Spring Cleaning

I have a confession to make: I've been doing a shocking amount of reading.

I guess, on a blog that reviews books, this is not too terribly surprising; but considering the fact that I have been telling everyone (and I mean everyone: friends, family, random strangers, etc. ) that I used to read but "now I watch TV instead," it's a little strange to sit down and tally out the books I've finished and realize, gee, I have managed to go through a number of them. Here are the ones I can remember for the year so far :

Discovered on My Shelf:

• Old Fashioned Girl, by Louisa Alcott - Always a delight. And really helpful too, as Alcott is one of those blessed authors more intent on edifying her readers more than entertaining them. 
• Mary Poppins  - I finally finished it! A vain Mary Poppins was fun to read of, but all in all I found the book un-magical compared to Disney. I didn't like the cynicism and lack of a morale, but the worst part was that nobody broke out into song.   
• The Juniper Tree - I've been working on this one for awhile too. It's a small, beautifully bound collection of Grimms fairytales, but the contents were so, so out there. The stories ranged from happy endings to tragic, from magical to mostly mundane, from well articulated to barely readable. The worst suffered from such bad wording that I wasn't sure in the end who the princess had married. My favorite Story? The man who knew no fear.

Bought (from the black-market bookstore):

• Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Judith Martin - Maybe not the whole 711 pages, but certainly most of them. 
• I Try to Behave Myself, Peg Bracken  - Probably more practical than the above in terms of spirit rather than law, and equally useful for purposes of anthropological study. Can you imagine having your most used telephone numbers on cards to "load" into your telephone?
• The I Hate to Cook Book, also Peg Bracken - Finally. This includes the Appendix, which was previously my only connection to Bracken and her delicious wit. More tidbits from a bygone era.
• The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, Douglas Adams - Both good and bad, as one might expect. Some perfectly hilarious moments and wonderful ideas, poured into one of those plots that builds and builds and builds until the conductor can't take it any more and steps out to have a beer. Or maybe a soda, if he's Thor. 

Borrowed:

• Tales from the White Hart, Arthur Clark - Another one of those books where I mention the author's name and everyone goes "Oh, him. One of the fathers of science fiction." Why don't you just give me a list? Anyway, this books is composed of short stories presented as tall tales told in a particular bar by a particular person. As such, even the ones touching on ghastly have a hint of the comic about them, and some of them are down right funny. Having said that, there is one story which the author advises delicate people (i.e. ladies) to skip. Just embrace your inner prude and skip it. Apart from that, I would wholeheartedly recommend this volume and wouldn't mind reading it again myself.
• The Third Son, Julie Wu - An actual fiction book, located half in Taiwan – during and after the Japanese occupation – and half in the States. The guy's wife drove me nuts, but aside from that I appreciated the little bit of history I gleaned from reading it.
• The Blue Sword,  Robin McKinley - I thought I had gotten the plot for this story the first time, then I read it again and realized it was a romance novel. Oh well, no wonder I liked it. It's a lot like Chalice, if you've read that one, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.
• A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan  - So much potential. Such an awful ending. I really wanted to like this book, but it suffered from Too Much Plot. Also, no matter how she protested, the main character came off as a little heartless and shallow. The beginning was pretty good though. 
• Lots of books that I got half way into and then returned, most of them out of disgust, but there was also Beverly Gordon's Textiles, a really cool anthropological picture book, but lacking in plot and characters.
• The Second Storm Lord book, by Brandon Sanderson - This book. It's hard to review, so I'm not going to. I liked it, but it bothered me that it wasn't as tightly crafted as the first book. In some places this worked to its advantage - I did a lot of laughing and I really enjoyed myself - but it took away from the Grand and Consequential impression which long, drawn out series should nurture in order to bully readers into finishing them. Also, if that girl and what's his name get together and leave the other dude to turn all evil, I will come and find you, Sanderson. 
• Marble Arches, a collection of short stories by Connie Willis. I loved Willis after reading To Say Nothing of the Dog, despite having never read Three Men in a  Boat. She likes romantic comedies and science fiction and "actual" literature, and I suppose if you put all those things in a blender you might get something like her out of it. She's weird, and she peppers her works with references to classics which I've never read, but I still like her. And, no, I didn't read every story in this book. 

I also read the latter half of Modestt's Scholar series. I started during Christmas, but the reading bleed into the new year, partially helped by the fact that my dad had the books on his iPad so I couldn't just take them home with me (or transfer them to my kindle, for that matter). I like this series, possibly better than the first imager portfolio. I did skip the first two books (accidentally - see, further drawbacks to reading on an e-reader, chapter 5, footnote 3) but the story didn't suffer from that. Also, Modestt actually made a female character I cared about, which might very well be a first.


That's the count for early June. I also read an Agatha Christie, but I think I'll save it for a separate post.

Impressionist: or, What happens when you only read the first two letters in an author's name

You have probably heard of Robin McKinley.

Maybe.

I've always seemed to have known about her. I read her retelling of Sleeping Beauty years ago, and came away with the conclusion that she was a "real" writer. I'm not sure what I meant entirely. It was before I found out you could hate books and authors and so I went around feeling a little lost instead. Wondering if I had missed something. I know I didn't like the book. It was so close to the characters' thoughts that it made my head heavy, as if I had caught the flu. And yet there was a wall, a wall of words like the fine mesh on your window, between the reader and the people in the story so that, even if were my head weren't buzzing, I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to see them clearly. McKinley doesn't  write in a pure stream of conscious, but sometimes the effect is the same. I probably put the book down blinking and saying "Ooooookay."
             Later on I read a few of her short stories, and that cemented the idea in my head that Robin McKinley's purpose in writing was not to breath life into a character and that her plots were weird. She was about ideas, the ideas that stay right out of reach in the back of your mind and can only be seen out of the corners of your eyes when they think you aren't looking.

             A few months ago I borrowed The Hero and the Crown from the library and was surprised by how fast I grew to love Aerin. Ah, here was McKinley's shimmering writing watered down enough for me to see through it into the Heroine's heart! And then something shifted in the last half of the book, the story that I was reading ended and the story McKinly meant to tell began. I was disappointed. But unlike similar situations where authors have failed me halfway though, I wasn't disgusted. It wasn't the way I would have ended my book. It wasn't the way  I thought it should have ended.  (I didn't finish it, just skimmed through the last page for closure - I may not be purple hat age yet, but I'm old enough to stop reading things that make my eyes roll). But it was her book and I could see, grudgingly, why she ended it that way.

McKinley writes for Ideas.  

        I've just read Chalice (I've always wanted to keep bees) and Pegasus (which felt less well put together) and they were interesting and intoxicating for someone who now spends more time watching TV than she does actually reading. And they both had "real" characters, with the main girl feeling quite human and the others taking their cues from her. The first made my head swim a little while I adjusted to the fact that McKinley does not think people are truly linear, and tries to prove it by jumping all around in the past and present. This helps her be wonderfully vague – so that you might not know until chapter seven that the tutor is a magician even thought after that it seems wonderfully obvious – and makes the magic in her books more magical, and therefore more real. And so you begin to feel that her true purpose is to tell you about the magic, only it's a thing that can't be put directly into words and so she  must show it to us through the story and the characters. This is as close as  I can get to explaining what I mean. McKinley writes for notions in the same way a science fiction author might. In fact, I read Isaac Asimov's Currents of Space in between these two books, and the similarities in the way information is presented - half in the background until we become so used to it we just assume we were told, and half two chapters after we needed it - was really amusing.


      Equally amusing is the knowledge that there is another person who does something similar in fantasy literature, and I found out about her quite by accident because I was wanted to start reading McKinley again. It was before Hero and the Crown, I think.  I went to the library, found the Mc's, and pulled off a book that looked likely. It was In the Forests of Serre  - and though the first paragraphs made me think more of Howls Moving Castle than anything else,  I soon found the book had taken my words away and pulled them into a neverland where sound and spacing wove around in all the colors of connotation. I did not mind that I spent much of my time confused and in a daze - who is alert and analytical in fairyland? The purpose of the book was the words. It was like a backwards painting, I thought after reading Ombre. If you looked at it from a distance you saw words and when you cam up close they faded away into a plot, a story. But then, if you took the time to exam even deeper you found that, really, the story was words too. The end result is a heady concoction indeed.


            Unlike McKinley, I do not really feel that McKillip is trying to tell me something profound. Or maybe she is, but she doesn't feel it's something flightily and hard to get at. She shows, with every line and page and chapter, what words can do and how powerful they are. She exults in that power, that beauty, and wants her readers to as well. And then when you have finished her story and looked back at the plot you find even that was nothing more than an allegory about words. Like McKinley, I feel her books are full of subtlety, and yet I can not tell you where the subtle lies. To say that it lies in the words its to say a tapestry is subtle beacuse of its millions of tiny stitches. When you are done with a McKillip book you are out of it, as if it were a dream. And when you are done with a McKinley story you left with bits of it in the back of your mind, as if it had actually happened long ago, when the world was wilder place.

How can two people be so the same and yet so different, even down to their names? It can only be through magic.

Finished

July 15th - 8:43pm

Nothing More Just

"Results are not Guaranteed, but if not perfectly satisfied, your wasted time will be refunded."
                                                            – Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth 

This is a perfect book. Sorry, but that's that and we're all going to have to live with it. This book has Rhyme and Reason, princesses and demons, sounds and silences, and words and numbers. It has soups which make you hungrier and half-baked cakes which disagree with you later. It has the Sea of Knowledge, in which some people can swim all day and without ever getting wet, and the Mountains of Ignorance, which take no time at all to reach. Here, amidst it's mere 256 pages, the Awful DYNNE plays with that utterly average child. And of course you have cars, which go without saying, and words capable of being snuck away with, safely hidden on the tip of your tongue. You even meet, all too briefly, the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, who refuses to return his homeland of Context.

And that's not all.

As if word play were not enough – as if Norton Juster's puns and twisted idioms were not perfectly entertaining by themselves –  he has given this book purpose. I'm not sure if it could be termed a plot. I hesitate to use that word to describe the sequence of events which transpire to run into each other here, even if they never do really crash and the whole thing turns out to have been beautifully orchestrated. It is closer to a moral, but that has all kinds of historical baggage - poor thing. The best I can do is pull out a quote and call it the running theme.*

"It's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters."

 What Norton Juster has done is pick and poke fun at different aspects of knowledge and different faults of the human persona while still, ultimately, preserving a sense of respect for both. He could make chores seem more fun than eating ice cream, without ever denying that ice cream wasn't all that bad to begin with. He laughs at a world where information is shoveled into minds as a dead thing, knowing that dead things usually stay dead unless they fall into the hands of someone who can make them grow and bear fruit. He's . . . He's . . . He's  Douglas Adams' Evil Twin.

Well, Priggish Twin.**

And after saying that, really, what more do I have to say to make you go and read it? If it helps you can replace all instances of the word "tollbooth" with "phone booth."


Also, while we're headed toward Delusions, I want a 1940s-style poster of the Terrible Trivium to hang on my wall.



 __________________________________ Socks Off:

* Exactly like a running stitch, used to bind together events in a piece of literature. A running theme may be the basis of your point, which directly effects the shape and tone of your plot. These themes can be subtle or, like The Phantom Tollbooth, they can be artistically blatant. Themes that are too obvious and large are likely to come undone, leaving your work little more than random, unjoined rags.


** Now that we've mentioned Douglas Adams, doesn't this quote – pulled completely out of context from chapter 14 – sound like it was written just for him?

"'That's absurd,' objected Milo . . .  .
'That may be true,' [the Dodecahedron] acknowledged, 'but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.'"

Funnier Then Strange

Bevity: Ahg! New blogger format, creepy.

Sixer: It makes it look like our blog title is Socks and SpoQ.

Bevity: We could change it to that. So do you remeber if we had a book in March?

Sixer: Umm... I'm pretty sure I read something in March.

Bevity: Never mind, it's May now (because those two months are right next to each other) and we have a new book.

Sixer: Yes, and it's the kind of book that can make you believe three and five are next to each other.

Bevity: It is..... The Phantom Tollbooth!!! I love this book, I remember when I first heard this book.

Sixer: If you haven't read this book you need to go out and read it now.

Bevity: It's a much better proportioned book than our last one.

Sixer: What last one?

Bevity: Whatever book we were reading before this one, I'm pretty sure there was one.

Sixer: I'm pretty sure I read a book before.

Bevity: Seems pretty strange.

Strange Failure

Sixer: This month the book we're reading is Susanna Clarke's tome Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Bevity: Yes, it's an extremely long novel. Like... never-ending.

Sixer: Luckily, We're both about two or three hundered pages in already.

Bevity: Yeah, lucky, we've only got six hundered pages left, woohoo!

Sixer: On one hand I'm really glad we have so much more to read because it's really well written and very interesting, however in some deep, dark, secret, hidden place in my soul I'm starting to wonder if all books over four-hundered pages were written just to torment busy biblophiles.

Bevity: Oh, most definitely. When I write novels they will all be one thousand pages long! MWahahahaaaaaa!!!!

Strange Ambition

Bevity: this month we have a very "interminable" book.

Sixer: Used hyperbolically, but yes. 14 days in and over 670 pages to go yet. I think, between us, we've yet to reach the two hundred page mark.

Bevity: It's pretty sad. Our predicament – not the book. The book is fascinating.

Sixer: And, as if to give homage to our blog title, it's full of footnotes. We're talking, of course, about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Bevity: It's really a book lovers' book. The first few chapters are all about books.  

Sixer: I love the description of all the old men sitting around studying magic and making it boring as, well, history.

Bevity: That was in the first line. I love how you can tell a lot about a book by its first line. Never judge a book by its cover, but always by its first line.

Sixer: So say we all.