Patricia Kennealy-Morrison:
The Throne of Scone
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Agatha Christie:
Murder on the Orient Express
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Joyce Porter:
Dover One
16 February 2002
Several months ago I reread Kennealy's The Copper Crown for the first time in ages. Then I got distracted by other books, and it's taken a while for me to get around to rereading The Throne of Scone.
I very much enjoy these two books, as well as their prequel, The Silver Branch. It's good space fantasy, with larger-than-life characters and some ordinary folks as well, a fascinating world that I'd love to visit, and a feeling of depth and history. Kennealy manages a tone that reminds me of good retellings of myths, which makes me able to believe in characters that I'd otherwise find unrealistic and to buy situations without saying "hey! that's deus ex machina!" (well...no, that's a spoiler) or "wait a minute, where did THAT come from?" In these books, it works.
Unfortunately, when I read Kennealy's Arthurian trilogy (The Hawk's Grey Feather and two other titles I don't feel like looking up), it did absolutely nothing for me, and in fact I never actually finished the third book. She's doing the same kinds of things that she did in the Aeron trilogy, but there's something missing. The Terran characters, to provide ordinary people to relate to? The sections from the antagonists' viewpoints, so that we could recognize them as true opponents worth fighting against? (I greatly admire and even like Jaun Akhera, Aeron's opposite number, but I don't root for him. Without his viewpoint, it'd be harder to "get" why Aeron must oppose him; because I see his viewpoint, I can better cheer Aeron in her actions.) Perhaps that's part of it -- the Arthurian trilogy is, if I recall correctly, told entirely from the viewpoint of Talesin, Arthur's best friend, and after a while I got tired of the "Arthur is so great this, and his sister is so great that, and this person who opposed them is so evil evil evil." At any rate, I was sufficiently disappointed in those books that I haven't had the heart to try anything else Kennealy's written since, and the reviews I've read of Blackmantle suggest that I might have similar problems with it. But the original Aeron trilogy is still one of the five sets-of-books I'd take with me to a desert island.
Recently I reread Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. It's a good quick read, and a very nice mystery, which I won't spoil for the small subset that hasn't read it yet. If there's a David Suchet dramatization of this, I really want to see it. (The first time I read the book was several months after I'd first read Randall Garrett's short story "Murder on the Napoli Express." Plenty of "aha! that's what Garrett's paying homage to here!"...though the solutions are rather different.)
And for something completely different, I tried Joyce Porter's first Inspector Dover mystery, Dover One. Dover is the antihero of British detection -- he's obnoxious, clueless, annoying, and solves crimes by pure luck and other people's efforts rather than by his own intellect. Add in his hapless assistant, and the menagerie of weirdos living in the housing complex where a young woman has disappeared.... The book is darkly funny, and while it's not a style that I like to read very often, I'll try another Dover mystery when I'm really in the mood for something anti-treacly.
P. G. Wodehouse:
The Girl in Blue
11 February 2002
A run-down British manor and its run-down owner. A corporate lawyer. A rich eccentric widow. A cartoonist with a trust fund. A stewardess with an inheritance. A gold-digging poetess. A pseudo-butler. A missing miniature portrait. Mayhem.
I haven't read a lot of Wodehouse, but of the ones I've read, this is my absolute favorite. The plot is one of those that takes numerous logical steps to reach an outrageous result, and there's a marriage proposal in there that I consider the best one I've ever read.
Amy Thomson:
The Color of Distance
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Through Alien Eyes
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Susan Gordon Lydon:
The Knitting Sutra
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Dorothy L. Sayers:
The Man Born to Be King
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Frederick Forsyth:
The Day of the Jackal
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Dorothy Dunnett:
Checkmate
7 February 2002
With the current shelving arrangement, Amy Thompson's The Color of Distance is right by the front door and easy to grab. I picked it up to look up some random passages, and ended up rereading the thing. The Color of Distance tells the story of a Terran scientist stranded on an alien planet, living with the indigenes and trying to understand their culture. This is definitely a science fiction book that you read for the world and the aliens. The plot is okay but nothing special; the characters are pleasant but nothing to write home about. But the worldbuilding, the Tendu culture, the alien ecology...that's what makes this book worth reading.
So since I'd finished that, I read the sequel for the first time. In Through Alien Eyes, the scientist returns to Earth with two of the Tendu. While Thompson looks at some interesting issues (for example, what happens when you have two aliens with phenomenal abilities to heal others -- and millions of people who want healing?), overall I found this book weaker than the first one. The whole deal with the ship being stuck in quarantine at the beginning -- what was the point? To show that there were nasty bureaucracies on Earth? To artificially create some conflict? (Sure, it's perfectly logical that there might be some questions about quarantine, when Earth is receiving its first alien visitors, but the way it was handled felt awkward, and the way it was resolved....) And there was the interaction between Juna and Bruce -- again, I can buy the things that happened, but the presentation fell flat for me, and Bruce just didn't seem real to me. And so on, and so forth. Actually, some of the problems I had with this book were problems I had with the first book as well, but The Color of Distance had the whole alien world to make up for any plot or character weaknesses; the future Earth of Through Alien Eyes isn't as interesting a place. Also, the ending didn't feel like a resolution; at best, it felt like a hinting for a possible third book. (Which I would probably read, granted, especially if it involved a return to the Tendu planet.)
A while ago, I picked up Lyddon's The Knitting Sutra: Craft as Spiritual Practice in a used book store. The author muses about how her hobby of knitting became a spiritual practice as well, and the things she learned from it that she later applied to her everyday life, and the ways knitting helped her through various crises. I have mixed feelings about this book. The parts about the knitting itself I enjoy very much; I identify with the things she's talking about, even when I'm not familiar with the specific designers or yarns, and I'm interested in how knitting acted as therapy for her. But there's also a lot of digression about other spiritual movements she's been involved in -- Native American studies, Arica, Sufiism.... Too newagey for my tastes. I end up skimming until she starts talking about knitting again.
And approaching spiritual and religious issues from another side entirely.... The Man Born to Be King is a series of radio plays on the life of Jesus, written by Dorothy Sayers. I really enjoy reading these, not just for the plays themselves but also for Sayers's commentary in the cast sections. Her Matthew is an especial hoot. I'd really love to hear these someday.
Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal seems to be a classic in the spy/thriller genre, and having read it, I can definitely see why. It's a page-turner; Forsyth does a great job of drawing you into the plot and making you wonder what's going to happen next and how the scenarios are going to work out. I'm pleased that I managed to figure out how the gun was disguised before it was directly revealed.
I'd decided that I was going to write Dorothy Dunnett a fan letter after I finished the Lymond Chronicles. Alas, that shall never be. But I've finally finished Checkmate, and the series has been well worth reading. I still don't quite get why so many women find Lymond attractive, and I still think that Philippa's the person I'd rather hang out with, but hey. It's a good tangled story.