Book log archives - January 2008

Archives - January 2008

archives -- index by author -- index by category -- favorite books -- links

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: This is the original Gothic novel, and it's darned entertaining, much more so than I found Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Okay, maybe Walpole didn't exactly mean (most of the time) to make the reader laugh, but who could help it, faced with enormous people-crushing black helmets ("an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers"), family curses, bleeding statues, telltale birthmarks, ghostly sighs, and all the rest? The characters are fairly one-dimensional (except perhaps for Manfred, the villain of the piece), but the fast pace and amazing events make Otranto what the late lamented Common Reader would have called "a Thumping Good Read".
Meg Cabot, Avalon High Coronation, Volume 1: The Merlin Prophecy: I read Avalon High, which is an Arthurian retelling set in a high school, in December and liked it enough to get the sequel from the library. For the sequel (which I guess is the start of a series), Cabot has switched to the manga format. It's pretty, but there wasn't nearly enough going on to make me want to read the next one; a third of it is recapping the book, and the rest is all setup, and not very interesting setup at that.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan (rereads): It was lots of fun to reread Northanger Abbey just after The Castle of Otranto, and my copy happens also to have Lady Susan, so of course I had to reread that too. I had forgotten how funny Northanger Abbey is, and how cleverly Austen sends up Gothic novels while quietly creating her own sinister plot, only revealed after the Gothic trappings have been thoroughly mocked.
A.S. Byatt, Possession: favorite.
Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing: I read the first of these in 2004; I liked it quite a bit for its powerful atmosphere and storytelling, though I wasn't entirely convinced by the Victorian setting. I also was disappointed at the relative lack of resolution, so I decided not to read the second book until the third had come out.

Anyway, when the books begin, sixteen-year-old Gemma Doyle has been sent from India to a boarding school in England after her mother's mysterious death, a terrifying event which Gemma witnessed in a disturbing vision. At the Spence Academy for Young Ladies, Gemma finds her way into an influential clique and learns more about her mother's and her own connections with a mystical group called the Order and about her own supernatural powers, when she finds that she has the ability to open a magical door to another realm. Though the otherworld at first appears unthreateningly delightful, Gemma soon finds that she has an enemy there, and she must fight to keep herself, her friends and family, and her new world safe.

I remain unconvinced by the setting; the language isn't quite right, and the tone seems often a little modern. (Possibly reading these after Possession, which does the Victorian period gorgeously, did them a disservice.) I also wonder whether Bray worked out the entire plot before writing the books, because it doesn't always hang together well, and the pacing of the beginning of the books is on the slow side before they each speed up and gain intensity. However, I can forgive these faults for the sake of Bray's engagement with issues around female power and sexuality, class, and race, her variety of characters (especially Gemma), and the marvelous, dark, magical atmosphere she creates. I like that the magic has a price, and Bray isn't afraid to sacrifice her characters when the story demands it. I'm very interested to see what she comes up with next.
Roger Kahn, The Head Game: Baseball Seen from the Pitcher's Mound: After an introductory chapter on the physics of pitching and how the different pitches work (much of which is based on the work of Robert Adair, author of The Physics of Baseball), Kahn proceeds to a history of pitching, spotlighting various pitchers along the way, from Old Hoss Radbourn, who won 60 games in 1884, to Bruce Sutter, the master of the splitter, and pitching guru Leo Mazzone (at the time the Braves' pitching coach). Along the way, he offers interesting analyses of various aspects of pitching: the development of different pitches, the dimensions of the playing field and of the pitchers' mound, headhunting and hitters' fear of getting, coaching and keeping fit (exploding the myth of the pitcher not being much of an athlete). It's a good and absorbing book, as you would expect from the author of the baseball classic The Boys of Summer. And besides, you've got to like a guy who offers his own list of the greatest pitchers of all time and ends with Jerry Solovey of Lake Mohegan, NY, because "lists are subjective. Solovey could almost always get me out."
Laurie R. King, Touchstone: This is a stand-alone novel, not related to either of her series. It's 1926, and FBI agent Harris Stuyvesant has come to London in search of a bomber; for help, he's sent to Englishman Bennett Grey, whose experiences in World War I have left him with an unearthly sensitivity to other people's thoughts and who has been hiding in Cornwall for years. Almost against his will, Grey agrees to help Stuyvesant by gaining him entry into an elite milieu which includes Lady Laura Hurleigh, who is devoting her life to social reform; charismatic politician Richard Bunsen; and Grey's sister Sarah, Lady Laura's best friend.

It's a good book in many ways, but it lacks focus; it's not as tight as I think a suspense novel ought to be. There are well-developed, complex characters, but too many of them are POV characters (six, and I thought only four or five at most were necessary), and King head-hops occasionally. There are lovely, rich settings, which are often over-described. The plot is intriguing, but it takes forever to get going and occasionally bogs down in description and dialogue (though the last hundred pages or so are quite tense). I think Touchstone would have better if it had been shorter and tighter, but I did enjoy it after finally getting absorbed in it, due largely to King's richly developed characters.
Laurie Halse Anderson, Prom: Ashley Hannigan doesn't care about her high school prom...that is, until the faculty advisor steals the money for it and Ash gets roped into helping her friend Natalia save the prom. This lacks the emotional resonance of Speak or Twisted, but Ashley is engaging and often very funny (though many of the other characters lack depth, particularly her boyfriend TJ). I did like the setting, working-class Philadelphia, which is interestingly different from the usual middle-class mostly suburban settings of most of the YA fiction I've read.
Janet Mullany, The Rules of Gentility: a fun Regency romp with definite overtones of Bridget Jones' Diary which made it stylistically a little weird for me (or maybe I'm just too used to Heyer); it's fairly fluffy, but has some good stuff about the rules of society and whether they're made to be broken, and a satisfying ending. I'm glad I got it from the library, as I can't see myself rereading it, but equally, I'll definitely check out Mullany's other stuff; apparently her previous book, Dedication, is somewhat more serious.
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch: Waters starts her tale of WWII London in 1947, introducing several characters and showing us their situations: Kay, who's still obsessed with wartime and can't connect with anyone in the present; Helen and Julia, whose love affair is threatened by Julia's possible infidelity; Viv, who's involved with a married man; and Viv's brother Duncan, whose life is changed when he meets again the man he shared a prison cell with. Then Waters works backwards: having shown us where these characters are after the war, she goes back to wartime to show us how they got there, with the main part of the book occurring in 1944 and a much shorter section at the end in 1941.

The wartime setting is excellent; Waters obviously did her research, and she creates a very convincing atmosphere, particularly when her characters are out in the streets of London. As far as the unusual plot structure goes, Waters is clever about how much she reveals as she goes along, so that I never felt that I already knew what had happened. It does feel a little manipulative, as the characters refer to earlier events circuitously, so that the reader doesn't get too much information, but it's an interesting experiment. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work for me. This was partly because I didn't find the characters all that engaging, and partly because once I finished the book, I would have liked to know what happened after the 1947 section, which is left very open-ended. Having been led back through the characters' lives to find out how they got where they were, I'd have liked a little more closure as to where they were going, too. It was worth reading, but it's definitely my least favorite of Waters' books.
Vere Hodgson, Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-1945: a recent Persephone purchase. It's subtitled "A Diary showing how Unimportant People in London and Birmingham lived through the war years", and that's a very good description of it. Hodgson, a social worker in Notting Hill, simply kept a record of what she and the people around her did on a daily basis during the war -- blitzes, blackouts, rationing, the whole bit -- and though it could easily have gotten repetitive, it's instead engaging, giving a vivid picture of civilian wartime life. I found her worship of Churchill especially endearing; at one point she says that a statue of gold should be erected to him in thanks.
Sarah Dessen, Someone Like You, That Summer (oddly packaged together as How to Deal, the name of a movie based on them, even though the books are unrelated): I read these originally in December 2006 and didn't booklog them (I think I was taking the month off), so I thought I would log them this time. Someone Like You is easily my favorite of the two; I really like how Dessen delineates Halley and Scarlett's close but not always perfect friendship and her sympathetic portrayal of teen pregnancy. That Summer pushes fewer buttons, I guess; I didn't like Haven, the protagonist, as much as I did Halley and Scarlett, and I wasn't as interested in her issues with her family. Still, it does have the insight and depth of characterization that I love about Dessen. Only a couple of months until her new book comes out!
Georgette Heyer, The Toll-Gate: On his way to stay with friends in Leicestershire, Captain Jack Staple finds himself at a toll-gate in the Pennines, where he's quickly drawn into mysterious goings-on and into a romance with Miss Nell Stornaway. I didn't think the romance quite mixed with the murder and smuggling plot threads, or maybe it's just that I like a little more romance in my Heyer. Still, this was a fun read, and I loved Captain Jack.
Patricia MacLachlan, The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt: I liked this, but I haven't enough impression of it left to write much about it. MacLachlan is good at getting inside her characters' heads, which I remembered from the little of her I've read before (Sarah Plain and Tall and a couple of others, I think), and I loved the musical background.
Robertson Davies, High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories: Robertson Davies originally wrote these eighteen stories to be read at his college's Christmas party, so of course they all feature ghosts in the college setting and of various literary and historical origins, from Queen Victoria to Henrik Ibsen. They're all entertaining, with only a touch of scariness, and full of Davies' signature erudite wit; I particularly liked the tale of the "ghost who vanished by degrees", who needs to take his Ph.D. examination in order to pass on to the other side, the one about a scholar possessed by Dickens, and the parody of Frankenstein about a monster cat.
Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, Friends and Heroes): Guy and Harriet Pringle are newly married and have just arrived in Bucharest, Romania, so that Guy can take up his position as a teacher of English literature; unfortunately for them, it is 1939, and the Romanian government is walking a tightrope between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Though I seem to have been reading a lot about WWII lately, this is a region about which I'm sadly ignorant, and I found Manning's portrait of it fascinating, from the detailed descriptions of Bucharest to the sharp observations of a society and country crumbling under pressure, and of the Pringles' increasingly stressed marriage and friendships (especially with the hapless parasite Prince Yakimov, whom I started out despising and ended up finding almost unbearably poignant). I long to read the subsequent series, The Levant Trilogy, which I managed to mooch from someone at Bookmooch immediately after finishing this trilogy.


Last updated 27 March 2008. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.