Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu’s Book Log
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
This post contains book-destroying SPOILERS for The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. If you got here by mistake, the non-spoiler post is here.
Continue reading “Jordan, Robert, and Brandon Sanderson: (12) The Gathering Storm (spoilers)”
I’m skipping over the backlog to talk about The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, while it’s still being discussed.
Long-time readers of this booklog will have noticed that this is the first time a new Wheel of Time book appears here. I stopped reading the series after Winter’s Heart, but had Chad tell me the plots during long car drives. The only thing that sounded interesting about Crossroads of Twilight, Perrin’s thread, also sounded painful, and while Knife of Dreams sounded like an improvement, by that point I had decided to wait until the series was finished.
Sadly, of course, Robert Jordan died before then, but left a great deal of material from which Brandon Sanderson is completing the series (in three volumes, projected to be out at year intervals). In preparation, I skimmed summaries and read selected chapters out of Knife, the prior book. While I have no desire to read the entire thing, I could tell that the pace had improved and was pleased that there were some very good bits: I would hate to be looking forward to the last volumes only because Sanderson was writing them, you know?
Thus, The Gathering Storm. Is it a Wheel of Time book? Yes, definitely; there are a few wobbles here and there, but the events very much feel part of the series to date. Is it a good Wheel of Time book? Yes, definitely. Exciting things happen, there’s strong character and plot movement, and it ends satisfyingly.
It’s easier to say (in this non-spoiler post) what didn’t work. I didn’t buy the couple of chapters Mat was in, and I’m not convinced that Sanderson has a handle on him yet. His dialogue was the only place where I was consistently jarred by the prose; as Chad pointed out in a spoiler post, the rhythm is all off. And both his behavior and the events he was facing seemed out-of-place to me. (Otherwise there were only a handful of times where the prose intruded on me, and I might be overreacting; after all, it has been a while since I really immersed myself in these books.) Some themes that I disliked in prior books are still here (“go away, Robert Jordan’s id! You are scary!”). And characters who were annoying before have not magically gotten clues between books. Alas.
But there is very satisfying fantasy-of-political-agency material; some genuine surprises—yes, it’s still possible to surprise readers, even after eleven books that have been very closely analyzed indeed; and tangible progress toward the Last Battle. Some of it was tough going emotionally, but not logistically, that is, I didn’t have any trouble following the plot (I’m not sure how much of that was Sanderson carefully sprinkingly in helpful reminders and how much was the relatively streamlined nature of the book, which principally focuses on Rand and Egwene). And in the second half particularly, I had a heck of a time putting it down for things like sleep. If you liked the series up to, say, Lord of Chaos, I think you’d like this.
A spoiler post follows.
Hot Pursuit is the fifteenth book in Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series and a bit of a departure, bumping the suspense in “romantic suspense” way, way up and featuring a character who’s already been happily and permanently paired off: Alyssa Locke is being stalked by a serial killer she pursued in her FBI days.
This book is interesting in the way it creates its tension: we’re promised, in the jacket copy, that the killer will catch Alyssa. But I, at least, didn’t know when, which kept me on the edge of my seat waiting for him to pop out from behind the corner, as it were.
That’s the part I enjoyed the most about this book. The principal secondary thread is a relationship between Dan Gillman, who has been rather a jerk for the recent part of the series and isn’t out of the jerk woods yet [*], and a new character named Jennilyn LeMay. This, well, isn’t complete, so I’ll withhold judgment.
[*] Despite a horribly anvilicious encounter with a small child who, in phonetic babytalk, lays bare (some of) his secret pain. Ack.
The other interesting thing about this book is the ending, which strikes me as the kind of thing that only an author with fourteen other books in the series, many about Alyssa herself, can get away with. (Spoilers, ROT-13: bgurejvfr univat ure uhfonaq erfphr ure sebz gur ovt onq frevny xvyyre juvyr fur vf urycyrff jbhyq unir n engure qvssrerag rssrpg.)
So: if you like the Troubleshooter books for their suspense or for Alyssa, you’ll like this one. I thought it was a fast entertaining library read.
I received a copy of Elegant Engimas: The Art of Edward Gorey through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, a shamefully long time ago, and was very pleasantly surprised when I received it to discover it was basically a hardcover exhibition catalog, in other words, much nicer than I was vaguely expecting.
As that may suggest, there are two significant parts to this book, an introductory essay and then a large number of reproduced images. The essay is by Karen Wilkin and is titled “Mildly Unsettling.” I think this gives you a reasonable way of calibrating your tastes against hers: as I’ve said before, I find Gorey’s art considerably more than mildly unsettling, so a lot of the ways Wilkin’s essay was useful to me was crystallizing the ways I didn’t agree with her, that is, didn’t have the same reactions. But it did a very good job of pointing out some characteristics of Gorey’s art that I would not have consciously identified and describing the breadth of Gorey’s work and some of his influences.
Between the essay and the images, I now have a short list of Gorey works that I want to see in their entirety:
The plates include some unpublished images, alternate covers and studies for later drawings; drawings that Gorey did for other authors; theater designs; and really cool illustrated envelopes he sent to his mother (never before printed). Oddly, nothing from The Curious Sofa is included, though it’s mentioned in the essay and presumably they would have had access (since other works also reprinted in Amphigorey are included). I can only assume that the exhibition didn’t want the controversy of displaying “pornographic” works, though they’re nothing of the sort.
This would be particularly good for library collections, but those who like Gorey’s work should definitely take a look.
This post contains book-destroying spoilers for Blue at the Mizzen by Patrick O’Brian. The non-spoiler post is here.
Continue reading “O’Brian, Patrick: (20) Blue at the Mizzen (spoilers)”
I have now read all of the novels in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series with the twentieth, Blue at the Mizzen. It’s better than the previous book, and doesn’t suck as either a book or an ending, but I’m not particularly crazy about it.
It’s hard not to see this book as the series in minature: there’s an odd reprise of the rushed ending of the last book, a long journey by sea, some politicking and battling, and some personal relationship stuff. But it feels a bit subdued to me: the political stuff is less vivid and clear than usual, and despite the importance of events to Jack’s life the book is very heavily focused on Stephen. Which includes consequences of the thing that happened in the last book that I hated, la la la I can’t hear you. (But if I could, I’d say that I also dislike them on their own merits.)
Finally, though I like the ending, it is extremely abrupt and convenient.
I’ll read or listen to the unfinished book at some point, but I’m not in any hurry.
A spoiler post follows.
The Language of Bees is the most recent book in Laurie R. King’s Russell/Holmes series, and it picks up a past reference that I thought she’d changed her mind about: Holmes’ lovely, lost son. The book indeed contains a careful, consistent, and completely unconvincing explanation why, nine books into a series, we’re only now hearing about said son in any detail. But, regardless, he’s back and needs help: his wife is missing.
This book is sort of the inverse of Locked Rooms, in that it’s principally about the psychological effects of a family-related mystery on one main character from the perspective of the other. I seem to have lost my feel for this version of Holmes since the last book in the series; this portrayal seems reasonable enough, but it doesn’t really delight me in that character-revelation kind of way that one might hope for, seeing an established character thrust into a difficult situation. But I was always more interested in Russell in these books, anyway.
There is an opening section involving Holmes’ bees, the relevance of which entirely escapes me; I suppose it must be thematic, but that feels clunky. (Or it’s just giving Russell something to do while Holmes is off getting the plot started.) And readers should be aware that the book literally ends on a “to be continued,” though it contains a reasonable amount of closure. On the whole, this book doesn’t change my general approach to the series, which is to get it out of the library.
My backlog here is kind of alarming, so I apologize for what’re likely to be some pretty sketchy catch-up posts.
Let’s start with Tamora Pierce’s Bloodhound, sequel to Terrier. Like that book, this is the diary of Beka Cooper, now a full Guardswoman. It takes place mostly outside of Corus, Tortall’s capital city, because she’s sent to help track down a counterfeiting ring.
I didn’t like this as well as the last one for a couple of reasons. It felt a little long and a little defensive about the importance and excitement of chasing counterfeiters. And for no reason that I can pinpoint, I find Beka’s diary entries about romance and sex acutely embarrassing: I don’t object to Pierce’s handling of these topics generally, it’s something about Beka’s narration. Which also reminds me that every time Beka mentioned that she was out really late and wrote this before sleeping or whatever, it wrecked my suspension of disbelief. She’s writing in a compressed cipher, sure, but it’s a 500+ page hardcover, and so I have a really hard time accepting that she’s actually handwriting out these entries in her copious free time.
My ancient notes to myself read “okay but never felt awesome,” and I’m going to stick by that impression now.
My review of David Anthony Durham’s Acacia is up at Tor.com. As I say there, my flippant one-line comment about the book is that it’s epic fantasy that lets me respect myself in the morning; my non-flippant comments run a full 1700 words.
METAtropolis is an original shared-world audio anthology edited by John Scalzi and containing standalone stories from Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, Scalzi, and Karl Schroeder. (No, I don’t know why the capitalization.) It has been nominated for a Hugo in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category and is available free (with site signup) at Audible.com. Unfortunately, it was not a successful listening experience for me.
The first story is Lake’s “In the Forests of the Night.” This founders on an extremely predictable problem: if you create a character who is an amazingly compelling speaker with a beautiful voice, you have to both write those astonishingly-convincing words and get an audiobook reader who can voice the words in the manner described. I don’t know whether Michael Hogan can, but he doesn’t. Since I coudn’t get past the crash and burn of my suspension of disbelief, I stopped listening.
Buckell’s “Stochasti-city” caught my interest when it started with its first-person narrator getting into trouble after taking a mysterious job. Unfortunately Scott Brick doesn’t voice the first-person narrator’s thoughts any differently from his speech, at least that I could hear. The third time I couldn’t figure out whether a statement was part of a conversation or internal monologue, I hit “skip.” (Brick is a highly prolific and very well-regarded audiobook narrator; maybe it’s just me, maybe he wasn’t on his game for this.)
I didn’t listen to Bear or Scalzi’s stories, so that left Schroeder’s “To Hie from Far Cilenia,” read by Stefan Rudnick. I did get all the way through this one, but I can’t call it a successful listening experience, because nothing happened. Our protagonist is hired to track down some missing plutonium, in the company of a woman who is looking for her son (as Farah Mendlesohn notes, “Men, it seems, have motives. Women have maternal feelings.”). Based on information from a captured minor player in the smuggling (which I never really followed why they trusted), they end up looking in ARGs, alternate reality games. Much time is spent describing ARGs generally and the ones they’re in specifically, and basically none on looking for the plutonium (or the son) in any systematic sensible way: from what I heard, I can only conclude that they just wandered around hoping. I was also dubious about the ability to “ride” other people remotely, i.e., using them to communicate your words and gestures; while this is presented as a good thing for autistic persons and the young, unskilled, uneducated, and alone, I would have liked to hear much more before accepting that conclusion. But in the end, whatever the merits of this story on the page, I did not enjoy it as audio because I couldn’t skim all the exposition and worldbuilding.
(Scalzi’s introduction didn’t help it any; it promised me mind-blowing ideas, but what I got was virtual reality technology putting overlays over the physical world, Internet nations, and the aforementioned riders. I’m not that up on hard SF these days, but even I recognize those as part of the recent-ish toolbox for the genre.)
The other nominees in this category are all movies: The Dark Knight (enjoyed but not sure how well it holds up; spoilers), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (pretty but dumb; spoilers), Iron Man (boring; spoilers), and WALL-E (did not see).