Assorted fiction, hard copy
Jun. 21st, 2009 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraAttempting to catch up on my backlog again.
Leighton Houghton, Heron's quest. Boy scout quest/field exercise, with a reasonable amount of camping realism (I could phrase this better, but will assume my audience can switch out of British Carry On style interpretation as appropriate) and interpersonal dynamics. For example, one of the slack scouts dumps the ashes of their camp fire into a hollow tree rather than put them out Properly, with a subsequent slow smouldering and eventual fire, and there’s a lot of time-consuming rushing around the countryside dealing with out. Also, this is set post-birds’ egg collecting being just a nice hobby for keeping boys outdoors and more in the endangering birdlife survival era.
Sandra Glover, The nowhere boy. Foster family take in alien (unknown). This is a perfectly competent story that does what should be interesting, non-obvious things with the characters, and yet it didn’t work for me at all – I read it, but it didn’t involve me or engage my emotions. Not sure why. It did remind me of a deeply creepy story in which one sibling manages to convince his brother he’s an alien, driving him into a deeply withdrawn state via physical and emotional abuse. I think I had problems with the resolution of that one, but it hooked me more. And I have completely forgotten the title.
Shirley Jackson, Life among the savages. Excellent semi-autobiography, focussing on Jackson’s home life (house, children, social whirl etc) with hardly any mention of her writing. Funny and incisive, as well as an interesting record of social history (no fathers anywhere near the maternity ward, but smoking in the taxi that takes you there is fine). I read a bunch of Shirley Jackson when I was 19 or so, as a result of reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (excellent history of horror) and traumatised myself quite effectively, and I keep having to remind myself that this is the same one. I should really find the sequel.
Alan Bennett, The uncommon reader. The Queen (the UK one) discovers books. This is entertaining, but the Queen’s reading pretty much follows the narrow line of accepted literary fiction (she has no time for fantasy, we’re informed, and no other genre), and the story’s theme is reading as education, with such enjoyment as there is tending more towards the smug. I felt as if this was less the story of one reader and more a reading course for the Ideal Reader, which is not something I’m all that interested in. And I’m still not convinced the Queen is all that better for the process – the guy who starts lending her books is sidelined by jealous staff, and the Queen just thinks briefly about how she’d outgrown him really, and how he mainly only read books by gay authors anyway (he’s gay). Bennett’s gay as well, but I had trouble earlier with his treatment of homosexual characters in The History Boys – in the play version (I haven’t seen the film) if you’re gay you end up dead, paralysed (which seems to be read as impotent), or alone, and the bisexual character is (as always) heartless and immoral and untouched by such petty events. Arrgh.
KJ Parker, The company. Well written gritty post-war fantasy (without magic) about a bunch of ex-soldiers, whose leader talks them into leaving their everyday lives and joining him in making a new life on a island he happens to have (dubious) access to. Great descriptions of technology, and I really liked that these guys are from a pre-war context where they aren’t that special; the war gave them meaning in a way, but it’s also warped them, and they’ve made varying successes of trying to live without it.
The problem with this novel is that the story’s progression consists of nasty things happening to unlikeable people, and the ending is inevitable from about the first time all the characters meet up, possibly earlier. There’s not really a way I can see for things to go right – just increasing degrees of badness, and it’s hard to get behind that as a reader. Unfortunately for me, I read this as a way of considering whether or not I wanted to track down her various trilogies, and I’m no more sure now than I was before.
Joanna Canaan, A pony for Jean. Breathless first person narrator moves to country after Father loses his job, but fortunately country cousins are able to give her a pony and she grows as a person while learning to ride. This is possibly a little snarky, especially as I’m reading the sequel, but I tend to mentally clump horse books into broad groups of a) excellent book b) good horse book c) enjoyable horse book and d) um, and these are solidly in the C section.
Mary Treadgold, No ponies. Definitely a B and edging into A, according to my previously established classification system – three children are travelling with their aunt to her house in France, just post-WWII, where they will be eventually joined by her two children, keen horseriders. But when they get to the house Katherine and Anthony’s ponies aren’t there, and other things are wrong as well…
This is only partly a horse story, despite the title, and the main action is that of a thriller – stopping the smuggling of Nazis out of France. The characters are believable and think about things, and there’s a nice assortment of plot elements when they’re all separated and have to make various assumptions and actions, with expected and unexpected interactions. Good use of the language barrier as well, and a lot of telling physical detail (blisters and so forth). And, interestingly, written during the war itself (Nov 1944-March 1945, according to the note on the last page).
Winifred Mantle, The Penderel puzzle. Odd collision of story elements – children being minded by relatives decide to run away to a house their parents may have just bought; at the house they find another family who are sheltering a Thai princess who is being hunted by evil relatives (this was bizarre, especially the bit where the Thai princess, who’s about 7, does not speak English and yet has apparently forgotten all her Thai due to moving away from there, so she doesn’t communicate at all), all tied up with a family historical story about Charles II. Failed to cohere.
Robert Fisk, The age of the warrior. Collected writings, most from 2002 onwards and most about the Middle East. There’s quite a bit of repetition (as to be expected from what are largely newspaper columns), but given my lack of precise knowledge about much of the Middle East this was generally more useful than annoying. Interesting and depressing, and also very much like walking in well into a number of arguments that have been going on for a very long time. I’ve been trying to keep up with his columns in the Independent since.
I was about two-thirds of the way through this when I had my first hair appointment with a new hairdresser (having moved). I am hopeless at small talk with hairdressers and tend to end up favouring mutual silence (although I did have one hairdresser who was amazingly good at telling vivid, detailed stories about all the horrific things – car crashes, sudden deaths, terminal illnesses – that had afflicted her clients/friends/family – which made the process more traumatic than relaxing), but the new one turned out to be Lebanese, and I was able to spend the appointment discussing the book, the civil war and the assassination of Bachir Gemayel, before moving on to (somehow) drug trafficking around the Mediterranean. A topic on which my knowledge is almost entirely derived from Arturo Perez-Reverte's Queen of the South.
Victoria M Azaro, Saffron. Child from eccentric family travels to foreign countries. I was expecting to enjoy this more – somehow Saffron’s adventures felt too on-the-nose (except for Buenos Aires), and the voice was less than endearing.
James and Deborah Howe, Bunnicula. Vampire rabbit leaves trail of vegetable corpses (drained white!) throughout household. Chaos ensues. ☺
Elizabeth Enright. The four-storey mistake. Read for suitability after moving into a large eccentric house. Have yet to discover concealed room (unlike characters).
Alison Bechdel, Invasion of the dykes to watch out for. Arrgh. Two characters do something very annoying at the end of this, which I think indicates Bechdel running out of steam – since then she’s done Fun Home, and hopefully her DTWOF stuff will become a little more optimistic with US political changes. But there’s only so much you can do with the same characters over this length of time without destroying them completely, and if that’s where she’s heading I’d rather she switched to other stuff entirely.
Gillian Bradshaw, The sun's bride. Set in Rhodes, 246BC, with a pleasing number of ship battles between rowing galleys, and the protagonist (Isokrates) tracking down pirates and getting entangled in politics. Isokrates is a standard Bradshaw hero, honest, competent and humble, and the female love interest is unfortunately also her standard, beautiful and talented and very, very hard to get a lock on as a reader, because it’s all so external. I enjoy her books, but I do wish she’d do more historicals from either a female pov (I loved Beacon at Alexandria) or outside her particular heterosexual romance paradigm, because while I can buy it in one or two books it gets difficult if they're all, or mostly all, like that.
Cynthia Voigt, Tell me if the lovers are losers. I think the title for this is somewhat off-putting, or at least it was for me, because it's taken me ages to get around to reading this. Mismatched roommates at a women’s college in 1961. Nice stuff about teamwork and conflicting worldviews, and then one of those tragic obvious plot events. It works well enough, but it undermines the reality of the story to that point by making it, however well done, into a more standard, simple, novel.
Okay. This leaves me with one book I've written up but can't find the file, 2 books for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc, one NZ book I had issues with and am debating going into more detail on, and 11 books I've read on the iPod that I intend to review, plus 2 unpublished novels for critique that I don't. Woo hoo! (and no, don't mention the manga)
Leighton Houghton, Heron's quest. Boy scout quest/field exercise, with a reasonable amount of camping realism (I could phrase this better, but will assume my audience can switch out of British Carry On style interpretation as appropriate) and interpersonal dynamics. For example, one of the slack scouts dumps the ashes of their camp fire into a hollow tree rather than put them out Properly, with a subsequent slow smouldering and eventual fire, and there’s a lot of time-consuming rushing around the countryside dealing with out. Also, this is set post-birds’ egg collecting being just a nice hobby for keeping boys outdoors and more in the endangering birdlife survival era.
Sandra Glover, The nowhere boy. Foster family take in alien (unknown). This is a perfectly competent story that does what should be interesting, non-obvious things with the characters, and yet it didn’t work for me at all – I read it, but it didn’t involve me or engage my emotions. Not sure why. It did remind me of a deeply creepy story in which one sibling manages to convince his brother he’s an alien, driving him into a deeply withdrawn state via physical and emotional abuse. I think I had problems with the resolution of that one, but it hooked me more. And I have completely forgotten the title.
Shirley Jackson, Life among the savages. Excellent semi-autobiography, focussing on Jackson’s home life (house, children, social whirl etc) with hardly any mention of her writing. Funny and incisive, as well as an interesting record of social history (no fathers anywhere near the maternity ward, but smoking in the taxi that takes you there is fine). I read a bunch of Shirley Jackson when I was 19 or so, as a result of reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (excellent history of horror) and traumatised myself quite effectively, and I keep having to remind myself that this is the same one. I should really find the sequel.
Alan Bennett, The uncommon reader. The Queen (the UK one) discovers books. This is entertaining, but the Queen’s reading pretty much follows the narrow line of accepted literary fiction (she has no time for fantasy, we’re informed, and no other genre), and the story’s theme is reading as education, with such enjoyment as there is tending more towards the smug. I felt as if this was less the story of one reader and more a reading course for the Ideal Reader, which is not something I’m all that interested in. And I’m still not convinced the Queen is all that better for the process – the guy who starts lending her books is sidelined by jealous staff, and the Queen just thinks briefly about how she’d outgrown him really, and how he mainly only read books by gay authors anyway (he’s gay). Bennett’s gay as well, but I had trouble earlier with his treatment of homosexual characters in The History Boys – in the play version (I haven’t seen the film) if you’re gay you end up dead, paralysed (which seems to be read as impotent), or alone, and the bisexual character is (as always) heartless and immoral and untouched by such petty events. Arrgh.
KJ Parker, The company. Well written gritty post-war fantasy (without magic) about a bunch of ex-soldiers, whose leader talks them into leaving their everyday lives and joining him in making a new life on a island he happens to have (dubious) access to. Great descriptions of technology, and I really liked that these guys are from a pre-war context where they aren’t that special; the war gave them meaning in a way, but it’s also warped them, and they’ve made varying successes of trying to live without it.
The problem with this novel is that the story’s progression consists of nasty things happening to unlikeable people, and the ending is inevitable from about the first time all the characters meet up, possibly earlier. There’s not really a way I can see for things to go right – just increasing degrees of badness, and it’s hard to get behind that as a reader. Unfortunately for me, I read this as a way of considering whether or not I wanted to track down her various trilogies, and I’m no more sure now than I was before.
Joanna Canaan, A pony for Jean. Breathless first person narrator moves to country after Father loses his job, but fortunately country cousins are able to give her a pony and she grows as a person while learning to ride. This is possibly a little snarky, especially as I’m reading the sequel, but I tend to mentally clump horse books into broad groups of a) excellent book b) good horse book c) enjoyable horse book and d) um, and these are solidly in the C section.
Mary Treadgold, No ponies. Definitely a B and edging into A, according to my previously established classification system – three children are travelling with their aunt to her house in France, just post-WWII, where they will be eventually joined by her two children, keen horseriders. But when they get to the house Katherine and Anthony’s ponies aren’t there, and other things are wrong as well…
This is only partly a horse story, despite the title, and the main action is that of a thriller – stopping the smuggling of Nazis out of France. The characters are believable and think about things, and there’s a nice assortment of plot elements when they’re all separated and have to make various assumptions and actions, with expected and unexpected interactions. Good use of the language barrier as well, and a lot of telling physical detail (blisters and so forth). And, interestingly, written during the war itself (Nov 1944-March 1945, according to the note on the last page).
Winifred Mantle, The Penderel puzzle. Odd collision of story elements – children being minded by relatives decide to run away to a house their parents may have just bought; at the house they find another family who are sheltering a Thai princess who is being hunted by evil relatives (this was bizarre, especially the bit where the Thai princess, who’s about 7, does not speak English and yet has apparently forgotten all her Thai due to moving away from there, so she doesn’t communicate at all), all tied up with a family historical story about Charles II. Failed to cohere.
Robert Fisk, The age of the warrior. Collected writings, most from 2002 onwards and most about the Middle East. There’s quite a bit of repetition (as to be expected from what are largely newspaper columns), but given my lack of precise knowledge about much of the Middle East this was generally more useful than annoying. Interesting and depressing, and also very much like walking in well into a number of arguments that have been going on for a very long time. I’ve been trying to keep up with his columns in the Independent since.
I was about two-thirds of the way through this when I had my first hair appointment with a new hairdresser (having moved). I am hopeless at small talk with hairdressers and tend to end up favouring mutual silence (although I did have one hairdresser who was amazingly good at telling vivid, detailed stories about all the horrific things – car crashes, sudden deaths, terminal illnesses – that had afflicted her clients/friends/family – which made the process more traumatic than relaxing), but the new one turned out to be Lebanese, and I was able to spend the appointment discussing the book, the civil war and the assassination of Bachir Gemayel, before moving on to (somehow) drug trafficking around the Mediterranean. A topic on which my knowledge is almost entirely derived from Arturo Perez-Reverte's Queen of the South.
Victoria M Azaro, Saffron. Child from eccentric family travels to foreign countries. I was expecting to enjoy this more – somehow Saffron’s adventures felt too on-the-nose (except for Buenos Aires), and the voice was less than endearing.
James and Deborah Howe, Bunnicula. Vampire rabbit leaves trail of vegetable corpses (drained white!) throughout household. Chaos ensues. ☺
Elizabeth Enright. The four-storey mistake. Read for suitability after moving into a large eccentric house. Have yet to discover concealed room (unlike characters).
Alison Bechdel, Invasion of the dykes to watch out for. Arrgh. Two characters do something very annoying at the end of this, which I think indicates Bechdel running out of steam – since then she’s done Fun Home, and hopefully her DTWOF stuff will become a little more optimistic with US political changes. But there’s only so much you can do with the same characters over this length of time without destroying them completely, and if that’s where she’s heading I’d rather she switched to other stuff entirely.
Gillian Bradshaw, The sun's bride. Set in Rhodes, 246BC, with a pleasing number of ship battles between rowing galleys, and the protagonist (Isokrates) tracking down pirates and getting entangled in politics. Isokrates is a standard Bradshaw hero, honest, competent and humble, and the female love interest is unfortunately also her standard, beautiful and talented and very, very hard to get a lock on as a reader, because it’s all so external. I enjoy her books, but I do wish she’d do more historicals from either a female pov (I loved Beacon at Alexandria) or outside her particular heterosexual romance paradigm, because while I can buy it in one or two books it gets difficult if they're all, or mostly all, like that.
Cynthia Voigt, Tell me if the lovers are losers. I think the title for this is somewhat off-putting, or at least it was for me, because it's taken me ages to get around to reading this. Mismatched roommates at a women’s college in 1961. Nice stuff about teamwork and conflicting worldviews, and then one of those tragic obvious plot events. It works well enough, but it undermines the reality of the story to that point by making it, however well done, into a more standard, simple, novel.
Okay. This leaves me with one book I've written up but can't find the file, 2 books for
50books_poc, one NZ book I had issues with and am debating going into more detail on, and 11 books I've read on the iPod that I intend to review, plus 2 unpublished novels for critique that I don't. Woo hoo! (and no, don't mention the manga)
