Godzillas in the Mist

I read Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series because I wanted to see why he was chosen to finish Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

I read Sanderson’s first book, Elantris, and although I enjoyed it, I didn’t really see any indication that he would make a good replacement for Jordan. So I read Mistborn, and now I understand why.

Elantris was a fairly simple book, even though it had its share of plot twists. In some ways the story was a one-book version of the Rand-fixing-saidin thread of Wheel of Time – in both the source of “magic” is damaged/contaminated, and fixing it fixes the physical or mental damage wrought on the magician because of their contact with the magic source. The characters were much lighter, and we know much more about them and what goes on in their minds, than those in WoT.

Mistborn is much more like WoT, character-wise and plot-wise. The characters are much more secretive, dark, and self-contained than those in Elantris – while the prince in E does things secretively, without sharing his identity with his fellow Elantrans, the other characters are much more transparent and open with each other; but the reader is aware of what is in the prince’s mind, unlike with Jordan’s characters who rarely, and usually only in retrospect, divulge their plan or intent to other characters or the reader. We usually only find out that a plan worked or didn’t work after we see the result.

MB has a lot of the same opacity to it, keeping secret from the readers what the actual goal of the trilogy is. I found it intriguing that each book had a single main goal that the characters worked towards, without any knowledge that each time they solved one problem, there was still another out there to be solved. It seemed much more true to life in that sense – so often we set ourselves a goal and even though we achieve it, find out that it has unintended consequences or that it is simply the first step on the road to something else. It’s rare that when someone receives a “quest” that one knows, in spite of whatever obstacles one has to overcome on the way, there is one way to achieve the desired end result, and that one can rest on one’s laurels once the steps are completed.

With the secretive characters and the intricate plot, Sanderson does a good job of leading the reader to an unexpected end – who is the Hero of Ages, who really is a god, and how is the planet going to be saved from certain doom?

And as an indication that he really does write a lot like Jordan, I found that with the third book, I had trouble focusing and kept wanting to get away and do something else while I was reading.

I’m a very fast reader, and have been known to read an 1100-page book in two days (and that’s not reading full time). A 700-page book might take me 3 or 4 days if I don’t have much time to read. It took me over a week to read Hero of Ages, because I kept wanting to put it down and go do something else. As much as I love WoT, there have been a couple of the books where I had that same response. Gigantism and the incredible amount of detail in the WoT books usually is not an issue for me – more often than not, as long as the plot is advancing or I’m learning more about the characters, I enjoy being able to feel as if I’m there observing details or action. Jordan could get repetitive, and in some ways all his female characters are just cookie cutters of each other (they all twitch their skirts into place exactly the same way, they’re all control freaks who are usually angry, and they all think they know what is best for everybody); sometimes I would hit a section (or even a full book – I’m talking to *you*, Crossroads of Twilight) that was just hard to read because it didn’t feel as if it was going anywhere or was just a bunch of people rehashing a previous scene in a different location.

I’m having trouble deciding what it was about Sanderson’s third MB book that caused my attention to wander. I enjoyed the first book immensely; the second book was very good; and it wasn’t that I didn’t like the third book – I especially liked the ending, but the journey there was interesting and Sanderson managed to reveal information in a way that didn’t insult my intelligence by being blatantly stated, but yet still connected to previously revealed information intuitively enough that I was starting to get a glimmer of what was going to happen. But I still could only read a chapter or two at a sitting. I think part of it was because in the love relationship between Vin and Elend, there was no closeness – Sanderson kept telling the reader about how much they loved each other, but it just didn’t come through most of the time.

In some ways, this series reminded me of the A Man of His Word series by Dave Duncan (The Magic Casement, Faery Lands Forlorn, Perilous Seas, Emperor and Clown). Without giving away the plot totally, the whole idea of becoming gods unknowingly has been done a lot – Sanderson’s take on it was a reworking, that mostly worked. I also was not put off by the religious and Christian elements (particularly sacrifice). When such elements are done in a heavy-handed manner, I will just not read the book – particularly toward the end this got pretty heavy-handed, but I was so close to done, and it fit within the context, so I finished it, and found that overall I enjoyed it.

If you compare MB to Elantris, you find similar plot elements – the ascension to a god or god-like being, and sacrifice. I’ll be interested to see if Sanderson’s other books also contain these elements.

I liked the magic system – the allomancy, feruchemy (?), and hemalurgy were detailed and rich, cohesive within the story and themselves. When Elend becomes Mistborn, it seemed a little squinky to me, but by the end of the trilogy, I understood how and why.

And I just have to ask:

“Scampered”?!? WTF?

Vin is a quiet, mistrustful, hide-in-the-shadows-to-avoid-notice girl, who is also a thief. Does that sound like the description of someone who “scampers”? Every time I read that word – yes, he used it more than once! – it threw me right out of the book. Bad, bad, choice of words.

Fortunately, most of his writing is much better than that.

Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem

No, that isn’t why I haven’t written a post for so long, nor is it my own personal situation.

However, it is the recommending feature of Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

I have been mildly naughty in regards to my book stash diet – a week or so ago, I found myself at the book store looking for one book, and ended up with, well, nearly a dozen. Several were on sale, so it isn’t like I paid full price, but still, it was not supposed to happen that way. (On the other hand, it has been nearly 6 months of not buying books, so I’ve really been very restrained). I was actually looking for any book by Brandon Sanderson, who is the author that is finishing the Wheel of Time series for Robert Jordan – I want to see what his writing is like before I buy and read his first WoT book. I did get Elantris, and the first of the Mistborn series; but I also ended up with a couple books by Jim Butcher, some other fantasy, another Augusten Burroughs book, and PaPaZ.

The combination of Regency romance and ultraviolent zombie mayhem in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is neatly done – Grahame-Smith manages to insert “unmentionables”, and the history of “five-and-fifty years” of zombie-ridden England into Austen’s story quite naturally. The “strange plague” that opened the gates of Hell and loosed “dreadfuls” onto the island kingdom is a normal part of life for Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters – they have been trained to fight as individuals and as a team – within the first 8 pages, we see the five of them join battle with a herd of zombies at the ball where Elizabeth and Darcy meet, killing them all using the “Pentagram of Death” formation.

I enjoyed the different take on Charlotte’s marriage to Mr. Collins – she always seemed to deserve some sort of creeping, evil illness to ameliorate her underhanded acceptance of Elizabeth’s rejected suitor. And Mr. Collins’ end is most suitable to his arrogant, pandering life.

In changing the history of England, Grahame-Smith also changed that of Japan – it is considered de rigueur that one should train in Japan to fight zombies, so the Bennett girls, who trained with Shaolin monks in China, are looked down upon by their social betters who trained in Japanese dojos with the greatest ninjas of the day. Of course, since the story is set in England in the early 1830s, in our world, Japan at the time was a closed country, isolationist in its foreign policy. It wasn’t until the 1850s that the US forced open their borders. But heck, if you’re going to add zombies to the world, what’s a little change in border/relationship status to yet another island country?

Of all the Pride and Prejudice fanfic I’ve read, this is probably the best.

Dreams, Lies, and Test-taking

Currently I’m reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I’m enjoying it, but apparently it’s making a bigger impact on me than I realized – last night I dreamed about it.

Just before bed I read a chapter that ended with Locke and Calo walking through the night, being stalked by a flying creature, although it flew off after simply following them around. I dreamed a different ending for the chapter: instead of flying off, a person in a cape shoots Calo with a crossbow from the roof of a building. Locke runs into the temple hideout where he and his gang live, and is very upset; but he sends Calo’s twin brother Galdo out to fetch the body. Even in my dream, it seemed like a rather cruel thing to do. I think there was a revised ending after that, where it turns out Calo isn’t dead, merely mostly dead. I guess my subconscious couldn’t deal with dealing out death.

The first major plot point deals with a scam that Locke and his gang of thieves, the Gentlemen Bastards, are pulling on one of the local minor nobles. I have found that I’m a little uncomfortable with this part of the plot – the idea of them stealing money or jewelry by pickpocketing or breaking and entering doesn’t seem so bad, but pulling a con job on somebody makes me uncomfortable.

This is a recurring theme for me. Brian and I play computer role-playing games, such as Morrowind and Oblivion. Invariably, we end up playing a lawful good character; even going so far as to quit pursuing advancement in a faction if they want us to do something that is, well, squinky. I mean, like stealing something from somebody who is not actively trying to do something bad to us or the people we’re working for is something we just won’t do. We only join the Thieve’s Guild to get regular access to lockpicks, which we then proceed to use only on locked items in ruins or owned by bandits and other bad guys. We’ve never pursued going higher in the Guild because we just can’t bring ourselves to steal from regular people.

Recently we’ve started playing Fallout 3. As part of the opening sequence, you establish your character by growing up and certain events give you the chance to determine what your character is like. One of the things is taking the G.O.A.T. – the Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test. We took the test – it’s multiple choice, and as the instructor tells the class, there are no wrong answers. But when we turned the test in and got our results from the teacher, he tells us that we’re in line to be the next Vault Chaplain. Sigh.

Actually, it’s not as bad as it sounds – it means that our highest skill is Barter. Guess the God in Fallout 3 is open to negotiating.

At any rate, I think my issue with the con job in Locke Lamora is that it’s fooling someone, and making them look stupid. I always felt embarrassed when watching I Love Lucy, because Lucy was always embarrassing herself; and listening to Mark & Brian when they are doing something that embarrasses somebody makes me turn the dial. On the other hand, I loved the movie The Sting – I think it was OK because they were getting revenge on a guy who had done something nasty to them.

- “Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes”

One of these things . . .

. . . is not like the others.

I recently read the third book, A Storm of Swords, in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

I also just read The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (now a series of two, after 18 years between books).

And I read Sin City: A Dame to Kill For by Frank Miller (2nd in a series of at least 6).

Now obviously, Sin City is completely different because it is a graphic novel, and because it is less than 1/4 of the length of either of the other two. Also, it is set in modern times, while the other two are set either in medieval history or pseudo-medieval times.

But in some ways, A Storm of Swords and Sin City have more in common than either of them do with Pillars. Both are very violent, and neither one of them depends on having a happy ending for the main characters – perhaps a satisfying resolution in the sense of achieving vengeance, but not by any means a happy ending.

With Pillars, I found myself riding a kiddie rollercoaster – it’s all ups and downs at predictable intervals, with no curves or loops, and not even any steep plunges to get your heart started. Every time a problem was resolved, you could count on a new problem cropping up and a quick solution to the problem being found – the only one that lasted through the book as an individual problem (as opposed to a new problem relating to the building of the cathedral) was whether or not Richard would regain his birthright as Earl. And even then, it had a “more than happy” ending – instead of Richard fumbling along as a bad earl, Aliena ends up getting to play earl. I mean, every time something else would go wrong, you could hear Follett expecting the reader to gasp in horror at how the characters found themselves in yet another tragic situation with no – oh wait, Prior Philip has a cunning plan! Collective sigh of relief!

And the dialogue was hard to believe, sometimes – it seemed too often as if the characters were saying something just to explain it to the reader.

I think it just was too much outside action impacting the characters – very little was based on the choices characters made. Not completely – for instance, Aliena definitely made a choice about who she was going to marry, and thus is created one of the conflicts – but there was too much of the deus ex machina both in causing conflicts and in resolving some of them. If such-and-such hadn’t happened at just exactly the right time, well, so much for building Kingsbridge Cathedral, or a character would leave the story, or would not find out the crucial bit of information that saved the day – but guess what – such-and-such happened.

After what seems like a completely negative review, I have to say that although it impacted my enjoyment of the book overall, that it was easy to read and kept my interest. It is a good book, but with a little character development and fewer plot contrivances, it could be a great book.

A Storm of Swords (and indeed the whole series) has a little bit of the same just-as-things-are-looking-up for one the characters, yet-another-bad-thing-happens style. However, the characters are much more believable, they frequently take action rather than just reacting, and they change over time. So far, the plot (the plots, actually) are holding together, and it is interesting to get hints of where this is all going to end up. Also, I like how Martin is not afraid of killing off characters – I was totally blown away when a seemingly necessary character was killed. Don’t get me wrong – if he were just killing off main characters to try to keep interest in the book going, it wouldn’t work. But Martin seems to have a plan for where he’s taking the story (book 7? maybe more? I have to admit that the trend towards fantasy gigantism is wearing on me), and as long as I can see some sensible travel-planning, I’m along for the ride.

I like the content arrangement in Martin’s books, with small chapters from a different character’s perspective. Particularly, I like that you don’t learn everything about a character there is to know right away; and by withholding certain characters from the list of narrators, there is a lot of unknown information that you can only accrue by hearing it from someone else’s experience of that character. For instance, Lord Tywin never graces us with his presence in the narrative, so we only know what he thinks or what his plans are through Tyrion or Jaime.

Without going back and checking, I believe that we don’t get a perspective from characters who die (with the notable exception of Ned (Lord Eddard). Is that intended, or is it just chance? We’ve never had a chapter from the perspective of one of the kings, and at least four of them have died (Robert, Renley, Joffrey, and Robb); but is that because knowing too much from the king’s perspective would mess with the plot, or because they’re doomed? We haven’t heard from Stannis or Balon, but we do hear from Daenerys. If it were true that we don’t hear from people who are doomed to die, then Daenerys should survive. I’m hoping Cersei dies an unnatural and painful death, so I’ll be very sad if she starts becoming a narrative presence.

From totally hating Stannis (remember, I’m only through book 3, so he could succumb to Melisandre again in later books) I ended up rather liking him as of the end of Swords. He was so close to being unforgivable with the intent of murdering the bastard son of King Robert that one would have thought he was irredeemable. The way Martin had Davos speak up to Stannis at the end of a chapter, and then we know nothing more about them until they sweep to the rescue of Castle Black was a trademark of how Martin keeps secret the things that people are not likely to know – so there’s no way Jon would have known about Stannis and his army, and we get to be as surprised as they are.

If Martin can keep the level of writing and plot/characterization going that he has through the first three books, he might actually make it to the end with most of his fan base intact. The fact that he has spin-offs in the form of games and miniatures, t-shirts, etc., implies that there is a core following who will be there no matter what – heck, just look at Wikipedia – there’s a lot more information on the world and characters of A Song of Ice and Fire than there are on some real-life countries/people.

A Dame to Kill For is all about reacting rather than acting, although one might not know it at first. Dwight McCarthy certainly doesn’t know it, at any rate. In the end, though, is he acting on his own choice, or still just reacting to Ava’s manipulations? One of the things about Frank Miller that I like is that one doesn’t always have a neatly packaged ending. It always seems as if one is never sure of the veracity of the narrator in Sin City – Marv was possibly crazy, and Dwight definitely has indications of madness – so if we’re hearing the story from them, how can we be sure that they’re telling the truth? They certainly are able to convince some people that they’re sane – if it weren’t for the scene where we see Ava being herself when Dwight isn’t around (after Damien is dead, but before she calls the police) we might even be sure that Ava’s tale to the police was true; but we know better – it may not be true but it also might be merely a different lie than we think.

So is Dwight crazy? Is he honest? Does one preclude the other? And which of these things is NOT like the other?

Death, where is thy sting?

I must admit to dissatisfaction with Neil Gaiman’s Death: The Time of Your Life.

Probably an emotional reaction, rather than a logical one. Emotionally, I feel as if there wasn’t anything to support the radical change in Foxglove’s heart; but when I read it, it all makes sense. I also felt that there wasn’t a good reason for Death to make a deal with Hazel. And noble Boris – that seemed pretty trite.

But I re-read it again this evening, and it all seemed to click into place, emotionally and logically. So it must have been because I was reading it at 3 in the morning this morning, during yet another bout of insomnia. Go figure.

Book Stash diet

One of my resolutions this year was to go on a diet – I have so many books waiting to be read that it is ridiculous.

I have decided for the year 2009 only to read books that I already own – there’s at least 5 shelves of new books (new to me, many of them are used books) – and even with the rate that I go through books (24 since the first of the year), I think these will probably last me a year.  So with the exception of a small order from Amazon.com (hey, I had a gift certificate, what was I supposed to do?), I have intrepidly set out to whittle down the number of unread books on my shelves.

Of course, being as chemobrained as I am right now, I’m concentrating on the fun (& easier) books that are there. Which is mostly scifi, fantasy, detective, and horror. The problem is that lots of the books are history or science. Don’t get me wrong, I *love* history and science, I just can’t focus enough right now to really absorb or enjoy them much. I’ll probably take a crack at a couple biographies in the next 6 weeks or so – I did recently read Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs – but then he’s easy to read, funny and serious at the same time.

So my already picked-over stash of books is slowly becoming the books that have been rejected previously – not because I don’t want to read them, but because they didn’t meet the criteria of mood or brain capacity that I was currently at. Fortunately, before I made my resolution, I did buy the Inkheart series (re-read the first one already), the first three books in the Artemis Fowl series (also read the first one this year), and the Bartimaeus Trilogy (of which I’ve finished the first two). The real trick is to not devour those immediately and leave myself with just the books that actually require a brain.

And it also leaves me in despair on some counts – for instance, I (literally) just finished reading Natural Ordermage by L.E. Modessitt, Jr., which has been on my shelf for quite a while, only to discover that it has a sequel, which is *not* on my shelf! Argh! My only hope for that is that Brian will take pity on me, and buy it for my birthday.

So then what do I do for the last 1/3rd of the month of March? I re-read books from my collection! I was being good, reading (from the new books) Exile’s Valor by Mercedes Lackey (Oooh, it really kind of burned me that she threw herself in there – but I can certainly understand the temptation. . .), and it made me need to re-read the Arrows of the Queen series because it happened right before that series. And then I was still in nostalgia mode (and not feeling as if any of the fantasy on the “new” shelves was going to satisfy), so I re-read Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksenarrion (book II has a couple episodes in it that read like playing D&D on graph paper with the dice a-rollin’ – still love it, though). I’m starting to feel that jones to re-read The Lord of the Rings again, but I’m trying to resist. It hasn’t been that long since I read them last, and I want to be able to really savor it the next time.

I have a couple history books that I’ve started, so I may try them, see if I can pick up the thread without having to re-read everything I’ve already read – one is The Pirates Laffite by William C. Davis. I do remember that I was really enjoying it, and don’t really remember why I set it down. Another is The First American by H.W. Brands. I remember enjoying it while I was reading, but after the first three chapters, I had trouble picking it up and sticking with it. I think I was coming off chemobrain from the last bout, and still not able to focus very well. At least if I pick it up again and review the first three chapters, I’ll probably remember the early years of Ben Franklin’s life until I’m 90 years old. . .

***********

2 days later -

So instead of going for the history, I picked up A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (Argh! I don’t have the next book in the series on my shelves – Brian! Help!). I’d read the prologue a year or more ago, I believe I was in chemo at the time, and everything about it just was too depressing. I think it was around that time that I started re-reading the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.

This time, however, I sailed right into it, although I’m struggling with having forgotten some of the events from the previous books since it’s been so long since I read them. Most of the time Martin is pretty good about throwing in enough details without overdoing it – just enough to remind me of the incident in question without having characters sit and reminisce inappropriately.

I’m about 40% of the way through (it’s 1128 pages (plus a 46-page listing of characters!)). One of the culled blurbs in the front in “praise” of this book and the series as a whole is from Publisher’s Weekly, and they describe it as “One of the more rewarding examples of gigantism in contemporary fantasy . . . richly imagined.” Obviously, here, they’re referring to the size of the book/series, and although I can’t find a definition in any of my books on literary criticism (outdated? don’t focus on so-called non-literature?), I suspect that gigantism also refers to the depth of detail that causes the books to be so long. In some ways, I think you could call *that* minisculism, for the microscopic way the author describes *everything*. Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind are good examples of the gigantism/minisculism phenomena – note to George R.R. Martin – I hope at 68 you’re in good health, or that you have good notes and a plan to finish the series!

A lot of people don’t have the patience to read all the detail, and as I’ve found in a couple of the Wheel of Time series, I occasionally struggle with it myself. With Goodkind, it wasn’t so much the detail that got me, as that the same things happened in every book, just different places with different villians. I finally gave up on his books, although I really enjoyed the first 2. But so far, even though I can kind of see hints of that repetitiveness starting to appear, I’m still enjoying the story, and the detail doesn’t bog me down. But I still have 668 pages to go, so by the end of the book, who knows?

At any rate, this’ll keep me busy for another few days, and then maybe I’ll be up for some of the history – probably not since I just had chemo yesterday, and already my brain is getting fuzzier; but everyone has to have a dream. . .

Pulp Fiction Sandwich

Being thoroughly immersed in chemobrain these days, there are times when I can’t focus well on books with depth and substantial meanings or themes. I’ve been longing to read some of these books on my shelves for long-time³, but chemobrain or being intensely involved in work, and now back to chemobrain has put a lot of the more intellectually challenging books off the table for me.

But I find little ways to squeak them in – partly by distracting the chemobrain into thinking that it’s getting pap, then sneaking something edgy in; but of course I have to finish it off with pap to keep it cool and the chemobrain fooled.

My latest pulp fiction sandwich consisted of Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie; the meat of the sandwich was The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi; and the pure whitebread closure was The 5th Horseman by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro.

Not much to say about either Death in the Clouds or The 5th Horseman – I mentioned on my main blog that I finally ran into an Agatha Christie book that I could not estomac, as Hercule Poirot says – I actually had to force myself to pick it up – although I have to admit that I was slightly surprised about the perp – I’d twigged to the person who was unexpectedly involved very early on, and had even guessed her identity; but it wasn’t until the heroine starts having another love interest that I realized there was something not quite right about the original love interest. Even then, I didn’t suspect him as the perp – guess in some ways it was better than I expected it to be based on my lack of interest initially.

The 5th Horseman was an example of Patterson’s usual work on the Women’s Murder Club Series, but I don’t really consider Lindsay pitching a fit about not wanting to be Lieutenant out of the blue, and then dropping it right back into the blue to be character development. Yuki was supposed to show how deep she is by freaking about her mother’s death, and then obsessing about the person she thinks is the murderer; but then to be all back together in days looking gorgeous, self-possessed, and happy just didn’t cut it with me. Especially since the guy she thought was the murderer turned out not to be “it” – and we only find out who really did it after we see her being socially poised and thrilled with her new job, after a couple months of not washing, stalking the doctor in question, forgetting to change into real clothes. Perhaps there will be some indication in future books about how she focused her obsession into her new job with the DA, but *describing* that she has a new job with the DA “putting away bad guys” isn’t enough to show how she turned herself around so quickly.

So there’s the pap.

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is a wonderful graphic novel about growing up as a woman in Iran during the 70s and 80s. I certainly can’t compare my childhood to hers in any direct way, but as I read the book I felt everything she felt, and it reminded me of growing up in a house where I was expected to be a girly girl instead of the tomboy that I really was. To be subjected to wearing the headscarf without being given a choice, to be raised in a liberal family who all were forced to act in ways that were contrary to their beliefs, to be given the opportunity to leave but still go back to find out who one really is speaks about how strongly our childhood impacts our adult selves.

One of the most powerful aspects for me is how Marjane soaks up the party line when she is a child – to the point where she believes her parents are disillusioned traitors. As she grows older and more understanding, she starts to see that she was sucked in, and that she was the disillusioned one, both by believing the government’s lies, and again when she realizes that they are lies. When she moves to Vienna as a teenager, she turns into a rebel because she doesn’t fit in with the “normal” girls; she doesn’t really fit in with the punk crowd she falls in with either; and she had trouble learning to fit in with anyone, even after going back home to find herself.

It takes her 10 years to mature enough and really understand what her parents and grandmother had told her before – that she was not meant to live in Iran. Raised in a liberal home suddenly shunted back into a highly traditional culture, she had the taste of freedom that would never truly be hers in Iran. But as a teenager in Austria, she was not able to appreciate the freedom she had, and like so many youths of so many cultures, the freedom went to her head. Finally, she was mature enough, and able to move out of Iran again at a time when she’d been through learning to fit in, but was still able to be herself.

We should all learn that lesson so quickly!

“The first and greatest of English detective novels”*

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins was a book that I had hesitated about reading.

I’m not really sure why – perhaps because of the hype used on the cover – first and greatest? Really?

Reading it, though, was enjoyable, and one can see the prototype of Sherlock Holmes, of Agatha Christie novels, and perhaps even of Dorothy Sayers’ Whimsey novels.

The “Agatha Christie”-ness of it struck me, which really should be the other way around. If anyone was imitating, it was Christie imitating Collins. The stereotypical butler, the young couple who are fumbling their way around a love affair, the detective who knows more than he says – in the end, he is surprised not by the culprit, but by the method of how the culprit achieved his theft.

As a matter of fact, as much as I love Agatha Christie, I get tired of the same old characters – the same old house maids who are poorly trained and gossipy; the same old curmudgeonly old ladies with a soft spot for a rogue nephew; the same old nurses who hold the key to the mystery without really knowing it; the same old spunky young woman who is down-to-earth and beats the glamourpuss every time. My enjoyment of Christie may be at least partly due to the very same stereotypes and the beloved characters (Poirot, Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, Ariadne Oliver, etc.) that I’ve read about since I was a young child – having read most, if not all of her books, there’s very little that surprises me in one of the ones I haven’t yet read, and that’s OK. I don’t go to Christie for novel plots and characterizations.

The same is true of Dick Francis – in many ways, every single male protagonist is the same person with a slightly different situation, but much the same personality and characteristics – stoic, quiet, hidden depths, daring, etc. Again, I find these books to be reliably enjoyable – I don’t think I’ve come across a Francis that I didn’t like (not that they’re all equal, of course, some are definitely better than others; but I have yet to throw a Francis book across the room in frustration at poor writing).

So to read the same things from a sort of reverse point of view – i.e., the precursor to the Christie and Francis reliability and enjoyability – made the read feel comfortable right from the start. The same way you might have a mild annoyance with an arrogant character but still enjoy reading their narrative, I found Collins’ characters to be somewhat stereotypical, but saved by injections of true humanity.

The butler, Gabriel Betteredge, tells the first and largest part of the narrative of The Moonstone. He’s confident in his abilities, confident in his knowledge of his staff and how to handle them, and even confident that he knows how to handle his employers – the Lady Verinder and her daughter. He’s always got a smart (alec) reply, helpful advice, and an attitude. He has a soft spot for the black-sheep cousin; and he has a very strong sense of class and place, that he’s most interested in keeping others in, more so than himself. He’s sexist, at least once pulling some girl onto his lap as a means of “handling” her (not fondling, so much as trying to “solve her problem”, when she is emotionally upset). He himself propagates stereotypes about other characters, and characters’ reactions may not always be completely understandable to a modern reader, but probably were to a current reader of Collins’ time.

Betteredge is saved from being a complete cliché particularly by a scene after he and the detective, Sergeant Cuff, have discovered that a young member of his staff who was implicated as knowing something about the theft of the Moonstone had committed suicide. His daughter is distraught, in tears at the news; Sergeant Cuff tells her to come to her father’s study. When she arrived, Betteredge “took her and sat her on my knee — and I prayed God bless her. She hid her head on my bosom and put her arms around my neck — and we waited a little while in silence.” The death of the girl was hard on both of them, but as Betteredge explains:

People in high life have all the luxuries to themselves — among others, the luxury of indulging their feelings. People in low life have no such privilege. Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on us. We learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with our duties as patiently as may be. I don’t complain of this — I only notice it.

Collins, who was neither of high life or low life, being firmly upper middle class, yet understood a lot about how both of those lives were led. He shows respect for both, but also shows how it is to be not of the aristocracy. I wonder how accurate his view of the inner lives of the aristocracy was – he certainly believed that lower classes felt constrained, and that the same lower classes believed that the upper classes were not so constrained. But stereotypes abound, and at least to outsiders, upper class Englishmen are traditionally “stiff upper lip” kind of people who don’t show their feelings – a direct contradiction to what Betteredge claims about high lifers.

Another injection of humanity saves Franklin Blake from being the stereotypical rogue-nephew-with-a-heart-of-gold. When Blake meets the physician’s assistant, Ezra Jennings, he was unable to quit staring at him due to his remarkable appearance:

The door opened, and there entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable-looking man that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown — eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits — looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head — without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast — it had turned completely white. The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity. At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into the white.

Even in this detailed description of the physical “oddness” of Ezra Jennings, Blake shows respect and sympathy as well as his self-ascribed rudeness of staring. The acknowledgment of “ancient people of the East” versus the “newer races of the West” implies that there is weight behind the ancient people that the newer races don’t have, and the description of the eyes is of beauty and sadness, not a sort of Svengali stare that one might expect in a description of a man of an ancient race. Betteredge specifically states that Jennings’ appearance is against him, and that the physician supposedly took him on in spite of a dubious character.

We never learn what this dubious character was, although Jennings confirms that he was accused of something that set the world against him. Only the physician, Mr. Candy, looked beyond his past and his appearance to see the human inside, and realize that here was an intelligent, gentle soul who needed a break. Blake manages to see past these also, and writes very emotionally of Jennings as a beautiful, caring person.

Finally, we have Rachel Verinder, the heroine. In some ways, she is the prototype stereotypical “marches to a different drummer” heroine that you see in Christie especially – remarked upon as being outspoken, believing what it suits her temperament to believe, and acting as she wishes. She does not subscribe to the notions of the day that women are decorative “angels of the house”, and she feels she’s just as good as any man. She could also just be a spoiled brat. I admit, I swayed that way a couple times during the story; and really, although she redeems herself, she got herself into a perfect tizzy by being so sure of what she believed to be the truth about Franklin Blake. Definitely, here is one person who is of the high life who indulges in their emotions. Admittedly, appearances were against Franklin, but she never even tried to find out if appearances were deceiving or accurate.

In the end, I felt that Collins really was a good judge of what made people who they were, and although everyone showed elements of stereotype, that he always came through with believable motives and actions. His humor was balanced by serious reflections on people and their stations in life. And who couldn’t love an author who named a stolen-goods fence/moneylender “Mr. Luker”?

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*According to T.S. Eliot

Yet Another “Definitive List”

The Guardian (UK paper/website) has published the “1000 novels everyone must read: the definitive list” – you can find it here:

1000 novels everyone must read: the definitive list

I’m losing ground. For the Big Read, I pretty much came in at 62 out of 100 books read, no matter the variations on the list. For this list of 1000 novels, one might expect then that I’d have read somewhere around 620; but no, I didn’t even hit 3x. 146. How’s that for a pitiful score? I thought I’d do much better in the science fiction and fantasy category, but even there it was only so-so.

Of course, they only count the Discworld series as one book, and I’ve read all of them but one so far (and it’s coming up as soon as Brian is done with it – Making Money). C’mon – there’s something like 30 books right there! And to list The Chronicles of Narnia as one book – there’s another 6 – so already my score is up by 35. I’m feeling better about this all the time – 181, woo-hoo!

Now if I can just eke out another 5 books, at least I could feel like I made the 3x mark. Maybe I should count the books on my shelf that are on the list but that I haven’t read yet, but at least I’ve *touched* them. . . That oughta be good for another 20. And what about the ones that I’ve seen the movie, but not read the book? That’s probably good for a couple dozen. At this rate, I might be hitting around 25 percent; still disappointing compared to 62% of the Big Read. Maybe I should add the ones that I’ve been meaning to buy that are on the list, that’s probably another 50. Or books that have the same name as one I’ve read, by a different author? I’ve read “The Hollow Man” by Dan Simmons, but they list “The Hollow Man” by John Dickson Carr. Surely that should count for something?

But what about all these books that I’ve never even heard of? I mean, “No Bed for Bacon” by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon? Come on! Where did they dig this one up? Why don’t they have classics like “Peter Pan” and “The Wizard of Oz”; or “The Last of the Mohicans”? I would accuse them of being Anglocentric, or Eurocentric, but they do include Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne on the list. What about all those Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Three Investigators books – shouldn’t they be on the Crime list? And what’s with only listing five Agatha Christie books, and two Peter Whimsey books? Really. Who made up this list?!?

But I’m not one to complain. It may take me the rest of my life, but I will keep working on the list. Even if some asinine panel of experts comes up with a list of the “Definitive 2500 Must-Read Novels” or the “10,000 Most Important Books Ever, Ever, Ever!”, I will keep reading.

That’s not to say that I might not get sidetracked by books that aren’t on the list, like this one:

A new take on Jane Austen

Another one bites the dust . . .

I have put myself on a stash diet – I have enough books to last me for (well, I was going to say a year, but probably not) a few months at least, just sitting on my shelves. In addition, I have several books that I’ve started reading but never finished for one reason or another.

I did finally finish Don Quixote, in one night, after all the delaying tactics finally reached the ridiculous point. Don’t ask me what I thought of it, because currently it is still colored by the angst I built up at *not* finishing it. I need to mull over it some more before I can really decide if I loved the book overall, or if the second half ruined it totally for me.

Another book that was on hold was Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes.

This one I can tell you exactly why I wasn’t reading it: bad stuff happening to an innocent person.

I’ve been through this with other books – although I read Jane Eyre as a young child, and loved it, I remember squirming at all the injustices that poor Jane put up with. I was a quiet, shy child, and didn’t fit in with the cliques at school or anywhere, so I related very heavily to Jane. Even though I read it through then, and have many times since, I always have trouble getting through the early parts without putting the book down for a while.

It wasn’t always just downtrodden characters, sometimes it was just when bad things happen – I couldn’t read Mistress of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts for years because I couldn’t get past the first few pages of the first chapter because a 12-year-old boy dies. When I did finally read it, I enjoyed the book very much, but that negative connotation is forever linked in my mind to that book, and it’s the first thing I think of when I see it or something brings the book to mind.

So Arthur & George sat for many months – I don’t remember when I first picked it up. Based on a true story from the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the first half of the book deals with the story of George Edalji, half Eastern Indian, half Scot, who is framed and wrongfully imprisoned for a vicious attack on a pony. I read one quarter of the book, up until the sentence “He does not realize that these are the last normal twenty-four hours of his life.”

Barnes did such an excellent job of setting up the scene and making one feel the inevitability of George’s conviction and imprisonment that I just could not get past that sentence. I tried picking it up more than once, but each time put it down again after reading a paragraph or two, because that one sentence was all I could hear in my head.

But I finally persevered, and am glad I did. The story is well worth the read. Although the ending is not necessarily a thoroughly happy one for George, it is still satisfying. George makes sense as a person – sometimes authors who are trying to novelize an historical figure aren’t able to make the character’s emotions or thoughts believable in the context of the facts of the story, but that is not a problem with George.

Arthur is almost too good to be true – based on his documented public life and the causes he supported, he was a progressive, passionate man. Racially unbiased, intelligent, genial, well-loved. But in some ways, he comes across as a caricature of the bluff, hearty Englishman; sporting, rooting for the underdog, a social butterfly, still bound by the class system, even though he believes he is not.

He definitely has flaws: a temper, he’s a bad loser, he does not believe in women’s suffrage, he abrogates responsibility for his children’s upbringing to his wife, he has a (chaste) love affair for almost a decade while married to an invalid, he is arrogant and egotistical. But he fights injustice, he loves passionately, he does not cave to negative opinions when voiced by people higher on the social scale than himself, and he allows common sense to overcome his impulsive nature when it is voiced by one he trusts and/or loves.

I found the elaborate description of Arthur’s funeral interesting. The inclusion of his spiritism (belief in clairvoyance, that ghosts can speak through mediums to the living) within the story made sense, because although it wasn’t part of the detective story, it was part of who Arthur was. Even using the funeral to tie together two people who hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in over two decades worked for me; but the blow-by-blow description of the funeral and George’s musings seemed forced. I can see why Barnes did it – the scene of George almost getting sucked in to the hysteria of the moment and nearly believing in something that he intellectually refuted (spiritism) nearly makes an apology for the people who *did* get sucked in to believing that George committed the awful crime he was accused of; if someone as unemotional and logic-driven as George can be so close to falling into a type of mob hysteria, how much more likely that those who are less educated and feel even normal emotions will believe false evidence that is presented to them in an emotionally charged way?

And that is one thing that slightly disappointed me – many of the people who believed in spiritism as Arthur did were as intelligent and logic-minded as either Arthur or George; it seems as if Barnes is saying that only people who don’t feel much emotion are able to resist blindly succumbing to misleading evidence, be it in the court of law or in social and religious beliefs. True? Not true? Being an emotional creature myself, I have to leave myself out of the judging.