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1 May 2004

• Elizabeth Peters, Guardian of the Horizon: the latest addition to the Amelia Peabody Emerson mystery series. This time, instead of continuing approximately where the last book left off, Peters goes back about ten years and fills in part of a five-year gap in the timeline of the series (so the action of the book takes place between The Ape Who Guards the Balance and Falcon at the Portal).
  
  The Emersons are spending the summer at home in England when they receive a visit from a mysterious stranger, who summons them back to the Lost Oasis, whence they rescued their adoptive daughter Nefret years ago. The plot is intriguing, the dialogue witty, and the plot fast-paced, as always with these books, but it lacked a little in suspense - since we already know from the other books that Ramses and Nefret end up married, reading yet more about their romantic travails isn't entirely fascinating. I love to spend time with Amelia and her family, but perhaps Peters could take a break and write a new Vicky Bliss novel instead?

Books read: 1

2 May 2004

• Barbara Michaels, Vanish with the Rose: reread, because it's got lots about roses in it and I'm currently obsessed with them (we're now up to 23 roses in the garden, not counting the little sick one we just found planted right next to a large redwood). It's a fairly typical Michaels romantic suspense story, with a hint of the supernatural, but a particularly well-done one, with a gripping story and interesting characters.

Books read: 1

3 May 2004

• Rita Mae Brown, Whisker of Evil: an above-average entry in Brown's series about Virginia postmistress Harry Haristeen and her pets (two cats and a corgi). These have been getting a little stale lately because of a lack of development in the lives of the main characters, so I was happy to see Harry faced with some big changes in her personal life. Those combined with a good mystery kept the book interesting, and Brown is good at writing about animals without being horrendously sappy.
  
  
• Midori Snyder, Hannah's Garden: a good YA fantasy, about a teen who travels to her grandfather's farm with her mother and discovers there her great-grandmother's garden and her family's secret bond with the fairies. I felt as though the plot moved a little too quickly at times, but Snyder's gift for description enlivens this tale of magic, music, and nature. She'll go on my list of authors to acquire.

Books read: 2

7 May 2004

• Midori Snyder, The Innamorati: a multi-layered tapestry woven of threads from Renaissance Italy and Greco-Roman mythology. The Innamorati tells the story of the magical maze in the city of Labirinto, where it is said that curses may be lifted, and of the pilgrims who enter the maze: Anna, the mask-maker who cannot make masks; the actor Fabrizio, who stutters; Rinaldo, cursed to live by the sword; Erminia, the siren, condemned to silence and exile from the sea; Zizola, the street girl whose curse almost dooms the maze and its inhabitants; and many others, whose stories start separately and then intertwine into a satisfying conclusion. Apart from the occasional awkwardness of language, I found this an entrancing book, with picturesque but realistic characters and a deeply imaginative storyline.

Books read: 1

11 May 2004

• Jeff Cox, with photographs by Jerry Pavia, Landscape with Roses: a useful and practical guide to landscaping with roses, including many specific rose and plant recommendations for different climates and areas of the garden.

Books read: 1

12 May 2004

• Joan Aiken, Jane Fairfax, Emma Watson: having now read four of Aiken's Jane Austen sequels in the last month, I'm left wondering why they're so uneven. Earlier this month, I read Mansfield Revisited, which I mostly enjoyed, and Lady Catherine's Necklace, which wasn't very good; now I've read Emma Watson, which was outright bad, and Jane Fairfax, which to my relief was as good as I'd remembered it. Emma Watson is actually a completion of Austen's unfinished novel, The Watsons, rather than a sequel, and it's remarkably poorly done in its inconsistency with Austen's text. Austen only wrote about 50 or 60 pages of The Watsons, but she told her sister Cassandra how it would have ended, and either Aiken didn't know that or ignored it, since her completion has little in common with Austen's proposed ending. Worse, the language, characters, and plot are inconsistent with what Austen did write. If I could see it as one of Aiken's Regency romances rather than as related to Austen in any way, I might have enjoyed the melodramatic plot and outspoken heroine, but as it was, I was constantly annoyed.
  
  Perhaps my liking for Jane Fairfax is colored by the fact that Emma, to which it is a companion, is not one of my favorites of Austen's novels; I find the self-absorbed Emma irritating and am thus quite ready to believe in Aiken's portrayal of her through the eyes of Jane Fairfax, the other heroine of Emma. In contrast to Emma Watson, the characters in Jane Fairfax are quite compatible with those in Emma; Aiken even manages to capture quite nicely their speech patterns, particularly those of the querulous Mr. Woodhouse and the chatty Miss Bates. Although I noticed a couple of minor inconsistencies in the dating (surely Mr. Knightly isn't quite that much older than Emma?), Aiken delineates very well the almost claustrophobic society of Highbury, while contrasting it with Jane's life outside it.

Books read: 2

13 May 2004

• Jane Austen, Persuasion: on my favorites page.

Books read: 1

15 May 2004

• David Mizejewski, National Wildlife Federation: Attracting Birds, Butterflies, and Backyard Wildlife: a short but useful guide to creating a garden which attracts birds, butterflies, and other wildlife. We've limited space and resources to work with in our current garden, but there are many valuable suggestions which I intend to try, as well as several family projects which I look forward to trying with Liam when he's a little older.

Books read: 1

18 May 2004

• C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen: a gripping and intense science fiction novel, set on the planet Cyteen in Cherryh's Merchanter Universe about 300 years in our future, when human cloning has become a reality. Ariane Emory is a brilliant scientist, and when she dies under mysterious circumstances, her successors create a replicate of Emory and struggle to duplicate her childhood environment as well, so that the replicate will grow up under the same conditions and become the same person; Cyteen is the story of the second Ariane Emory. The characters are complex and their relationships intriguingly tortuous; the plot is intricate (and I feel that I'll probably get more of it on a re-read); and the world is very detailed and convincing. Although it was originally published fifteen years ago, Cherryh's exploration of genetics, environment, and nature vs. nurture continues to resonate and fascinate.

Books read: 1

19 May 2004

• Meredith Ann Pierce, Waters Luminous and Deep: Shorter Fictions: a marvelous collection of shorter works by a writer who is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. The title is nicely evocative, as all of the stories have to do with water (or ice or snow) in some way, and "luminous" is an excellent description of Pierce's beautifully clear and expressive writing. The stories range in length from just a few pages to novella-length, and in tone from the utterly charming "The Frogskin Slippers", a witty take on the fairy tale of "The Frog Prince", to the more serious "Rampion", a novella of two half-sisters, their lives on an isolated island, and the very different ways in which they rebel against their unscrupulous father. I find Pierce's longer fiction even more engrossing, but these shorter pieces still show off her wonderful imagery, strong heroines, and lovely writing.

Books read: 1

23 May 2004

• George MacDonald Fraser's The Candlemass Road is a taut and thrilling story of the Scottish Borders in the late 16th century. The narrator is the Spanish Catholic priest Father Luis Guevara, who has been taken in by Lord Dacre. When Lord Dacre is killed, his heir, the fiery Lady Margaret, arrives to take over his estate and finds that some of her tenants are being threatened by border reivers, so she hires the mysterious vagrant, murderer, and thief Archie Waitabout to protect them, in exchange for his life.
  
  The book is only about 150 pages long and moves at a breakneck pace, but never at the expense of character development, which is brilliantly shown in the tense interplay between the characters, particularly Lady Margaret, Waitabout, and Guevara. The language, both in the narrative and in the dialects used in dialogue, is brilliantly convincing and fairly easy to follow, once you've slipped into the flow of it. Fraser's understanding of the history and society of the Borders is clear and incisive; he succeeds marvelously in creating "a fiction based firmly on border fact which might convey something that a straight history could not" (from the Historical Postscript).
  
  
• Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories, by Diana Wynne Jones, brings together fifteen stories (all but three of which I'd read before) and a novella, "Everard's Ride". Spanning genres from science fiction to fantasy and even a touch of horror (in "The Master"), all of the stories show off Jones' wit and wild imagination, qualities which make her one of the best young adult fantasy writers of today (perhaps one of the best fantasy writers of today, period).  I was disappointed, though, that so many of the stories had been in previous collections - surely there were more to choose from?
  
  Among the stories, the standouts are: "Enna Hittims", in which a girl who has the mumps draws stories about a fictional hero, who becomes frighteningly real; "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight", set on a world in which dragons are real and telepathy is illegal; "The Girl Who Loved the Sun", the myth-like tale of a girl who longs to become a tree; "Nad and Dan adn Quaffy", a witty story of a typo-prone science fiction writer whose computer suddenly starts talking to her; and "What the Cat Told Me" and "Little Dot", both tales of magic narrated by cats.
  
  Since I already own and had read most of the stories, I was most looking forward to reading "Everard's Ride" and wasn't disappointed.  Alex and Cecilia live in Victorian England, the children of a wealthy farmer; there is a mysterious island near their home, said to be the site of a ghostly kingdom called Falleyfell.  When an enigmatic stranger comes to the farmhouse one night, Alex and Cecilia begin an adventure which leads them into Falleyfell and the dangerous intrigues of its court.  Not as inventive as Jones' best novels, "Everard's Ride" is still fast-paced and thrilling, with glints of humor and vivid characters.

Books read: 2

25 May 2004

• I've finished my reading of Joan Aiken's Jane Austen sequels with Eliza's Daughter and The Youngest Miss Ward, both of which would work better as novels in their own right - they'd be fine Regency romances like Aiken's others in that genre. Eliza's Daughter is a sequel to Sense and Sensibility, about the illegitimate daughter of Willoughby and Eliza, while The Youngest Miss Ward is a prequel to Mansfield Park, about the youngest sister of Mrs. Norris, Lady Bertram, and Mrs. Price. Both novels feature intelligent and spirited heroines who lead exciting lives, and they were both quite entertaining to read, but they just don't have much to do with Austen.
  
  Eliza's Daughter is also named Eliza. Brought up by a paid nurse in a village known as "Byblow Bottom", she knows neither her mother nor her father, nor has she ever met Colonel Brandon, who acts as her guardian. Her adventures take her from walks with Wordsworth and Coleridge, to school in Bath, and eventually to Portugal, and along the way she discovers her parents' stories as well as creating her own. Unfortunately, the characters from Sense and Sensibility who appear bear little resemblance to their Austen incarnations: Edward is a bitter, resentful, poor parson who has no regard for Elinor's well-being; Marianne has become a mean and spiteful woman who has always kept Colonel Brandon from seeing Eliza; and even Elinor is turned into an analog of Jane Austen, who writes novels without her family's knowledge. If the names were simply changed, the characters would be interesting and believable, but their entire inconsistency with Sense and Sensibility is hard to understand and detracted from my enjoyment of the book.
  
  Hatty Ward, the heroine of The Youngest Miss Ward, doesn't even exist in Mansfield Park, which clearly says that there were three sisters - Aiken tries to get around this by having the other sisters cast off the youngest, but it's not quite convincing. Fortunately, the action takes place years before Mansfield Park and only marginally involves the characters we know from that novel, so it's relatively easy to read this one without being too distracted by inconsistencies. Hatty is sensible (in both senses of the word) and engaging, a budding poet, and her trials and travails are absorbing, although the plot does become a trifle too melodramatic, and I wasn't thrilled by the contrived ending. But like Eliza's Daughter, The Youngest Miss Ward is an entertaining Regency - just forget while you're reading them that they have anything to do with Jane Austen.

Books read: 2

26 May 2004

• Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is tough to classify, but its mixture of mystery plus fantasy plus science fiction plus bits of Great Books equals one wildly inventive and entertaining book. Thursday Next (her mother is named Wednesday) is a LiteraTec, or Literary Detective; her beat is stolen manuscripts, forgeries, and other literary crimes, in a world where there are militant Baconians (people who believe Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare plays) everywhere and art disputes between Surrealists and Renaissancites can turn violent.
  
  Thursday is after criminal mastermind Acheron Hades, and when he kidnaps her uncle Mycroft and uses Mycroft's invention, the Prose Portal, to enter the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and murder a minor character (causing that character to disappear permanently from every copy of the book), the pursuit becomes personal. Then Hades kidnaps Jane Eyre out of the pages of her book, threatening the existence of one of Britain's most beloved books (though it's not exactly the Jane Eyre we know in our world -- in Thursday's world, Jane accompanies St. John Rivers to India rather than marrying Mr. Rochester).
  
  The plot and narrative of the book are full of whimsy, with characters with names like Braxton Hicks, Victor Analogy, and Paige Turner, not to mention Acheron Hades and Thursday Next herself, but Thursday is such a believable character that, like Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's books, she engages the reader's sympathy and suspension of disbelief. She's tough in a Chandler/Hammett kind of way -- when she finds that the man she loves is engaged to another woman, she quietly leaves for the shooting range, telling her partner, "I may be some time" -- yet vulnerable, due to her sojourn in the Crimean War (which has been going on for over 130 years), where she was one of the only survivors of a massacre that killed hundreds, including her brother Anton. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to Thursday in the next book in the series, Lost in a Good Book.
  
  
• Imagine a world in which Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated in 1588, in which the Spanish Armada defeated the English, and in which in the 20th century the Catholic Church controls all of Europe and the New World, suppressing all technology beyond the level of the steam locomotive. This is the world of Pavane, by Keith Roberts, a book of six more-or-less connected short stories (called "measures", in the dance metaphor of the title) followed by an epilogue, or "coda". Pavane is remarkable not for the carefully worked-out details that characterize many alternate histories, but rather for its intensely visual style and hauntingly dark mood. Roberts started his career as an illustrator, and that shows in passages like this (from the first story, "Lady Margaret"):
  
  "At three in the afternoon the engine sheds were already gloomy with the coming night. Light, blue and vague, filtered through the long strips of the skylights, showing the roof ties stark like angular metal bones. Beneath, the locomotives waited brooding, hulks twice the height of a man, their canopies brushing the rafters. The light gleamed in dull spindle shapes, here from the strappings of a boiler, there from the starred boss of a flywheel. The massive road wheels stood in pools of shadow."
  
  With passages like this, Roberts sets the dark, grim tone that pervades the book. The world he presents is not a pretty one, and even the epilogue, with its hints of a brighter future, cannot dispel the somber mood, since it also contains a surprising and disturbing twist. Some of the stories are more successful than others, but all are powerful and intelligent; this is an outstanding work of alternate history, which deserves to be better known.

Books read: 2

27 May 2004

• Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is on my favorites page.

Books read: 1

28 May 2004

• Robert B. Parker's new novel, Double Play, is a brilliant look at how Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. Joseph Burke is a WWII veteran whose wife leaves him while he's in the hospital recovering from serious wounds; after leaving the hospital, he works as a boxer and a bodyguard and is eventually hired by Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers to protect Robinson in his first year in the majors. Repercussions from Burke's previous job, guarding Lauren, the self-destructive daughter of a powerful local businessman with Mob connections, spill over into his work for Robinson, and Burke has to play off various criminal organizations against each other in order to protect Laurie and Jackie. Interspersed with the tight, fast-paced narrative are short chapters in which Parker reminisces about his boyhood, growing up during the war, and his love of baseball and the Dodgers.
  
  The events of the book are of course largely fictional, but Parker's take on Robinson's character is spot-on (and I say this having just read Robinson's autobiography); Parker shows very clearly the terrible pressure Robinson was under during those early years with the Dodgers, when he was under directive by Rickey not to respond in any way to the taunts and threats that came his way, no matter how awful they were. Even Burke, who's almost entirely distanced himself from emotion after the war and his divorce, cannot but admire Robinson's courage, and their relationship, though fictional, is moving and believable.

Books read: 1

29 May 2004

• After reading Parker's Double Play, I decided to read Jackie Robinson's autobiography (as told to Al Duckett), I Never Had It Made, which I've had sitting on the shelf unread for quite a while. Less than half the book actually deals with Robinson's baseball career; the rest details his troubled family life and his business and political dealings after retiring from baseball, from the problems of his son Jackie Jr., who conquered a serious drug addiction only to die in a car accident in 1971, to Robinson's work with the NAACP and his relationships with figures like Martin Luther King, Nelson Rockefeller, and Richard Nixon. His story is frequently disturbing, but always illuminating, and I came away with a profound respect for a man who suffered many hardships in his life but who spoke his mind and did what he thought was right. This is essential reading for anyone who is interested in baseball.

Books read: 1

31 May 2004

• Shannon Hale's The Goose Girl is a lovely new retelling of the Grimm fairy tale. Judging by Amazon.com sales ranking (yes, I know they're not the be-all and end-all, but they're a good indicator), lots more people are reading The Amulet of Samarkand than The Goose Girl, and that's a shame, because The Goose Girl is a much better book.
  
  Ani is the Crown Princess of Kildenree and is born able to speak the language of animals, a talent which is strongly discouraged by her mother, the ruling queen; she has thought all her life that she would be queen, but when she turns sixteen, she finds out that her mother has instead betrothed her to the prince of the neighboring land, Bayern. On the journey to Bayern, Ani's lady-in-waiting and guards betray her, and off we go into the traditional fairy tale. Hale follows the plot of the fairy tale fairly closely, but has reimagined it in order to provide extra structure and meaning; for example, Ani's ability to speak with animals explains her relationship with her horse and her success as a goose girl. A cast of complex characters and a lucid and eloquent style round out the novel and make it an excellent addition to the retold fairy tale genre.
  
  
• Jonathan Stroud's The Amulet of Samarkand, the first volume of a planned trilogy, has been enormously hyped as being the next Harry Potter, so I had to give it a try to see if it was that good. Well, it's not. It's not bad, and I'll probably read the rest of the trilogy, but while the world is reasonably original, Stroud fails to make either of his two main characters terribly sympathetic.
  
  Nathaniel is a magician's apprentice. After being humiliated by an older magician, he decides to get revenge and summons Bartimaeus, a djinni, to carry out his order to steal the fabled Amulet of Samarkand from the older magician (magic in this world works through magicians summoning various types of demons); complications ensue. The plot is reasonably complex and interesting, but the characters are not.
  
  The narrative shifts between Bartimaeus in the first person and Nathaniel in the third person; annoyingly, Bartimaeus's sections are full of footnotes, which are generally funny, but which interrupt the flow of the narrative - surely parentheses would have conveyed a similar flavor and not been as disruptive in the text. Nathaniel comes across as alternately whiny and arrogant, not a combination which appeals; even the occasional moments of heroism or altruism weren't enough to make me care about the character. Bartimaeus is frequently very witty, but his demon amorality is hardly sympathetic either.
  
  However, there are hints of growth in the main characters and in their relationship, as well as intimations of interesting events to come in future books, so I may pick up the next one from the library when it comes out. Perhaps the series will fulfill its promise then.

Books read: 2

Total books read this month: 23
Total books read this year: 177

Last updated 29 November 2005. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.