Book notes

[redbird]

Two collections read recently, courtesy of the library:

• Rex Stout, Three for the Chair, three novelettes, from which I'm thinking I don't like the narrator (part of this may be that there are bits that get dropped into each story at least once, like emphasizing how fat Nero Wolfe is, that might be less annoying if met once per book rather than thrice.


• Patricia McKillip, Harrowing the Dragon, a short story collection. The title story is actually "The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath," an excellent picture of a cold, isolated mining town, the people who want to live there, and one who left but comes back to play hero. "A Matter of Music" is about a young bard settling into a position in a foreign court, in a culture where the choice of instrument to play at a hunt or for any number of other occasions has implications of status, and her entanglement in her new home's politics. "A Troll and Two Roses" is a sympathetic look at a lonely, bullying troll who wanders into enchantment, and has to get out again. "The Witches of Junket" are ordinary-seeming women who have to control an old menace, working around real-world problems including a husband who has been in a coma at the VA hospital for the past nine years. The last three stories in the book are commentary on old tales: "Star-Crossed" picks up shortly after Romeo and Juliet, a helpless-feeling attempt to explain and deal with that play and its consequences. In "Voyage into the Heart," "The virgin they got from the cow barnm the Prince's daughter being, as she put it, indisposed." They don't tell her why they want her, but the wizard winds up most surprised. "Toad" helped a princess, and isn't at all sure he likes the results.

Other than that, I'm in the middle of at least three novels, two of which I've been in the middle of for much too long. Midnight's Children is probably somewhere on my desk, and Midnight Lamp is under my bathrobe, next to the bed.

And there ought to be some mention of Geoff Ryman's Air, but my comment is basically that it's good, I'm glad I read it, and I have no idea why it won the Tiptree Award.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I would never tell the Tiptree judges that they all must march in lockstep just so I could figure out why they had picked something! But I'm also not motivated enough to find all the judges each year to ask, so it remains fun I'm not a part of. (I hasten to add that that's fine with me -- I have no sense of exclusion from the folks I know who are associated with the Tiptree, so it's not as though I feel like I couldn't become more closely involved if I was motivated. Just that it would take a fair amount of effort to have a good handle on why each work was chosen.)

As for the Stout books, I just started reading them this year, and I knew that Nero Wolfe's seventh of a ton was less than the (large but not "immense") bigger of my two housemates before I started reading the series. I have had several conversations with people about why it's a bad idea to give specific numbers when you're trying to convey that a character is really tall or really short or etc., and the Stout books kept coming up as an example. I'm reading through the series anyway, but I didn't have the chance not to be conscious of it -- it came up before anybody could tell me which to try reading first.