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 have no idea why most things that win the Tiptree Award do so. I have more or less given up on understanding it. Asking people who have been on the committee in the past doesn't help because they have enough autonomy that they can't really explain other years' committees to me. So it is one of the genre's mysteries for me.

I'm not sure anybody likes Archie Goodwin. I certainly don't. I don't find his "wow he's fat" or "girls are pretty but useless" attitudes congenial in novels more than in novella collections. But there are other things about the series I think are well-done. (Haven't read Three for the Chair; it's next on my stack.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much where I am on Air; brilliant, but being brilliant specifically about community, and I have no idea what people are construing it as saying about gender that's noteworthy.

Archie seems to me to embody some degree of thought about the flaws that go with the virtues of being a Chandler-type detective in much the same way as Wolfe does the flaws that go along with the virtures of being a Holmes-type, come to think of it.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I love Archie Goodwin and I always will. I imprinted on him long before I was either a feminist or a fat activist, and I just don't care about those problems with him. Though it was a big surprise to me when I realized that Wolfe's oft-repeated "seventh of a ton" is less than 300 pounds, and thus not very fat at all for a reasonably tall man.

As for Tiptree winners, that's what makes it fun.

And as for Air, opinions vary, including judges' opinions. For me, what did it was the pregnancy and the result of the pregnancy.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

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.

I used to like that voice. I thought part of the point was that Archie is supposed to be charming. Things like the emphasis of how monumentally fat Nero Wolfe is (a full seventh of a ton! can you imagine? he needs a special tailor, and yards upon yards of cloth to make trousers with what might be a 44" waist!). I grew to like it less when I came to regard fat people, and women, for that matter, as respectable human beings.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

the first year that i really paid attention to the tiptree was the year that raphael carter won it, and i've been somewhat disappointed with how indirectly the winners in years after have dealt with gender.

i liked air, and i gave it to my father to read, since i thought it was a really good book about someone inventing marketing out of whole cloth, and he's a marketing professor.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i've decided why m. john harrison's _light_ won the tiptree. specifically to piss me off, that's why.

er, or because it's a fine example of how gender normativity permeates everything and causes otherwise sensible people to act like morons. also, i was disappointed that after all that buildup no one in the book turned into a cat. i was all ready for that, and would have liked that as an ending much better.

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

I'm also a fan of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. I'm not generally a mystery reader but I got hook on Nero Wolfe mysteries early. I have been collecting them (http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=tsjafo) but I don't think I have a complete set.

I'm not much concerned about the intolerance displayed in some of the author's descriptions or writing because I try to take into account the times in which they were written.

Since you like Nero Wolfe, you might find Glen Cook's "Garret" mysteries interesting. Think Archie/Nero set in a fantasy world. Cook's writing makes it all seem plausible.

[erik]

The thing about repeating it is that he was writing these for pulp magazines (the novellas, anyway) so he had to assume the reader knew nothing about the universe.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

When he finishes it, you should mention what he thinks of it. I'm not a marketing person, but some of my best friends have been I was married to one, once.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think it's the bit about how when they had broadcast TV everyone watched everything, but once they had choice the men kept it on sports and naked women.

That's a genuinely interesting thought about gender, choice and the third world.

[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.