intertext

( Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog )
( Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver )
( (counts as one, as all are re-reads) Megan Whelan Turner, The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia )
( Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock )

Catching up with my reading log (and yikes, I'm doing okay, but I'm going to have to get my skates on if I'm to read 50 books this year):
( The Hunger Games )
( Fire )
( A Conspiracy of Kings )
( The Uncommon Reader )
( Darkwood )
( Lips Touch, Three Times )
( American Gods )

Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones

I think from now on, DWJ is moving off my "buy immediately in hardcover" list. There hasn't now been a book that I haven't been slightly disappointed in since Deep Secret, which was the last of the "true" genius DWJ novels, imo.

This one was okay. I liked the domesticity of it, the focus of the action mostly in one small village. I liked the fact that for once there were healthy relationships between the protagonist and adults; Aidan had a grandmother who loved him and whom he grieves for and then goes to live with his... uncle? cousin?? I can't remember - Andrew, who is nice, and treats him well. The system of magic was quite interesting, but not fully worked out (it seems to be about seeing, but turns into performative speech again at the end). The idea of the "counterparts" was quite interesting.

The overall plot was pretty predictable and seemed... unimportant. The ending was rushed, as often happens in DWJ novels. Most of the characters, other than Andrew and Aidan, seemed more like caricatures than people. There was some rather distasteful attitude towards the overweight and the mentally challenged, and I particularly disliked the reference to the mentally challenged man as fat _because_ there was something not-quite-right about his mind.

It was fun, but nothing earth-shattering. Sigh.

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

This was a birthday gift, so I'm glad to be able to report that I enjoyed it very much. It's a quiet, graceful book. Somehow very Japanese in its understated elegance and slight oddness. It is about - yes - a housekeeper who looks after a professor who, although a mathematical genius, can remember only 80 minutes at a time. It's mostly about friendship, quiet and tentative. What I like most about it is that it doesn't try and introduce any kind of romance; it really is about friendship. And symmetries. And patterns. And mathematics. For some reason, my brain can cope with quantum physics, but it doesn't cope all that well with math. I have to confess that much of the math just went in one side of my brain and out the other, but that didn't impede my enjoyment of the novel. Except I feel that I ought to re-read it to try and understand the math better. Maybe I will.

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin

Lavinia is austere, meticulously researched, beautifully written, but for the most part curiously uninvolving.

Perhaps my greatest complaint about it is that although Le Guin sets out to give a voice to a voiceless character from Vergil's Aenead, the king's daughter whom Aeneas wins in order to found the Roman empire, I finish the book feeling that I don't really know Lavinia any better than I did at the start. She never comes alive, except as a quiet, curiously passive woman who moves through the pages observing the tumult swirling around her. We are meant to feel a great love affair between her and Aeneas, but we are not given any real stake in it.

As a critical reader, I can not help but admire Le Guin's prose. She is a great stylist, and you can feel the careful craft behind every sentence. It's a long time since I read Vergil in Latin, but I sensed that certain passages were direct translations. All in all, this novel read a little like an academic exercise in scholarship and clear, luminous prose.

There is an emotional pay-off at the end that makes up for quite a bit, but I'm not sure I'd recommend the novel to anyone except those interested in the period or who, like me, are long-time admirers of Le Guin's work.

Photo Impressionism and The Subjective Image Freeman Patterson and Andre Gallant.

Freeman Patterson has been a photographic hero of mine since the Seventies, when I first took up photography seriously and when his Photography and the Art of Seeing was something of a Bible for me. I always enjoy not just looking at his photographs but reading his advice and his philosophy (he's one of those with somewhat zen-like ideas about art).

I liked one half of this more than the other. The first half is devoted to extremely abstract work created by doing things with multiple exposures and moving the camera while exposing. Not so much my cup of tea. The half devoted to "the subjective image" is wonderful and inspiring. Even though published in 2001, it's resolutely film based - I'd be interested to read an updated version that allowed for digital techniques (though I think Patterson still does much of his work with a film camera). Many of the ideas here could be adapted with Photoshop.

Pursuant to my earlier post about best and favourites of children's lit - everything I wrote about there I read as a child, and, indeed, began reading at or before the age of seven. One author that I did not discover until I was in my late teens or early twenties, but whom I have continued to read and delight in ever since is, of course, Diana Wynne Jones. I feel as if I am part of an exclusive club - Those Who Know How Great DWJ Is!

Thus, I was thrilled to see Neil Gaiman's tweet this morning, announcing the lovely article about DWJ in the Guardian Book Blog. You can read it for yourselves, so I won't discuss the contents, except to say that she talks about how wonderful DWJ is and how difficult it is to choose an all-time favourite.

I have no difficulty choosing an all-time favourite ... well ... almost no difficulty ... maybe it's a tie. I think, if I were tied down and poked with sticks, I would plump for Fire and Hemlock as both my favourite and undoubtedly her best. I love it for its complexity, the dense intertextuality, the lovely relationship between Tom and Polly and indeed the unusual for DWJ emphasis on close human relationships of all kinds. And I've never found the ending ambiguous at all (but then, I'm a hopeless romantic and an optimist).

But, as a close second, by only a shade of a whisker, is Howl's Moving Castle, which for me is the ultimate comfort read: funny, irreverent, romantic, charming ... what can I say?

And then there's Dogsbody, with its remarkable presentation of the dog's point of view. And Time of the Ghost, and The Homeward Bounders, which I think is possibly my THIRD favourite DWJ book, maybe. But that would mean that I'd be leaving out Charmed Life, which was the first of her books that I read but still one that I love. Or The Ogre Downstairs which still cracks me up.

I can't wait for this summer's conference - All DWJ All The Time! What could be cooler than that?


PS: I need a DWJ icon.

Rosemary Kirstein, The Steerswoman, The Outskirter's Secret, The Lost Steersman, and The Language of Power.

It was papersky who first mentioned this series in her blog, and then I think sartorias referred to them, and then possibly truepenny. When writers whose works you admire write about how much they admire another writer, it's usually worth checking her out, and the chance definitely paid off in this case. I got them from the library, but I'm going to order the whole set from Amazon so that I can read them again.

When I grow up, I want to be a Steerswoman. No - wait - I think I already am. To some extent, anyway. In the world of this series, Steerswomen (and some Steersmen) are a group of itinerant ... questioners. Scholars, really. Their responsibility is adding to the collective knowledge of the world. One of their prime contributions is mapping - perhaps that was their first task - but they also record all the minutiae of the world around them: animal and plant life, and the customs of human societies. There is a custom - a law, really - that you must answer a Steerswoman's questions and she must answer yours. Unless, that is, you ever refuse to answer one of her questions, in which case she will place a Ban on you and no one of her order needs ever answer one of your questions again. Their place in this world is much like that of a mendicant priesthood - a town or village is usually glad to have one in their midst and will feed and house her in exchange for teaching and entertainment in the form of storytelling (she's like a kind of human Discovery Channel).

There is another specialized group in this world: Wizards. They keep themselves to themselves. They seem to tolerate the Steerswomen, and are tolerated by them but not liked.

Rowan, the Steerswoman protagonist, has found something and tries to find out what it is. Her questions come to the attention of the Wizards, who immediately pursue her and try to kill her. As she seeks answers, Rowan meets and befriends an Outskirter, Bel, who is a member of a loosely knit tribal group that lives literally on the edges, in the wilder, less hospitable areas of the world. Rowan and Bel travel together and are joined by Willam, who is a young man who wants to become a Wizard.

This sparse summary makes the series sound like one of those Extruded Fantasy Product Quest sequences that have people wandering randomly about a world looking for something while being hunted by Dark Riders. It really isn't. I can't say anything at all about what they discover without massive spoilers, and the process of discovery is what this sequence of novels is all about. It's really one unbroken story rather than a "series": each novel picks up almost immediately where the other left off.

Only Barbara Hambly, and perhaps Ursula Le Guin, have equally effectively conveyed the heart and mind of a scholar and the appeal of a scholar's life. The point of view is so tightly controlled that we find out the truth gradually, as Rowan does. Even now, at the end of the fourth book, when much has become clear, there are some mysteries yet to be solved. The world is detailed and internally consistent. The characters are well developed - so far, I have yet to meet anyone who is not interesting, and even the "villains" have complex motives. I love the relationship between Rowan, Bel and Willam, and can't wait to spend more time with them.

It is a delight to discover a new and compelling series when I thought I'd read everything worth reading. The best and worst thing about it is that it's not finished, and Kirstein doesn't seem to be a fast writer. This is a good thing in the sense that the quality of the work is stellar; she hasn't gotten sloppy as the series continues. In fact, if anything, the books get better as you continue through the sequence. But now I absolutely can't wait for the next one!

And maybe you can help me identify one of them!

Because I've been cleaning and clearing and sorting, I've been thinking about what books in my collection to keep and what, if any, books from my youth are missing from the collection, and whether they'd even be any good if I could find them and read them again. I have in mind three very obscure books, two that I remember the titles of, and one that I only read once and have only a very vague recollection of.
( The Strange Light )
( Something I don't remember )
( The Winter of Enchantment )

Via classics_cat 

I suspect that few if any on my flist would fall into the "average" category below.  As always, 'tis a strange list, with peculiar things like "The complete works of Shakespeare" then individual plays, or "the tales of Narnia" plus individual books.  Although, I suppose lots of people might have read one rather than all of them.  And some of them are a bit WTF.  But anyway...( Read more... )