August books

[ellarien]

This month's tally is a bit healthier [ETA: the list is the same length, but it covers four weeks rather than six!], due to two weeks of rather wet vacation. Vague spoilers, as usual, behind
the cuts.


Martha Wells, The Gate of Gods

This is the final installment of the trilogy that started with The Wizard Hunters, and brings the story to a satisfactory conclusion after much proliferation of teleportation circles both ancient and modern. Tremaine continues to be difficult to warm to as a heroine, but she's achieved a certain amount of healing by the end.


Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear

More surreal detection in the world of last year's The Big Over Easy, this time involving a reporter called Goldilocks, a family of forest-dwelling bears, a psychopathic Gingerbread Man, and cucumbers of unusual size. It's all quite entertaining in a lugubrious fashion, and has about as much plot integrity as, say, your average Ruth Rendell novel.

Speaking of which ...


Ruth Rendell, End in Tears

The latest Chief Inspector Wexford mystery, in which the slow unfolding of the solution to a teenage girl's murder, played out over months of weather from sizzling heatwave to early snowstorm, interweaves with incidents in Wexford's family life and a romance between two junior members of his team. The very modern young female detective, thoroughly imbued with the latest terminology, makes an amusing contrast to her stodgy middle-aged seniors.



Anthony Trollope, Lady Anna

This is a fairly obscure work by Trollope, a tale of clashing classes and a young lady who resists all persuasion to solve her family's inheritance dilemma by marrying her cousin the Earl, remaining instead stubbornly faithful to a young tailor to whom she became attached while living in reduced circumstances. Having once, as it were, turned pink, she can't bring herself to change her mind. Trollope, given his sympathy with the upper classes, seems quite ambivalent about this choice. Most shocking to modern sensibilities, though, is the young tailor's stern insistence on being his wife's master and his ultimate refusal to let her have any control of her own money. There's a hint at the end of a projected sequel, but as far as I can tell from the bibliography it was never written, perhaps because Lady Anna was not a great success. I couldn't help wondering what Wilkie Collins would have done with the same setup -- the situation is brought about by a disputed marriage, a theme Collins used more than once.



Judith Marillier, Blade of Fortriu

Second in the trilogy about the dark ages pictish leader Bridei. Bridei himself continues to not be very interesting, but this story centers mostly on hostage princess Ana, sent off to marry a thuggish chieftain and seal a treaty, and Bridei's spy, assassin and general henchman Faolan, and that story did hold my interest, though the mixture of fantasy and history is still a little awkward.



Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below

In the near future (the exact date never stated), catastrophic climate change is happening, and our heroes in the NSF are doing their best to mobilize the scientific community to sort it out. In the meantime, one of the central characters is living in a treehouse in Rock Creek Park, getting back in touch with his paeolithic routes while taking full advantage of modern technology, and pursuing a romance with an elusive Homeland Security agent who keeps him informed about the surveillance under which he is living. The usual Robinson motif of people living cheerfully in the most unlikely environments crops up again, and there are some scarily plausible developments of technology and its applications. It all seems rather too light-hearted and optimistic to be quite believable, in spite of the flooded islands, the extreme weather, and the disintegrating polar ice.



Anthony Trollope, Rachel Ray

Romance among the small-town lower middle classes, with lots of finely-divided class consciousness, many digs at the low church, and an incidental display of casual anti-semitism. I doubt that Trollope thought he was prejudiced against Jews, but he certainly lets his characters throw the stereotypes and slurs around without rebuke or consequence, and has what are apparently supposed to be sympathetic characters campaign against a Jewish parliamentary candidate purely on the grounds of his race.



Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

Re-read of an old friend. It's fairly early Dickens, I think, chiefly famous for Mrs. Gamp, the drunken nurse, and a scathing if not scurrilous portrait of American life in the days of slavery. No slaves actually appear (though one ex-slave is briefly dragged to center stage as a non-speaking object lesson), but there is much fulminating about the institution and the inherent contradictions between that and the liberty on which Americans so prided themselves, together with condemnations of American manners and hygeine. I suspect in my earlier days, when I knew much less about American history, much of the slavery theme went over my head. The American chapters are a fairly small part of the book, though. I don't think I'd ever read it quite this fast -- over about three days -- and the plot, such as it is, does come clearer when read at that speed. It's an untidy sprawl of a book, of course, but it has some great comic portraits and some rather nice lyrical descriptions of travel around the English countryside in the stagecoach days. I sometimes wonder what Dickens, who wrote about journeys by coach and rail with such gusto, would have made of modern air travel -- a subject that modern authors tend not to dwell on at much length.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I have read Martin Chuzzlewit, but all I can remember of it is the fact that I have read it. The entirely plot and characters have left my memory.

And I've never managed to like Trollope. I've tried several times, and found him stiff and prejudiced and boring. Then again, I am on the verge of abandoning Middlemarch _again_ because I just cannot sympathise with the characters enough.

[ellarien]

I read a lot of Victorian literature as a teenager, possibly partly because it was cheaper by the word than in-copyright stuff, and just as good an escape from day-to-day reality as fantasy (which there wasn't that much of in the seventies, anyway). In those days I wasn't very critical of the nineteenth-century worldview; it's interesting to go back now and read them with twenty-first century filters in place. I find Trollope's prejudices interesting now because they're so much part of the era, even when he was obviously trying to rise above them.

I seem to remember identifying rather strongly with poor Dorothea, when I was a nerdy fifteen-year-old, and being sorry that her idea of marrying for brains didn't work out better.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I was a nerdy 15yo, too - but she's not just nerdy, she's weird. I really *want* to have read more of this book before I put it down, but I don't know how much longer I shall last...

[ellarien]

Would it help to know that she does grow out of it to some extent? Now I come to think of it, she isn't the only character who shows significant growing-up over the course of the novel.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I am seriously attempting to keep reading. Right now I do a sort of skim-and-read, and there are just about enough interesting phrases in the text to keep me going, but it's a close call...