Lois McMaster Bujold:
The Curse of Chalion
30 August 2001
The best way to spend one's birthday is reading a new book by one's favorite author. The Curse of Chalion has been sitting wrapped on the table for three weeks, while I gazed at it and whimpered. Fortunately, I have been well rewarded for my patience.
Lois McMaster Bujold has been my favorite author ever since the day I checked Brothers in Arms out from the library. Her characters are quirky and delightful and so damn real -- if pressed, I'll admit that I'm still a little in love with Gregor Vorbarra. (Well, look at his description -- dark-haired, skinny, and handsome. Can we say "Castiron Lust Template", boys and girls?) Her sense of humor is fantastic; almost every book has several lines I chortle over. The characters grow and change over time, making the Vorkosigan series as a whole fascinating reading.
With The Curse of Chalion, Bujold makes a second foray into fantasy. I liked her first fantasy novel, The Spirit Ring, and I assumed that this one would be at least as good.
Whoa.
This is the best thing Bujold has ever written.
This is the...I won't say best thing I've read all year, because depending on what units I measure in, Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic duology might come out higher, but this is in the top five.
This is the book I've most enjoyed this year, and that's including Sarantine Mosaic.
From the sample chapters on Eos, I wasn't expecting to love it this much. The beginning is somewhat leisurely, with an interesting character to be sure, and with lots of nice little tidbits, but overall fairly laid-back.
And then it starts getting interesting.
And then it starts getting really interesting.
And as I go through, all sorts of little throwaway details turn out to be far less throwaway than they appeared at first glance....
The characters are, as usual, great fun; the plot is one of the tightest she's ever come up with; and the theology definitely made me think. I don't know enough about medieval Spain to see what she's done with that background (although it'll make for some interesting comparison next time I read Kay's Lions of Al-Rassan) But overall, I love this puppy.
Dorothy Dunnett:
Queen's Play
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Louisa May Alcott:
An Old-Fashioned Girl
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Christine de Pizan:
The Book of the City of Ladies
28 August 2001
Multitasking is occasionally challenging. Reading while knitting -- doable with a hardcover, damn difficult with a paperback. But with the library hardcover of Dorothy Dunnett's Queen's Play, it worked well.
And oh my word, what a book. I started the Lymond Chronicles after strong recommendations from Alexandria Digital Literature, boosted by one of my online friends (waves tentacle at R.). This is the second book in the series, following The Game of Kings, and it's even better than its predecessor. So far the books have a high static and low kinetic coefficient of friction -- it takes me a while to get into them, but once I get the momentum, I can barely stop.
I'm not a particular fan of Lymond himself; he's a fascinating character, yes, but too much of a rogue for me. But I like the stories, and the tangled plots. I love how Dunnett fooled me at the beginning of the book -- and has other characters be fooled in the same way. Robin Stewart was heartbreaking, and some of the passages toward the end are eventually going in my quote lists. The chance-met, indeed.
For a quickie comfort read to follow that, I spent an afternoon with Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl. What can I say? Yeah, it's schmaltzy, but it's so charming. (And it's interesting how learning a bit about the women's rights movements of the mid 19th century adds to my appreciation of Alcott -- I get some of what she's referring to.)
A couple weeks ago, I started flipping through Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, translated by Rosalind Brown-Grant, and ended up reading the whole thing. It's a fascinating collection of stories about great legendary women of ancient and medieval times, in a very readable translation. One of my favorite stories was of the mother of a medieval warrior who was so ashamed of her son's cowardice in battle that she lifted up her skirts and told him that if he was so scared, he might just as well crawl back up into her womb. The son, ashamed, returned to the battle and won a brilliant victory.
As the translator notes, Christine de Pizan isn't feminist in the modern sense. But in the context of her time, she's Gloria Steinem cubed, and the stories are just neat.
Raymond Chandler:
The Big Sleep
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C. Dale Brittain:
The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint
6 August 2001
It's nice to know that there are still wonderful works out there that I haven't read. A while ago, when I mentioned to my husband that one of my characters wanted to talk in a vaguely hard-boiled detective style, he reminded me that we own books by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler if I wanted to read the original style for myself.
Well, I wasn't enamored of the one Hammett I read (The Maltese Falcon, for the curious -- too detached for my tastes, and I didn't like anybody in the book), but Chandler is a delight. I've just finished The Big Sleep, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the Philip Marlowe books. It's beautiful, subtle prose, with creative similes and perfect word choices. Chandler could write Philip Marlowe talking about his shopping list (hell, he probably does, somewhere), and it'd be fascinating reading. And so much is said between the lines. I want to write that well someday.
I also read C. Dale Brittain's The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint. I picked this up at a library discard sale for elcheapo, just because the title sounded kind of interesting and reasonably funny. And that's what it is. Kind of interesting and reasonably funny. Not the best thing I've ever read, not especially deep characters, but a fun story and an amusing weekend read. (And the legend of the saint is a hoot.)