October novel-reading

[garran]

Since I don't think I'm going to have any personal reading time to speak of for the remaining few days of the month (I'm right in the middle of a three- or four-week period of unusually intense schoolwork, which is also in large part why I haven't been writing here), I may as well post my October reading now. In keeping with the new tradition, I'll once again happily elaborate on my experience of any of these if asked.

Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting
C.J. Cherryh, Brothers of Earth
Peter S. Beagle, Tamsin
Steven Brust, Agyar

Comments

[vegetius.livejournal.com]

I've read the first two books. If you like, we can compare notes once you've finished them. (Don't want to taint your discovery of them with my opinions.)

[garran.livejournal.com]

These are all books I've already finished, actually. (Specifically, the books I've finished since I made my September post.)


-Garran

[vegetius.livejournal.com]

Ah, I misunderstood. Very well, what did you think of them?

[garran.livejournal.com]

Master and Commander held my interest, but wasn't immediately as charming or as affecting as I'd expected, from reports; I suspect it probably suffers from the television pilot problem of being slightly atypical for the series, not yet having hit its stride. The prose style was entertaining, but somewhat distancing; the pacing was very strange, which I'm still trying to get my head around (there was a lot less resolution to a lot of the things that happened, for instance, than I expected, or sometimes when there was some sort of climactic event, like the operation on the gunner's brain, it took place off-stage). I suspect that all the scenes where well-meaning seamen explain technical aspects of ship life to Stephen were intended to help the reader get up to speed with the sort of offhand knowledge of rigging, etc., that the crew displayed, so it's a shame that they reliably made my eyes glaze over. I'll try out at least another book or two of the series, anyway.

(I saw the movie maybe a year or two ago, and I had a similar experience there of feeling like something pretty interesting was going on slightly outside my field of view, that might have made what I could see a lot easier to follow, had it been clearer; in that case, the trouble was exacerbated by that I couldn't make out a lot of the dialogue.)

I liked The Dragon Waiting a lot, but I'm not sure what to say about it. I think it was a little unlike anything else I've ever read, especially in the way it was doing so many different things, at once or in stages. Of those things, I especially liked the treatment of Dr. von Bayern's condition, and the locked room mystery, and all of the four main characters as people. I suspect that some of the rest would have benefited from a wider knowledge of English history on my part.


-Garran

[vegetius.livejournal.com]

I've read a lot of historical naval fiction, both Age of Sail and WW2, so I had more of a context in which to evaluate Master and Commander when I read it, than you imply you have.

Having read Forester's Horatio Hornblower series prior reading that of Mr. O'Brian's, I found Mr. O'Brian's superior in terms of writing style and characterization. You mention how certain things take place offstage: nearly everything of importance takes place offstage in the Hornblower series, quite often the battles themselves!

Overall, I enjoyed Master and Commander, and did not notice the things you mention. I read most of the series until the point that Mr. O'Brian demanded and got the right not to be edited any more, whereupon the series degenerated into 400+ pages of sailing and seabirds. I don't read naval fiction for sailing and seabirds!

As for The Dragon Waiting, I thought it was excellent. The well-realized characters, the dramatic and ornate tapestry of events ... I didn't want it to end. I hoped for a sequel but Mr. Ford never repeated himself, never. I believed he considered it bad art to do so (or so I infer from a line of dialog in one of his novellas regarding writers and writing).

Anyway, Mr. Ford died this August, so there will be no more of his brilliantly realized novels or short stories. If you'd like to acquaint yourself with his other writings, the wikipedia has his bibliography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Ford

Oh, one more thing.

[vegetius.livejournal.com]

Of the three Napoleonic naval war series I've read, the one I consider the best is the Richard Bolitho series by Alexander Kent. Alexander Kent is a pen name for Douglas Reeman. Under his real name, he writes WWII naval fiction (as a WWII & Korean War veteran of the Royal Navy he is well qualified to do so). Strangely enough, Mr. Reeman writes better under his pseudonym than under his real name. My speculation is that since far fewer people are familiar with the Napoleonic period and "ragwagon" naval warfare, he has to write in greater detail to set the scene for his audience. With WWII, more people have familiarity, and so one can let some of the background detail slide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Kent

[tanetris.livejournal.com]

I am curious as to your experiences with C.J. Cherryh, both with this month's book and those from last month (and even other books by her you know, if applicable). My only knowledge of her is from The Sword of Knowledge, which I enjoyed thoroughly, but which was written between her and 3 other authors, thus I don't know how much of my enjoyment was actually her.

[garran.livejournal.com]

Whoops, this is rather later than I originally intended. Sorry about that!

According to wikipedia,

Cherryh did not write the three novels in the Sword of Knowledge series, but received co-author's credit because she penned a foreword to each.

The Sword of Knowledge page itself goes so far as to say that she "may have helped plan the storylines", but for the most part it looks like you have still to try her for the first time.

There's a weird sense in which I only just discovered her myself; I read my first series of hers more than ten years ago, but after that I didn't read anything else until this past summer. That series was the 'Morgaine cycle', about a dangerous and powerful woman who travels with her feudal vassal between a series of worlds connected by magical or technological 'gates', carrying out her ancient mission to close as many of the gates as she can. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it -- in fact, I've reread it several times in the interim -- so I'm really not sure why it took me so long to investigate her further. Actually, I think that I did pick something up, once, when I was in exactly the wrong mood for it and couldn't get past the first page, so that might have had something to do with it.

Then, this summer, after a long, quiet buildup period of overhearing people talking about her like I was really missing something remarkable, I finally picked up Cyteen, which is, in fact, something remarkable. (How to describe it? It's about cloning and slavery and politics and the nature of genius. This description makes it sound rather more boring than it is.) That book is set in the same future history as most of her science fiction and possibly some of her fantasy, so I was immediately motivated to seek out more; I read Rimrunners, which is similarly good but on a very different scale, and then everything after that you've seen. I'm slowly working my way through her entire corpus, which I pleasantly expect to take years.

So, I like her and recommend her. Her work is characterized by:

• A certain degree of subtlety, most especially manifested in a slightly sideways approach to giving background information (though she's not as subtle about that as some other authors I read).
  
• What seems to be an abiding thematic interest in suffering and politics, both personal and large-scale.
  
• Characters, including protagonists, who are very and plausibly foreign in their mindsets.
  

Even though it isn't where I started, I think that The Pride of Chanur is probably the best place to start, if one wants to try her out; it's likely her most accessible book. It is a space opera about a grizzled, humanoid-lioness trader captain.


-Garran

[meta4mix.livejournal.com]

Being unfamiliar with all five, I am tempted to ask you for a quick rundown of each, though I'm not sure how fair that'd be to your homework schedule and whatnot. ^_^;

[garran.livejournal.com]

Not to worry. I'm quite ruthlessly willing to put these off until I have attention to spare. ^^;

Rundown o shimasu!

Master and Commander is the first in Patrick O'Brian's series of I think like seventeen books set during the Napoleonic war, mostly about the powerful though unlikely friendship between a naval officer and his ship's surgeon. The books were the basis for the movie of the same name. A lot of people I respect are really enthusiastic about them; as I implied to Ancestral Hamster above, I don't think the first one gave me enough information to make an overall judgement.

John M. Ford died on September 25th, and a certain portion of the internet shattered like a mirror into a thousand tiny shards of grief. I had already been intending to read his books eventually; reading all these things about him pushed me over, and I got the first thing the libraries had. This happened to be The Dragon Waiting, which won the World Fantasy Award the year I was born. It's an alternate history in which Christianity never really caught hold, and the Byzantine Empire remained powerful rather later than it really did, and also magic and vampires exist. I thought it was really good.

Brothers of Earth was one of the first two books by C. J. Cherryh ever published. It has some of that early-written clumsiness to it, but I liked it better than I expected to. It's about a soldier from an advanced spacefaring society who crashlands on a somewhat primitive planet and tries to make it his home.

Tamsin is the book about which you might have heard me say, "I opened it and read the first page, and it read like the most perfect young adult fantasy novel ever written. So I closed it and put it down again." That's literally true; the reason is split somewhere between my wanting to savour it and it being so much a thing I expected to like that it was almost painful. It wasn't actually quite that book it read like at first, because it breaks some implicit rules of the genre (allowing the characters to swear and use drugs, for instance), which meant that I didn't feel quite safe in it even in the places it was faithful -- I couldn't take them for granted.

(Peter S. Beagle happens to be the guy who wrote The Last Unicorn. This knowledge didn't intrude on my reading much until I came to a place in the book where it described the dead as experiencing things by remembering them, and I thought, involuntarily, "Like the skeleton in The Last Unicorn!" Then I felt very disoriented, realizing that this new story came from the same source as that other one, which I imprinted on (in movie form) early enough that it's one of my basic archetypes for how things like ghosts and magic might be treated in fiction.)

Agyar is probably the subtlest book I read in the month of October, and the cleverest in its writing; that I'm not certain about that is a tribute to The Dragon Waiting. (Those books actually have something else interesting in common, but to elaborate would probably be a spoiler.) Actually, I'm struggling to find anything to say about it that wouldn't explain too much, and give away the joy of discovery. Looking at amazon, I see, "A mysterious young man appears in a midwestern college town, takes up residence in an abandoned house, and awaits his death at the hands of the woman who controls his destiny," which is probably an acceptable degree of revelation.

I really liked reading it, but found some parts hard to take; in particular, the main character is pretty comfortable treating some of the people around him rather abhorrently, which is more unsettling than it might be when coupled with a narrative voice that seems so generally cheerful and reasonable.


-Garran