interesting to see how a demon sees him.
Death of a Murderer, Rupert Thomson. A policeman is called to watch the body of Myra Hindley, the last night before she's finally cremated. He thinks about her, and his family, and his past, growing up in the area. A finely written, careful story, and the more I think about where it ends (inside a very specific flashback) the more disturbed I get. I had doubts about anyone doing this when I heard about the subject matter, but this is exactly right.
On, Off, Colleen McCullough. I've enjoyed a few of her books, and at some stage in the future I may get around to reading her Caesar series. This is a fairly archetypal thriller/serial killer novel, unusual for being set in Connecticut in 1965 and for not (until the final chapter) going into the pov of either the serial killer(s) or their victims, a change so refreshing that I got to page 300 and realised I had no idea who’d done it. It’s competently written, the research institute background is both believable and so obviously 1960s America that it hurts, there’s a racial strand (all victims are of white/black mixed parentage) I liked and there’s a scene – where Desdemona wakes up to find someone in her apartment – where the whole story came alive for me. But the trouble with serial killer novels is gimmickry (Mo Hayden being possibly the worst I’ve encountered), and this, though as effective as I think it could be given what she's chosen, is still a flaw in the book.
Phoenix and Ashes, Mercedes Lackey. Yes, I complained bitterly about the last one I read in this series (Wizard of London) and now I’m reading another one. Um. In my defence it is a better book. Surprising, really, as the fairytale this one spins off is Cinderella, and the Cinderella plot is responsible for more irritating stories about inherent nobility and specialness than you can shake a raven-haired violet-eyed magic-using half-elven scion of the aristocracy at. After her father dies, Eleanor's stepmother casts a spell on her to bind her to the house as a servant (burying her severed finger under the kitchen hearth); however, Eleanor is a Fire Master, and her godmother helps her develop her powers. Meanwhile, an Air Master shot down over France and suffering from shellshock is rehabilitating in the local manor... yes, yes, it's all very obvious, and I still don't understand why magic hasn't changed history in this series (and why it's all so secret), but it wasn't irritatingly obvious, and it's hard to take all power out of a magical training involving a journey through the Tarot.
How Ethel Hollister became a Campfire Girl, Irene Elliot Benson. From Project Gutenberg. Pretty much what you'd expect, only with less camp stuff and more pointedly moral backstory.
Moroccan Traffic, Dorothy Dunnett. And I am going to do a post about this series, of which this is the last. Nicely antagonistic relationship between Johnson Johnson and Wendy, this book's narrator, and I was pleased to see Rita again. The ending worked; not as well as the endings of her historical series, but enough.
