August books

[redbird]

Ursula Le Guin, Voices. Loosely a sequel to Gifts, but only loosely, and not as dark as that earlier novel. Orrec and Gry are in this story, but it's mostly Memer's story, and that of her city and household. This is a story in which books are magic in some ways, and seen as dangerous magic, and blasphemous, by the conquerers. They respect poetry and story, and hold bards in honor for what they write and what they recite, without realizing that if power and danger are in the words, poems, and stories, not in writing them down. Oracles are traditionally hard to interpret; the one in this book is also hard to remember or hold fixed, as even the written records of its answers change over time. Much of what's going on here is, or involves, politics; oracles may be a factor there, but it's the people who hear and interpret them, and the relations among them, that determine things, not an unchangeable Fate. This is also a story of love in a number of forms, romance only one among them, and a kind of love that the viewpoint character feels herself too young for. This is one for those of us who love books and cities, and don't mind a little ambiguity.

Aaron Elkins, Murder in the Queen's Armes. This is part of a series, with a detective who's mostly a physical anthropologist but apparently, earlier in the series, has gotten a reputation for how much he can figure out about recent crimes from examining bones. The local police are skeptical of the amateur detective, unsurprisingly; this is definitely the sort of story where one murder leads to another, and it's at least possible that without said amateur detective, they'd not have. He has some relevant evidence, but could have just passed it all on to the police, if not for a desire to protect an old friend, and academic politics. The book is marred by some carelessness, noticeably an error on British history and background that threw me right out of the text in the first chapter, though I got past it and kept reading. (Cromwell didn't have anyone executed in 1685, and the use of the Bloody Assize for local color was incidental enough that it could have been fixed or omitted without messing anything else up, if either Elkins or an editor had noticed the problem). I don't think I'll bother with more of Elkins's books.

Daniel Keblman, Measuring the World, trans. by Carol Brown Janeway. This is a novel, in the sense of a work of prose fiction with something wrong with it. The main characters are based, I don't know how closely, on Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt. I'm sure the real men had interesting internal lives, but Kelbman doesn't show it--dislike of almost everyone doesn't qualify, nor does frustration at the difficulties of exploration. I finished this one mostly out of stubbornness. Both this book, and another of Elkins's mysteries in this series, were recommended as summer reading by the book columnist in Natural History; I doubt I'll take any further fiction recommendations from that source, and I'm glad I got these from the library.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, Signet Classic collection of 22 stories, being I think most of them and almost everything I'd heard of. I realized at the library, on seeing this, that I'd actually read almost none of the Holmes stuff, so borrowed it. I had, instead, seen people quote, say, the description of the gathering of many red-headed men in "The Red-Headed League," or "she was always the woman" about Irene Adler, but with no idea of what else went with it. Someone who hadn't read "A Scandal in Bohemia," and had seen the quote about Adler, might well have inferred a rather different connection between her and Holmes. I enjoyed these, with some "the past is a different country" stuff, especially with regard to marriages and the way women were treated at the time. Reading lots of mysteries together had me thinking about connections between them, Doyle and Allingham (recent reread of short story collection) and Stout; there's a recurring trope of the unofficial detective deciding to let a criminal escape in the interests of justice, for example.

Rex Stout, The Best Families. This is another Nero Wolfe, but more focused on Archie Goodwin than usual. (Yes, Goodwin is always the narrator.) Wolfe spends much of the book literally out of sight--even Goodwin doesn't know where he is, and can't get a message to him, though almost nobody believes him on that. The book starts with Wolfe being asked to investigate a relatively straightforward question; soon thereafter, a master criminal (think Moriarty, not John Gotti) is pressuring him not to investigate the murder of his original client, and being unwilling to say either yes or no, he vanishes, leaving Archie a note saying "Do not look for me." The book is tightly plotted, and the usual supporting characters, including Lily Rowan, get a bit more time on stage than usual. I noticed in passing that, in between all the talk about how fat Wolfe is and how much he eats, the skinny Goodwin is also taking plenty of hearty meals, with something like a plate of beef stew, three whole tomatoes, and two slices of pie being his normal fare at a lunch counter. This isn't unrealistic, nor is Goodwin's seeming not to have realized, through however many years and books, that he's eating as much as Wolfe does; I'm only a little surprised I didn't notice this point sooner. By the end of the book, Wolfe has gone beyond his occasional practice of deciding to wink at illegality to deliberately setting up a murder.

A major difference, in fiction, between amateur and private detectives and police procedurals seems to be that sooner or later, the unofficial detective is going to decide to let a killer go, not because of danger to himself but in the interests of justice. Wolfe does it, Sherlock Holmes does it (and I suspect the later writers got this at least in part from Conan Doyle), Peter Wimsey's variant is to give the upper-class murderer enough warning to commit suicide and spare himself a trial, and Robert Parker's Spenser has done it (though given that Spenser's best friend and frequent sidekick is a hit man, that's less surprising). The unofficial execution in this case, and the careful psychology behind it, are less usual.

Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives. This is a first-person narrative, set in 2005 or early 2006, with the same fast pace and often soap-operatic plotting as the Tales of the City series. It's fun if you know who Michael Tolliver is, probably not worth bothering with otherwise. Like the earlier stories, it's a very quick read.

Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger. Quality space opera, the coming-of-age story of a woman from a well-off family that's been in the interstellar shipping business for generations. Kicked out of her planet's military academy for political reasons, she is given command of one of the family's trading ships, on its intended last voyage before being sold for scrap; she has a small crew of experienced older spacers, and proceeds to go off on her own. That much, her father more or less expected; the details, and the level of danger, surprise him and everyone. I liked Kylara, and Moon does well with characterization, pacing, and what papersky would call incluing. The fruitcake Ky's aunt insisted on sending with her winds up being rather more useful than she'd expected when she was trying to find a way to leave it behind.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. My basic reactions are "this is what all the fuss was about?" and "too much of this is stolen from Lord of the Rings. (Calling your villain the "Dark Lord," even if it makes sense, serves as a reminder of Tolkien.) I suspect it would have helped if I were more deeply immersed in the series and characters, because it feels as though we're supposed to get most of the characterization, and hence caring about most of the characters, from memories of the previous volumes. I had read the previous books as they came out, though, which ought to be sufficient.

Also, much of the second half of the book had a "collecting plot coupons" feel about it. And I'm tired of, and unimpressed by, large numbers of characters whose motivation for evil deeds appears to be that they have chosen to be Evil (rather than, say, greed, anger, fear, lust, or revenge). This is less of a problem for the characterization of Voldemort than for his followers.

Walter Mosley, Devil with a Blue Dress. I think this is the first of his series of detective novels featuring Easy Rawlins; it's where the character drifts into detective work, at first working for some very unsavory people. The setting is 1948, in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The plotting worked, and I enjoyed reading it, but I don't expect to go hunting up the rest in any hurry: I realized that I liked the narrative voice better than I liked the narrator as a person. The milieu is painted well and convincingly; I don't know, of course, whether LA in 1948 was actually like that for a black war veteran.