September novel-reading

[garran]

I want to start keeping formal track of the books I read each month (I don't know if I'll reliably do so by posting about it here, but it seems an obvious place). Mostly this is because sometimes, when I try to recall what I've recently been reading, it feels like there's something obvious I'm forgetting, and, though it may or may not be true on any particular occasion, the feeling itches. Probably that sort of itchy uncertainty was somewhere behind the very invention of writing things down.

Here's a list for September, then, by the order I read them; I'm only including novels, for now, though I also read short stories, nonfiction, and graphic novels, which go unmentioned. For some people I know, this would be a normal or a modest amount of reading, and for others a great deal; for me, it's unusually industrious (I've been caught up in an enthusiasm for the libraries, lately).

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs Of Atuan
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Farthest Shore
C.J. Cherryh, The Pride of Chanur
Robert Charles Wilsom, Spin
C.J. Cherryh, Chanur's Venture
C.J. Cherryh, The Kif Strike Back
C.J. Cherryh, Chanur's Homecoming
Jo Walton, Farthing
Charles Stross, Accelerando

It was my first time reading all of these. I thought that every one of them was remarkably and uncommonly good, which I was thinking of as a string of particularly nice reading luck for a couple of minutes, before I recalled that the list consists of two classic and beloved series, two of this year's Hugo nominees (one of which won), and the much-anticipated latest from an author I much admire; in other words, I kind of stacked the deck! I might still talk more specifically about some of them later, especially if somebody actually asks me what I thought.

Comments

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to hear what you thought of the Earthsea books; I (and most of my friends who have read them) read them at such an early age that I'd be curious to see an adult perspective.

Also, I highly highly recommend reading Tehanu, the generally-fan-hated fourth book.

[garran.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I kind of took LeGuin backwards; I read The Dispossessed when I was mostly prepubescent. I read somewhere that the best time to experience Tehanu is 'two or three decades after you read the first three, whenever that might be'. I probably won't hold out for that long, but I thought that I'd give it at least a little gap. (There's also a fifth one, isn't there?)

I was expecting to like Earthsea, but I was also expecting it to be a much more typical sort of fantasy trilogy -- you know, with a continuous story arc across the three books covering a fairly short span of time, dealing with the struggle by the heroes against some world-endangering threat (from the vague things I'd heard about the books' plot beforehand, I expected this to take the form of white-skinned invaders from across the sea). So I was fascinated by what I got instead, which I'm not sure how to characterize; those smaller stories, quieter and more graceful, with their sense of already being very old. I found it enchanting. I felt like I was reading the first example of something that had informed things afterward, the way one feels reading Tolkien, or listening to the Beatles*; I don't know how accurate an impression that was, but in particular I thought that the way she used familiar tropes like the power of names or the need for equilibrium in magic was deft and unselfconscious enough that I wouldn't be surprised if they were anyway among the first modern instances of those devices.

(*Does everyone feel this way about Tolkien, the Beatles, Casablanca, etc. -- that the then-freshness of the familiar things they're doing pervades the work, and makes those things joyous and powerful again? I certainly do feel this, for those things, but in each of those cases I knew about their historical importance before I first experienced them, so I've never been certain just how psychosomatic it is.)

More specific things I remember liking, now, a month later: after reading in the recent Tiptree biography about how LeGuin in her early work never wrote women, I was pleasantly surprised to meet the protagonist of The Tombs of Atuan. In the third book (mild spoiler warning), I liked that there was a prophecy that obviously referred to the main character, and that it was rightly taken to be so obvious that there was never actually a scene where the character realized and spelled out for the reader, "Wait a minute, I'm fulfilling the prophecy!" -- they had gradually realized right along with the rest of us, so they just went ahead and did it. I don't think I'd ever seen that before. I am also a sucker for when a character we're familiar with from the inside shows up as an impressive and mysterious stranger (see also: Komarr, sort of).

I'm trying to remember if I had any complaints or reservations about the books, but, if I did, it's no longer fresh in my mind the way these positive impressions are. We'll see how they hold up when I come around to re-reading.


-Andy H.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear about Spinand Farthing--both are on my to-read list.

[garran.livejournal.com]

Spin is one of those science fiction novels that the genre is famous for but that I actually don't encounter that often -- the kind where the main focus of the story is the ideas, not the characters. (Come to think of it, Accelerando was like that, too.) With the caveat that I'm not very good at judging the science of this sort of thing, I thought that the central idea of Spin was awesome; it was wondrous, it performed well as both a mystery and a threat, and I was entirely satisfied with the eventual revelations and explanations.

After I had finished Farthing, it's the political aspects of the plot that stuck with me the most, so I understand why that's what so many people are talking about. I thought it was a shame, though, as I was reading it, that the packaging played up the alternate history angle so much; it seemed to make it unlikely that people who liked mysteries would pick it up, and I think that it works better that way, enjoyed straight as a Sayers-style mystery, at least as one is beginning, so that the other stuff can be allowed to sneak up on you. It's certainly written elegantly enough, and faithfully enough to the genre, to allow that reading to be possible -- the detective stuff is neither an easy excuse nor a sleight of hand, but integral. I liked the voices of the characters a lot.


-Andy H.