Birthday Books!

Sunday was my birthday, and (as always) I got books! I've been using the library so much this year that I didn't ask for as many books as I used to ask for, but what I got was quality:

• Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy in the Tiina Nunnally translation -- I can read the language of Charles Archer's older translation, but it tends to feel like Archer is trying too hard. His archaisms are grammatically correct, so I can stand to read them, but they still feel strained to me, as if he's trying just a little too hard. I've read that Nunnally's translation is also more faithful to the tone of Undset's own words, but I don't read Norwegian, so I can neither confirm nor deny.
  
• From my brother: Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian, The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillipa Gregory, and Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton. My brother just started working at Borders, so he was looking for books to buy me, and I picked a few from my old Amazon wishlist and a few from Diana Gabaldon's "Methadone List". Armed with the list, he actually walked into the store where he works and bought a Phillipa Gregory and a Laurell K. Hamilton! Coming from an almost-21-year-old, that's real brotherly love. (I mean, Master and Commander is love too, but without such potential for young-manly embarrassment.)
  

Adam may very well have gotten me books, too; we haven't had our celebration together yet.

Girl In a Cage -- Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris, 2002 (read 27-30 June 2007)

I read this more than a month ago now, but it's stuck with me, as any good book does. Yolen and Harris do a marvelous job of pacing Marjorie Bruce's tale and of making it feel viscerally real. Marjorie's story is Scotland's story, and the story of Scotland's people; politics and daily life are woven together, and Marjorie learns that both require her considerable personal courage. Marjorie's narration moves back and forth between the long days of her captivity and the breakneck months leading up to it, allowing us to see not only her acts of valor and intelligence, but the ways she has learned to refine and govern these powers.

Girl in a Cage is apparently the second book in a planned quartet of Scottish history. Its story and characters stand alone, but I'd like to read the other books in the series; this one conveys so well the legendary victories and crushing defeats of Scottish wars against England. I'm reading other books now, about much later Scottish history, but my mental images are still very much affected by Yolen and Harris's images of rebellion, perilous flight, and noble pride.

Library visits, 2nd half of July

Can't post. Too busy reading Outlander books! Here are my book-hauls from the library in the past couple of weeks. (I've been checking out Upstairs Downstairs over and over again too, but I haven't been watching them as much as I might like -- I haven't had as much alone-doing-chores time this summer as I anticipated.)

• 17 July:
  
  
  
  • In Spite of the Gods: the strange rise of modern India (Edward Luce)
    
  • Dragonfly in Amber (Diana Gabaldon)
    
  • Voyager (Diana Gabaldon)
    
  • Lady Ilena: Way of the Warrior (Patricia Malone)
    
  
  
• 25 July:
  
  
  
  • The Fiery Cross (Diana Gabaldon)
    
  • Drums of Autumn (Diana Gabaldon)
    
  • The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction
    

    (I picked these up at a branch I'd never been to before. One librarian asked me if they were out of small books that day, and another raved companionably about Diana Gabaldon's speaking skills.)
    

  
  
• 26 July:
  
  
  
  • Lord John and the Private Matter (Diana Gabaldon) (to make the Outlander series last just a little longer!)
    
  • Charity Girl (Michael Lowenthal) (so I could have a copy out on my own card)
    
  • Hikaru no go. 1, Descent of the Go master (Yumi Hotta) (for Adam)
    
  
  

I, Coriander -- Sally Gardner, 2005 (read 20-26 June 2007)

I was going to stop with two new reviews tonight. I know I'm way behind on posting reviews of what I've read, but really, it's time for me to go shower -- or at least get off the computer.

I'm putting off the last few pages of Outlander for this! Which, come to think of it, might be why I'm doing it; I have to wait until tomorrow afternoon at least before I can get my grubby hands on the copy of Dragonfly in Amber I requested from the library.

But my proximal excuse is that I just re-encountered the perfect quotation to complement the next book I'm due to review.

I had trouble getting into I, Coriander. I made a few false starts at the first chapter, and only really started reading at the last minute before the book was due at the library.

I had to check out another copy the same night I returned it. Here's one of the reasons why:

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Gardner's world of magic is weird and disturbing even when it's beautiful, and it's frequently ugly. The things that happen to Coriander outside the magical world are the same way. What I ended up loving about this book -- what had me, in my mind, standing up and cheering for Coriander -- was this: She begins as a little girl, shocked by a sudden swing in the course of her life, and terrified of very real threats to her safety. She grows, not just into herself, but into someone who confronts her life's demons face-to-face. (And she does it without breaking character!)

I can imagine this book working magic in the life of an abused child, not least because it's not syrupy medicine, but a story anyone can fall into.

The Legend of Lady Ilena -- Patricia Malone, 2002 (read 21-24 June 2007)

I have a lot of different favorite kinds of books. The Legend of Lady Ilena is several of them!

• Believable historical fiction: Well, Ilena is completely fictional; we have no evidence that anyone like her existed. It was a stroke of genius, in my opinion, to situate her lightly in Arthurian times, a setting where it's easy for modern readers to suspend disbelief. I'm easily annoyed by implausible details in historical fiction, so I really appreciate books that suck me into the past without making me stub my toes on what a normal person would consider minor errors. Of course, any writer of historical fiction has to make a lot of things up; what matters to me is that the fiction harmonize well with what we do know. Ilena is strong and smart and very much of her own time.
  
  
• Strong women who really fit into the stories being told about them: See the last sentence above. It helps, as I said, that we don't know too much about sixth-century Britain, and it probably helps me that so much of what I do know is colored by all the historical fiction I read growing up. I also have a decided weakness for lady knights -- not the easiest characters to write into real history! Whatever their story, it's always a great pleasure for me to read characters I both like and believe in.
  
  
• Traditional stories re-explained: Malone has managed (against the odds!) to contribute something really new to the masses of historical fiction set in Arthur's time. She's done it in part by avoiding Arthur himself, leaving him a vague, faraway presence, but she's done it well.
  
  
• Just plain good writing: This is one of my basic litmus tests, of course. To really love a book, I have to enjoy its prose and its characters and the world it creates. It certainly helps if there are lines that makes me grin both with humor and with revelation. I don't know if Malone is the first one to have this insight, but I loved her idea that the unearthly barking of Hearn's Hounds (the ghostly hunt at Halloween-time -- you might remember it from The Dark Is Rising) might be the same sound as the honking of migrating geese.
  

I just love literary craftsmanship of all kinds.

I'm looking forward to checking out Malone's second Lady Ilena book; the Amazon reviews suggest that it won't be disappointing.

The Tale of Despereaux -- Kate DiCamillo, 2003 (read 19-20 June 2007)

Another box checked on the "things I've been sort of meaning to read for a while now" list. I finally wrote this review last Friday -- Friday the 13th! -- while sitting in a strange library,* taking a break between endurance bouts of integration.

* Not strange anymore -- I technically have a card for this library now (and all other public libraries in Maryland).

The most striking feature of The Tale of Despereaux is its extreme cuteness. The story's prose is charming to the point of being laugh-out-loud funny (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not). The invocation to the reader annoyed me somehow, although Adam thought it was charming.

Surprisingly although the story is sometimes a bit too conscious of itself as a story -- too much "Reader, this happened" and "Reader, that happened" -- it never struck me as too very self-conscious about the cuteness. It's appealing in a very obvious way, yet not in an acutely embarrassing way. It's really just sweet.

The trials Despereaux faces weren't as tense for me, as a reader, as they were for Despereaux himself, but that might be different if I were younger. Overall, I was charmed by the plot. I particularly like the way the story's resolution depended on almost every character having a bit of good in them. I also liked that it came about in spite of almost everyone having bit of doubt about themselves or their actions.

Since finishing Despereaux, I've seen Ratatouille, which has some obvious superficial similarities. I liked Ratatouille better, I think. On the other hand, I would not have appreciated it in precisely the same way if I hadn't just read Despereaux, so there you are.

Library visit, 10 July 2007

Checked out:

• Upstairs Downstairs, discs VII and VIII (Season 2). This is my alone-time TV -- I watch it when I'm eating dinner, folding laundry, knitting, or just procrastinating. I watched through Season 4 already, but I was in the same place in the series as one of the librarians (and we kept competing for the DVDs), so I started over. It would have been too sad, anyway, to finish it so soon.
  
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. This book caught my eye when I was browsing back issues (so to speak) of Reading Is My Superpower, and it caught my eye again on the New Items shelf at the library. I didn't pick it up at the time, because it was a large print edition. When it was still there on Tuesday, Adam convinced me it was fate.
  
• Fenzig's Fortune by Jean Rabe. I can't tell yet if I'll like this one, or even if I'll read it -- I've been checking out more of every genre than I can read, but especially of fantasy. But it was on the New shelf too, so why not?
  
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. This is all over the blogosphere, in a quietish way, and has been for lots of years. Romance-y historical fiction, entertaining and smart and well-written. So far, I really, really like it.
  
• Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. I probably won't actually read these, now that I think about it. But I'm listening to audiobook versions of both of them in the car, and when I can't quite hear things on the recording, I wish I had a print copy to consult later.
  

Returned:

• Books I was enjoying, but won't finish before they're due:
  
  
  
  • Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer
    
  • Empress Orchid by Anchee Min
    
  • War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
    
  • Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson
    
  
  
• Books I meant to read and didn't:
  
  
  
  • Wild Ginger by Anchee Min
    
  • Secret Sacrament by Sherryl Jordan
    
  • Mairelon the Magician by Patricia Wrede
    
  • Valentine: A Love Story by Chet Raymo
    
  
  
• Books I'm done with:
  
  
  
  • Sew What! Skirts by Francesca Denhartog and Carole Ann Camp
    
  
  

My very own library card...

Adam was getting sick of my excessive booklust putting him over the 60-item limit on his card...

Also, it turns out that there's now a unified library card for all Maryland public libraries, so that you don't have to be a Howard County resident to get a Howard County library card.

So on Saturday we went and signed me up for my very own Howard County library card. It's shiny and holographic!

In honor of this new development, I'm going to start posting the things I check out (and return) on each trip to the library, so you can see how excessive my booklust really is (even as compared to the number of books I claim to be reading at a time).

On Saturday, we went to both the local branch library and the central library. Here's what I checked out:

• Local branch:
  
  
  • From a display shelf of selected young-adult "good reads":
    
    • Nine Days a Queen: the short life and reign of Lady Jane Grey (Ann Rinaldi)
    
    
    • Just Ella (Margaret Peterson Haddox)
    
    
    • Singer (Jean Thesman)
  
  
  • From New Books: One Night at the Call Center: A Novel (Chetan Bhagat)
  
  
  • The Borgia Bride (Jeanne Kalogridis)
  
  
  • For Adam: The West Wing, season 4, disc 5.


• Central library:
  
  • From New Books: The Ladies of Grace Adieu (Susanna Clarke)
  
  
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
  
  
  • A Morbid Taste for Bones (Ellis Peters)
  
  
  • The Last Templar (Michael Jecks)

On Sunday, I went to study at the central branch. In the last 15 minutes before the library closed, I browsed the new nonfiction books and grabbed these:

• My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned By Becoming a Student (Rebekah Nathan, aka Cathy Small)


• The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial (Susan E. Eaton)


• Poor People (William T. Vollmann)

Total items out so far: 13.

The Time Machine -- H.G. Wells, 1895 (read 18-19 June 2007)

Who was it that originated the phrase "cracking good read"? Google can't seem to tell me, but it can tell me that I'm not the first one to describe The Time Machine this way. It helps that I'm used to nineteenth-century use of language -- quite enjoy it, in fact -- and that the "now" of this story is a time period that feels familiar to me. In some ways, The Time Machine feels like Heinlein's science fiction -- visions of a new society, women as accessories to Men of Science (this is worse in The Time Machine than in, say, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). One difference in style: Heinlein goes to a good deal of trouble to make his characters sound different and speak a futuristic language, whereas Wells's characters seem to belong very much to his own time.

I've got Anna Karenina on my to-be-read pile, and I've heard that it's a gripping, quick read like this. Supporting evidence to come!

Anna of Byzantium -- Tracy Barrett, 1999 (read 17-18 June 2007)

Continuing my series of historical novels about strong young women...

I'm inclined to compare Anna of Byzantium to I, Claudius; I think the common theme I'm seeing is women behind the throne.

My favorite history professor always held up the BBC miniseries of I, Claudius as surprisingly historically accurate, particularly in its portrayal of the details of daily life among Roman aristocrats. I don't know as much about Byzantium as I do about Rome, but Anna seems to me to be accurate in much the same way: a creative, yet basically faithful, filling-in of personalities and events left out of the historical record.

I did have a hard time believing that Anna would have been so carefully educated to rule; still, Barrett defends the idea nicely. She also suggests that her version of Anna's education is partly a consequence of the way she compressed some major events in Anna's life into her adolescence. We know Anna was a scholar of politics and the author of the Alexiad, a major chronicle of Byzantine history, but she completed it when she was 55; I think she may have had plenty of years as an adult to educate herself in history and philosophy, and to cement this education with her keen observation of Byzantine politics.

Hattie Big Sky -- Kirby Larson, 2006 (read June 16, 2007)

A quick and compelling read, obviously. Hattie Big Sky gets off to a bit of a slow start -- too much backstory all at once, I think. The ending comes so abruptly that it doesn't quite make sense; Hattie's attitude and plans seem to change so swiftly and so completely. On the other hand, maybe that's not so surprising; Hattie is independent and adventurous enough to strike out for Montana alone at sixteen, so why shouldn't she be ready for another adventure?

I liked most of the characters Hattie meets, even some of the ones who do evil things, and I liked hearing about all of them. This book sheds a wonderful light on Montana frontier life, and on the kinds of relationships that made life possible on the frontier.

It's lovely mental exercise to compare and contrast Hattie Big Sky with Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. Both are fictionalized versions of real pioneers' lives. Their main characters have different family situations and live at least a generation apart. They face different political challenges, but the challenges of the prairie, and the ties of friendship and kinship that make it liveable, are strikingly similar. Hattie Big Sky gives us a small, richly detailed slice of one woman's life, where the Little House books (and their sequels) give us a drawn-out saga. The lives of the Little House protagonists are no less intensely lived than Hattie's, but there is more room to spread historical detail out over many books, so they are a bit gentler to read. I wish we could have a whole series about Hattie's life!

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (Volume 1: The Pox Party) -- M.T. Anderson, 2006 (read 11-15 June 2007)

I can't say too much about this book on this blog, because Adam is just about to start reading it. It's an entertaining and horrifying book. The style is reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, although it's less deliberately creaky and less self-conscious. It's also, therefore, less full of in-jokes with the reader -- creaky and self-conscious can be well used.

At first, Octavian Nothing's action is also reminiscent of Quicksilver; Anderson and Stephenson are toying with some of the same elements of early modern society, including scientific societies. It soon becomes clear, however, that while Octavian Nothing may indeed be "Neal Stephenson for young adults," it's not "Quicksilver for young adults"; its themes (liberty, slavery, betrayal) and its plot (no spoilers!) are all its own.

An Abundance of Katherines -- John Green, 2006 (read 10-11 June 2007)

Adam grabbed this one at the library this weekend because it was on the young-adult New Arrivals shelf, and he remembered that his mother, who teaches children's literature at a state college, had recommended it. He got first dibs on reading it, so I waited around most of the weekend while he read and read and laughed and laughed and laughed. I don't usually hear him laughing out loud so often at a book.

It is very funny, and the main character is so like him; it's no wonder my boyfriend liked it. I liked it too -- perhaps a little less than he did, but it's not the book's fault. It's just that I've read quite a few books about child prodigies, and quite a few books with funny, acerbic footnotes, and after a while they start to get a little blurred together. Which is a function of my weird tastes -- it's not exactly an old, tired genre.

I also didn't love the way Green worked mathematics into the book. It's such a valiant, passionate attempt to show how cool Real Math and Theorems and Science can be, how much fun it is to figure out how to generalize and explain things -- but somehow it didn't quite work for me. Since I'm a mathematician, that's hard for me to say! I hope, actually, that that's the problem, and that this subplot will work just fine for readers just a little less picky than I am.

So much complaining! These are small flaws in an intelligent, witty, unnervingly lifelike, and sometimes laugh-out-loud-funny novel. Do read it!

The Westing Game -- Ellen Raskin, 1979 (read 5-9 June 2007)

This is one of the first books Adam's recommended to me that I've actually read.

I remember coming across this book in elementary school and thinking it looked horribly boring. I was wrong. It's lots of fun! Raskin's writing is engaging and clever; we don't have much time to get to know the many, many characters, but each one stands out as a distinguishable individual.

Clues, red herrings, and surprises come at you fast. I kept thinking I was clever for figuring something out, only to get knocked down a peg for totally misinterpreting something else -- just the way the characters do. Thanks to my omniscient readerly perspective, I got the main point of the mystery much faster than the characters did, but I missed a crucial piece that was obvious to them. (It was available to me, if I had read a little more carefully.)

I didn't find the ending quite satisfying -- there were still too many loose ends I was curious about -- but I've heard there's a sequel.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince -- J. K. Rowling, 2005 (re-read 31 May-4 June 2007)

I've just finished re-reading the Harry Potter series in anticipation of Book 7. I re-read them pretty frequently -- probably at least once a year, and definitely when there's a new one coming out. They bear re-reading well; there are always details I forgot or didn't notice, and it's fun to read them all in a row, to watch the whole story unfold. This time, of course, I was looking for clues about all the mysteries Book 6 sets up: Is Snape good or evil? What's going to happen to Harry? Can I guess any of the things he's going to find on his quest?

The Rope Trick -- Lloyd Alexander, 2002 (read 3-4 June 2007)

Another quite satisfying ending. It leaves a number of loose ends, but they're not irritating omissions; rather, they seem like exciting mysteries, which fits the magical and mysterious feel of the whole book.

I'm noticing a certain similarity between The Rope Trick and The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha (also by Alexander, published in 1978). Both are set in thinly fictionalized versions of real countries several centuries ago, but that's true of nearly all of Alexander's children's books. I'm more struck by the subtle sameness of the magic in these two books. Magic plays completely different roles in the two plots, but the rules about magic are something like this: People who try to do magic are mostly conjurers doing tricks; but sometimes, sometimes they really can do magic.

I've been reading a lot of Alexander since I learned that he died this May -- I read the Prydain and Westmark books when I was younger, and The Arkadians, but I missed all the others. I'm glad to find that Alexander's writing (both his use of language and the stories he has to tell) is still as compelling as it used to be. I'm particularly enjoying the way he writes about family love, romantic love, and friendship; it's such fun to watch clever characters learn to understand and take care of each other, and their love (of whatever kind) seems so genuine.

The Perilous Gard -- Elizabeth Marie Pope, 1974 (read ~31 May-3 June 2007)

A wonderful book! Not entirely surprising, since it's a Newbery Honor book. It's based on the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, and I enjoyed it much more than Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which is based on the same legend. This is saying a lot, since I'm quite a Jones fan.

Kate, the heroine, is an interesting person, someone I can identify with. All the characters seem like people I'd enjoy talking to. A good book, of course, may or may not have characters like this, but it definitely was pleasant.

I did keep noticing two flaws in the book:

• Pope used Tudor period details well, displaying the results of what must have been plenty of research without including a single historical detail that didn't seem necessary at the time. Even Kate's thoughts were backed up with details about her upbringing in and around Tudor royal courts, and her personal exposure to a few of the great thinkers of the period. Still, her thought processes often seemed too modern, even post-modern. In particular, her conclusions about the clash between Christian and pagan lifestyles felt too much like Marion Zimmer Bradley to be believable in a Tudor lady-in-waiting. They were very nicely disguised as period-appropriate thoughts, though.
  
• In a few places, I found it too easy to predict what was about to happen -- particularly just before the very end.
  

These problems were far outweighed, however, by my favorite thing about this book: It has an ending that's exactly right. It's so unusual for an ending to be satisfying! Usually the book stops before it really seems done; less often, there's a real denouement, but it doesn't happen at all the way I wanted it to. This book is one of perhaps five or ten I've read with truly satisfying endings.

Welcome!

Welcome to yet another Libby's Blog.

I'm thinking of joining the Adult Summer Reading Program at the local library. To participate, whenever I finish a (library) book, I'll submit a card with my personal information, the book's title and author, and a short review. I'll be posting my reviews here.

I've been meaning to keep up a reading journal for at least a year now. I'm hoping that keeping this book-review blog will help me build up momentum.