Four book reviews
Three Men In A Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Jerome K Jerome. This was given to me by I., as part of the same package that included Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, reviewed below. I think it was meant as background reading, but in some ways I enjoyed it more than the Willis - it was cleaner and easier to follow, and it had a blokey familiarity to it that I liked. This felt like a classic dandy humor novel - sort of Wodehouse or Saki meets road-trip-in-a-punt. The humor is really well done, the story is...less engaging, but fairly unimportant to the reader's enjoyment, and the period flavor of the piece is - well, if you like that period (and I do) it's delightful. The wonderful narrative quirks are the main reasons to read this, and they're what makes it truly memorable.
To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis. This is the first and only Willis I have read, thanks to I., who is on a mission to introduce me to new and wonderful authors. It takes time travel and jumble sales and the Jerome K. Jerome book and builds a hilarious and complex world full of British whimsy in multiple centuries. There's romance, there's farce, there's a good dollop of science fiction - I enjoyed this immensely. Until, that is, the last fifty pages or so. I found the wrap-up to the book dense and confusing, and not as satisfyingly well-constructed as the rest of the book. While this may be the fault of the speed at which I read (did I miss nuances early on that might have allowed me to better parse some of the stranger bits of the climax and denouement?) it was a disappointment that kept me from wholeheartedly loving the book.
This is to some extent also true of Robin McKinley's latest, Sunshine. I'm not much of one for a vampire novel, and so I bought this solely on the strength of the author, whose YA fiction and adaptations of myth and fable I have so thoroughly enjoyed in the past. And I must say, she made vampires more interesting to me than anyone else has managed to do, by constructing an elaborate but casually referenced alternate reality that included them and focusing her story around a pragmatic pastry chef and a local restaurant. The story had all the McKinley hallmarks: Young woman, raised to believe she is nobody special, finds that she is, in fact, uniquely powerful by virtue of her blood - an older man, about whom she has conflicted feelings, helps her through the revelation and together they fight a great evil. But for some reason, it wasn't working as well for me in Sunshine as it did in her Damar novels. The ending was too rushed and messy - she tends to have her heroines go into these weird oneiric battle scenes with Incomprehensible Evil, and because the foe is so mysterious, it makes the whole conflict a bit hard to connect with as well, at least for me. The strength of this novel lay in the general worldbuilding; the stuff about vampires, frankly, including the finale, was a bit confusing and boring. Not one of her best, but I say that with love and will continue to buy her books.
Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders : From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, James Belich. Belich is clearly both an excellent writer and a good historian. This is probably, hmmm. A tertiary text? Like, it's not for lay reading really, it's for historians, but it's still not focused and specific enough to be a secondary text. College students doing introductory New Zealand history might have it as a course text. What I'm saying, basically, is that if you don't already have a significant amount of interest in the subject, this is not the book to interest you. That said, Belich seemed quite balanced and clear in his presentation of events (I haven't read a great deal of other NZ history, but I was impressed by his consideration of multiple interpretations on many counts) and he has a sly sense of humor that had me occasionally backtracking to snort at some outrageous phrase or other that he had sneakily stuck in among drier fare. The book was divided into two parts, "Making Maori" and "Making Pakeha." This, in the end, was not a choice that worked well for me, though I perhaps understand why it was done. I ended up devouring the first half and slogging through the second - I used it mainly as a cure for insomnia, I'm afraid. Whether this is just my own bullshit - am I fascinated with the exotic "otherness" of the Maori? Do I have an "authenticity" thing about non-European cultures? Please God let me not be That Sort Of Person - or whether I've just read far more about European colonization and frontier cultures in my life and am thus less interested in them as a whole, it made the book only half of what I'd wanted to read. And there was so much information I had trouble absorbing it in any way that would allow me to recall it organically; I will have to use the book itself for reference if I want to access any of the facts, even after reading it cover to cover. That last, however, I suspect is a function of my reading speed and absorption habits rather than anything else.
Next up, whenever I can get around to it: The Noviks and the Braudel.
To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis. This is the first and only Willis I have read, thanks to I., who is on a mission to introduce me to new and wonderful authors. It takes time travel and jumble sales and the Jerome K. Jerome book and builds a hilarious and complex world full of British whimsy in multiple centuries. There's romance, there's farce, there's a good dollop of science fiction - I enjoyed this immensely. Until, that is, the last fifty pages or so. I found the wrap-up to the book dense and confusing, and not as satisfyingly well-constructed as the rest of the book. While this may be the fault of the speed at which I read (did I miss nuances early on that might have allowed me to better parse some of the stranger bits of the climax and denouement?) it was a disappointment that kept me from wholeheartedly loving the book.
This is to some extent also true of Robin McKinley's latest, Sunshine. I'm not much of one for a vampire novel, and so I bought this solely on the strength of the author, whose YA fiction and adaptations of myth and fable I have so thoroughly enjoyed in the past. And I must say, she made vampires more interesting to me than anyone else has managed to do, by constructing an elaborate but casually referenced alternate reality that included them and focusing her story around a pragmatic pastry chef and a local restaurant. The story had all the McKinley hallmarks: Young woman, raised to believe she is nobody special, finds that she is, in fact, uniquely powerful by virtue of her blood - an older man, about whom she has conflicted feelings, helps her through the revelation and together they fight a great evil. But for some reason, it wasn't working as well for me in Sunshine as it did in her Damar novels. The ending was too rushed and messy - she tends to have her heroines go into these weird oneiric battle scenes with Incomprehensible Evil, and because the foe is so mysterious, it makes the whole conflict a bit hard to connect with as well, at least for me. The strength of this novel lay in the general worldbuilding; the stuff about vampires, frankly, including the finale, was a bit confusing and boring. Not one of her best, but I say that with love and will continue to buy her books.
Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders : From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, James Belich. Belich is clearly both an excellent writer and a good historian. This is probably, hmmm. A tertiary text? Like, it's not for lay reading really, it's for historians, but it's still not focused and specific enough to be a secondary text. College students doing introductory New Zealand history might have it as a course text. What I'm saying, basically, is that if you don't already have a significant amount of interest in the subject, this is not the book to interest you. That said, Belich seemed quite balanced and clear in his presentation of events (I haven't read a great deal of other NZ history, but I was impressed by his consideration of multiple interpretations on many counts) and he has a sly sense of humor that had me occasionally backtracking to snort at some outrageous phrase or other that he had sneakily stuck in among drier fare. The book was divided into two parts, "Making Maori" and "Making Pakeha." This, in the end, was not a choice that worked well for me, though I perhaps understand why it was done. I ended up devouring the first half and slogging through the second - I used it mainly as a cure for insomnia, I'm afraid. Whether this is just my own bullshit - am I fascinated with the exotic "otherness" of the Maori? Do I have an "authenticity" thing about non-European cultures? Please God let me not be That Sort Of Person - or whether I've just read far more about European colonization and frontier cultures in my life and am thus less interested in them as a whole, it made the book only half of what I'd wanted to read. And there was so much information I had trouble absorbing it in any way that would allow me to recall it organically; I will have to use the book itself for reference if I want to access any of the facts, even after reading it cover to cover. That last, however, I suspect is a function of my reading speed and absorption habits rather than anything else.
Next up, whenever I can get around to it: The Noviks and the Braudel.
posted by The Stute Fish at 02:45
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