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

[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