Outside of a Dog: A Book Log

I sometimes say that a willingness to pore over the shelves of used bookstores is the surest sign that one is an optimist. Well, sometimes one's optimism is rewarded. I visited some of my favorite stores in Boston today, and came away with 10 paperbacks for something around $20—including copies of Mirabile and Hellspark (I'm particularly pleased about Mirabile, as it's already become one of my comfort books), a few hard-to-find things for friends, and the first of Elizabeth Moon's Serrano series, Hunting Party (I'd read a few of the sequels and enjoyed them, though not enough to buy the first new).

I also picked up Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy, along with another Heyer, and read it on the subway & train on the way back. I'd often heard that this was a favorite of Heyer fans, and I certainly enjoyed it more than some of her others (say, Regency Buck), though not as much as The Unknown Ajax. Sophy puts the lie to the cliché that romance heroines are little weak-willed simpering things. Upon arriving in the Rivenhall family home and discovering that everyone, more or less, is unhappy, she promptly sets about rearranging things; it's rather like watching a card trick, at the end of which the original relationships have been reshuffled into several different, and much happier, singles and couples. It's a tribute to the skill of Heyer's characterization that Sophy doesn't become incredibly annoying while doing so. There is an unfortunate interlude with a Jewish moneylender; whatever the stereotype in Regency times may have been, Heyer was writing in 1950. Other than that, The Grand Sophy is very funny, with vivid characters and a nice, but not overwhelming, eye for period detail.

(Note to sf fans visiting Boston: if you stop in at Avenue Victor Hugo, take a minute to walk down Newbury to Spenser's Mystery Bookshop. It has only a very small sf collection, but I seem to have good luck there; for instance, today I bought for a friend, very cheaply, one of Sheri Tepper's very hard-to-find Marianne books, and a nice copy of The Face in the Frost to give to someone who'd like it. Also, the proprietor has been extremely helpful whenever I've been in.)

Posted at 3:54 PM | link and comments

Sometimes a book just happens to be wrong for a reader, through no fault of its own. Aaron Allston's Doc Sidhe is one of those books.

I got this book on the strength of a review on rec.arts.sf.written. (I probably never would have picked it up otherwise, as the cover is terrible and the back copy isn't so good, either.) It's a fantasy homage to 1930's pulp adventures, with elves and snappy clothes and big cars with running boards and something like tommy guns, and with the title character as the wise leader of a band of variously skilled people who are On the Side of Right. Harris Greene gets pulled from our world into the elven one, and falls in with Doc and his band.

Unfortunately, I kept mentally banging straight into another book when reading this, John M. Ford's very excellent The Last Hot Time (which I will write a review of one of these days, honest). In that fantasy novel, a young man gets pulled into the household and employ of a wise leader in a place where there are elves and gangs and cool big cars and snappy clothes. Except that in The Last Hot Time, the young man's referred to as Doc. And so, half the time we got a point of view from Doc Sidhe, usually just identified in the text as "Doc," I'd get all confused and think he was the young outsider, not the wise leader.

This was not the best way to read a book. Especially since they're not at all similar, otherwise.

This may indeed be a perfectly good book, but I was too distracted to really get involved. I may try it again. But first I'll get this review of The Last Hot Time out of my system . . .

Posted at 8:51 PM | link and comments

Finished the fat omnibus, Partners in Necessity by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. This consists of three previously-published novels in the Liaden universe, Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change, and Carpe Diem.

These remind me a little bit of the Mageworlds books, in that they're (co-written) family-centered space opera with magic/paranormal bits. They aren't exactly like, as they're more, hmmm, straightforward than Mageworlds—that is, so far all of the people who look like bad guys, are. They also focus a bit more heavily on the emotional wounds and scars of the main characters. I really enjoyed them, though (as I do the Mageworlds books).

Conflict of Honors is first in chronological order, second in publication order, and a standalone about how two of the characters met. The next two, Agent of Change and Carpe Diem, start a sequence which is not yet completed (the next one, Plan B, is out now, and apparently the forthcoming I Dare will complete this sequence). I just have to quote from this review of Plan B by Christina Schulman, because I don't think I can do better in giving the flavor:

These books, collectively known as the Liaden series, were full of shooting, being shot at, running away, suddenly pulling new psychic powers out of one's ear to avoid being shot, and lots of whimsical dialog and passionate kissing in between the shooting bits. And giant turtles.

This sort of thing is a great deal of fun to read about (especially the giant turtles) . . .

Indeed, I strongly suspect the turtles are reader favorites; they're certainly my favorites.

Anyway, the story started in Agent of Change focuses on Val Con, a Liaden deep-cover operative who has got some serious problems with his head, and Miri, a Terran ex-mercenary who's fallen afoul of organized crime. Evil-doers are revealed, some of them are thwarted, plots and dangers ensue, and much fun is had by the reader. There are a few minor problems; once in a while, the background material isn't as clear as it could be, and the dreaded Foreign Language Apostrophes appear, and every so often the prose clunks a bit (I'd been putting off buying this for a while, because every time I flipped it open in the bookstore, I couldn't quite get into it. Mostly this goes away once you get into the story.). Also, be aware the omnibus does end on somewhat of a cliffhanger ("Plan B in now in effect."). These are minor quibbles, though; they're great fun and I recommend them.

Posted at 11:02 AM | link and comments

I finished that piecemeal re-read of Pratchett & Gaiman's Good Omens last night, on the grounds that reading the fat in-progress three-volume omnibus at bedtime was just asking for trouble (I tend to lose track of time. . .). I still don't quite understand why, when I first read this, it didn't quite work for me. It certainly does now.

Someone called A Spokesman sounded close to hysteria [on the radio].

". . . danger to employees or the public," he was saying.

"And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?" said the interviewer.

There was a pause. "We wouldn't say escaped," said the spokesman. "Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid."

"You mean it is still on the premises?"

"We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them," said the spokesman.

"Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"

There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."

"But you said the power station is still producing electricity," gasped the interviewer.

"It is."

"How can it be doing that if it hasn't got any reactors?"

You could see the spokesman's mad grin, even on the radio. You could see his pen, poised over the "Farms for Sale" column in Poultry World. "We don't know," he said. "We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea."

Posted at 11:43 AM | link and comments

I've actually finished two novels since I last updated this, but one of them was part of a three-novel omnibus, so I'll wait until I've finished the whole thing to comment on it.

So last night I read Seduction in Death by J.D. Robb, the new Eve/Roarke novel (as opposed to the new story that I read a few days ago). This is more in the police procedural mode than the mystery mode, as we're introduced to the killer pretty early on. I read it straight through and was, again, entertained and amused. Just once, though, I'd like to see Eve go up against a killer who pushes all her buttons in the other direction; instead of sexual homicides by men, multiple sexual homicides by a woman, say, who's clearly psycho, but is targeting only rapists, child molesters, and abusers. Would be kind of an interesting change.

Posted at 11:20 AM | link and comments

Yesterday, it was a beautiful sunny afternoon, I was in a great mood because I'd just finished something important that had been hanging over my shoulder for a long time, just at the deadline, and I decided that, since I'd been inside working all week, I would go outside and sit in the sun and read (the sun makes me so happy. I'm seriously phototropic.). So, I said to myself, "Hmm, I need a nice sunny book to read. I know, I'll re-read Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds."

So I did. And I was very happy.

I've previously reviewed Bridge of Birds, so I'll just leave you with this passage:

"Let's get out of here."

It was easier said than done. It would be suicide to go back into the labyrinth, and the only other exit was the small mouth of the cave. We stood there and gazed down a hundred feet of sheer cliff that could not possibly be negotiated without ropes and grappling hooks at an angry sea where waves smashed against jagged rocks that lifted through the foam like teeth. There was one small calm pool almost directly beneath us, but for all I knew it was six inches deep. The moon was reflected in it, and I gazed from the moon to Master Li and back again.

"My life has been rather hectic, and I could use a long rest," he sighed. "When I go to Hell to be judged, I intend to ask the Yama Kings to let ne be reborn as a three-toed sloth. Do you have any preference?"

I thought about it. "A cloud," I said shyly.

. . . Li Kao climbed up upon my back and wrapped his arms around my neck, and I discovered that I was beginning to feel undressed unless I wore my ancient sage like a raincoat. I perched on the edge and took aim.

"Farewell, sloth."

"Farewell, cloud."

I held my nose and jumped. The wind whistled around our ears as we plunged toward the pool, and toward a jagged rock that we hadn't noticed.

"Left! Left!" Master Li yelled, pulling on my pendant chain like the reins of a bridle.

I frantically flapped my arms, like a large awkward bird, and the reflected moon grew larger and larger, and then so huge that I almost expected to see Chang-o and the White Rabbit stick their heads out and shake their fists at us. We missed the rock by six inches. The moon appeared to smile, and the warm waters of the Yellow Sea opened to embrace us like long-lost friends.

Posted at 9:51 AM | link and comments

Decided to go with something a little lighter than Lord of Emperors after all, so I picked up Diana Wynne Jones' Year of the Griffin. This is a sequel to Dark Lord of Derkholm, which I enjoyed; it was loosely connected to her Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a travel guide that (very funnily) parodied by-the-numbers fantasies. Dark Lord imagined if that was an actual travel guide, and what havoc tours like that would cause on a world. It was fun and original, though a couple shifts to darker tone were slightly jarring. (Deep Secret, my favorite Jones book, manages this much better.)

The sequel is set eight years later. Elda, a griffin, has gone off to University to learn magic. (She's the daughter of Derk, the human wizard who had to play the Dark Lord for the very last tour ever. Yes, they're different species.) The University is in a mess, with financial troubles, deeply incompetent management and teaching, and a bunch of new students with various . . . problems. Like jinxes on their magic, and assassins after them, and parents who don't know they're there . . .

This is a lot lighter than Dark Lord, and rather dopey—but in a way that made me speed through it with a smile on my face, not roll my eyes and put it down. The shots taken at educational policy will undoubtedly resonate with a lot of people, and the joy of learning, one of the real pleasures of school stories, is done very well. I've read probably a half-dozen Jones books, some of which just slid right off me (the Chrestomanci and Dalemark books, basically) for no apparent reason. Unfortunately, Jones is so prolific that if you don't like one, people will inevitably tell you that you've read the wrong ones, and just try this one, and this one, and . . . If you're wondering where to start, read The Tough Guide first, and then try this review of Deep Secret by Dave Langford (warning: it reveals a good bit of the plot, but gives a nice sense of the book). If you like Deep Secret, well, you might like the Derkholm books. Or not. (But if you do, there's a great big "To be continued" on the characters of Griffin, if not the plot, so you can expect more . . . )

Posted at 12:00 PM | link and comments

I'm re-reading Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic diptych, because, well, I felt like it. Okay, I'd seen the paperbacks in the library and thought about getting them out, but decided to wait until I was at home, and they've also come up recently on Usenet. I've just finished the first, Sailing to Sarantium.

I already said quite a lot about the book in a review, so I won't repeat myself here. Re-reading the first book when in a slightly scattered frame of mind, though, is a dangerous thing, because I find myself chasing down bits in the second book (Lord of Emperors) that come out of chance comments in the first, or are why I like this character that was just introduced so much, or, well, you get the picture. As a result, I've already read most of the sequel in unordered chunks during the past few days, without "officially" having started it. (Also, while I'm very fond of the first, it is paced considerably more slowly than the second, which is packed with amazing stuff.) As a consequence, I don't know if I'm going to read it straight through now. I might; I really love these books. They're both out in paper now; what are you waiting for?

Posted at 11:04 AM | link and comments

I've got a new Eve/Roarke story by J.D. Robb, and I'm happy. Yeah, it's a guilty pleasure (I explain a little bit about the background in a review of Conspiracy in Death). But it's a pleasure all the same.

The new story, "Interlude in Death" (a.k.a. "I couldn't come up with another title using '. . . in Death' that I hadn't already used"), is a novella in a collection called Out of This World. The story doesn't break much ground, but it moves along nicely, and the sight of Eve trying to get out of giving a seminar at a conference is pretty good. (I'm not crazy about the obligatory revelation about Eve & Roarke's pasts, but that's a small quibble.)

Out of This World is billed as an anthology of "paranormal romance"; since there's nothing paranormal about J.D. Robb's stories, I suspect it was just shoehorned in to have a lead author in the anthology. The other major piece in the book, the first six chapters of Laurell K. Hamilton's new Anita Blake book, Narcissus in Chains, fits somewhat better.

I haven't read any of the Anita Blake books, because they always had an indefinable air of, well, ickiness about them. I got the impression that they were basically vampire porn, though when I opened a book at random in the store, I got werewolf porn instead (and with a detail that's sufficiently improbable that I think it's just wrong, which doesn't do much for my suspension of disbelief). I don't particularly object to unusual sexual preferences (hey, you wanna sleep with undead and shapeshifters, none of my business), but I thought the books also had lots of pain and violence and blood—and angst, don't forget the angst—all tied up with the relationships, which is much less my cup of tea. The opening of the new book (titled here "Magic Like Heat Across My Skin") did nothing to disabuse me of this impression. While it might be a decent place to start, just because Anita has apparently stopped angsting about her relationships with the vampire and the werewolf (even though there's a lot of backstory here; I'm still not sure what a mark is, in this context), and I do have a certain curiosity as to what happens—well, I don't think I'd respect myself in the morning.

There are two other stories in the collection; I skimmed them, and they were dopey.

Posted at 10:30 AM | link and comments

Last night I finished volume one of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore (which I keep wanting to call The League of Frightened Men, which is a Nero Wolfe book). This is the collection of the first six issues/story arc of a new comic.

The story opens in 1898 with a Ms. Mina Murray assembling a crew of, well, freaks, at the direction of British Intelligence. After some effort, Ms. Murray (formerly Mrs. Harker, from Dracula) tracks down and recruits Allan Quatermain (from H. Rider Haggard's books); Dr. Jekyll (& Mr. Hyde); and Hawley Griffin, the Invisible Man. (Captain Nemo is the other member, but the book opens after Ms. Murray—who kicks ass and takes names, and almost made me want to re-read Dracula, which I recall as being very dull textually—has recruited him, which is good because that's by far the least probable one for her to have tracked down.)

That we're in an alternate England is quite clear, and not only because these characters actually exist here, though their fates are not as recorded in our world. (For instance, a postscript at the end of Dracula says that in 1904, Mrs. Harker is still married and has a son.) On page 2, our characters stand upon an incomplete bridge across the English Channel—something never attempted in our world. And we eventually learn that our protagonists have been brought together to recover some stolen cavorite from another famous character of the era . . .

This story was a pretty straightforward adventure, made remarkable by the thought and research evident in the details—cameos, world-building, and background images. (There are annotations available, if you're having trouble identifying some of the characters—or just translating the bits in different languages.) It was an enjoyable read, but I probably won't buy the next one in hardcover for myself. (I bought this one in hardcover as a present for Chad, and since he thinks my scruple of not reading books I buy for other people is weird, borrowed it some time after he was finished.)

Posted at 12:32 PM | link and comments

Since Sunday, I've basically just read things that happened to be lying around, since I've either been packing, moving, or working on some academic stuff.

I re-read Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy pretty much piecemeal over Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. This is an omnibus of three books, one novel—Too Many Magicians—and two collections—Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates. As the titles suggest, these are alternate-history fantasies that riff on classic mysteries. Among the supporting cast in Too Many Magicians are two characters who are rather like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (for more on which, see below, but who appear in books including Too Many Clients,  . . . Cooks, and  . . . Women), and Lord Darcy investigates a crime or two not dissimilar to those that Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter investigated.

The alternate-history conceit of these books is in two parts. First, Richard I didn't die on the Crusades but settled down after recovering from his wounds and became a very good king, and the Plantagenets have ruled the Anglo-French empire ever since (it's about the 1960s in this alternate world, or about present-day to when Garrett was writing). Second, the Laws of Magic were discovered before the laws of science, and have been worked out as thoroughly as science was in this world. (Materialism is presently scorned.)

The feel of the world is a bit odd, as the existence of a competent ruling dynasty apparently means the preservation of the aristocracy and certain courtly forms of manner and dress, yet the tech level encompasses railroads, elevators, and horse-drawn carriages with pneumatic tires. There's also fairly large amounts of info-dumping going on; I happen to think that the information being dumped is amusing, but other people might have less tolerance of the form. They lend themselves well to being read piecemeal, though, and I enjoy them.

Another book I've been reading piecemeal, though over longer than this week, is Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens. There's a spare copy of this in the car for when we get stuck in traffic, for me to read aloud to occupy our minds; it works very well for that, though I'm not so good at reading through snickers. On Wednesday, while waiting for the people who were to help unload the moving truck (they didn't show), I re-read a bunch of it. To borrow a phrase from Book-a-Minute, "Five billion people almost DIE, and it is FUNNY."

Good Omens is the story of the Apocalypse. The Antichrist was born eleven years ago; but due to a little mix-up at the hospital, he's been sent off to a nice English family and been raised completely free of Satanic—or angelic—influences. And there's this angel and this demon who get along better with each other than their superiors, and this book of really, really accurate (but very muddled in time) prophecies, and the Four Horsepersons, and Dog (Satanical hellhound and cat-worrier), and, well, it's too hard to describe. Just read it. Really.

Pratchett & Gaiman are very good writers separately, as well. Good Omens might feel a bit more like Pratchett in style (such as the Discworld books), but at that time Gaiman was also writing Sandman, a brilliant comic, so that's not too suprising.

Today I read Rex Stout's In the Best Families because, well, it was sitting on the kitchen table when I sat down to eat breakfast. This is one of Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books; Wolfe is a very fat, very brilliant detective who never leaves his house on business, and Goodwin is his man Friday who goes about and gathers information for Wolfe to be brilliant with. Archie's also the first-person smartass narrator of all of the stories, one of my favorite characters ever, and a pure pleasure to spend time with. (A&E TV is currently adapting a bunch of the stories, and Timothy Hutton's Archie is a very good one.) In this book, the mysterious and dangerous Zeck (from And Be A Villain and The Second Confession) warns Wolfe off a case; Wolfe's client is murdered; and Wolfe immediately disappears, leaving Archie at loose ends.

Some of the Wolfe books don't have enough plot, but this has plenty. It also has some priceless moments, which I shall not spoil here. It's probably not the best place to start reading the series, though, as it might not have as much impact if you don't know the characters already. Good places to start would be Champagne for One or The Silent Speaker (both currently in print), for instance, or some of the short story collections.

One of the nice things about helping someone move, by the way, is unpacking boxes of books and being reminded of all the books one would like to borrow. I will not be reduced to "Well, it's here . . ." in picking my next book to read . . .

Posted at 8:10 PM | link and comments

Thank goodness for Donald Westlake.

Friday morning, I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at my bookshelves. I just didn't feel like reading anything I had. Finally, my eye lit on Good Behavior, which was sitting off to the side. With a sigh of relief, I swooped down upon it and then sped out the door to work.

I'd re-read Good Behavior within the last six months or so, but Westlake is almost infinitely re-readable, particularly his Dortmunder books. To paraphrase the opening of the most recent, Bad News, Dortmunder is a man upon whom the sun only shines when he needs darkness. Good Behavior opens with him dangling from the rafters of a convent after a burglary gone awry; the nuns look upon him as proof of divine intervention, as their newest member has been kidnapped by her father (who's trying to deprogram her out of the Catholic Church). If only Dortmunder will get her back—from the seventy-sixth floor penthouse of an office building with very tight security—then they won't tell the cops about his nocturnal activities.

These books are consistently entertaining, witty, and smoothly plotted. I particularly like Good Behavior, because, well, how can you not like a caper with nuns? The only small flaw on this re-read is that my paperback reprint had been subjected to a copyeditor with no sense of humor: when Dortmunder is given the way to pull off the caper, in the Mother Superior's office, he says, "Let us prey," not "Let us pray." It was still perfect subway and before-bed reading, though, and I highly recommend the Dortmunder books to just about anyone. (Do ignore the movies, though; as far as I can tell, the movie What's the Worst that Could Happen? has precisely three things in common with the book: the title, the ring, and some of the names. The book is hysterical.)

Posted at 10:51 AM | link and comments

Today's book was Sabriel by Garth Nix. I'd vaguely heard good things about this on Usenet, so bought it on a whim. It's nominally a YA (Young Adult) novel, so you may have to look in that section for it. (At least go look: the cover is pretty cool.)

This was good. Sabriel is training to follow in her father's footsteps as a necromancer—but unlike every other necromancer except her father, she binds the dead, according to the Charter that holds together the Old Kingdom, and doesn't raise them with Free Magic. When the book opens, she's in Ancelstierre, a vaguely British—or Australian, which is where Nix is from—country with an early-mid 20th century tech level. Her boarding school is near enough to the Wall that magic leaks over from the Old Kingdom (she's about to graduate, and took a First in Charter Magic to match her Firsts in English and Music). She gets a disturbing message from her father, who has apparently been trapped over the border of Death; he hands over the tools of a necromancer, his sword and his bells, to her. (The seven bells each have a name and a function; if you're like me and can't remember names, bookmark the page that they get introduced.)

Sabriel sets out to find out what's happened to her father, which turns out to be part and parcel with the corruption of the Charter in the Old Kingdom. The quest/coming-of-age format remains durable, and the world she's questing through as she comes of age is vivid and intriguing. Those who like their magic to be just a little inexplicable will probably like this one; it has some very faint, indefinable flavor of John Bellairs about it. The story's self-contained, but there's definitely more to be told, and Lirael is out now (set a generation later). I probably won't buy it in hardcover, but I'll certainly look for it in paper.

Oddly, this is the second book about necromancers I've read in a week, the other being Martha Wells' fantasy Death of a Necromancer. I'd read her City of Bones, which I picked up used, and just bounced hard off it; I'm not sure why and I don't really care enough to re-read and find out. Death of a Necromancer was the Wells book I'd been recommended, though, and I enjoyed it fairly well; it was satisfyingly creepy (with a title like that, you expect it . . . ), moved quickly, and had a nice setting, a elegant and refreshingly non-quasi-medieval city. Apparently her Element of Fire is recommended by some as well, though I haven't yet read it.

Posted at 10:34 PM | link and comments

After reading Mirabile, I grabbed Kagan's Hellspark when I saw it in the library. I finished it last night. While not as cheerful and comfort-book-like as Mirabile, it's still a good read.

Hellspark is the story of a survey team on a new planet, internally split over whether the major animal life form is sentient or not. Adding to the tension, a team member has died—murder? accident? No-one knows. Into this situation comes Tocohl Susumo, whose planet of Hellspark emphasizes linguistic and cultural fluency. Since everyone on the team is from a different culture, and they were briefed by an idiot, and since one marker of sentience is language, well, she's quite welcome. (Her extrapolative computer doesn't hurt; I don't read many AI stories, but Maggy seems like a good one to me.)

Some of the cultural tics presented seem a little extreme to me, and while I don't doubt that body language is a very important component of language, I was starting to get a little jaded by the nth time some problem was solved by Tocohl's noticing that a movement was wrong. Overall, though, it was a solid, entertaining, imaginative book.

[Hellspark has been reprinted by Meisha Merlin.]

Posted at 9:18 AM | link and comments

I just read another subway book, one that I started on the subway to work and finished over my morning bagel at my desk—it was a very short book. It also wins my prize this year for "Most Misleading Cover Copy." The book is No Score by Lawrence Block, the first in the Chip Harrison series. Now, Block is a well-known mystery writer; I've been reading his Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries all summer and enjoying them greatly. (The made-up Sue Grafton titles are a hoot.) Block does first-person smartass narration really well, and after having exhausted the Bernie books, I decided to try some of his other stuff. (Light stuff. Apparently some of his other books are very dark.)

The Chip Harrison books looked pretty promising, at least according to that back cover copy I mentioned. To quote: "IT IS A MYSTERY why a big man with a big gun turns Chip's dream of desire into a nightmare of danger . . . IT IS A MYSTERY that Chip has to solve fast and furiously in a sizzling and suspenseful adventure . . ."

Well, no, it's not. Chip's an inch away from getting laid in Chapter One (which is not what I was expecting, as Bernie always draws a discreet curtain over his own affairs, but then, this isn't Bernie), the guy with the gun bursts in, and then we get most of a book's worth of backstory on how he got there. And when we get back to the guy with the gun—there's absolutely no mystery about it.

To be fair, I've just gone to Block's website and he admits that the first two Chip Harrison books "are not mysteries at all (although you couldn't tell that from the packaging of the Signet paperbacks). They're erotic coming-of-age novels." (I'd link right to the page, but it's annoyingly framed, so I can't. The original version of this post had a link that skipped the Flash intro, but there's some odd things going on with the URLs, so rather than have you get a 404 . . . ) The third apparently turns into a mystery novel.

No Score is a very fast, light read. Just don't expect a mystery out of it.

Posted at 9:30 AM | link and comments

I'd mentioned that the most recent books I'd read were subway books from the library; the first was Lost and Found. The other two were paperbacks, Mercedes Lackey's Storm Rising and Storm Breaking. These are the final two books in a trilogy (the first is Storm Warning) set in her popular Valdemar universe. I'd read these before, which is why I took out them out even though the branch library didn't have the first volume.

Lackey has approximately a gazillion books in this world, most of which are your basic misunderstood/abused teen goes through much nastiness, but wins through to a place in the community. (The Arrows trilogy were her first, and seem to be thought of the most highly by her fans.) Lackey also has prolific-author syndrome, unfortunately, and the Storm books are one of the few later Lackey trilogies that I re-read. The plots still suffer from author-induced stupidity (if you're going to explore someplace completely unknown, on a really important mission, and you have people around who are telekinetic, don't you think it would be a good idea to bring one of them in case you find something unexpected, or even something on a really high shelf?), some glaring continuity errors, and a fair lack of subtlety, but I happen to particularly like the characters in this trilogy and find their company soothing. Karal is a young priest of a land that's been at war with Valdemar for generations, trying to make sense of a world where suddenly it was his religious hierarchy that was evil in the past, not Valdemar—while on a diplomatic mission to Valdemar itself. If that weren't unsettling enough, then weird things start happening—magical storms, as the titles imply. The other major new character is Tremane, head of an Imperial Army that invaded the next country over from Valdemar, with some buried shreds of decency and conscience in a culture that rewards only expediency. Anyway, lots of stuff happens, Karal and Tremane plug along doing what has to be done, the World Is Saved, and more subway rides have passed harmoniously. (Though stickily. It's pretty miserable in New York City right now, and though the subway cars are air conditioned, none of my stations are.) Hooray.

Posted at 10:53 PM | link and comments

A great book I read recently, though before I started this log, is Mirabile by Janet Kagan. It was mentioned prominently in a thread on rec.arts.sf.written about "Cheerful SF," and so when I spotted it on the shelf at the library, I grabbed it.

It certainly lives up to its billing. Mirabile is about a planet colonized by people from Earth, whose plant and animal gene banks have some unusual twists—literally, as the geneticists on Earth had a fetish for redundancy and encoded secondary and tertiary DNA helices in everything. Thus, when the conditions are just right, a few of your petunias might seed ladybugs—or poisonous ants. And your kangaroos might give birth to carnivorous kangaroo rexes, which might be an intermediate step on the way to something useful (or at least Earth-authentic), or might just be Dragon's Teeth, mutations that affect the backup helices to produce very strange things indeed.

It's a full-time job keeping these stable, and Mirabile is told by one of these geneticists, called "jasons" after the premier first-generation geneticist. Annie Jason Masmajean has a dry and thoroughly enjoyable way of telling a story, and the types of problems she faces lend themselves well to stand-alone chapters, perfect for the subway or just before bed. Mirabile's got humor, a bit of suspense, a bit of romance, lovely characters (and creatures; Mabob is strangely charming, even if he'd be deafening in person), and even a thoughtfully science-fictional approach to the problem of Dragon's Teeth (I can't vouch for the plausibility of encoding secondary helixes in DNA, though). It's a great read, but out of print, so if you spot a copy, grab it.

Posted at 6:20 PM | link and comments

There's a certain class of book I get out of the library when I'm using mass transit to commute to work. For one thing, when I'm commuting via New York City's subway system, paperbacks are a definite plus, as holding a hardback in one (not very large) hand, in a crowd of people, while hanging for dear life onto a pole with the other hand, is, well, not optimal. But in addition, at the end of a sweaty trip on the subway, after a long day at work, sometimes I just feel like something not terribly challenging over dinner, to rest before working out, reading that law journal piece I'm supposed to be editing, writing that law school paper I'm supposed to be writing . . .

The most recent three books I've been reading were checked out of the library with this in mind. Only one of them is new to me, Jayne Ann Krentz's Lost and Found; though currently in hardcover, it otherwise fits the mold well, though a little more brainlessly than most.

I suppose I should back up a little. In my adolescence, I read genre romance novels indiscriminately—in much the same way I read everything else then, really. There are a few authors that I still get out of the library, as part of my "guilty pleasure" stack: Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz, and Linda Howard are the major ones. Unfortunately, it seems that when romance novelists make the move into mainstream hardcover fiction, they feel obliged to throw in murders and paranormal stuff and goodness knows what-all else to justify the removal of that killer word "Romance" from the spines of their books. I've never quite understood this, but it seems rather a pity, particularly in Jayne Ann Krentz's books, which I read for the characters and family dynamics.

Lost and Found is set in the decorative arts and antiques world; Cady Briggs is an expert on authenticating pieces, Mack Easton runs a company that traces and retrieves lost and missing pieces, and they end up working together to investigate a death in Cady's family. The book follows the general pattern of a Krentz novel: Her protagonists are generally business men and women, stubborn, loyal, a bit wary after being burned in the past, with a tangle of demanding, complicated, and, dare I say it, quirky, familial relationships and friendships. They meet, sparks fly, they fall into bed (for really rather brief bouts of sex; I'd quote, but I don't know who might come across this. All I can say is I had no idea there were so many people satisfied by wham-bams, such that they keep showing up in these books.), they have spats, they fall into bed some more (for even briefer bouts), they figure out whatever external problem brought them together, they smooth out the longstanding tensions in their familial relationships with the aid of the other's insight, and then they live happily ever after.

This sounds cynical, but they're soothing and fairly entertaining reads. Krentz does have a sense of humor, and the emphasis on family is a good touch; many of the romance novels I devoured in my misspent youth (TM) seemed to imagine that the protagonists existed in vacuums, with other characters appearing solely as plot devices or convenient receptacles for exposition. Unfortunately, as with many prolific authors, the energy level and freshness of recent books has declined. If the general pattern described above sounds appealing, I recommend reading one of Krentz's early books, like The Golden Chance. Lost and Found certainly served the purpose of occupying my mind during a Sunday morning when I was feeling slightly ill, though, so I don't regret carting it home from the library. (I regret having to go back to the library because I'd left my wallet there, but that's another story.)

Posted at 2:01 PM | link and comments