Some July books

[redbird]

This is by no means a complete list of what I've read since the last book post; in particular, I seem to devour Rex Stout mysteries like popcorn while visiting rysmiel and rarely have much to say about them.

Playmates, by Robert Parker. Another Spenser mystery, from some years ago and better than the more recent one I read earlier this year. I picked it up off the library shelf at random as train reading. The narrative isn't broken into quite as many tiny chapters as in some of Parker's recent books; also, there are characters who actually care about something that happens in the story, which helps.

Half Life, by Shelley Jackson. Very weird, I liked it, I think it's good, may need to reread it again to have a clearer idea of what the author is getting at, beyond the fragility of identity. The starting point is an alternate twentieth century with conjoined twins in large numbers--all with two heads on a single torso and the usual number of limbs. Jackson draws parallels to gay liberation, and talks about identity, and the malleability of memory and maybe reality. A recurring theme is the National Penitence Ground at White Sands; another is a dubious--and doubted by the viewpoint character--attempt to use Venn diagrams as a form of therapy. I borrowed this one from the library because it won the Tiptree Award; I think the light cast on gender here is from the broad areas of identity and classification more than ways the characters are being female, male, neuter, or anything else on those axes.

His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik. This one was fun, in a light and cheerful way. Novik does the Napoleonic wars in a world where dragons have been a given all along, but somehow almost all the historical events seem the same except that Africa is, we're told,inhabited by humans only near the coasts, the interior being too full of savage beasts. Oh, and Spain never conquered the Incas, but the absence of all that silver has made exactly no difference to European history. (This is a problem with a lot of alternate history: if you put the divergence point back far enough, the resulting worlds also diverge, but that's not usually what the readers or authors are looking for. It's probably best to read for dragons, and the relationship between Temeraire [dragon] and Laurence [the oddly strait-laced naval officer who accidentally becomes his captain], and not think too much about. The Jade Throne and Black Powder War, second and third in what now looks like it's intended as an ongoing series. If she takes us through the Napoleonic Wars at six months per book, she can keep writing these for a long time. Unlike the first two, Black Powder War didn't really feel like it had an ending so much as a "tune in next week" (the first two did better at that);

A Theodore Sturgeon collection, To Here and the Easel, which includes "Shottle Bop" which I had somehow never read, or read so long ago that I remembered nothing except the disappearing shop, and "There Is No Defense," which Fred Saberhagen almost certain did. The title story is an odd fantasy about a character who moves back and forth between two worlds and identities, with no elapsed time in one while he's experiencing the other.

Alan Garner, The Owl Service: I picked this one up because various people, notably brisingamen, have been saying good things about Garner. I suspect I'm missing something, perhaps knowledge of the Mabinogion, and ithe book felt as though it ended a scene or two before it should have. Points for geography and for depicting and talking about class differences; fewer for characterization, unfortunately--I kept losing track of which character was which.

Anthony Price, Other Paths to Glory, is a cold war spy novel; I gather from what rysmiel told me that it connects somewhat with Price's other novels on this theme, but isn't part of a plot arc. A historian working on fine points of trench warfare in the First World War gets tangled with murders, secrets, and secret agents. Price tells a good story, with good characterization. There was an extra layer of "time passing" from the 30-odd years between when Price wrote it and the present, to go with the parts he intended, about the gap between the Battle of the Somme and the early 1970s, and aging veterans and what they did and didn't remember. The war Price was writing about is also fading into history, and in 1973 there were a reasonable number of elderly WWI veterans who his characters could find and talk to; now, they're down to a last handful of centenarians. [cue Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," though the British veterans Price depicts mostly lacked that bitterness, or wouldn't show it to strangers, even when talking about the "Pals Battalions."]

C. J. Cherryh, Rimrunners. Space opera, a bit slow to start: I put it down for a couple of days (and read Price and more Rex Stout) because I had trouble caring about the viewpoint character. When I picked it up again and she started seeming likeable, I realized that part of what Cherryh had been doing early in the book was showing us someone who didn't, at that point in her life, much care about herself. (Even when done well, this risks losing the reader.) The interpersonal stuff is good, but the ending seems a bit odd given how the characters have interacted until the last few pages.

Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise, which I think is the only Tey I hadn't already read. Tey tells us up front who the corpse is going to be, then shows enough of his interactions with people to make me, at least, pleased when he's reported missing and presumably drowned in an extremely muddy river. From there, it's Inspector Grant trying to find the body, and discern a motive for murder. His friend Marta Hallard turns up again; the victim has been staying in a village where she has a home, and Hallard is happy to give him a few good dinners, and some useful information and conversation. In odd ways, this is a book about the advantages of being an adult. At one point, Grant thinks that the most important thing he'd want in a wife would be intelligence. The engagement that had been disrupted (though not actually broken) by the visitor was so vulnerable because the man has the bad habit of taking his fiancee, and other people he likes, fo rgranted: it's the ones he dislikes that he's actively considerate of. (Not taking for granted in the sense of being confident of theirc ontinued love, but that of course she's listening to his radio broadcasts, and of course she loves him, that's only natural because he's him, while not taking much time to learn about her.)

Comments

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Does _To Here and the Easel_ have the Sturgeon story about a patient recovering from a peculiar form of amnesia, who is learning to speak and puzzling the hospital staff?

[redbird]

I'm not sure. (I know, that's not helpful--but the book is on a shelf in Montreal, and that description is tangling with the James White novel I posted about a month or two back.)