This came off my wishlist in part because I was in the mood for something simple and relaxing, and these stories delivered. I find the style of the late 19th and early 20th century to be comforting and welcoming, most likely as a result of having been read too much Dickens as a child. I also enjoy stories about women doing things.
Unfortunately, when someone makes a choice like having a female detective, especially in the 19th century, you have to ask why. In some of the stories, it was clear that it was novelty: there were, even in the 19th century, plenty of male detectives and fewer female ones. Your female detective would stand out. But Lois Cayley, for example, is a Cambridge-educated young woman, who's broke and over-educated. Her friend asks her at the beginning of the story if she's going to teach, since that's one of the few career paths open for an intelligent, educated woman. Cayley's determined to make her own way, even if that means becoming a lady's maid for the present. Cayley questions gender roles - does it really have to be teaching? - but takes on a feminine position.
Contrast Madelyn Mack. There seems to be no reason why she should be a woman. She's educated, intelligent, supercilious (Weir, the author, has modeled her on Holmes, fairly obviously - she makes similar leaps and has a slightly less intelligent friend), deductive. There's no issue made of her gender, though her friend Nora says that she had been expecting someone masculine and got a very beautiful, feminine woman. No one ever doubts her competence or suggests that the crime scene is too terrible for her to see. It's actually quite refreshing: later authors often make too much of the gender of their characters.
As to the plots of the stories, well, some of them are better than others. Many of them are not particularly, well, mysterious. Sometimes the solution works itself out with very little interference.
Madelyn's story is one of the best; Weir's plot is clever, if a bit Conan-Doyle flavored. I was also partial to Anna Katherine Green's The Second Bullet, which was quite depressing, but very clever. Richard Marsh's The Man Who Cut My Hair was weak - it depends entirely on the unlikely ability of the heroine, is less a mystery than a case of the girl being in the right place at either the right or wrong time, and uses the loss of the main character's hair as a plot device. As a whole, though, the collection was interesting and entertaining.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Worst of 2011
To be honest, I had a very even-keeled year in books: nothing spectacular, nothing awful. I put down boring things, and managed to avoid buying "so bad it's good" things. I'm sure I can find five books I hated, though.
1. Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm and The Lady of the Shroud
The Lair of the White Worm is about ghosts or something, and The Lady of the Shroud is, you think, about ghosts or something but then it turns out to be about juvenile fantasies of becoming king and getting a really pretty wife.
Both of these were awful; the first was racist even for the 19th century - it involved a white woman being absolutely disgusted by a black man, who was described in hateful terms. The second was questionable: there were hints of the noble savage, though in Eastern Europe rather than America or, god forbid, Africa. An Englishman comes in and takes over for the natives, who all think he's the best thing since sliced bread? I don't think so. And, perhaps their worst fault, both of them were absolutely boring. One might say that Dracula is slow; these were positively glacial, with no reward to show for it at the end. And the titular Lady had, it seemed, literal stars in her eyes. This was one of the few things I give one star to.
2. Felix Gilman, Thunderer
It's about rebellion, and magic, and gods, and politics. How did it manage to be so dull?
One of the reasons is that his prose is, while not terrible, nothing to write home about; another is that he chose to write three different perspectives, which rarely works well; another, that his characters are boring and have incomprehensible motivations. Evidently the sentence "They had sex" appeared. It could be argued that the flat tone was purposeful, but I don't think it was; Gilman didn't seem to have that much control over language. Also, because he was trying to write three strands in 300 pages, plot elements were lost, or give short shrift, and the characters were underdeveloped. A fairly major character dies, but it has little emotional weight because the reader's been given nothing to care about. However, his worldbuilding was quite interesting, and there were hints of something I'd want to read; it's a shame they didn't come through more. Two stars.
3. Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Wizard Lord
The Chosen come together to defeat a Dark Lord.
The plot sounds boring, but the ideas sounded interesting enough for me to buy it, and it was clear that the plot was just a vessel for the ideas. The Chosen aren't chosen by fate; they're positions appointed to keep the Wizard Lord in check. We start out by getting a new Swordsman, who is a farm-boy, but not in a boring way; he then wanders around a fairly interesting world (no over-arching ruler or government, each village has very different customs, taboos, naming traditions) to try to find the other Chosen. It turns out, to no one's great surprise, that the Wizard Lord has gone bad - and cartoonishly bad at that. He killed an entire village because he was bullied as a child, which is the most boring attempt to make a grey villain I've ever read. One of the Chosen argues that maybe he should be left alone, since he hasn't done anything bad since then, which, again, is an incredibly shallow attempt at adding moral depth. There was also the obvious (even to this fairly oblivious reader) twist that one of the Chosen was working with the Wizard Lord. Everything about the book could be called shallow - plot, characters, morality, prose. Two stars, if only because I enjoyed it while I was reading it, and it seemed so...earnest.
4. Ekaterina Sedia, ed, Paper Cities
There were at least 15 stories in this collection, which was supposed to be about Cities, and I liked maybe two of them. A very poor ratio.
Much of the problem was expectations: I wanted city-as-character, as in Viriconium, the Paradys cycle, or even, though I don't particularly like it, Ambergis. What I got was things that...had cities in them, for the most part. Some of the stories were bad, some merely indifferent. Hal Duncan, for example, had decent ideas, but he thinks that the most obscure word is the best one, which is not always the case. I had high hopes for the collection, but they were dashed. Two stars, because I didn't hate everything.
5. Ciaran Carson, Fishing for Amber
Retellings of Greek myths and Irish stories and history, all connected somehow with amber.
This is mainly on my worst-of list for lost potential. It could have been amazing, but it ended up boring, because of flat prose and a derivative nature. The Greek sections were straight from Ovid, with the color stripped from them; the Irish were fairly lively retellings of fairy tales, but were only interesting because of the original story; the historical parts read like a school report. He never varied his voice: part of the story was told by an old sailor, who read exactly the same as the narrator. Good ideas were betrayed by lackluster prose. Two stars.
1. Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm and The Lady of the Shroud
The Lair of the White Worm is about ghosts or something, and The Lady of the Shroud is, you think, about ghosts or something but then it turns out to be about juvenile fantasies of becoming king and getting a really pretty wife.
Both of these were awful; the first was racist even for the 19th century - it involved a white woman being absolutely disgusted by a black man, who was described in hateful terms. The second was questionable: there were hints of the noble savage, though in Eastern Europe rather than America or, god forbid, Africa. An Englishman comes in and takes over for the natives, who all think he's the best thing since sliced bread? I don't think so. And, perhaps their worst fault, both of them were absolutely boring. One might say that Dracula is slow; these were positively glacial, with no reward to show for it at the end. And the titular Lady had, it seemed, literal stars in her eyes. This was one of the few things I give one star to.
2. Felix Gilman, Thunderer
It's about rebellion, and magic, and gods, and politics. How did it manage to be so dull?
One of the reasons is that his prose is, while not terrible, nothing to write home about; another is that he chose to write three different perspectives, which rarely works well; another, that his characters are boring and have incomprehensible motivations. Evidently the sentence "They had sex" appeared. It could be argued that the flat tone was purposeful, but I don't think it was; Gilman didn't seem to have that much control over language. Also, because he was trying to write three strands in 300 pages, plot elements were lost, or give short shrift, and the characters were underdeveloped. A fairly major character dies, but it has little emotional weight because the reader's been given nothing to care about. However, his worldbuilding was quite interesting, and there were hints of something I'd want to read; it's a shame they didn't come through more. Two stars.
3. Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Wizard Lord
The Chosen come together to defeat a Dark Lord.
The plot sounds boring, but the ideas sounded interesting enough for me to buy it, and it was clear that the plot was just a vessel for the ideas. The Chosen aren't chosen by fate; they're positions appointed to keep the Wizard Lord in check. We start out by getting a new Swordsman, who is a farm-boy, but not in a boring way; he then wanders around a fairly interesting world (no over-arching ruler or government, each village has very different customs, taboos, naming traditions) to try to find the other Chosen. It turns out, to no one's great surprise, that the Wizard Lord has gone bad - and cartoonishly bad at that. He killed an entire village because he was bullied as a child, which is the most boring attempt to make a grey villain I've ever read. One of the Chosen argues that maybe he should be left alone, since he hasn't done anything bad since then, which, again, is an incredibly shallow attempt at adding moral depth. There was also the obvious (even to this fairly oblivious reader) twist that one of the Chosen was working with the Wizard Lord. Everything about the book could be called shallow - plot, characters, morality, prose. Two stars, if only because I enjoyed it while I was reading it, and it seemed so...earnest.
4. Ekaterina Sedia, ed, Paper Cities
There were at least 15 stories in this collection, which was supposed to be about Cities, and I liked maybe two of them. A very poor ratio.
Much of the problem was expectations: I wanted city-as-character, as in Viriconium, the Paradys cycle, or even, though I don't particularly like it, Ambergis. What I got was things that...had cities in them, for the most part. Some of the stories were bad, some merely indifferent. Hal Duncan, for example, had decent ideas, but he thinks that the most obscure word is the best one, which is not always the case. I had high hopes for the collection, but they were dashed. Two stars, because I didn't hate everything.
5. Ciaran Carson, Fishing for Amber
Retellings of Greek myths and Irish stories and history, all connected somehow with amber.
This is mainly on my worst-of list for lost potential. It could have been amazing, but it ended up boring, because of flat prose and a derivative nature. The Greek sections were straight from Ovid, with the color stripped from them; the Irish were fairly lively retellings of fairy tales, but were only interesting because of the original story; the historical parts read like a school report. He never varied his voice: part of the story was told by an old sailor, who read exactly the same as the narrator. Good ideas were betrayed by lackluster prose. Two stars.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Best of 2011
I rarely do best-ofs. I hate being constrained to five stars on Goodreads. I find it hard to quantify quality. That being said, here's my top five for the year:
1. Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
The book is about a thief who becomes lost in time, a magical-realist New York City, and a splendid white horse. More than that I can't say.
What I love best is beautiful prose. This delivered in spades. If I had to detract from its beauties, I might say that the characters are sketched more than well-drawn; but, though I hate to say things like this, the characters weren't what it's about: it's about a world of magic and winter and beauty. It evokes the feeling of cold through its prose.
2. Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole
A linguist becomes lost on a trip to Helsinki and finds himself in a city where no intelligible language is spoken.
I hesitate to put this, if only because I finished it yesterday, so I don't know if it will stand out for me in a month's time. However, I think it will: again, not about plot, but about language. It's about the possibility of communication; it's about alienation; it's about desperation. If it has faults, it's in the end, which is rather abrupt; but since the plot is unimportant, it's very hard to end. It is a testimony to Karinthy's skill that a book with only one character is gripping all the way through.
3. The Fantastic Imagination II
It's perhaps unfair to put a collection as one of your best books of the year, but this one was nearly flawless. The Fantastic Imagination I and II are collections of mainly older fantasy stories, with a couple of contemporary stores at the end. They give an excellent introduction to the history of the genre. II especially was well-selected; there was, I think, only one story that really disappointed me. I included the fantastic Come Lady Death, by Peter S. Beagle, but that was the only stand-out, while I enjoyed Lord Dunsany's story, C. L. Moore's enough to buy a full book, and certainly Ursula Le Guin's.
4. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmund Dantès is framed and imprisoned for being a supporter of Napoleon; while in prison he learns of a fabulous treasure. He gets out and uses it to take revenge on those who have wronged him.
The Count of Monte Cristo is perhaps the most famous revenge fantasy ever. It's a thousand pages that fly by. I love Dumas' style; it's comfort reading for me. Surprisingly, it's not particularly swash-buckling: much of it is financial intrigue and people being cutting at balls. Fortunately, I like financial intrigue and people being cutting at balls. It's interesting how much of Dumas is based on money. Forcing people to ruin themselves is also a large part of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne.
5. Angelica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial
A series of stories about emperors of a certain city.
She manages variation of character in her emperors; they're not one-dimensional ruler-stereotypes but rather living and breathing people. The world conveyed through the stories feels real and strong; she succeeds by half-telling things in giving a feel of history. That is, she doesn't tell all the history, but that's because it's been lost, and there's a real sense of its having once existed. The whole history of our world isn't known, but there's a sense of history in everything; that same sense was present in this. And besides, her prose is gorgeous.
Tomorrow: Five worst, because I'm far better at being cutting than at gushing. Both are hard, however, since I had more of a mediocre reading year than anything. I read a lot, but nothing particularly stands out as terrible or amazing.
1. Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
The book is about a thief who becomes lost in time, a magical-realist New York City, and a splendid white horse. More than that I can't say.
What I love best is beautiful prose. This delivered in spades. If I had to detract from its beauties, I might say that the characters are sketched more than well-drawn; but, though I hate to say things like this, the characters weren't what it's about: it's about a world of magic and winter and beauty. It evokes the feeling of cold through its prose.
2. Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole
A linguist becomes lost on a trip to Helsinki and finds himself in a city where no intelligible language is spoken.
I hesitate to put this, if only because I finished it yesterday, so I don't know if it will stand out for me in a month's time. However, I think it will: again, not about plot, but about language. It's about the possibility of communication; it's about alienation; it's about desperation. If it has faults, it's in the end, which is rather abrupt; but since the plot is unimportant, it's very hard to end. It is a testimony to Karinthy's skill that a book with only one character is gripping all the way through.
3. The Fantastic Imagination II
It's perhaps unfair to put a collection as one of your best books of the year, but this one was nearly flawless. The Fantastic Imagination I and II are collections of mainly older fantasy stories, with a couple of contemporary stores at the end. They give an excellent introduction to the history of the genre. II especially was well-selected; there was, I think, only one story that really disappointed me. I included the fantastic Come Lady Death, by Peter S. Beagle, but that was the only stand-out, while I enjoyed Lord Dunsany's story, C. L. Moore's enough to buy a full book, and certainly Ursula Le Guin's.
4. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmund Dantès is framed and imprisoned for being a supporter of Napoleon; while in prison he learns of a fabulous treasure. He gets out and uses it to take revenge on those who have wronged him.
The Count of Monte Cristo is perhaps the most famous revenge fantasy ever. It's a thousand pages that fly by. I love Dumas' style; it's comfort reading for me. Surprisingly, it's not particularly swash-buckling: much of it is financial intrigue and people being cutting at balls. Fortunately, I like financial intrigue and people being cutting at balls. It's interesting how much of Dumas is based on money. Forcing people to ruin themselves is also a large part of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne.
5. Angelica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial
A series of stories about emperors of a certain city.
She manages variation of character in her emperors; they're not one-dimensional ruler-stereotypes but rather living and breathing people. The world conveyed through the stories feels real and strong; she succeeds by half-telling things in giving a feel of history. That is, she doesn't tell all the history, but that's because it's been lost, and there's a real sense of its having once existed. The whole history of our world isn't known, but there's a sense of history in everything; that same sense was present in this. And besides, her prose is gorgeous.
Tomorrow: Five worst, because I'm far better at being cutting than at gushing. Both are hard, however, since I had more of a mediocre reading year than anything. I read a lot, but nothing particularly stands out as terrible or amazing.
First Post
Welcome, Potential Reader! You may be asking if the blogosphere really needs another book blog, especially one that, for the most part, focuses on fantasy novels. I of course think that the answer is yes. This is because I'm not going to write about new releases, or at least not only about new releases. I read a lot, fairly indiscriminately; my to-read pile currently ranges from Georgette Heyer to Hermann Hesse. It is my mission to write, in at least a little depth, about everything I read this year.
On Ratings: I have trouble rating, especially on a five star scale. I'll use seven stars here: Seven, is, of course, "Love;" six, "Great enthusiasm," five, "Great," four "good," three "competent but nothing to write home about," two, "poor but not awful," one, "irredeemable." Both extremes are rare. Further, I have trouble rating, say, Magister Ludi and The Black Moth. Certainly Magister Ludi is a better book; but I enjoyed both a comparable amount, though in different ways. I'll try to break my ratings down into the components of my enjoyment.
On Ratings: I have trouble rating, especially on a five star scale. I'll use seven stars here: Seven, is, of course, "Love;" six, "Great enthusiasm," five, "Great," four "good," three "competent but nothing to write home about," two, "poor but not awful," one, "irredeemable." Both extremes are rare. Further, I have trouble rating, say, Magister Ludi and The Black Moth. Certainly Magister Ludi is a better book; but I enjoyed both a comparable amount, though in different ways. I'll try to break my ratings down into the components of my enjoyment.
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