Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

In audiobook news, I most recently finished listening to Jeremy Irons reading James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. I grabbed it from Audible largely because I thought Irons' narration would be enjoyable—as indeed it was, though I'd forgotten that my primary association with Irons' voice was as the bad guy in The Lion King (yes, I know, I'm an uncultured lout), which was briefly disorienting.

(I can't remember whether I saw the movie or not, which probably means I didn't.)

I don't know that I have much to say about this: it's a Roald Dahl book, after all. There's a mistreated child, horrible adults who come to bad ends, and extreme and wacky weirdness. Despite the fantastic nature of the story, it has a certain concreteness in the characterizations and the way that the characters meet the problems of voyaging in a Giant Peach. Strangely, this made it disproportionately vexing when the story flat-out ignores the occasional physical impossibility. It is likely that the audio format gave me more time to dwell on these things, which wouldn't bother a general reader.

With that minor caveat, recommended.

Combining audiobook logging and backlog catchup, we have Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, read by Stephen Briggs. I read this when it first came out, and then listened to it several months later.

Going Postal is a stand-alone Discworld novel, in which (semi-)ex-con-man Moist von Lipwig is given the task of resurrecting Ankh-Morpork's Post Office. This is a monumental task, what with the two slightly crazy men who are all that's left of the staff, the mountains of undelivered mail, and the supernatural aspects of the building itself. And then there's the almost inadvertent, but certainly dangerous, competition that a revived Post Office poses to the Grand Trunk semaphore company and its chairman, Reacher Gilt.

I really enjoy a con story, so this was up my alley from the start. When I realized it was also a book about geeks of all kinds, plus had a rich brew of themes (communication and piracy, angels and messengers and deliver(y)(ance), tools and people, and above all, hope), well, I was thoroughly enamoured even before I got to the terrific climax. It's not a perfect book structurally: the Post Office's resurrection runs on two different parallel tracks, one mystic and one practical, and the mystic one drops out about two-thirds in, which feels a little odd. But it has chapters with "in which" subheadings, and a hysterical Lord of the Rings movie joke, and this passage that I will think of forevermore when reading corporate-speak:

If Moist von Lipwig had been raised to be a clown, he'd have visited shows and circuses and watched the kings of fooldom. He'd have marveled at the elegant trajectory of the custard pie, memorized the new business with the ladder and the bucket of whitewash, and watched with care every carelessly juggled egg. While the rest of the audience watched the display with the appropriate feelings of terror, anger, and exasperation, he'd make notes.

Now, like an apprentice staring at the work of a master, he read Reacher Gilt's words on the still-damp newspaper.

It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. Oh, yes. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although "synergistically" had probably been a whore from the start. The Grand Trunk's problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, "well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error"—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting "fundamental systemic errors" committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and "were to be regretted." [*]

[*] Another bastard phrase that'd sell itself to any weasel in a tight corner.

 . . . .

It was masterly . . . the bastard.

"Er . . . are you okay? Could you stop shouting?" said Miss Dearheart.

"What?" The mists cleared. . . .

"You were shouting," said Miss Dearheart. "Swearing, in fact."

I really, really like this book. I also think it would be a pretty good entry point to the Discworld series.

As for the audiobook, Pratchett's novels lend themselves well to being read aloud, with their light omniscient POV and their wordplay that I sometimes miss in the rush of plot. I'd tried listening to Jingo, but the narrator (Nigel Planer) didn't sound like Vimes to me, an entirely personal reaction. Briggs is also a good narrator, and with the exception of Death (who I doubt anyone could do properly), none of his characters jarred me. (His Reacher Gilt was particularly nice.) I may have enjoyed this book even more on audio.

Oh, and after reading Going Postal, I re-read The Truth, wondering if it was too similar, being a stand-alone about the starting of Ankh-Morpork's newspaper industry. I don't think it is; the plot of the book, which is Yet Another attempt to get rid of Lord Vetinari (the last to date, I believe), isn't as tightly woven with the newspaper stuff. Also, it's just not as good, since I couldn't remember the plot at all before I started re-reading.

The best 50 cents I've spent this year went to buy Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising at the fundraiser outside the school budget vote. This was Clancy's second book, a brick of a WWIII story published in the late 1980s—back when someone could claim that if NATO were neutralized by a successful invasion of Germany, America wouldn't react to an invasion of the Persian Gulf aimed at taking over the oil fields. (A catastrophic oil-field fire is the event that kicks off the novel.) When I was a kid, I read my dad's copy and enjoyed it; now, I was able to parcel it out over a couple of weeks as bedtime reading. It was perfect for that purpose: absolutely no characters to get emotionally involved with, a story that I remembered the broad outlines of, and soothing little tactical puzzles or military info-dumping in convenient chapter-sized chunks. (Also, its politics aren't distracting, being limited to a strong sympathy for the professional military ethos and a distaste for the political system of the USSR.) I've just acquired copies of The Hunt for Red October and (though I'm somewhat ashamed to admit to reading later Clancy novels) Rainbow Six, and look forward to many more weeks of soothing bedtime technobabble.

I have Audible's new audiobooks as an RSS feed, so when I saw a novella by Donald Westlake pop up, I promptly headed to the library. While picking up the anthology Transgressions, edited by Ed McBain, I also discovered with great delight a new Dortmunder novel, Watch Your Back!, which I hadn't known existed. A good library day.

The novella in Transgressions is "Walking Around Money," and is a moderately typical Dortmunder story, centered around a counterfeiting scam, double-crosses, you know the drill. Good for lunch reading, but not much beyond that.

The only other novella I read in the Transgressions anthology was Stephen King's "The Things They Left Behind". I was initially nervous when I realized that it was a September 11th story, and parts of it don't quite come together for me—but it made me sniffle once or twice at the end, so it was worth the read.

The new Westlake novel, Watch Your Back!, is a much more satisfying piece of work than the last Dortmunder novel, Road to Ruin. Here, the (formerly) loathsome fence Arnie Albright hands Dortmunder and Co. an extremely easy job. However, Dortmunder's concentration is badly disrupted by the mob's taking over the O.J. Bar and Grill, the group's usual place to meet and plan. Obviously, he simply must Do Something (sorry, briefly channeling Sorcery and Cecelia, there), and with what effect on the paying job . . . ?

It's not a hugely clever book, but it moves along well and it's satisfying to see justice being served, Dortmunder-universe fashion. I'll be interested to see what happens to the young character introduced here, who has the potential to be the first apprentice crook in the series to date (unless I'm seriously misremembering). I am deeply relieved that the Brain Eater appears not to have gotten Westlake after all.

Oh, regarding the title and its exclamation point: according to Westlake's webpage, which will change soon enough,

there are two meanings for that phrase, the American meaning and the New York meaning (America and New York are always at odds, so why not here?), and it was the New York meaning I meant. In America, "watch your back" means be careful, someone means to do you harm. In New York, it means, "Comin' through!" Move over, in other words, or get hurt. I added the exclamation point in an attempt to juke the reader toward the New York meaning.

And now for something different: Saiyuki (volume 1), by Kazuya Minekura, a.k.a. my very first manga.

A number of smart people I know on LiveJournal read and talk interestingly about manga, and after reading Mely's post on what appealed to her about anime and manga, I thought I might give manga a try sometime. Not so long ago, Borders had a sale on graphic novels, and after some recommendations and serious in-store browsing, I ended up with four opening volumes, spanning a reasonable range of the genre. (The others were Planetes (near-future sf), Hana-Kimi (romantic comedy), and Revolutionary Girl Utena (fantasy).)

I picked up Saiyuki because it fit the fantasy-action niche, I'd seen it widely recommended, and Mely made it sound like a lot of fun:

Summary: A whacked-out retelling of the Chinese classic, The Journey to the West, in which the four protagonists travel in a jeep (which is also a dragon) across an anachronistic ancient Chinese landscape in order to save the world from a plague of insanity that's descended on the formerly peaceful youkai (demons). Or at least as peaceful as humans, which -- okay, not so much with the peaceful. But formerly sane. In Minekura's version, the holy monk Genjo Sanzo gambles, smokes, drinks, curses, and shoots people at the slightest provocation; about the only sin he doesn't commit is unchastity, and that's clearly because he doesn't like people enough to let any of them touch him. The Chinese trickster figure, the Monkey King, is a naive teenager with an endless appetite and an extremely violent alter ego. The kappa (water sprite) Sha Gojyo is a womanizing gambler with a vulgar mouth and a heart of gold; the last companion, Cho Hakkai, is a soft-spoken, well-mannered scholar with by far the most violent and disturbing past of the four; Kanzeon Bosatsu, the goddess of Mercy, is a hermaphrodite with a wicked sense of humor and a taste for transparent dresses.

Also, for those looking for plot connections to Journey to the West, the people creating the plague of insanity (as a side effect to trying to free a seriously bad-news youkai) are using the stolen holy scripture of Sanzo's murdered master.

I spent a good while browsing this in the store, to see if I could get used to reading right-to-left and if I could parse the black-and-white drawings. I'd previously flipped through randomly-selected manga and foundered visually on both these aspects. I decided that I could probably manage, and the snark of the characters appealed, so I brought it home.

Normally I'd wait and log the entire series, rather than just the first volume (as I'm doing with Lucifer), but since this is my first manga, I thought I would note down my experience processing a new form of art while it was still fresh.

Manga is quite different visually from Western-style comics; Mely (again) has a post on visual conventions that I found very helpful, when I remembered its existence halfway through reading Saiyuki. The most important piece of advice I got out of that post is that the first thing to look at is not the text, or even individual panels, but the entire page. This is rather hard for me to do—I'm a very text-oriented person—but it really is far more difficult, if not impossible, to read this type of manga without considering the page as a whole first. Once I remembered to do this, there were only a very few panels that I had difficulty with—mostly action scenes. (There were also one or two very narrow panels close to the inside edge that I nearly missed, because I don't like to crack spines of my books. While manga often goes straight to the edges of the page, I've also heard it said that Tokyopop's binding is sub-optimal in this regard.) Generally speaking, even (or especially) to my ignorant eyes, Minekura does a very nice job with making the characters look individual in black-and-white (a problem I'd had with some other manga I browsed), and with composing panels (look! more Mely posts! One, two, three close readings of pages from a later volume of Saiyuki).

[Edit: telophase also has interesting things to say about Saiyuki in a Manga Analysis Series; I haven't read the other posts in the series yet.]

Perhaps the other main point of note about reading manga is the prevalence of sound effects. In this edition, they're left untranslated, with translation notes keyed at the back by page number. I mostly gave up on the sound effects, because the vast majority of the pages didn't have a page number displayed, making it too much work to look up the meanings. Also, the sounds I did look up didn't seem to add a lot to my comprehension of the panel.

(I think my understanding would also be enhanced by knowing more about the clothes that the characters are wearing—including the crown-like thing Sanzo wears—so if anyone has explanations or links to references, it would be appreciated.)

Overall, reading this took more effort and a different kind of attention than reading Lucifer, but it was not unduly difficult or burdensome. And it is pretty.

What about the story itself? I enjoyed it and want to know more about the characters. Structurally, the volume has its peculiarities: the prologue is oddly redundant, and the main body of the story is made up of two somewhat-similar episodes: the four pause on their journey, get attacked by youkai, kick butt, and provide a Valuable Life Lesson for the people around them. However, they get through these episodes with snark (like deducting points from the assassin in the second episode: "Poor maniacal laugh. Minus 15.") and tantalizing hints about their backstory and what's to come. What will happen regarding the debt that Gojyo so pointedly tells Sanzo he'll need to repay? Why are Goku, Gojyo, and Hakkai the only youkai who aren't going insane? How did they all meet in the first place? What's going on with the divisions among the bad guys?

I'll be indulging my narrative craving very soon: starting tomorrow, Borders is discounting books 20% for Public Service Workers, so I'll grab volumes two through eight [*]. I should have no great problem stretching them out until next month, when the concluding volume is released. (There's a sequel, which has been licensed for US distribution, and a prequel (incomplete at one volume?), which has not.) I'm looking forward to it.

[*] Ten dollars per volume is less expensive than Western-style graphic novel collections, both absolutely and probably in value as well, but it still adds up; and Amazon appears not to discount manga.

I recently finished listening to Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, narrated by Patrick Tull, which was excellent. I'd read the first three of O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, and though I'd enjoyed them, I also didn't remember a thing about them and had no real urge to keep going. I got the audiobook of Master and Commander out of the library, thinking it might get me interested in the series again—and also, if it worked, there were lots and lots of them to fill my commute.

Audio is a good way for me to experience these, because I'm not able to skim past the nautical stuff. Moreover, by listening to the narration, I can get a fairly good picture of what's going on, which is enjoyable and exciting. Hearing the prose also lets me savor the humor (including some jokes I probably missed the first time) and the skillful way O'Brian uses omniscient point-of-view to show the life of the ship. In the future, however, I may read/skim the books I haven't read yet to get the big picture and remove the tension, and then listen to the audio versions for the fine details. Since I remembered so little about this book, I got perhaps too caught up in the story, to the point where I kept wanting to tell random people confidingly, "I'm worried about James Dillon."

Dillon is the Lieutenant on the Sophie, Jack Aubrey's first command, and one of the things I'd forgotten was how much of the book, the first in the Aubrey-Maturin [*] series, is concerned with someone other than Aubrey or Maturin. I'm not quite happy with the Dillon arc, absorbing as it was; the setup is straight out of Dunnett or Kay, while the resolution is entirely plausible but of a different genre.

The book is very episodic, covering the course of Jack's command of the Sophie; the movie (which I enjoyed vastly) picks out specific incidents and uses them to ornament an entirely different plot framework. If I had more time, I would love to plot out the way that the ship's fortunes rise and fall over the course of the book, as I think it might prove instructive. Even the slowish start, of getting the Sophie ready to sail, has its hills and valleys; and by the end of the book, we're heading up mountains and down crevasses. It was highly absorbing and I really enjoyed it.

[*] Oh, and Aubrey and Maturin aren't anything other than platonic friends. I consider this indisputable, since a minor thread concerns how the ship's Master has a terrible crush on Aubrey, which is blindingly obvious to everyone except Jack, even though Jack perfectly well knows the Master's sexual orientation (not that any of the characters use that term). Can't get any straighter than that.

Brief notes on some other audiobooks, while we're on the topic: So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane, narrated by Christina Moore. This is very nicely read indeed (I particularly liked Fred's voice) and works better as a book than I'd remembered. Moore reads all of these, but I've bogged down partway into the next, Deep Wizardry, because I really want to yell at Nita and that's harder to take in the slow pace of an audiobook.

Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls is read by Kate Reading, who doesn't do a very good job distinguishing between the two main male characters' voices; Ista's voice is also just a touch throatier than I like. The talky bit in the middle, while probably unavoidable, seems to work less well on audio than the comparable bit in Chalion (which audiobook I really enjoyed). However, the Bastard is voiced very well, for which I will forgive a good deal.

On my drive out to and around Massachusetts this past week, I listened to The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, read by Lisette Lecat. This is the first in the highly popular series of novels set in Botswana and featuring Mma [*] Ramotswe, who opens a detective agency upon her father's death.

[*] One-syllable honorific/title of polite address. Press your lips together on the drawn-out "mm" and pop them out on the "a".

Lecat is a charming narrator who does an excellent job with all the different voices, and the book is a quite leisurely listen, much less demanding than Patrick O'Brian. Its portrait of life in Botswana is lovely.

Most of the time I enjoyed what I was hearing, but overall this failed to satisfy. Structurally, this is not a mystery novel, but a chronicle of an indeterminate time in the life of a private detective. It opens with a short description of one of her earlier cases, which failed to impress me: as I drove, I told Mma Ramotswe out loud, "That only worked because he was stupid, and you don't seem to realize that." Not an auspicious start.

Then it spends was a long (maybe two hours?) time on Mma Ramotswe's biography: her father's life in the South African mines and why he came home (an interesting first-person reminiscence); her raising by "the cousin" (who, despite wanting women to have a better lot and carefully educating the young Precious Ramotswe, is never given a name); and her disastrous marriage (which fails to ring psychologically true to me).

Then Mma Ramotswe opens her detective agency and another early case is described, which again struck me as less than plausible. Also at about this point is a chapter describing the abduction of a young boy. His father writes Mma Ramotswe looking for help, but she decides she can't do anything. For the next couple of hours, nothing further happened on this front, and I was convinced that was all we were going to get on the topic, which seemed rather a cheat. That plot does come back, but I can't really say it gets resolved: the concluding event is quite different than what the book led me to expect, and the reasons for this difference aren't explained. Immediately after the event, there's a similarly abrupt and unexpected personal development, and then the book just ends.

I wish I liked this better, because Lecat's narration is so enjoyable, but I am distinctly underwhelmed.

All Shall Be Well, by Deborah Crombie, is a mystery novel featuring two members of Scotland Yard, Superintendent Duncan James (Superintendent appears not to be a terminal rank, unlike at a U.S. school or prison) and Sergeant Gemma James. I saw a later novel in this series reviewed as an audiobook, and thought it sounded interesting enough to check the first book out of the library.

This is actually the second book in the series; I don't know where I got the idea it was the first. It appears to stand alone. This is a short, tight novel about the life and death of Jasmine Dent, a neighbor of Duncan's who was terminally ill with cancer. It looks like suicide, but Duncan has his doubts, and as you might expect from the genre, he's right.

The exploration of Jasmine's life unfolds satisfyingly, and Duncan and James are perfectly agreeable. I think the mystery is probably fair, though I didn't bother trying to figure it out since I expected the revelations of the past to hold the vital clue. This struck me as nicely understated and somehow respectful. It was a pleasant way to pass a subway ride and a lunch, and I might pick up more later, but I'm in no great hurry.

Another of Suzanne Brockmann's "Troubleshooters" novels, Over the Edge. Hey, one where I actually liked the main romance the most! A hijacked plane is landed in the fictional country of Kazbekistan, and the SEALS are called in, along with Reserve helicopter pilot Teri Howe. She's a great pilot but less assertive when off-duty; through her friendship and then love with Senior Chief Stan Wolchonok, she grows into an all-around kickass person.

Brockmann is slightly too fond of the embarassing public declaration of feelings (or perhaps I just get embarassed easily on characters' behalfs), but generally speaking I found this a lot more engaging than the primary relationships in prior books, or the secondary threads here. In those, Sam and Alyssa continue to be the great angst puppets of the series; though I'm guessing that Max Bhagat (FBI negotiator) and Gina Vitagliano (hostage) are going to give them a run for their money, since they are the primary thread in the new book coming out next month, several books after this one.

The WWII plot thread was the German occupation of Denmark, and I did a lot of skimming because I am easily distractable at lunchtimes these days and I do that a lot with parallel (in the mathematical sense) storylines.

Three of Laurie R. King's Russell/Holmes novels, originally read a while ago and now re-read in anticipation of getting the latest, Locked Rooms, out of the library soon: O Jerusalem, Justice Hall, and The Game.

O Jerusalem is a flashback novel, set chronologically during the first, The Beekeeper's Apprentice. Russell and Holmes go to Jerusalem to hide from their Beekeeper's adversary, and have adventures with two apparent-nomads, the Hazrs. This is exciting and absorbing, with a vivid portrayal of the setting; it should be noted, however, that it is primarily about adventuring rather than detecting.

Justice Hall is set after The Moor, the fourth Russell/Holmes novel, but closely concerns characters from O Jerusalem in a way that generates more than a little whiplash (and not just because King had a better idea about their first names between Beekeeper's and here). I think this may be my favorite to date, a solid and moving exploration of family secrets and obligations in an English manor house whose inhabitants are still feeling the effects of WWI. For those who care about such things, there is very little Holmes in this novel.

The Game is King's homage to Kipling's Kim, as Russell and Holmes hunt for a missing Kimball O'Hara. This is much like O Jerusalem, except in India of course, as Russell and Holmes see the country and have adventures and do little in the way of detecting. It is also engrossing, sensual, and fun, but I was slightly concerned on three fronts: first, the prologue suggests that the framing device, that someone is sending Russell's manuscripts to King, is being dropped; second, there are some unresolved questions and loose ends; and third, Russell and Holmes are going to have nervous breakdowns from having three cases in a row with basically no recovery time! (It's my guess that Locked Rooms will address some or all of these, though not always as I'd like—I am concerned at reports that it is partly in third-person Holmes POV. Well, we'll see when a library copy becomes available.)