A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
1959, 313 pages
Read April 14, 2010

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s only published novel is one of the great postapocalyptic novels of the twentieth century.  I’m fond of postapocalyptic fiction, books that deal with the aftermath of total annihilation of a civilization, because it is ironically a literature of hope and triumph, and I love the contradiction.  Everyone at some point in life has to ask the question “if something bad happens, what will I do?” and postapocalyptic stories offer a vicarious exploration of the worst bad things ever.  The fear of nuclear war in the last half of the twentieth century produced some wonderful examples, which is where A Canticle for Leibowitz comes from.

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Changes
by Jim Butcher
2010, 438 pages
Read April 7, 2010

Ten years ago Jim Butcher published his first book, Storm Front, featuring a wisecracking wizard named Harry Dresden.  He had a good idea and some native talent with dialogue and fast-moving action.  Since that time, he’s published eighteen—EIGHTEEN!—full-length novels and a handful of short fiction.  With the publication of Changes, the twelfth novel in the Harry Dresden series, Butcher has achieved a level of success that no one anticipated a decade ago.  True to its name, Changes marks not only dramatic alterations to the series, but a subtle transformation in Butcher’s writing abilities and style.

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Moving a 2200-square-foot house and 4,000 books turns out to be rather draining.  There’s all the packing, for one.  (If you are planning a move any time soon, I highly suggest you call my mother-in-law, who is a very demon for packing and has way more energy than I do.)  Then there’s the moving.  We hired movers, and this was a good thing, but they started getting these pained looks every time they brought in a stack of book boxes and I said “Those all go downstairs.”  And then the unpacking, which is the least strenuous but takes the most time.  It’s a little like Christmas, if Santa came into your house and put all your stuff in boxes so you don’t know where your toothbrush is (not in the bathroom box) or what happened to half your drinking glasses (still haven’t found those).  But in the end, you have a wonderful new home full of stuff.

And, in my case, a basement full of boxes and not enough bookshelves.

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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
J.K. Rowling
1999, 435 pages
Read July 15, 2007

(This review was originally posted on the Diana Wynne Jones mailing list.  All page references are from the first Scholastic trade paperback printing, 2001.)

We had our expedition to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix cut short when, about forty-five minutes into the film, the theater complex's generator shut down and took all the films in all twelve theaters with it. Why they would put the sound on the backup generator but not the picture is beyond me. Okay, sure, it probably takes less energy to run the sound, but why bother at all? It's not like we wanted to sit there in the dark listening to Dolores Umbridge begin her mad fascist reign of terror at Hogwarts. Very odd. It was too late in the day to get our money back and go to a different theater--even during summer vacation, we don't let the kids stay up all that late--so we opted to hang on to our ticket stubs and come back another day. It left me positively aching to know if Umbridge is an agent of the Dark Arts or not. :)  (But anyone who wears that much pink cannot possibly be up to anything good. Isn't Imelda Staunton lovely? She cracks me up.)

So I spent that evening toodling around Wal-Mart, picking up some few random items like bread and juice and the blinker bulb for the rear light of our van, and then finishing up Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I wasn't able to read this in one sitting as I did the first two, thanks to those pesky children needing things like maternal love and attention. The first session ended with Harry and Lupin having tea in his office for the first time, the day everyone else goes to Hogsmeade, and I left it thinking how much I liked Remus Lupin and how nice it was to have a teacher who took a personal interest in Harry and was a good guy as well.

And that's where I ended up, though my view had broadened by the end: I'm starting to like these characters.

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(I’ve been reading a lot, but haven’t had much time to review anything.  So rather than let this blog sit idle, I’ve decided to repost a series of reviews I did a few years ago when the final Harry Potter book was released and I re-read the entire series in preparation for it.  These reviews were originally posted on the Diana Wynne Jones mailing list.)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
by J. K. Rowling
1999, 341 pages
Read July 11, 2007

(All page references come from the first Scholastic (US) trade paperback edition, September 2000.)

The movie version soured me on this book--or, at least, on the desire to ever read it again. All I remembered was that the movie felt too long, was tediously edited, and that my kids have been on my case for years wanting me to buy the DVD. (I finally bought it because it cost only $10 and was the widescreen edition, which is the only way I watch movies any more. It's nice to be able to afford to keep one's inner snob in the style to which it would like to be accustomed.) It was nice to find that the book is not awful and that there were moments I remembered enjoying, though like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone this still had me mystified as to why kids were so crazy about the series.

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(I’ve been reading a lot, but haven’t had much time to review anything.  So rather than let this blog sit idle, I’ve decided to repost a series of reviews I did a few years ago when the final Harry Potter book was released and I re-read the entire series in preparation for it.  These reviews were originally posted on the Diana Wynne Jones mailing list.)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
by J. K. Rowling
1997, 332 p.
Read 7/10/07

(Note: All page number references come from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, first Scholastic trade paperback printing, 1999. I do own the UK edition of this one, but the US was more convenient to read as it came in a boxed set with two others. However, I much prefer the real title and will use it whenever possible, because...well, crap, people, there never WAS such a thing as a "Sorcerer's Stone"!)

The first thing that strikes me about Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is what a weird mix of literary elements it is, particularly the ones that distinguish a juvenile book from a YA. The subject of genre and age-level classification is too broad to address here in any detail, but one item in particular is relevant to this discussion.

In some juvenile fiction (books aimed at readers ages 8 to 12), one's willing suspension of disbelief about events or ideas is asked to stretch a lot further than if the same events or ideas were presented in an adult or young adult novel. Thus, for example, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's upside-down house is a charming novelty rather than something that in a YA or adult novel would have to be justified and explained and possibly have readers demanding to see the building permit. Or, for a more egregious example, the citizens of Jahnna N. Malcolm's Jewel Kingdom think nothing of being ruled by four prepubescent girls whose only qualification for governing is that they were born to very silly parents. Such elements are not universal in juvenile fiction, but they are natural to it. Young adult fiction, which as I have asserted before is supposed to be about the experience of being a young adult rather than simply aimed at a readership of 13- to 18-year-olds, is correspondingly more like adult fiction than juvenile. Readers expect unusual events or ideas to be supported by the text, or at least acknowledged as a problem. As long as a reader knows what kind of book she's reading, this isn't a difficulty. But Philosopher's Stone has enough elements of a YA book that it's hard to comfortably read it as one thing or the other.

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The Belgariad
(Pawn of Prophecy, Queen of Sorcery, Magician's Gambit, Castle of Wizardry, Enchanters' End Game; also published in two omnibus volumes)
by David Eddings
1982-1984, 1635 pp. total
Read from August to November 2009 (audiobook)

In 1985 a friend brought me a book she had checked out from the library called Enchanters' End Game.  “I think it’s your kind of thing,” she said.  I didn’t realize at first that it was the last book in the series, and when I did, I went ahead and finished it anyway.  So my first reading of The Belgariad was completely out of order; I read the books as I could get them from the library.  This was back in the days when I was young and, apparently, brain-damaged.  (Another feature of the crazy was that I never thought to look up the authors of books I liked to see if they’d written any more, delaying my “discovery” of Diana Wynne Jones by at least five years.)  Then I read them over and over again, in the right order, for about a year.  It was a year in which I read the same twenty-five books repeatedly.  I have no excuses.

Fast-forward a few years, to when Greystoke and I met at college.  “You like fantasy—so have you read The Belgariad?” he asked.  “Many times, but now I think it’s total crap,” I said.  The fact that he took this as a challenge rather than an insult is one of the primary reasons we’re married today.

Fast-forward again to last summer, as we were preparing for a road trip and I was heading to the library to find audiobooks the whole family might enjoy.  (This is a long-standing tradition and my weirdo children have never complained that we don’t have a DVD player in the car like all the other cool families.  I honestly had nothing to do with that.)  “You’re going to hate this,” said Greystoke, “but I think we should introduce the kids to The Belgariad.”  I’d mellowed over the years enough to think this might be a good idea.  And so, last August, we packed up the car, loaded all five books of the series onto the Zune, and started listening to the story of a little boy named Garion and his amazing Aunt Pol.

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Some books deserve recognition not only for being excellent, but for being an excellent representation of a particular kind of book.

Best New Series

The Inspector Ian Rutledge books, Charles Todd

Again, this is not a new series in the sense that it just started this year (because how can you know if it’s a good *series* without at least three volumes?) but is “new” to me.  I heard about it from another reviewer whose recommendations are…let’s just say that he and I seem to have markedly different tastes, and about 82% of the time, if he likes something, I’m not only going to dislike it, but wonder why anyone would ever think it was good.  But I keep paying attention to him because the other 18% of the time, his recommendation is both spot-on and fabulous.  (I’ve never seen such a bizarre overlap of artistic preferences before.  It’s sort of fascinating all by itself.)

The series, beginning with A Test of Wills, is about Ian Rutledge, a Scotland Yard inspector newly home from World War I with a case of shell shock and an invisible passenger—the spirit of Hamish Macleod, Rutledge’s former corporal.  When Macleod refused to lead the squad over the trenches into certain death, Rutledge ordered him shot for dereliction of duty; moments later, his body protected Rutledge from death when a German attack hit their position.  Whether Hamish is genuinely present or not is irrelevant to the story, since Rutledge treats their connection as literal and occasionally realizes things through Hamish’s perceptions that help him to solve cases.  However, Rutledge is damaged, and he knows it.  It doesn’t affect his ability to solve cases that no one else can, and despite his superior’s animosity toward him (and active efforts to humiliate and disgrace him so he’ll have to quit) Rutledge brings mystery after mystery to a satisfactory, if not brilliant, close.

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Previously I discussed my best books of the year.  But I’m never able to exclude other great books just because they weren’t quite as great.

Notable Books of 2009

Great Sky Woman, Steven Barnes

In November, I was browsing the library shelves in that aimless way you get when you know you’re in the mood for a particular kind of book but you don’t really know what it is.  (Unless this only happens to me.)  Our library puts books on the bottom shelves so their spines point upward and you don’t have to crouch down to see what’s there.  I happened to see this title, and the author’s name seemed familiar…oh, duh, he’s the coauthor of the Dream Park novels!  Despite the fact that I like those books and believe firmly that Barnes’s contribution is what makes them good (it’s a long story, even for me), I had never bothered to look for any of his solo novels.  This seemed like a good time to start.  Great Sky Woman is set in prehistoric times, in Africa, and the story centers on a group of people who live in the shadow of Kilimanjaro (Great Sky Mountain).  Barnes’ mythology is compelling and his characterization very strong, particularly in the development of the two main characters.  He also avoids some of the things I really hate, like making his characters wise beyond their time and full of modern knowledge or setting up a conflict between the wise, peaceful, earth-loving tribe and the huge, brutish, violent tribe.  There is a tribe of huge, brutish, violent people, but they are firmly contextualized within the story.  Having read Michael Crichton’s account of climbing Kilimanjaro with modern gear and oxygen, I really enjoyed the part of the novel where several people make the same climb without all that gear.  (They also whined less than Crichton did.  Seriously, I love the guy and all, but he comes off poorly in some parts of Travels.)  I am looking forward to reading the sequel, Shadow Valley, in the next week or so.

(And every time Greystoke walked past someplace the book was lying, he would say “Great SKYYYY, woman!”  It was funny the first time.)

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This tradition, for me, started years ago over at the Diana Wynne Jones mailing list, which is full of a lot of really nice people with exceptional taste in reading.  The end of a year is such a nice defining line, a mark that sets one group of the books you’ve read apart from the rest, and over the years I’ve gotten a lot of good recommendations from the year-end summaries the DWJers produce.  It was also part of my resolution, back in 2004, to keep a record of everything I read.  That record made it so much easier to remember what I’d liked or what I hadn’t that I ended up posting some very long year-end summaries.  Despite being way behind schedule, I don’t want to give up on my favorite tradition, though my residual guilt over inflicting long emails like that on the DWJ group means I will break this one into several posts.

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