Book Review: Lud-in-the-Mist

Funny that I had never heard of this book until recently, as it's been around since 1926. To me it falls into the same category as The King of Elfland's Daughter by Dunsany. In either case, they inspire me to include a more timeless or perhaps, time-blind, element to my fiction. 

Nathaniel Chanticleer hears a musical note from Faerieland as a child and it haunts him for the rest of his life. He sometimes finds the facts of life to be a little too overwhelming and this melancholy settles on him. I can definitely relate to that feeling, though I'm not certain how I feel about that fact. It hit very close to home. When he confronts the crisis and finally looks up from the bottom of the metaphorical well, he sees The Way Ahead like a shining path. At that moment, reading the book, I was totally with him. I've felt that certainty, though not very often, and I can relate to the tenacity with which he clings to that path.


I had twenty pages left when I got off the Metro, so I went into my office, shut the door and finished the book in 15 minutes or so. Of course, I cried right at the end. I hate it when they make me cry at work. Stupid book...

Both S_ and I agree that there is a dreamlike quality to this book, in the sense that both of us felt that this book came to the author fully formed in a dream or vision. It is not like anything else she's ever written. It makes me wonder if something is waiting out there for m in the ether, that will rush into my brain at some point.

ether brain rushes.

That's a funny phrase. :)

Book Review: Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale

So S_ told me that listing the books I've read this year in the sidebar is no longer sufficient, that I need to write something about each one or at least the ones that moved me especially.

Fine. >.<

I read Wicked Gentlemen two weekends ago on my trip to Atlanta. Gay sex, steam punk and descendants of redeemed fallen angels sounded like a good antidote to attending a convention of 3,000 Applied Linguists.

It's a set of two novellas, each from a different POV. In an alternate, steampunk-lite world where the Inquisition convinced the Fallen to repent and leave Hell, their no-longer-fallen-but-still-in-disgrace descendants are now loving among us as the downtrodden lower caste members of society. I love the concept and the writing is good. In short order, we are introduced to the two main characters, and they begin a professional relationship with some fringe sexual benefits. The fact that the two main characters are in a gay relationship seemed perfectly normal in the course of the story, but perhaps I am enured to this sort of thing after Sarah Monette.

I love that you see the relationship, and what it means, from each side - one POV in each novella. The fact that they spar with each other in humor and sarcasm seems right to me for two men. They also don't really discuss their relationship that openly or easily, which I also think reads right. It was exactly right for a novella - I felt the world was much wider that what we were given to glimpse, I wanted to know and read more, but I actually did not need more to understand and appreciate the story.

There, S_. I hope that is sufficient for the required literary analysis.

Book Review: Trouble on Titan

Last time I was back home in Ohio, I pulled an old book off my bookshelf. Trouble on Titan, by Alan Nourse, published in 1954. It was one of the first science fiction books I ever read. It falls into the "rebellious space miners need to be brought into hand by representative of tyrranical Earth government who learns they are not so bad and, lo, in fact, they have been shockingly misrepresented over time" category of early scifi.

I loved it then and I loved it for the nostalgia now. Rocket mail. Seriously.

Mental Health Day

I took a mental health day today. I really needed a break. Even then, I still had to participate in a conference call this morning.

Finished reading The God Engines by John Scalzi. That man is deeply disturbed. It was good, but I noticed that there was a character about whom he deliberately avoided using pronouns. I got that the gender was meant to be ambiguous, but why he made that choice I'm not sure.

Opened up my own novel after a few months away from it. I'm going to try to work on it a little bit more often. I need to do something with it and I just don't want it to sit there. lurking on my laptop, like some kind of literary monster under the bed.

Aggghhhh....

Obviously, I'm working with the look and layout of the blog. I've changed a few settings and I've had a few failures in adding a picture. More on that later. I've spent the last hour trying to set up the blog so that comments will show up. I've changed all the settings and the comments should be allowed, but for now, it's not letting me do it.

If I can't figure it out by tomorrow, I'll change the entire template and go from there.

BEDA buddies, I haven't forgotten you.... I just can't figure out how to let you talk to me.

:(

**************

On anther note, I finally finished He Who Fears the Wolf by Karin Fossum. This is the second of her Inspector Sejer mysteries that I read. I'm really impressed so far. They're tight, good little mysteries, but since they are originally written in Norwegian and we are reading them in translation, they are not exactly like American detective novels. I like that we are getting a little bit of daily Norwegian life in the course of reading the book.

I have yet to finish Robin Hobb's Ship of Destiny, though I am slowly working my way through it. I love Robin Hobb, but you have to emotionally prepare yourself for the ride. The characters are so real and she makes you care for them, even when you watch them make perfectly reasonable decisions that lead them down the path to destruction and ruin. Ugh. Sometimes, I just can't take the emotional heartbreak. I asked S_ earlier this evening about the book, which she read sometime last year. I'm in the last third of book three, I said. Surely it must get hopeful from here on in... Surely... She just smiled at me sadly. Dammit.

Book Review: New Amsterdam

So I finished New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear the other day. I really liked the conceit - that the colonies never broke away from England, and so they are still under British rule in the 1890s. The two main characters - Don Sebastien de Ulloa and Detective Inspector Abigail Irene Garrett, work well together. It's almost like reading an episode of Law and Order set in the past - with magic and vampires. The book is a series of short stories, relatively self contained, though they do build in chronology. The sequal, Seven for a Secret, comes out next year and already, I'm in.

Miles to Rivendell: 439. It's the end of my first week of the walk-to-job program and I feel really empowered that I was able to even do the first week.

Blog Relaunch

OK, so I've decided that I'm going to try this blogging thing again as one of my New Year's resolutions. Seeing that the last post was in March made me feel pathetic, quite frankly. I mean, I regularly read two dozen blogs and my goal this year is to write more, soooo.....

I thought I'd start things off with a list of the books I was able to read over the Christmas Break. For some reason, I was able to get a lot of personal reading done in the month of December (at the expense of laundry and other things, but still...)

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
This has been on my shelf for about two years now. I finally picked it up and got sucked in immediately. She was able to create a great tension through fear and suspense w/o much actual blood and vampire spooookiness. I also loved the academic researcher milieu. It's a lot more fun to read "She spent the whole day in research before she found the key information" than to actually spend a whole day doing research. I thought her ability to weave together a story from letters, notes and accounts was also very skillfully done.

A Companion To Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear
OK. I read this because I like Sarah Monette, and b/c I'd read in some reviews on her blog of the "controversial nature" of how sex was addressed in the book. I enjoyed the book, though I wanted more, the same way I felt about Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark - There was enough there to address a whole trilogy, rather than just one book, and I felt the same way here. I thought the sex was tastefully addressed and, you know... if you're going to bond a female wolf, that's about what should happen when she goes into heat...

Weight, Jeanette Winterson
A retelling of the Atlas story as part of Canongate's The Myths series. I enjoyed Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, but I didn't like this as much. I guess it was a little too fragmented for me. It was OK, but again, it had been on my shelf for two years, so I had to read it. There were a couple of ideas that piqued my interest - Laika joining Atlas as a companion, and the characterization of Hercules as being afraid of inaction were novel.

The Bone Key, Sarah Monette
I really enjoyed her Melusine books, so I've been wanting to get this forever, but I couldn't find it. Grrr.... Finally, I got it for Christmas from my wife, who is much more practical than I am and just ordered it. I loved her protagonist, Kyle Murchison Booth, an archivist at a museum. He's the perfect protagonist for a short story because in that venue, she doesn't have to resolve his emotionally crippled state. It would be harder to maintain his social awkwardness if he had to be the protagonist for an entire novel. I also liked that he wasn't hellbent on banishing all the spookies that he finds. He's more of a "Sorry, don't let me interrupt. Good luck with that. I'll be going now..." kind of guy.

Her Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (reread)
I *love* this book. In the way these things usually go, I picked it up to read my favorite section and ended up rereading the whole thing. As I said to my wife (who has yet to read it, but I'm sure will love it) - "It's the best Regency period book I've ever read. Dragons instead of boring women scheming to get a husband..." :)

First Testing, Page, Squire, Lady Knight (Protector of the Small Quartet), Tamora Pierce
YA fiction, I literally found this by walking down the wrong aisle of Borders. I love YA and the novel that I'm working on *might* turn out to be YA rather than adult (it depends how much the story turns to sex, I suppose...) I enjoyed this series of four books and the young, female protagonist. I picked it up, in part, because I'm trying to get a handle on writing a more realistic teenage girl for a protagonist.

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
Good story. Interesting magic system. I'll probably read The Well of Ascension eventually. I wanted to see what the guy who will be writing the last Wheel of Time book had written on his own. I also enjoyed the female protagonist, thought the thief who attracts the attention of nobility is a trope that I'm pretty much over at this point. Anyone who writes a book called Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians can't be all bad, though.

I'm also slowly working my way through

The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzberg
This is an academic study of Italian agrarian cults in the 16th and 17th centuries, including a discussion of the Benandanti spirit walker belief. I've been looking for this book for awhile, and was able to get a used copy off of Amazon. I'm hoping to use this folk legend as a basis for a short story.

and The Mammoth Book of New Historical Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley.
My wife got this for me because it has a short story by Margaret Frazer featuring Dame Frevisse, her sleuthing nun. We have read a few other Dame Frevisse books and enjoyed them as well. There's something about a medieval mystery that I find irresistible.

Well, that's what I've read in December anyway. I doubt I'll be able to finish anything else in the next few days, but I'm going to try to write a review of each book I read in 2008. Well, I guess we'll see...