I lied.

A few days ago, I claimed that the experience of reading a really bad book had demolished my ability to read any novel-length fiction for nigh on a month.

But that’s not true. Sometime over the weekend, I recalled that I actually did read a book immediately after finishing the bad one — my boss had lent me a copy of Stephanie Meyer’s teenage vampire love-story, Twilight, and I figured I ought to get it read so I could return it.

That I completely forgot that I read it is not a commentary on the book itself, I think, but rather is a statement of how fried my brain was after finishing the other book.

Twilight is actually not too bad, for what it is. I’m not particularly enamored of vampire stories or straight romance-for-romance’s-sake novels, but Meyer is a compelling tale-teller who whips you through 500 pages of teenage angst at a good clip. Her characters are sharply drawn and appealing — I totally get all the swooning over the male lead I’ve read about online the past couple years — and her prose is solid. I think it could have been a little shorter, myself; too much courting goes on (it’s a romance, after all) and for the first three-quarters of the book the tension is all about, “oh noes! i’m in love with a vampire!” But the action picks up at the end, so that you feel like something actually happened in the story aside from a lot of talking about what a bad idea this whole relationship is.

In short there are a lot worse things one could spend their summer days reading.

Believe me, I know.

I don’t know why I did it to myself.

It must have been the word “free” — I seem psychologically unable to resist it, especially when it’s coupled with the work “books.” Say it with me, if you will:

Doesn’t it make you all tingly inside?

Still, I should have known better. Last spring, the buzz about a particular book by a particular author piqued my interest, and I paid out hard cash to try it out only to end up extremely disappointed. I really had no intention of seeking out the remaining volumes in the trilogy, right up until the publisher offered a set of all three to anyone willing to write a review of them (especially the last book, which was just released).

Something in my brain short-circuited at the thought of getting free books, especially a free ARC (advance review copy). So what if they were books I didn’t want to read? They were FREE! And I’d have the opportunity to read the last one before anyone else!

Of course, having the books in my possession meant that I was obligated to actually read them, and then write about them. And I did. Read them, that is. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because as disappointing as the first book in the trilogy was, the second and third books managed to magnify my opinion to one of true, teeth-gnashing disgust.

I don’t want to go into the many things wrong with these books. Well, I do want to (strictly for educational purposes, you understand) but I made a decision a while ago that I wasn’t going to trash anyone’s books here, because I know that what goes around comes around, and I haven’t written much myself (yet) that would stand up to heavy critical appraisal. In the back of my head, I have this idea that I could end up sitting next to one of these authors at a con someday, and I don’t want our conversation to start with something like, “Say, aren’t you the one who wrote that totally scathing review of my book on your blog…?” So that’s why I haven’t mentioned the book or author by name.

Also, it would be a very long post. Very.

Apparently, reading bad books gave have a long-term effect on your brain. I swear, I haven’t been able to pick up another novel for the better part of a month, now, ever since finishing the book in question. It’s like I sprained something in there, and I’m afraid if I stretch it too soon I’ll damage myself beyond all recovery. Not even the likes of Ursula LeGuin, John Crowley and China Mieville (all waiting in my to-be-read pile) can lure me into their pages. I’ve had to make do with nibbling at a few of short stories and non-fiction and episodes of Get Smart while my Narrative Appreciation lobe recuperates.

That I’m actually writing about the experience is a good sign. I must be in recovery, if I can talk about it.

I skipped out on my weekly writer’s group meeting last night to attend a signing by Lois McMaster Bujold at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I debated about going for a few days, because San Diego is a long way, gas is not cheap, and it was a school night. But when I didn’t manage to talk myself out of wanting to go, I decided to make the trip, and am very glad I did.

Ms. Bujold was a very engaging speaker and answered a lot of questions from what I feel was a very enlightened audience. I’ve been to a lot of signings where the audience asked a lot of questions about the content of the books — why did this happen, what about that character, etc — but this group were more interested in her process and experience as a writer. Very interesting stuff, from this writer’s point of view. It was recorded for a podcast, so within a few weeks you can hear it yourself if you like.

There’s one point in particular that I’m glad she brought up, which had caught my attention while reading an interview with her last week:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.) (Source: Fantasy Book Critic

I think it’s an interesting observation, but I am not sure I entirely agree. Or maybe it’s that I disagree that fantasy should be that way, though it certainly seems to be the case with the bulk of modern popular fantasy. I’m currently preoccupied with the labels we apply to the different genres. Typically, we classify them according to their dressing — this one is fantasy because it has magic, elves and dragons, that one is SF because it has spaceships, time travel and alien viruses. But with all the cross-over and blending, this way only leads to madness and an eternally growing list of sub-genres. Maybe we need to start labeling stories according to the kind of story they tell, instead … but that’s a topic for another post, when I have a better grasp on what it is I actually want to say.

After the signing (I had my ARC of Passage signed, along with my copy of Paladin of Souls and a second copy of Passage that will be a gift for my eldest sister) I got to enjoy a long Girl Geek Gab. I paused on the way out to tell Sam, who works at the store and who is also the co-host of the afore mentioned podcast, Adventures in SciFi Publishing, that I was a fan of the show — this is a very out-of-the-box action for me, since it is not always easy to get my introverted self to initiate conversation, but it really paid off.

We were joined by two other attendees (whom I had conversed with previously while in line to get my books signed) and spent the next hour talking about just about every major SF&F fan topic that you can think of, with topics ranging from whether it was Eowyn or Merry who killed the Witch King, why it was probably a good thing that The Golden Compass didn’t do well at the box office, and a comparison of the relative sizes of particular body parts of certain Jedi knights (”May the Schwartz be with you.”) It was GREAT!

I don’t often get the opportunity to converse about this sort of stuff anymore. My co-workers are great, but none of them are into the SF world (except for the owner of the company, who surprised me by being a Firefly fan) and only look at me strangely when I burst out in defense of Star Wars at a company luncheon. Oh, they all have their own fannish pleasures, so they understand, but their different fandoms so we can’t really share them. My social contacts outside of the office are very slim to none (I’m such a houserat). How rare a treat to be able to say, “Have you seen Viggo’s photography?” and have them know exactly what I’m talking about!

So it was a good night, and not too late (I was home by 11), and hopefully Lost was taped properly so I can watch it over the weekend without having to download it. Next week it will be back to the writer’s group (another group of people I enjoy talking with, but also not into SF-dom) and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have something to share for critique.

I have burbled happily about Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy novels here before (I’ve yet to sample her SF — can someone recommend where to start?), but not about her newest series, The Sharing Knife, which first appeared in 2006. I read the first volume, Beguilement when it came out, right after I first read The Curse of Chalion, and remember feeling a little disappointed in it. It was well written, and the characters had all the intrinsic appeal that Bujold conveys so well; in fact, I was quite engrossed in the tale until I was about 20 pages from the end, well into denouement territory, and I realized that nothing much had happened, story-wise. The climax of the book, if it can even be called that (and I won’t say what it was, for the sake of those of you who haven’t read it), was pretty low-impact, not the sort of “wowee wow wow” explosion (and I mean that most metaporically) of Chalion (and of Paladin of Souls though I hadn’t read that yet). Clearly, as I finished the book, the story was meant to continue, and in fact I found out later that books one and two were supposed to be one volume — they split it up for production cost or some such excuse.

Well, by the time the second volume, Legacy, came out last year, the urge to know what happened next had faded a bit, and because it was in hardcover, I put off buying it. But a few weeks ago, a chance came up (via the Eos books blog) to get an ARC of the third volume, Passage, in exchange for writing a reader review by the time of the book’s release on April 22nd. Never one to pass up on cool free stuff, I jumped at the opportunity. Nevermind the fact that this meant I had to go out and buy Legacy first, in hardcover because it’s not been released in paperback yet. Free is still free, no matter how much it costs you.

Whew. I need to learn to cut down this introductory blather.

Because I read the two books one on top of the other, it’s hard to talk about them separately. And really, that’s how it should be. In fact, I would go so far to say that to really understand and appreciate these books, we’re all going to have to wait until book #4 comes out in a year or so, because my sense of the story being told is of one comprehensive arc, not three or four independent stories that happen to come one after the next.

Now, a lot of people might call these books “romantic fantasy”, because of the heavy emphasis on the relationship between the two main characters, Fawn and Dag. Another term that might apply is “domestic fantasy,” since the emphasis is on ordinary folk doing more or less ordinary things (as opposed to kings, gods, wizards, etc. faced with extraordinary times, as comprises so much epic or high fantasy). I think Passage does a good job of shaking off both these labels. Yes, the romance is still important, but now we see that it is merely an essential catalyst that initiates the real story, which is about resolving the differences that divide the two cultures that Fawn and Dag represent, and very possibly (we’ll have to wait for book 4 to prove me right or wrong on this) resolving or at least better understanding the underlying evil that plagues both societies. As for domesticity, there’s till plenty of that (maybe too much, but more on that later) but Fawn and Dag are no longer even attempting ordinary lives in Passage, and much of the plot is taken up with their decidedly un-ordinary actions and events spawned by them.

I know, if you haven’t read the other books you’re helplessly confused right now because, really, I’m a terrible review writer. So let me try to explain succinctly and without giving away too many spoilers. The setting of The Sharing Knife books is remarkably similar to a pre-industrial Ohio, geographically and technologically, with the exception that there are no firearms. It may, in fact, be a post-apocalyptic Ohio — we learn of a long-ago magical disaster that wiped out much of civilization and still has repercussions in the land, in the form of “malices”, evil beings that are (apparently) spontaneously generated in random locations, and can suck the lifeforce from everything in the vicinity. Fawn is one of the farmer folk, who as a whole fear and mistrust Dag’s people, the Lakewalkers, semi-nomadic tribes who use magic (though they don’t call it magic) to battle the malices and keep the land safe. In the course of the first two books, Fawn and Dag meet, fall in love, and then try to make a life for themselves amongst all those who are against their relationship. The primary tension through these volumes is whether or not their relationship will survive despite all odds.

Now, I can’t talk about book three without spoiling for you that, yes, they do manage to stick it out together. I’ll try not to give away more than that, though. In book three, the pair set off (with an oddball collection of others) to see something of the wider world and, hopefully, find a place where they can settle into it. The bulk of their journey takes place along the Grace (cf. Ohio) river, and the story takes as leisurely a pace as the river current does — which is definitely not a bad thing. I enjoy the way Bujold lets the story unfold, letting her characters come to events instead of forcing events upon her characters. It doesn’t hurt that her characters, primary and secondary, are so well-drawn that just watching them be themselves is plenty entertaining. It is not a anxious-making page-turner in the usual sense (”Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen next?!?”) but I kept turning pages because it was just plain fun to read.

Bujold’s writing style throughout the books is a rolling, back-country cant well suited to the setting she’s writing in. It gets in your brain though, like watching a Firefly marathon will do, only you’ll be saying “blight” all the time instead of “gorram” (I did think blight was a bit overused … we have a lot more variety in standard English). Just don’t be surprised if you end up talking like a hick for a while after reading it (no offense meant to all my hick friends in the world!).

If I have one gripe with the book(s), it is a feminist one. Early in book one, Fawn seems poised to be a dynamic female lead — she is smart, curious and unafraid; her decision to leave home initiates the story, and she even takes out one of the malices herself. However, after that, her role in the story seems to drop off to little more than helpmate to Dag. In book 2, she spends a lot of time spinning and sewing and cooking and coddling of her mate — the one definitive action she takes (setting off on her own to go to him when he’s in trouble) only puts her in a position that allows him to solve the current dilemma. She herself is just a bystander, a position that becomes even more pronounced in Passage, when her role becomes little more than to inspire and encourage Dag as he explores his burgeoning powers and confronts some of the mysteries that make up their world. Even throwing her in the direct line of danger is only an excuse to test Dag’s abilities — she just stands around and waits for him to rescue her. I like Fawn, don’t get me wrong, I’d just like her to have the chance to do something notable in her own right.

As far as typical fantasy goes, this one is pretty anti-fantasy. The familiarity of the setting (at least for an American audience), the nature of the magic in use, and the very un-epicness of the narrative, create a unique niche for this book. It’s something that I’d feel easy recommending to people who are a bit leery about trying fantasy literature (wizards and dragons can be daunting, you know), and those already devoted to the genre will find it a pleasant revision of the familiar tropes. All in all, I was very happy with the book, and am now anxious for the fourth and (I believe) final volume to come out. While I have no idea what Fawn and Dag are going to do next (the narrative had no suggestion whatsoever), I do have a lot of suspicions and I want to see if they will hold out or not. Mostly, though, I just want to enjoy more of Bujold’s smooth prose, irresistible characters and compelling storytelling.

The Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis

For Kivrin, preparing for on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be retrieved.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin — barely of age herself — finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.

This is one of those books that I’ve meant to read for a long time (it was published in 1992) but never quite got around to before. I just recently listened to a podcast interview with Willis, though, so I thought I’d give it a try. As a Medieval Studies major myself, I can really sympathize with the protagonist’s desire to visit the period, to experience what life was really like even fully aware of the harsh realities of existence in the 14th century. And Willis does not hold back in her depiction of those harsh realities, though she balances the grimness with an intimate portrait of family life that keeps this book from turning into simply a fictionalized historical report.

I’m not wholly enthusiastic about this book. It’s a heavy read with very little in the way of consolation at the end, just a weary sort of relief. The first part is weighted with lots of procedural, medical “drama” that just keeps wearing away at you — I was, in fact, bored with the whole tracking-the-epidemic thing at several points and just wanted Willis to get on with the story, though ultimately I think the emotional numbness created by the early part of the book is the only thing that made it possible to get through the true horrors later on. It’s really hard to be enthusiastic about a book where so many people die. But I do recommend it, just not when you’re having a bad week already.

I’ve just pre-ordered my copy of Fairy Tales for Writers, by Lawrence Schimel, due out next month from A Midsummer Night’s Press, from my local Borders. Kind of a joke, really…the pre-ordering, I mean. Every time I go in, I never fail to hear how screwed up the special orders desk at the store has been since I left the position a few months ago (a comment less on my own outstanding capabilities, but rather showing that they just haven’t bothered to fill the job).

At any rate, from the sample posted on the Mythic Imaginations website, I think it will be an interesting read, worth looking for elsewhere even if it never shows up at my Borders. The title of this post is a line from “Sleeping Beauty”, the above linked poem, a bittersweet reminder of how talent and dreams may be put to sleep and forgotten until it is too late. A second poem, “The Little Mermaid“, is likewise sad, but the publisher’s blog promises some happy endings as well.

As ever, Mythic Passages is full of lots of other interesting tidbits, but I’m feeling too lethargic after two weeks of extra hours at work and a trip to Disneyland to focus properly on any of it. Instead, I’m downloading some of the podcasts to my new gifted-for-Mother’s-Day iPod, to enjoy in a more comfortable chair.

My husband brought me a copy of On the Origin of PCs, the printed prequel to my favorite webcomic, The Order of the Stick. It was fun learning a little backstory about the characters, though none of the strips made me laugh outloud as much as this recent one did.

Honestly, my favorite bit of the book was in the preface, presumably written by one of the supporting characters in the story, Redcloak. After explaining exactly what PC and NPC means, for those readers who aren’t familiar with gaming terminology, he makes this hard-to-argue observation:

Heck, as far as I’m concerned, the presence of players is a necessary evil at best. I think most gamemasters will agree that their world functions significantly more smoothly before the PCs ever show up.

Truer words were never spoken!

I started reading Order of the Stick because of the roleplaying jokes, but I have found the story that has developed over the past 450+ strips to be quite intriguing, and the commentary the author, Rich Burlew, provides in the printed volumes is useful and enlightening, from a storyteller’s point of view. I wish I had No Cure for the Paladin Blues, the second collection, on hand to quote some of the more interesting passages, but alas my mate has taken it off to Indiana with him. I’ll have to try to get back to it another time.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting link to a blog post with some thoughts about creating and fulfilling reader (or viewer) desires in narrative, the main point being that it is the job of the storyteller to defer satisfaction, which not only keeps the audience intent but makes it all the more satisfying in the end.

ATC Rainbow 1,
originally uploaded by Cartazon.

Lucy just finished reading A Wizard of Earthsea. I got a little thrill when I saw she was reading it, since it is one of my favorite books, ever, and I’m glad to say that she seems to have enjoyed it as much as I did.

I asked her if she was going to get the second book, The Tombs of Atuan — I know she’ll like that even better, if only because the protagonist is a girl — but she doesn’t know if it’s in the school library. I’m sure we have a copy in the house somewhere, so I know she’ll get to it eventually.

In the meantime she’s brought home another fantasy classic, Dragonflight, the first book of The Dragonriders of Pern series. It is very exciting to me, to see her discovering literature that has been a passion for me since I was her age. At least we’ll have something to talk about as she ventures into her ‘tween and teen years!

I realized, after the last post, that I tend to focus on what’s I didn’t like about a book when I write up my comments on it. That’s my inner editor at work, I think, picking on others’ writing because I haven’t done any of my own lately for it to pick on. Or perhaps it’s a vestige of my last writers’ group, which as a whole focused on telling the author of any given piece what they did wrong, or “you should do it this way instead.” That’s why I’m not a part of the group anymore.

As far as Ysabel goes, I was disappointed because it lacks the poignancy I loved from his earlier books. But while that may be missing, there are still a lot of real good things about this book, as you can see has been pointed out in the reviews posted at his site. I’ll excuse my failure to linger over the good parts by saying I’m not really writing reviews here so much as a quickly written up response to a book I’ve just finished. But I promise I’ll try to be less negative in future write ups, and include what I like as well as what I didn’t like.

Ysabel
by Guy Gavriel Kay

“You have blundered into a corner of a very old story…”

Ned Marriner is spending six weeks with his father in France, where the celebrated photographer is shootign Saint-Sauveur Cathedral in Aix-en-Provence. Both father and son fear for Ned’s mother — a physician with Doctors Without Bordres, currently assigned to the civil war-torn country of Sudan. This is not the first time she’s placed herself in harm’s way to help alleviate suffering — and Ned has inherited her courage. He’ll need it.

While exploring the cathedral, Ned meets Kate Wenger, an American exchange student with a deep knowledge of the area’s history. But even Kate is at a losss when she and Ned surprise a scar-faced stranger, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a knife, deep inside the cathedral. “I think you ought to go now,” he tells them. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story…”

In this ancient place, where the borders between the livng and the long-dead are thin, Ned and his family are about to be drawn into a haunted tale, as mythic figures from conflicts of long ago erupt into the present, changing — and claiming — lives.

You know an author must be one of your favorites when you find his newly released novel in the sort room of the bookstore where you work and you carry it around with you for the remaining hour of your shit, even though you are still working. Yes, that’s the kind of draw the work of Guy Gavriel Kay has for me; it’s been a year since the release of Ysabel was announced, and I’ve been watching the inventory at work closely, waiting for the long anticipated date of its arrival. I even squee’d aloud when I saw the books on the back table — fortunately no one else was there to hear me.

Despite my excitement, I did not delve into the book immediately upon arriving home. First of all, I was really tired that day, and I didn’t want my reading experience dulled by fatigue. I was also still enmeshed in Vellum, and I knew if I interrupted my reading of that book, I’d never be able to get back to finishing it. I was also experiencing strange pair of emotions, sort of the flip sides of the same coin, that kept me from diving in as soon as I could. One was the knowledge that once I finished it, I would never have that magical “first kiss” again; sometimes when you anticipate a great experience, you want to put it off as long as possible, to increase your enjoyment of it. The second feeling was fear, fear that maybe the book wouldn’t be as great an experience as I was hoping.

I’ve been let down by Kay before, after all. My first encounter with his work was A Song for Arbonne, which a friend recommended to me knowing my interest in the Middle Ages. I was quickly hooked by Kay’s style, the poignancy of his storytelling, the subtle blending of myth, history and fantasy –everything just clicked for me and I quickly devoured every other work of his available up to that point: The Fionavar Tapestry, Tigana (my absolute favorite), The Lions of Al-Rassan. When the first volume of The Sarantine Mosaic came out, I was a little disappointed, and didn’t pick up the second volume until it came out in paperback. It wasn’t until I read both books together, a few years later, that I realized what a masterpiece it is. The Last Light of the Sun, however, Kay’s last book before Ysabel, remains a disappointment even after a couple of readings — Oh, it’s not by any means a bad book, and I’d rather read it than a lot of other fantasy fiction on the shelves. It just didn’t have the same impact on me that his earlier books did.

Sadly, the same is true of Ysabel, for a few reasons. The major one is that Kay’s distinctive lyric style, which heightens the emotional poignancy of the story (for me, at least…I know other readers who’d be put off by it) and elevates the tale and characters into a more mythic space, cannot survive the impact with cellphones, iPods and the World Wide Web. The book is set entirely in the real, modern world, a first for Kay, and while there is plenty of magical stuff happening, a true sense of being in a mythic space is never achieved. A lot of it has to do with language, and a lot of it has to do with technology. The hero’s solo descent into the underworld (which happens to be up a mountain in this book) just doesn’t seem quite so heroic when he flips open his cellphone at any time to check in with his dad.

This is also the first time Kay’s main character is an adolescent; even the youngest primary characters he’s created before have already crossed the threshold into adulthood. I don’t have a problem with young protagonists, and I should just be thankful that Ned isn’t a stereotypical angst-ridden teen. He’s a pretty normal kid, up until the start of the book, but that normalness is almost a drawback here. Aside from his concern for his mom, he has no depth, nothing that makes him stand out as a character we want to care about; I might even go so far as to say he’s a typical Mary-Sue — the average kid unexpectedly granted extraordinary abilities.

The most interesting characters (including, even, the surprise appearance of a couple of familiar faces from one of Kay’s other books — I won’t spoil the surprise by saying who) are those we see the least of, the three ancient individuals in whose story Ned becomes entangled. Even though Kay’s explored the tragic lovers’ triangle before (twice, actually, in the Fionavar Tapestry and The Lions of Al-Rassan), I wouldn’t have minded a repeat here, if only we’d been able to see more of it. These are the only three characters with real depth in the tale, and we are left guessing at most of their history together, tantalizing glimpse of the great story behind the series of events that make up the novel.

I guess what I miss most is the emotional impact that Kay’s earlier works seemed to have. I want to be moved to tears, like when Dianora walks into the sea or Diarmuid rides into battle for the last time or Rodrigo and Ammar must duel to the death. I want to be struck with the mystery of seeing a riselka, and feel the joy at discovering an unexpected love. That’s what I want most from a Kay novel, and I’m disappointed not to have found it once again. Well, you can’t strike gold every time, right? I’ll just have to put my hopes on hold until Kay’s next book is ready for me to read.

Upcoming:
Stealing Fire from the Gods by James Bonnet
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison