Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

The seventh Lemony Snicket book, The Vile Village, continues to ramp up my interest in the ongoing plot. Someone named Snicket appears, more things with the initials V.F.D. pop up, Klaus has his thirteenth birthday, and Sunny learns to walk. And, of course, all of the adults are either actively harmful, or very kind and completely feckless. They really are the quintessential YA books in terms of the absent parent/adults-as-enemy theme.

I feel like I should slow down in reading these, because I don't want to have to wait for the release of new ones; there are still three more to come. But they're such quick and easy reads that it's hard to resist. We have the eighth out from the library as well, and it will probably be appearing here fairly soon.

I shall leave you with these words of wisdom:

Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion—which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea—you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.

Dorothy Sayers's second Wimsey novel, Clouds of Witness, was another lunchtime read. I liked this a lot better this reading, probably because this time I noticed the theme:

Truly enough the '47 port was a dead thing; the merest ghost of its old flame and flavor hung about it. Lord Peter held his glass poised for a moment.

"It is like the taste of a passion that has passed its noon and turned to weariness," he said, with sudden gravity. "The only thing to do is to recognize bravely that it is dead, and put it away." With a determined movement, he flung the remainder of the wine into the fire.

This is very much a book about the need to clear away old, bad passions and romances, and the unfortunate consequences of failing to do so. (I think, by the way, that this might be one way to read the odd ways a couple of the plot threads wrap up: rewards to the characters.) In a way, the opening is a clue, as Peter vacations in Corsica and "stud[ies] the vendetta in its natural habit," and then fetches up in Paris, which I tend to think of as representing elegantly decadent passion and romance. Of course, the first page made me snarf for a different reason, but that's not relevant right now.

This is a better mystery than Whose Body?, with its complications and obfuscations very much proceeding from its theme. I know some people, including Pam [spoilers at the end] and Truepenny [spoilers throughout], have complained about the opening and closing set-pieces, but I confess to a certain fondness for them; no surprise there, I suppose, as I am a trial lawyer, and you just don't get lines like "My lords, the barometer is falling" these days (or in this country). It's not a perfect plot by any means; besides the odd wrappings-up, Sayers appears to have completely forgotten the existence of one (1) broken bone and one (1) child, neither of which is really justifiable. But I'm inclined to give this a bit of pass, just because I appreciate the way this book moves the characters and sets the stage for later books.

(I'm reconsidering leaving my The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion at home, by the way. It's a gorgeous volume, very well done, but it's just not the same looking up references after the fact. On the other hand, I hate to bring it into work; it weighs a ton, it's too nice to leave in the bottom drawer of my battered filing cabinet, and dragging it out during quick lunches at my desk seems inexpressably geeky. Decisions, decisions . . . )

Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw is about, well, why don't you go look at the cover?

Yeah. It's about dragons that are people, specifically people in a Trollope novel, or what a Trollope novel might be if its characters were literal dragons. And, not-so-incidentally, ate each other. It is, in other words, a book in which the omniscient narrator can say

It has been baldly stated in this narrative that Penn and Sher were friends at school and later at the Circle, and being gentle readers and not cruel and hungry readers who would visit a publisher's office with the intention of rending and eating an author who had displeased them, you have taken this matter on trust.

and this reader, at least, laughs at the "gentle reader" reference while remarking on the tricky balance between the tone and the content.

The book open with a dispute over how much of a father's body should be eaten by each family member. From there spin out a lawsuit, social and religious dilemmas, hats, and numerous confessions and proposals (until one of the last chapters is titled "The Narrator Is Forced to Confess to Having Lost Count of Both Proposals and Confessions"). I agree with Chad that the end might wrap up a little too neatly, mostly because I don't quite understand why one character didn't tell another an important piece of news, but I love the end all the same: the resolutions are both what's expected for the genre, modulo the teeth and claws (or at least what I imagine that to be; I've never read Trollope [*]), and an inversion, or subversion, or progression, thereof. That doubtless makes no sense at all to people who haven't read the book, for which I apologize.

[*] Sherwood Smith has, and wrote an interesting review for the SF Site.

This is pretty well entirely unlike Walton's previous novels (The King's Peace and The King's Name, and The Prize in the Game), except in its meticulously observed narrative voice and excellently rounded characters and world. (I even liked Felin, and I was fully prepared to dislike her when we first met.) This was good light fun with deeper substance behind it, and a gorgeous cover to boot. Being a gentle reader, I could hardly ask for anything more.

One of the benefits of an ongoing series is that an author can build up an extended cast: for instant conflict, just put one of the cast in danger. Over the many "in Death" books, the friends and colleagues of Eve Dallas have been attacked by serial killers, charged with murder, and beaten up by her husband, Roarke. In the latest, Divided in Death, J.D. Robb turns to one of Roarke's most trusted employees, his admin Caro (who finally gets a last name): her daughter is framed for a double murder.

This is the first solo Robb book in hardcover [*], and perforce I checked it out of the library. (They're guilty pleasures, not worthy of purchase in hardcover; besides, I was counting on these to help fill up the paperback shelves.) I speculate that the jump to hardcover affected the plot. On the personal level, it's almost a reset in Eve and Roarke's relationship, as they have their most serious conflict since they got married. I have become steadily more annoyed with Roarke as the series has progressed, and this book didn't help that any. And on the mystery level, it has one of the more complicated plots that I can recall in these; which is not to say that it's terribly interesting or plausible, because it isn't. I really, really wish someone would dissuade Robb from doing computer-based plots, because they are just laughably bad.

Guilty, yes; pleasure, not so much. Too much angst—and just how long can Robb keep milking Eve's tragic past, anyway? Sheesh.—and too many things running up against my willing suspension of disbelief. The next book looks to be a more traditional serial killer story, judging by the excerpt in the back of this book, and maybe that will be a return to form.

[*] Remember When was co-written with Robb's other persona, Nora Roberts (her real name).

(But hey, these last few have been logged right after I finished the book in question. Except for half-a-dozen collections I'm partway through, and Sethra Lavode, which I will log when it's released, I'm all caught up and can start making a dent in all the new releases I've been eagerly awaiting.)