Patricia Briggs, Silver Borne, 2010.

I blame Felicia Day and her twitter feed for my first reading Briggs and her series about a mechanic, Mercedes Thompson, who shifts into being a coyote and whose personal life is a little too intertwined with werewolves. In many ways, it’s very traditional fantasy: a great deal of thought has been put into the nature of werewolves and their pack dynamics (and their revelation of their existence to the wider world), into the fae, into witches and magic and vampires. Underlying each novel to date in the series (and I don’t seem to have blogged about them, but have read each one—embarrassment?) is an acknowledged debt to existing mythology and a clever attempt to update it and bring it into our own world. Its weaknesses, as a series, stem from another convention of too much of contemporary fantasy: the novels verge too often on slipping into the harlequin-esque romance style, and the depth of reliance on mythology and the sheer creativity of the milieu Mercedes inhabits is the saving grace.

This novel is the fifth in the series (after Moon Crossed, Blood Bound, Iron Kissed, and Bone Crossed), and is not my favourite of the lot. Its plot revolves around an attempt on Mercy’s life, fae who want an object in her possession, werewolves trying to upset the pack dynamics, and a werewolf on the verge of ending his life. The elements of the plot fail to cohere sufficiently well: ideas are introduced but not sustained, and emerge later, half-forgotten. The entire suplot of the werewolf unhappy with his existence is weak and implausible given what we know of him from the other books in the series. Finally, the denouement is so scattered and diffuse that it feels like Ms. Briggs simply didn’t know how to bring the story to a successful conclusion. I do hope that the next volume returns to the quality of the earlier books in this series.

Tom Sharpe, The Gropes,* 2009.

I loved Blott on the Landscape as a lad: it's funny, sharp, biting in just the right ways, and does a marvellous job of skewering people's self-importance. So given the opportunity to read another by Sharpe--my father bought it as a plane book, and then left it lying around--I picked it up. It's a palate-cleanser, but nothing more. The plot of The Gropes is well enough done: an odd, matriarchal family combined with a gormless bank manager, his doppelgänger son, and romance novel-obsessed wife combined with her brother who might be a minor or even major criminal leads to silliness and suspicion. It falls a bit flat at the end, although I suspect most readers will find themselves almost happy for the bank manager--but all in all, there's nothing in this book to make me want to recommend it to anyone. If you happen to be renting a cottage and it's lying around and you forget your newly acquired copy of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet at home, sure, give it a read. Otherwise, buy and read Mitchell's new book instead.

* Why no link? Well, Amazon was about my only option. While I do buy books from Amazon on occasion, I try to avoid it. So--if you want to acquire this book (or any other!) check out your local bookstore. In the Hamilton area, I strongly recommend Bryan Prince Bookseller, where I picked up The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet yesterday...

Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark, 2001.

A pleasant, ephemeral, un-mysterious mystery that was oh so much better than the two Twilight novels I read (and about which, because of their sheer disturbing trashiness, misogyny, and general annoying-ness, I refuse to blog). Dead Until Dark is the first story about Sookie Stackhouse--and the basis for a new HBO series, called True Blood. It`s light and fluffy, and replete with vampires and other otherwordly creatures. Don`t expect much, but enjoy the pleasant pulp that relaxes your brain, right after a Christmas that was very, very full of services.

The past week has been wonderful for reading. I read the entirety of if nobody speaks of remarkable things, a wonderful present from W—and S--, and a book which left me in awe both of the skill of the artist and the world in which we live. I finally finished Swann’s Way. I finished, and then read again, L. William Countryman’s book, Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All, which is about priesthood (both the ordained kind and the more important kind that stems from our humanity) and what it is to live in ways open to the HOLY. I read quite a number of poems by Rowan Williams. I spent a lot of time with the book of Kings. I enjoyed and learnt from Barbara Brown Taylor’s The Preaching Life. I read Edmund Gosse’s biography of Jeremy Taylor, and a large and not overly fruitful chunk of Jeremy Taylor’s own work, including the entirety of Holy Dying, in the fond hope of finding a passage that has been occupying my spiritual life for some time now. I browsed throughout the monastery’s library, and read bits and pieces of a number of different things, about which I will not make an effort to blog. I’ve reread The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, and chunks of de Waal’s expansive commentary on the rule of Benedict, A Life-Giving Way. I’ve started reading Icelander, an amusing and odd mystery novel (“A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie,” reads the back), if only because its name sounds soothing in the midst of the heat of summer (though chapel, library, and refectory have been deliciously cool).

I have also read a lot of psalms. Some I sang, some I spoke, and many more I listened to. In one of the books I glanced into there was a story of a Zen master visiting a Camaldolese monastery and commenting on the amount of time the monks spent reading the psalms. The response given to the Zen master by one of the monks was no: we spend far more time listening to our brothers read them to us. We are quiet here, and we listen. This retreat of mine has been about space and about calm, about an entirely different rhythm of life than that which I experience at home. It will be interesting for me to pay attention to how I carry the rhythms of this place back with me. To a large extent, that’s why I brought my copy of the SSJE rule with me, and the de Waal commentary: I want to be more intentional about how I am, and they’ve offered me some help in making sense of how to re-engage the process of reflection on my life. More helpful still was the endless flow of psalms, the wave of scripture read, and the wash of “chapters” that share stories of the saints and our call to respond to God’s love that have enveloped me and made space for me to be quiet.

I have been still.

I have enjoyed the rich waft of cedar that has held me in a close embrace in the chapel.

On my way to and from that space of prayer (and particularly on my way to and from Matins, at 4:00am) I have revelled in the odd smell that reminds me of the strawberry fruit roll-ups that were a staple in my grade school lunch boxes. It took me five or six trips along the path before I was able to identify the smell, and it evoked waves of nostalgia, and makes a fitting image of this time and my reading: a Proustian recollection; an invitation, a la Countryman and Brown Taylor, to look deeper into all things of the world, that we may experience and share our encounter with the ONE WHO IS, a reminder of the transitory nature of life from Williams’ poetry, and a true Benedictine way of being quiet, and listening. Away, I’ve had much needed time for reading and prayer. I’m looking forward to discovering how to carry this experience back with me into the rest of my life: I will be still, in the midst of busy-ness.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007.


Do you not know what happens in the book yet? If you don't want to know, don't read this blog entry. I'm not much for summarizing plot, but I'm not going to conceal it. Deal with your own issues elsewhere.

This blog entry is in two parts.

Part I: The book itself.
A writer to Salon commented that Rowling's prose is sturdy. It's unexceptional, but it's fun and it suits the purpose. It's not Tolkien, and it's not art. It is quite entertaining, though. An associate writes that much of the book is filler, as Ron and Hermione and Harry wander through England without a real plan. It's dull. Note to JKR: not having an editor? Dumb idea on your part. There are moments of levity, but most of the book is an attempt to be as well-done with the chapter ending cliff-hangers as is a novel by Dan Brown; Rowling doesn't do it as well. Harry's death is poorly written; the train station scene ludicrous. The entire situation lacks the pathos needed. The fights through the climax are fine, but I have the sense that characters were introduced in other books so I'd care that they're killed off now; with few exceptions, I was not much moved. Ho hum.
The part which I found baffling was the postlude set 19 years into the future, with a happily married Harry, complete with three kids. I recognize that some people aren't happy unless they know everything turns out well, but the postlude was just silly.
The book is quite good for children's pulp.

Part II: Spoiler silliness

Right. Anyone remember the beginning of Romeo and Juliet?

Chor. Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The eminent playwright begins the play by telling you EVERYTHING that will happen. I don't remember people being upset about this when Luhrman's version was splashed on movie screens across the globe. Yet, for the last months, there has been inch after inch of copy filled with news of the embargo on this book. Who's been feeding spoilers? There's surely a special hell for those people!

I have no sympathy for this crap. What happens is never as important as how it happens. Little Nell dies, people. So does Smike. If you missed it being telegraphed when they were first introduced, it doesn't matter. The HOW matters, and that's the point of the sonnet I've quoted above. I've grown weary of the idea that knowing what happens "spoils" what is to come. That's just not the way books have ever worked for me. /rant.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Book of the Dead.

The sequel to Dance of Death, it was nice to return to this quick read (less than 24 hours, one late night, but no reading during my work day). An enjoyable yarn, totally implausible, but making me remember far too much of when I wanted to be an Egyptologist. At any rate, this one may be the last of the Pendergast novels; I think it’s a decent though far too obvious an ending.

Short version? Picks up right where Dance of the Dead left off: Pendergast in prison, D'Agosta working to bust him out, the evil brother Diogenes up to no good--and of course, all set at the American Museum of Natural History (wikipedia summary of museum here). The stories those walls could tell--how many murders, beasts, evil spirits, etc., have wandered through those 46 acres of downtown New York in the world of Preston and Child? Ah well. The story revolves around an exhibit being opened to restore the Museum to the good graces of the public: an exhibit of the tomb of Senef, supposedly a vizier to and regent for Thutmose IV. I can't actually think of anything else about the plot to write without giving things away.

Entertaining, overly contrived, but a fun bit of pulp. The most fun thing about these books is the imagined exhibits themselves; Preston and Child should go into the museum curator business. They populize well.

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Dance of Death, 2005.

A nice bit of pulp. Pendergast's evil younger brother emerges as a master criminal, Pendergast and D'Agosta try to stop Diogenes before it's too late. Things snowball badly. To say more would reveal too much.

Far from anything special, this book's an enjoyable and quick little read.

Max Allan Collins, Cold Burn, 2003.

A CSI book. It's not great--the writing's a bit sloppy, and the characters don't entirely hold true to what one would expect, from the show. But all in all, a quiet little bit of ok pulp for a holiday weekend.

Stephen Coonts, Liars and Thieves, 2004.

More of the same from Coonts. Less good than the others.

James W. Huston, Flash Point, 2000.

The roommate of a Navy fighter pilot--Tomcats--is killed by terrorists in Israel; the pilot retaliates, writes to the Hill, gets war declared on the terrorists, bombs them, gets shot down, etc. Predictable, and plotted a little too loosely. Some fun, but not convincing enough for me to read anything else by Huston.

Stephen Coonts,
America, 2001,
Liberty, 2003.

Hm. Well, that's all of the published Jake Grafton novels; now we can move onto something else.
America is the story that revolves around stolen submarines, plots to destroy the United States' economy through electromagnetic Tomahawk missiles, a Star Wars -type space defence missile shield. Improbably, ridiculous, decent pulp.

Liberty was written after the attacks of September 11th. Like a number of other books, it's about bad guys--this time terrorists, instead of agents of other states--trying to get a hold of WMDs, in this case Russian nuclear warheads. Jake has to find all four before they're exploded. Naturally, life's complicated. He decides to retire at the end of the book--two or three books late, in my opinion, but hey. Decent fun, nothing special.

Stephen Coonts,
Under Siege, 1990
The Red Horseman, 1994,
Cuba, 1999,
Hong Kong, 2000.

Four more Jake Grafton novels. (Two to go)

Under Siege I've read before. Jake serving his Joint Chiefs tour, in the Counter-Terrorism sector. A whole bunch of drugs lead to domestic terrorism, assasination attempts, etc. Decent but unexciting.

The Red Horseman is a tad too unrealistic. Russia/CIS falling apart, post Gorbachev, etc. Nukes stolen, invading the country that they were sold to by corrupt Russian forces officials, etc. Jake's there with the Defence Intelligence Agency, observing and then running the show. Hard to swallow.

Cuba deals with Castro's death, biological warheads. Jake's in command of the carrier battle group that's in the Caribbean, and has to deal with the mess. Solid.

Hong Kong is weaker than Cuba. Coonts' plot has Grafton sent to Hong Kong back to investigate Tiger Cole, his old bombardier from Flight of the Intruder, now the consul-general to Hong Kong, a tad after the Chinese takeover. Revolution ferments, bad things happen, more Jake in hand to hand combat.

Two left--let's see how they are.

Stephen Coonts,
Flight of the Intruder, 1986,
The Intruders, 1994,
Final Flight, 1988,
The Minotaur, 1989.

Four Jake Grafton novels.

The first one, Flight of the Intruder, has become a movie that's not awful, but the story definitely makes a better book. What the movie does do well is attempting to capture what life is like aboard an aircraft carrier as the pilots of the air wing conduct bombing missions over Vietnam in the dying days of the war. Lots of implausible bits, but on the whole, it affords a view of what life must have been like.

The Intruders, which was written after the other three that I'm posting about here, but is the next in the sequence, is about Grafton's life aboard a carrier immediately after his last tour ended, this team with a Marine A-6 squadron, instead of a Navy squadron, thanks to an ill-advised barfight with a civilian. Really, it's about Jake trying to decide if the Navy will be his career. Sadly, this book's a little too much like Flight of the Intruder and Final Flight, in a way that The Minotaur is not. More implausibility, more general fun.

Final Flight is a nice, riveting thriller about a plot to steal nuclear bombs from a carrier. Nice segue from attack planes to fighters like the F-14, and far more interesting than Top Gun-type crap.

The Minotaur is all about Jake finding a life in the Navy after his flying days are done, and is an intriguing little spy thriller that's quite nicely done.

David Eddings, The Belgariad (Pawn of Prophecy, Queen of Sorcery, Magician's Gambit, Castle of Wizardry, Enchanter's Endgame), early to mid 1980s.

Read whilst in Cuba.

After returning, I reread the Mallorean (Guardians of the West, King of the Murgos, Demon Lord of Karanda, Sorceress of Darshiva, Seeress of Kell), 1987ish-1992ish.

So. Why reread Eddings? I reread for the Belgariad for the umpteenth time whilst in Cuba. It was something light and fluffy for the trip that I knew that I'd enjoy, and the books were ones I'd not cry over if I lost. Part of the point of the trip was to turn my brain off for a space, after all. I reread the Mallorean upon my return because I wanted to remember the end of the story.

So. A few thoughts about Eddings?
David & Leigh do some things very, very well. The books are funny and light, and they often do get to thinking about some slightly interesting issues--why religion can overwhelm rational thought in some people, for instance--although the issues get too far short a shrift, and are vastly oversimplified. These books are good pulp, and that alone is enough to make me happy.

My one criticism is far from new. Like all series of this length, or like authors who spend too much time with characters that are all basically the same--I'm thinking of Heinlein, here--the characters lose individuality as the series progress. The characters, more and more, all start to act in the same ways as one another, and they tend to start speaking exactly like every other character. Different people sound different, and they act differently. Let's remember that, authorial folk.

The one thing that I'd point to that's done beautifully throughout both series is the way magic works in the books: "the will and the word." The sorcerer gathers his or her will for an action, and then speaks, calling for the action to take place. The action is typically something that isn't hugely possible in an ordinary sense, and makes noise audible to other people capable of magic. The sorcerer has to understand how to do what he or she wills done. This conception of magic is simple, but strikes me as fairly profound, because it concisely captures our desire for magic and how it should work.

At any rate, the books aren't as spectacularly novel as Tolkien's oeuvre, or Lewis's Narnia, but they offer a fun world in which to spend a few hours. I like going back there from time to time, but this time--while I enjoyed my time there--I don't really feel as though I'm likely to want to go back. I'm going to have to think about why that is.

Tom Clancy, The Teeth of the Tiger, 2003.

This book is weak. It's not a good Clancy, nowhere near Red Storm Rising or Without Remorse or Debt of Honor: instead of careful thought and analysis, he indulges in fantasies of killing terrorists swiftly, without mercy or real justice.

Unwilling or unable to come up with plausible new characters, Clancy spins off Jack Ryan's son & Jack Jr.'s two cousins, coming up with characters that aren't even as plausible as cardboard caricatures. The story meanders, focuses in far too much detail at the wrong times, never becomes particularly gripping. In short, it was a waste of money even though bought on remainder. Avoid this book like the plague: it will bore you, and possibly rot your brain.

Michael Dobbs, Whispers of Betrayal, 2000.

I've been trying to find the time to blog about this one for two weeks now, but have been a bit distracted.
At any rate, this one is much like the other Dobbs' novels I've read recently, but better plotted & paced than the others. Unlike the careful political intrigue of the first novel, or the silliness of the second, this one is a thriller that is carefully thought out and well executed, with moments of great humour and high pathos.

It was a fun one.

Michael Dobbs, The Buddha of Bower Street, 1998.

Goodfellowe, part 2, not as desperate, and oddly connected with Tibet. This story is darker than Goodfellowe's first outing--the torturous villanies that Dobbs ascribes to the Chinese characters are particular difficult to read. The book tells of the search for the next Dalai Lama in England, and the desperate efforts made by Goodfellowe and the Tibetans to succeed before the Chinese forces can kidnap the child. Some more fun pulp.

Michael Dobbs, Goodfellowe MP.

Some nice fun pulp by the guy who wrote the novel on which was based a miniseries I loved some time back, House of Cards.

This story follows an MP, once a junior minister, whose fortunes have fallen: a drunk driving arrest, a wife in an asylum, a rebellious daughter, a difficult constituency committee, an overdrawn bank account... and a desire to improve his station. Sadly, his morals get the best of him, and he's drawn into trying to make the world better--by reforming the press. Not a good call, really, and so they go after him; all hell breaks loose, and a spot of fun happens. If you like politics, this book's a fun divertissement.

Kathy Reichs, Monday Mourning.

Enjoyable pulp, nothing special.

I dislike the way Reichs can't manage suspense. Quit talking about it, just let it come. Do not, do not, do not at the end of a chapter write the line "Whenever I think back on that moment, I wish to God I'd done what Tawny was asking. I wish to God I'd listened and understood."

I'll put up with this crap, but only 'cause my brain needed a quick break from thinking.

<sigh>

Kyle Smith, Love Monkey.

Love Monkey is a wacky and entertaining story of an infatuation, a romance, a love-story, an unrequited sob-story. It's in the same vein as Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, a story of a man hopeless in love, and throws in a good wallopping dash of Manchild (with the protagonist at 30ish instead of 50ish).

Tom Farrell is a low-grade almost-editor at a trashy New York tabloid who falls for Julia in what he calls "doses" of her. A man who's not quite sure what he wants, other than her, Farrell's misadventures along his path reveal the author's insights into the nuances of relationships. Moreover, Smith brings new punch to traditional stereotypes of how men and women behave in the big city.

A paean to New York, the book loses much of its energy when it begins to depict the events of September 11, 2001. The writing falls into clichés, the love stories fall away, and what made the book entertaining to that point starts to wane.

All in all, it's a fun divertissement, but nothing special. Just another book that's not bad--and I'll certainly keep my eye out for Smith's next novel--but I wish I could remember what prompted me to place a hold on it in the first place.