January books
Jan. 30th, 2006 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienIt's a little early, but I don't think I'm going to finish any more this month. Spoilers below the cuts, some more specific has been than my recent wont.
Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Not bad, not bad at all, but not my favourite Pratchett either. Dwarves and trolls, an ancient war, a secret hidden in a painting, and Vimes as father to a small child who insists on being read to at the same time every day.
John Crowley, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land
After finishing this, I filed it under 'fiction' rather than with the SF and Fantasy. The conceit is interesting; the manuscript of a gothic novel written by Lord Byron, enciphered by his daughter Ada Lovelace just before her own death, is discovered and deciphered. The 'novel' itself, a rambling thing that's half early-nineteenth-century gothic, half society goings-on, is presented interspersed with e-mails between the discoverers and Ada's own notes in which she carefully points out the parallels with her father's real life. In the process, the woman working with the papers reaches something of a reconciliation with her own scandalously-estranged father, a sort of Roman Polanski figure exiled after allegations of sex with an underage girl. The novel, it gradually emerges, is itself a sort of encoded message from Byron to the daughter he hadn't seen since she was a baby, putting his side of the story of his life. The e-mails from the woman who breaks the code, a supposedly brilliant mathematician who won't punctuate or capitalize and seems to know nothing much about anything but mathematics, are rather annoying, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrissa pointed out. Oddly, and perhaps not accidentally, her fractured prose ends up paralleling that of the dying Ada.
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
This is technically a reread, but I was so young the first time I read it that it hardly counts. A young man grows up in the care of a father who, having made a mistake in his own marriage, is determined to keep his son from doing the same. This turns out about as well as you'd expect, with some satire, some comedy, and some purplish lyricism along the way. It's rather franker about the seamy side of high-society life than, say, Dickens, who was writing at the same time but started earlier than Meredith, IIRC. It made an interesting parallel read to the Crowley, as both involved innocent young men getting into trouble in London society.
You know those odd fictional pseudo-medical conventions? The trivial -- or at least completely mendable -- shoulder wound; the concussion with no repercussions; the reversible amnesia? In the nineteenth century, and maybe before, there was another one; 'brain fever', apparently an organic infection of the brain, but brought on by acute stress or mental trauma. As far as I know, it corresponds to no known disease, but it was a very convenient plot device. I don't think Dickens, whose medical observations I'm told were remarkably accurate, ever used it, but Wilkie Collins did, and Arthur Conan Doyle at least once, and I think Mrs. Gaskell. Meredith uses it twice in the same book; one mild case, and one fatal one, in different characters.
Doris Egan, Gate of Ivory
This is one of those space-opera-with-magic things, I suppose. The protagonist is an interstellar tourist stranded on the world of Ivory, where magic works and is an accepted part of society. She becomes involved in the affairs of an aristocratic mage, and sticks with him when he suffers a reversal of fortune, getting a tour of the world and society in the process. I liked it quite a lot, though the villain was so sympathetic -- or maybe pathetic -- that his downfall seemed rather unnecessarily brutal. There are a couple of sequels, out of print but fairly easy to get. Does anyone have any opinion on whether they're better, worse, about the same?
Debra Doyle & James Macdonald, The Gathering Flame
Prequel to the Mageworlds trilogy; more space-opera-with-magic, though the magic in this case looks a lot like psi. It starts well, and reminded me a lot of Liaden, but the worldbuilding seemed cruder, the characters thinner in spite of the temporal layering of the narrative. I'm not sure I should have started with the later-published prequel, and will withhold judgement on the series as a whole until I've read at least the first book of the trilogy.
Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Not bad, not bad at all, but not my favourite Pratchett either. Dwarves and trolls, an ancient war, a secret hidden in a painting, and Vimes as father to a small child who insists on being read to at the same time every day.
John Crowley, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land
After finishing this, I filed it under 'fiction' rather than with the SF and Fantasy. The conceit is interesting; the manuscript of a gothic novel written by Lord Byron, enciphered by his daughter Ada Lovelace just before her own death, is discovered and deciphered. The 'novel' itself, a rambling thing that's half early-nineteenth-century gothic, half society goings-on, is presented interspersed with e-mails between the discoverers and Ada's own notes in which she carefully points out the parallels with her father's real life. In the process, the woman working with the papers reaches something of a reconciliation with her own scandalously-estranged father, a sort of Roman Polanski figure exiled after allegations of sex with an underage girl. The novel, it gradually emerges, is itself a sort of encoded message from Byron to the daughter he hadn't seen since she was a baby, putting his side of the story of his life. The e-mails from the woman who breaks the code, a supposedly brilliant mathematician who won't punctuate or capitalize and seems to know nothing much about anything but mathematics, are rather annoying, as
mrissa pointed out. Oddly, and perhaps not accidentally, her fractured prose ends up paralleling that of the dying Ada.George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
This is technically a reread, but I was so young the first time I read it that it hardly counts. A young man grows up in the care of a father who, having made a mistake in his own marriage, is determined to keep his son from doing the same. This turns out about as well as you'd expect, with some satire, some comedy, and some purplish lyricism along the way. It's rather franker about the seamy side of high-society life than, say, Dickens, who was writing at the same time but started earlier than Meredith, IIRC. It made an interesting parallel read to the Crowley, as both involved innocent young men getting into trouble in London society.
You know those odd fictional pseudo-medical conventions? The trivial -- or at least completely mendable -- shoulder wound; the concussion with no repercussions; the reversible amnesia? In the nineteenth century, and maybe before, there was another one; 'brain fever', apparently an organic infection of the brain, but brought on by acute stress or mental trauma. As far as I know, it corresponds to no known disease, but it was a very convenient plot device. I don't think Dickens, whose medical observations I'm told were remarkably accurate, ever used it, but Wilkie Collins did, and Arthur Conan Doyle at least once, and I think Mrs. Gaskell. Meredith uses it twice in the same book; one mild case, and one fatal one, in different characters.
Doris Egan, Gate of Ivory
This is one of those space-opera-with-magic things, I suppose. The protagonist is an interstellar tourist stranded on the world of Ivory, where magic works and is an accepted part of society. She becomes involved in the affairs of an aristocratic mage, and sticks with him when he suffers a reversal of fortune, getting a tour of the world and society in the process. I liked it quite a lot, though the villain was so sympathetic -- or maybe pathetic -- that his downfall seemed rather unnecessarily brutal. There are a couple of sequels, out of print but fairly easy to get. Does anyone have any opinion on whether they're better, worse, about the same?
Debra Doyle & James Macdonald, The Gathering Flame
Prequel to the Mageworlds trilogy; more space-opera-with-magic, though the magic in this case looks a lot like psi. It starts well, and reminded me a lot of Liaden, but the worldbuilding seemed cruder, the characters thinner in spite of the temporal layering of the narrative. I'm not sure I should have started with the later-published prequel, and will withhold judgement on the series as a whole until I've read at least the first book of the trilogy.