Catching up (books)
Sep. 8th, 2007 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraBack to some semblance of a normal life (or, at least, no deadlines before Thursday). These are all old books, and there are two more that I wanted to spend a bit more time on, and then two more that I've read over the last week. And then there's the manga post...
Gordon Korman, Everest 3: The Summit. The trouble with this sort of series is that there’s a predictability to book 3 that’s very hard to rise above. And each character has to resolve their own issue by the end of the book. It’s deft enough, but no more than that, and I was a touch irked that the sole female team member’s storyline boils down to being dumped by email from her boyfriend and not making the summit (okay, there’s more to it than that, but not a lot). I think Korman’s better than this sort of action formula (okay, I know he is, given the Macdonald Hall books) and you can, occasionally, see him testing the edges, but not enough to make me want to re-read these. That said, they’re very readable books and they do have good atmosphere; less climbing information than I expected, but the Everest setting feels solid.
The only previous Vivian Van Velde book I’ve read (or started) was one I found in a home furniture store some years ago, on a display bookcase with a bunch of other blue hardbacked books, all with dustjackets removed. Most of the rest were stats texts. I read the first fifty pages or so and liked it but had to go, so I took it up to the counter and asked the staff if I could buy it. I probably would have got a better reception if I’d held up my pyjamas and said I was going to nap in one of the display beds. They sounded absolutely horrified at the thought of considering a book as a reading object rather than a form of décor, and took the book away from me to stash it behind the desk rather than risk my sullying its pages further. I’d be less irked by this if I could remember the title.
I don’t think it was this one, although I liked this and if you find it in a home furniture store it probably also deserves to be liberated. Vivian Van Velde, Heir Apparent. Main character (sorry, I have no idea where I’ve put my copy, and I read it about eight weeks ago) gets voucher for interactive reality game and, due to indignant protesters (anti-sullying of children’s minds) is trapped in the game, facing the threat of brain damage and/or death unless she can complete the fantasy quest. Unfortunately, she keeps dying, and she hasn’t even managed to find the ring that is her first quest object…
It’s fun, it’s fast, and the pacing with regard to the deaths and quest progress is very well done, especially when she’s getting further on through the quest – and then has to go back to the beginning again. The quest characters and goals are also good (there’s a particularly effectively annoying nun), and yes, main character does learn things about herself and her family relationships etc etc, but not in an overwhelming way.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Unseen. Feels a bit like a quick sketch by a very good artist – everything that’s there is precise and graceful, but there’s not a lot else. One of the younger children in a big family learns to see the Unseen, but you get out of these things what you take into them – and she has a lot of anger to deal with. Left me wanting to read The Green Futures of Tycho, actually (William Sleator), but Snyder’s own Stanley family series (of which my favourite is the first, The Headless Cupid) also has great family dynamics; the dynamics here are good, too, but there’s not as much depth to them, and there’s nothing to match those amazing initiation scenes that Amanda makes the rest of the children go through in The Headless Cupid.
Atul Gawande, Better: a surgeon’s notes on performance. Also, his conclusion, where he talks about ways to improve (“becoming a positive deviant”) is a bit anticlimactic. I’d prefer to have been left with the impact of the stories themselves, which are incredible – I particularly recommend this article, The Bell Curve about cystic fibrosis care and comparing medical centres (what does it take to be the best? what do you (patient or doctor) do if you find out your hospital ranks badly against all the others?). Reminds me of my favourite ever BMJ headline – “Half of all doctors below average!”.
Mary Stewart, My brother Michael. Camilla, visiting Athens on her own after a marriage break-up, uses the wrong Greek word at the wrong time and ends up taking a car to Delphi to meet Simon Lester, the designated good-looking and only slightly broody Englishman here to investigate his brother Michael’s death in the war, fourteen years earlier. The Sunday Times assures me (on the dustjacket) that the novels of Mary Steward “can be confidently recommended to all civilised palates”, and I liked this – the setting in particular is excellent, and even glancing at the book to write this is giving me flashes of a blazing sun over a white cliff, marked with tangles of scrub and wild flowers (only in much more specific and poetic terms). There is also one of those appalling scenes that works all the better for being underwritten, where Camilla is hiding from a killer and hears his accomplice, a woman, approach him to seduce him in triumph – and what she’s hearing shifts from sex to murder, seamlessly.
CP Snow, The Affair. The title refers to the Dreyfus affair, which prompted one of those conversations between myself and my boss where both of us were aware of the existence of this notorious scandal, but completely vague as to details. The case is taken up by Lewis Eliot, whose brother Martin gave up a job in atomic energy to become junior tutor at the college. It is a quiet and exact book, about politics and power, and how people respond to guilt and the possibility that they, themselves, may be mistaken. I’d like to read this with Sayers’ Gaudy Night, which also turns on a point of academic fraud; instead, I read it with most of the Fullmetal Alchemist anime occupying my head, which actually works surprisingly well given that both involve a pair of brothers and scientific research, but the styles could not, really, be any further apart.
And two re-reads:
Eva Ibbotson, The Secret Countess (re-read, under its original name of A Countess Below Stairs). Like all of Ibbotson’s books, effortlessly charming and satisfying. This one lacks the slightly darker undercurrents of the ones that deal with the Nazi invasion of Austria (Anna, the countess, is a refugee from the Russian Revolution who takes a job as a housemaid), although the fate of Dr Lightbody’s (eugenics cultist and bad guy) wife is painful. Great supporting characters, as always.
Mary Cadogan and Patrician Craig, You’re a Brick, Angela! Re-read, multiple times, and I think this may actually be my second copy, but I wanted something familiar post-exam. Each time I read this the quoted excerpts from the stories become more vivid than the commentary between them, which has at times an ambivalent relationship to the studied texts (it’s a history of the girls’ story (mainly UK, with a little US) from 1839-1985), with a number of digs at “emotional readers” and the need, ultimately, to grow up. Tends to focus on the popular rather than the good – Antonia Forest, for example, gets one mention in the index, and Elsie Jane Oxenham 24, which does reflect public interest but reminds me that there is a critical book out there somewhere looking at four writers (I think including Antonia Forest) that I wanted to track down. I always forget how much of this book isn’t about the school story, as those are always the parts that are most vivid in my mind, and that I most enjoy re-reading. I do think that including authors like Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton expands the focus from girls’ stories to books girls read, which is not quite the same thing.
Gordon Korman, Everest 3: The Summit. The trouble with this sort of series is that there’s a predictability to book 3 that’s very hard to rise above. And each character has to resolve their own issue by the end of the book. It’s deft enough, but no more than that, and I was a touch irked that the sole female team member’s storyline boils down to being dumped by email from her boyfriend and not making the summit (okay, there’s more to it than that, but not a lot). I think Korman’s better than this sort of action formula (okay, I know he is, given the Macdonald Hall books) and you can, occasionally, see him testing the edges, but not enough to make me want to re-read these. That said, they’re very readable books and they do have good atmosphere; less climbing information than I expected, but the Everest setting feels solid.
The only previous Vivian Van Velde book I’ve read (or started) was one I found in a home furniture store some years ago, on a display bookcase with a bunch of other blue hardbacked books, all with dustjackets removed. Most of the rest were stats texts. I read the first fifty pages or so and liked it but had to go, so I took it up to the counter and asked the staff if I could buy it. I probably would have got a better reception if I’d held up my pyjamas and said I was going to nap in one of the display beds. They sounded absolutely horrified at the thought of considering a book as a reading object rather than a form of décor, and took the book away from me to stash it behind the desk rather than risk my sullying its pages further. I’d be less irked by this if I could remember the title.
I don’t think it was this one, although I liked this and if you find it in a home furniture store it probably also deserves to be liberated. Vivian Van Velde, Heir Apparent. Main character (sorry, I have no idea where I’ve put my copy, and I read it about eight weeks ago) gets voucher for interactive reality game and, due to indignant protesters (anti-sullying of children’s minds) is trapped in the game, facing the threat of brain damage and/or death unless she can complete the fantasy quest. Unfortunately, she keeps dying, and she hasn’t even managed to find the ring that is her first quest object…
It’s fun, it’s fast, and the pacing with regard to the deaths and quest progress is very well done, especially when she’s getting further on through the quest – and then has to go back to the beginning again. The quest characters and goals are also good (there’s a particularly effectively annoying nun), and yes, main character does learn things about herself and her family relationships etc etc, but not in an overwhelming way.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Unseen. Feels a bit like a quick sketch by a very good artist – everything that’s there is precise and graceful, but there’s not a lot else. One of the younger children in a big family learns to see the Unseen, but you get out of these things what you take into them – and she has a lot of anger to deal with. Left me wanting to read The Green Futures of Tycho, actually (William Sleator), but Snyder’s own Stanley family series (of which my favourite is the first, The Headless Cupid) also has great family dynamics; the dynamics here are good, too, but there’s not as much depth to them, and there’s nothing to match those amazing initiation scenes that Amanda makes the rest of the children go through in The Headless Cupid.
Atul Gawande, Better: a surgeon’s notes on performance. Also, his conclusion, where he talks about ways to improve (“becoming a positive deviant”) is a bit anticlimactic. I’d prefer to have been left with the impact of the stories themselves, which are incredible – I particularly recommend this article, The Bell Curve about cystic fibrosis care and comparing medical centres (what does it take to be the best? what do you (patient or doctor) do if you find out your hospital ranks badly against all the others?). Reminds me of my favourite ever BMJ headline – “Half of all doctors below average!”.
Mary Stewart, My brother Michael. Camilla, visiting Athens on her own after a marriage break-up, uses the wrong Greek word at the wrong time and ends up taking a car to Delphi to meet Simon Lester, the designated good-looking and only slightly broody Englishman here to investigate his brother Michael’s death in the war, fourteen years earlier. The Sunday Times assures me (on the dustjacket) that the novels of Mary Steward “can be confidently recommended to all civilised palates”, and I liked this – the setting in particular is excellent, and even glancing at the book to write this is giving me flashes of a blazing sun over a white cliff, marked with tangles of scrub and wild flowers (only in much more specific and poetic terms). There is also one of those appalling scenes that works all the better for being underwritten, where Camilla is hiding from a killer and hears his accomplice, a woman, approach him to seduce him in triumph – and what she’s hearing shifts from sex to murder, seamlessly.
CP Snow, The Affair. The title refers to the Dreyfus affair, which prompted one of those conversations between myself and my boss where both of us were aware of the existence of this notorious scandal, but completely vague as to details. The case is taken up by Lewis Eliot, whose brother Martin gave up a job in atomic energy to become junior tutor at the college. It is a quiet and exact book, about politics and power, and how people respond to guilt and the possibility that they, themselves, may be mistaken. I’d like to read this with Sayers’ Gaudy Night, which also turns on a point of academic fraud; instead, I read it with most of the Fullmetal Alchemist anime occupying my head, which actually works surprisingly well given that both involve a pair of brothers and scientific research, but the styles could not, really, be any further apart.
And two re-reads:
Eva Ibbotson, The Secret Countess (re-read, under its original name of A Countess Below Stairs). Like all of Ibbotson’s books, effortlessly charming and satisfying. This one lacks the slightly darker undercurrents of the ones that deal with the Nazi invasion of Austria (Anna, the countess, is a refugee from the Russian Revolution who takes a job as a housemaid), although the fate of Dr Lightbody’s (eugenics cultist and bad guy) wife is painful. Great supporting characters, as always.
Mary Cadogan and Patrician Craig, You’re a Brick, Angela! Re-read, multiple times, and I think this may actually be my second copy, but I wanted something familiar post-exam. Each time I read this the quoted excerpts from the stories become more vivid than the commentary between them, which has at times an ambivalent relationship to the studied texts (it’s a history of the girls’ story (mainly UK, with a little US) from 1839-1985), with a number of digs at “emotional readers” and the need, ultimately, to grow up. Tends to focus on the popular rather than the good – Antonia Forest, for example, gets one mention in the index, and Elsie Jane Oxenham 24, which does reflect public interest but reminds me that there is a critical book out there somewhere looking at four writers (I think including Antonia Forest) that I wanted to track down. I always forget how much of this book isn’t about the school story, as those are always the parts that are most vivid in my mind, and that I most enjoy re-reading. I do think that including authors like Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton expands the focus from girls’ stories to books girls read, which is not quite the same thing.
