Ah, the Kindle Quest.... I was hinting madly pre-holidays that a Kindle or other e-reader would be a good gift, but a landslide off Mount To-Be-Read (hereinafter referred to as 'Mt TBR') put paid to my argument that I had NOTHING to read over the winter and was completely dependent on the library's willingness to line me up books via internet holds, the indie bookstore's willingness to order any books I emailed or phoned them about, and my spouse's willingness to stop by the library and/or bookstore one or more times a week. All those good reasons wiped out in a mini-avalanche of new and second-hand paperbacks and hardcovers collected over the past 10 years (since we moved into this house). Sigh. No e-reader under my tree, in my stocking, or wrapped in birthday paper a scant two weeks later.
I made a deal with myself: if I read or otherwise appropriately dispose of 100 'dead-tree' books from Mt. TBR by next December, I'll buy myself an e-reader, whichever one by then includes the most features that I think I'll actually use and the fewest useless ones.
'Dispose of' in this context means 'to make disposition for', whether that includes reading and finishing and finding a place for the book in the permanent collection, or finishing and passing along to a friend, relation, seniors' centre or used-bookstore, or starting, not finishing, and passing along.
It's mid-January and I'm up to 8 books. If I can keep up this pace, I might make the end-posts. But it's easy to sit around indoors in winter, hanging by the fire with a teapot and a lap-cat, reading for hours or days. We'll see what happens when the weather warms up.
To keep me honest, here's my current list:
1. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins. 4.5 out of 5. Brisk, competent writing, clarity of the adolescent character's psychology and voice, and a dystopian world constructed in the fewest possible words yet more vivid than many of the worlds in bloated SF/Fantasy series. Well worth the buzz.
2. Court of the Air - Peter S. Beagle. 3.5 of 5. Competent writing and good imagery in this early example of urban fantasy. Seems a bit dated now, especially in regards to the young people's sexual practices, but demonstrates some serious thought about the lives of the gods that is often lacking in modern urban fantasy of the Cuisinart sub-genre (toss in some vampires and werewolves, a few forgotten gods behaving badly, whirl up with some hot chilis and a mango, and call it the latest in paranormal romance/mystery/YA smoothi.... er, novels)
3. A Cast-off Coven - Juliette Blackwell. DNF, despite being a new, autographed copy of a paranormal mystery, with a really cute cover. This is the second in the Lily Ivory series and there's a lot I would like to like: vintage clothing, ghosts, hot men and good friends. But although I finished the first book it didn't completely engage me and the second even less so. Life is short, so this book went to my daughter for a second opinion and may pass through several hands before it finds a loving home.
4. The Blue Hackle - Lillian Stewart Carl. 3. This traditional mystery was won in a draw and gratefully accepted just before the self-imposed Kindle-Quest deadline for new entries. This is the final book in the Jean Fairbairn series and the first to cross my path. Lovely Scottish setting, fully human secondary characters, nobody too perfect or too stupid to live. As the finale, it was surely wrapping up threads and relationships from earlier in the series but I did not find any gaps in the story although some curiosity about previous episodes.
5. The Forever War - Joe Haldeman. 4.95 out of 5. A SF classic that is breathtaking in its crisp writing, sure characterization, and headlong rush through time and space. And that's all before factoring in the serious science elements. It may end up being my single most enjoyed book of 2011.
6. And On The Surface Die - Lou Allin. 3. This traditional mystery features RCMP Corporal Holly Martin on the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. Canada's Caribbean is home to glorious natural beauty and a wide mix of natural inhabitants but this book examines less welcomed incomers too: lumber companies, real estate developers, meth dealers and the hapless victims of all of them. Great sense of place.
7. Murder on a Girls' Night Out - Anne George. 2.5 out of 5. I can see why this series was popular: eccentric middle-aged women and their family members getting into trouble by poking around where they don't belong. It was a light, fun, cosy read but nothing made it stand out for me at this point in my reading life.
8. Captain Bolton's Corpse - J.G. Jeffreys. 2.5. Mildly entertaining older novel of a crusty London investigator crawling through 18th-century port sewers both actual and metaphorical. The deliberately dated language and dialects took a bit of getting used to. Kind of a 'Moonfleet' for adults.
Averaging one book every two days would put me over the 100-book line by late summer, but it won't last. For one thing, there are new books coming into the house all the time, via the library and book stores and review copies and prize draws. Some of those are like Godiva chocolates: you simply HAVE to devour them while they're fresh. So it will be a challenge.
Jayne
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Finally Finding the Attenbury Emeralds
It's been a while since I had leisure to post anything here, and now I'm cheating a bit by copying part of a reviewlet on The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh that I originally sent to that quintessence of classical mystery lists, DorothyL.
'The Attenbury Emeralds' by Jill Paton Walsh got opened last night. It was open way, wa-ay too late.This is novel is an interesting read on several levels. The writing rarely rises to the elegant prose of the original Sayers but Lord Peter does occasionally talk some irresistable piffle. The characters of Lord Peter and Bunter are much as they were, and the references to snippets of the original history are much appreciated. In Lady Diana's shenanigans we have a plausible 'first contact' between Lord Peter and Dian de Momery's ilk. The telling of tales within a tale is also from the Sayers canon although she used it in short fiction, not (that I recall offhand) in a novel.The inevitable comparisons out of the way, what really kept me reading was the unfolding history of the titular jewels. This is no simple story of jewel theft and recovery, but a series of crimes and other problems that, over decades (from Peter as a young man to Peter with a teenaged son) all involve the same main stone.Having arrived - well past page 50 - at the present day in story-time, I was desolated to discover my bedtime was already long past and I had to close the book for the night. The next night I picked up, stayed up way too late, and came to an event unlookedfor, so potentially devastating to the characters that I gently closed the book. I stayed away from it for several days until I had digested the immense changes that would result.
These characters, especially Lord Peter and Harriet but also the Duchess and Bunter, have been with me since my teens. Much as I admire Jill Paton Walsh's feat in continuing one of the most famed love stories in detective fiction, I hope she resists any pressure to write another book with them. I am ready to walk away and leave them to lead their own lives, secure in the knowledge that they are in a good place together despite all that has gone before.
Herewith, in closing, a book trailer in which the author discusses the how and why of writing The Attenbury Emeralds (but does not answer my concern above).
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Of Manners and Monsters and Mystery Fiction
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any essay with a remote connection to Jane Austen's works must begin with "It is a truth universally acknowleged...". Herewith no exception: a link to the literary icon so remote as to be almost unviewable not only from the beauteous peaks of the Lake District famously visited by Miss Lizzie Bennett in 'Pride and Prejudice', but indeed from the tallest modern manmade construction in any major city in the world. As remote, indeed, as the link between Miss Austen's acclaimed classic work and the more recent novel of which she is listed a co-author. Can the gentle reader be yet in doubt as to the title of the tome in question?
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith was the first of the Austen-Monster mashups. After three full seasons of ignoring its existence, I was finally worn down by the mute endurance of a friend's loaner copy gradually losing its colour as it languished, face up, in full sunlight by the picture window. A faded cover seems friendlier, somehow. Anyway, I opened it.
Skim city.
The principal charm of this book is its conceit, taken in one of two senses of the term (its principal failing being applied to the author in the other sense of the word).
The highest of its precepts is not that a well-honed dagger at the ankle is an indispensible part of a young lady's toilette. Rather, the highest precept here is represented by the book's very existence: the vast gulf between the constrained society of Austen's day, in which a young lady's life might be blighted forever by unsuitable reading material, undesirable companions or unthrifty ancestors, and the present day, in which young ladies are as free to read of zombies and violence as they are to read Jane Austen, their life choices enriched by a vast range of freedoms both societal and economic, freedoms never before quite as accessible to quite so many women at the same moment in time.
The freedom that allows women to feel both gently bred and kick-ass in the same moment, or to explore all facets of their personality by turns, is worth preserving. And worth expressing, whether exercised in full or in fiction.
Western women's participation in male literary domains is a relatively new freedom, just slightly more venerable than the right to vote. When Jane Austen was writing in the early 1800's, fiction for women was overwhelmingly ghettoized, its virtuous heroines most threatened by monstrous villains in gothic castles. Jane broke the mold by making her monsters other women - of the ilk of Lady Catherine DeBourgh - who ruthlessly enforced a rigid social code upon the young heroines and punished them for deviations. Women's fiction was never to be taken as literature, its subject matter and style unlikely to appeal to male readers. Mary Shelley had made inroads fifty years earlier with Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a decidedly masculine novel for a woman of her time. But for all her literary reach she was severely punished by society because she violated the rigid social mores applicable to women.
A hundred years after Austen, Baroness Orczy was encroaching on the male domain of detective novels with 'Lady Molly of Scotland Yard', first published in 1910. Her readers were still mainly women, reading about a woman, but this woman stood up for more than the right to marry or not. She stood up for justice, like any male detective. More daring still, the baroness breached the male preserve of literary derring-do with The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which Lady Blakeney had a voice not limited to screaming for help. Men as well as women began to read these novels of the French Revolution as avidly as they had Dumas' Three Musketeers and other adventure tales written by men. Mary Shelley would have been in awe. Jane Austen would have reveled in that freedom, and written more about her male characters than she had dared do 100 years earlier.
Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford Univeristy (in 1920), broke another barrier in 1923 when she published a novel featuring a male detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Partway through his wildly popular series, she gave him in Harriet Vane a female partner in life and in detection. Their relationship, developing over several books, is not only one of the great romances of detective fiction but an early literary example of a relationship remarkable for egalitarian balance. Harriet was intellectually his equal, independent in spirit, financially self-supporting, and although grateful after being saved from certain death by Lord Peter, she did not submerge her own interests merely because he decided to marry her. Did that example contribute to myriad readers of both genders becoming more open to egalitarian tendencies in their own relationships?
Enduring fascination with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane led to the series being revived long after Sayers' death. In time for the 21st century, Jill Paton Walsh finished Sayers' unfinished manuscript, 'Thrones, Dominations', and went on to write two further novels of Harriet and Peter, 2002's 'A Presumption of Death' (set in WW2) and, now on the cusp of release in September 2010, 'The Attenbury Emeralds' which combines Lord Peter's first case - never previously published but set post-WW1 - with further insights into the mature couple's intellectually egalitarian relationship.
Nowadays, it is difficult to find mainstream fiction in which the heroines lack choices. Women buy more fiction than men, and women do not often buy books in which the heroine is passive. Less than a hundred years ago that was not the case, and two hundred years ago our options were even more limited. From Jane Austen's mannered, marriage-minded novels, in which the monsters were apt to be other women, through to 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' in which Lizzie Bennett dispatches monsters by her own skill with weaponry, we've come a long way, baby.
All of which is not to say I'll read every word of that latter title. It is not dazzling in style, wit, characterizations or plot. Not worth my close attention. I do confess, however, that I will be peeking at pages until I discover whether Mr. Collins eventually gets et. Some things a girl's just gotta know.
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith was the first of the Austen-Monster mashups. After three full seasons of ignoring its existence, I was finally worn down by the mute endurance of a friend's loaner copy gradually losing its colour as it languished, face up, in full sunlight by the picture window. A faded cover seems friendlier, somehow. Anyway, I opened it.
Skim city.
The principal charm of this book is its conceit, taken in one of two senses of the term (its principal failing being applied to the author in the other sense of the word).
The highest of its precepts is not that a well-honed dagger at the ankle is an indispensible part of a young lady's toilette. Rather, the highest precept here is represented by the book's very existence: the vast gulf between the constrained society of Austen's day, in which a young lady's life might be blighted forever by unsuitable reading material, undesirable companions or unthrifty ancestors, and the present day, in which young ladies are as free to read of zombies and violence as they are to read Jane Austen, their life choices enriched by a vast range of freedoms both societal and economic, freedoms never before quite as accessible to quite so many women at the same moment in time.
The freedom that allows women to feel both gently bred and kick-ass in the same moment, or to explore all facets of their personality by turns, is worth preserving. And worth expressing, whether exercised in full or in fiction.
Western women's participation in male literary domains is a relatively new freedom, just slightly more venerable than the right to vote. When Jane Austen was writing in the early 1800's, fiction for women was overwhelmingly ghettoized, its virtuous heroines most threatened by monstrous villains in gothic castles. Jane broke the mold by making her monsters other women - of the ilk of Lady Catherine DeBourgh - who ruthlessly enforced a rigid social code upon the young heroines and punished them for deviations. Women's fiction was never to be taken as literature, its subject matter and style unlikely to appeal to male readers. Mary Shelley had made inroads fifty years earlier with Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a decidedly masculine novel for a woman of her time. But for all her literary reach she was severely punished by society because she violated the rigid social mores applicable to women.
A hundred years after Austen, Baroness Orczy was encroaching on the male domain of detective novels with 'Lady Molly of Scotland Yard', first published in 1910. Her readers were still mainly women, reading about a woman, but this woman stood up for more than the right to marry or not. She stood up for justice, like any male detective. More daring still, the baroness breached the male preserve of literary derring-do with The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which Lady Blakeney had a voice not limited to screaming for help. Men as well as women began to read these novels of the French Revolution as avidly as they had Dumas' Three Musketeers and other adventure tales written by men. Mary Shelley would have been in awe. Jane Austen would have reveled in that freedom, and written more about her male characters than she had dared do 100 years earlier.
Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford Univeristy (in 1920), broke another barrier in 1923 when she published a novel featuring a male detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Partway through his wildly popular series, she gave him in Harriet Vane a female partner in life and in detection. Their relationship, developing over several books, is not only one of the great romances of detective fiction but an early literary example of a relationship remarkable for egalitarian balance. Harriet was intellectually his equal, independent in spirit, financially self-supporting, and although grateful after being saved from certain death by Lord Peter, she did not submerge her own interests merely because he decided to marry her. Did that example contribute to myriad readers of both genders becoming more open to egalitarian tendencies in their own relationships?
Enduring fascination with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane led to the series being revived long after Sayers' death. In time for the 21st century, Jill Paton Walsh finished Sayers' unfinished manuscript, 'Thrones, Dominations', and went on to write two further novels of Harriet and Peter, 2002's 'A Presumption of Death' (set in WW2) and, now on the cusp of release in September 2010, 'The Attenbury Emeralds' which combines Lord Peter's first case - never previously published but set post-WW1 - with further insights into the mature couple's intellectually egalitarian relationship.
Nowadays, it is difficult to find mainstream fiction in which the heroines lack choices. Women buy more fiction than men, and women do not often buy books in which the heroine is passive. Less than a hundred years ago that was not the case, and two hundred years ago our options were even more limited. From Jane Austen's mannered, marriage-minded novels, in which the monsters were apt to be other women, through to 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' in which Lizzie Bennett dispatches monsters by her own skill with weaponry, we've come a long way, baby.
All of which is not to say I'll read every word of that latter title. It is not dazzling in style, wit, characterizations or plot. Not worth my close attention. I do confess, however, that I will be peeking at pages until I discover whether Mr. Collins eventually gets et. Some things a girl's just gotta know.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Where to wander after Austen and Heyer?
Herewith some suggestions from Michelle Kerns of Examiner.com
If those don't max out your Austen-ish addiction, there are handy reviews of Austen take-offs (mostly of 'Pride & Prejudice') on Austenesque
Neither site mentions Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen Mysteries, which I am re-reading now in order after a few random dips over the past decade. The first book, 'Scargrave Manor,' was a bit studied, the writing somewhat stilted. The second book in the series, 'The Man of the Cloth', has a wonderful Austen-esque voice along with a creeping sense of mystery. While I still find the footnotes a distraction - they tempt me all the way down the page and interfere with my immersion in the fictive dream - the language and subtle homages to well-loved Austen characters are more than equal to the challenge of restoring my story-trance.
'Jane and the Man of the Cloth' is set in a lovely seaside village. The inhabitants are as cloistered and their lives as intertwined as any in an Austen novel, with the addition of murder and other crimes implied or actual. For those of us who spent part of childhood in smugglers' tunnels with the adventurous hero of Moonfleet and the children of Enid Blyton's novels, there's even a scene in a dank, dark, seaweedy seashore cavern and tunnel leading to... but that would be telling.
And yes, I did spend another four hours Lost in Austenprose last night. How could you tell?
If those don't max out your Austen-ish addiction, there are handy reviews of Austen take-offs (mostly of 'Pride & Prejudice') on Austenesque
Neither site mentions Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen Mysteries, which I am re-reading now in order after a few random dips over the past decade. The first book, 'Scargrave Manor,' was a bit studied, the writing somewhat stilted. The second book in the series, 'The Man of the Cloth', has a wonderful Austen-esque voice along with a creeping sense of mystery. While I still find the footnotes a distraction - they tempt me all the way down the page and interfere with my immersion in the fictive dream - the language and subtle homages to well-loved Austen characters are more than equal to the challenge of restoring my story-trance.
'Jane and the Man of the Cloth' is set in a lovely seaside village. The inhabitants are as cloistered and their lives as intertwined as any in an Austen novel, with the addition of murder and other crimes implied or actual. For those of us who spent part of childhood in smugglers' tunnels with the adventurous hero of Moonfleet and the children of Enid Blyton's novels, there's even a scene in a dank, dark, seaweedy seashore cavern and tunnel leading to... but that would be telling.
And yes, I did spend another four hours Lost in Austenprose last night. How could you tell?
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Lost in Austenprose
Austenprose has been doing Georgette Heyer novel reviews all month. I finally went there last evening when the yearning to participate became stronger than my common sense. I was lost for many hours, reading reviews, commenting on my favourite characters and scenes, commenting on other commenters' comments on same. Lost... for hours... and going back for more this evening.
Heyer was my favourite author even before I discovered Jane Austen. Her books have been read to tatters multiple times. My oldest daughter shares my conviction that the best possible escape from this irksome workaday world is a retreat to the Regency... but only in the very highest-quality genuine Heyer and Austen varietals. Beware cheap knock-offs!
Discovering Heyer helped me survive more than the usual teen angst. At the start of high school, I was abruptly transplanted from West Germany to a small mill town in Northern Ontario. Even though I shared a common language and heritage (English Canadian) with my high-school peers, my clothing and attitudes and taste in music marked me as definitely different. 'Different' is not a boon in high school.
My family was dissolving around me under the doubled stress of culture shock and over-crowding: 2.5 distressed teenagers and their shaken parents, isolated in a small apartment in a town where 80% had never gone out of 'The North', where teen pregnancy, early marriage, and a life of hockey and beer were the overwhelming and accepted lot of the neighbours. We did not fit in, and knew no-one. And yet I was FROM Canada, supposedly coming 'home'. I have a lot of sympathy for immigrants, who add language difficulties on top of the rest. Moving cultures is HARD.
Finding a fictional world where heroines - bright, intelligent, creative, thoughtful heroines - faced up to such troubles and more, and found ways around them that did not often include being saved by the guy on the white horse - gave me a respite from worldly cares and some ideas for alternate behaviors in the face of scornful peers. In Heyer's world, if you are being whispered about behind the other girls' fans, you hold up your head higher, smile a little brighter, flirt a little stronger, and look as if you are having the best time in the world. Soon enough it becomes, if not completely true, at least not as much of a lie. And you don't go home from the Assembly/school dance to weep into your pillow. You go home with visions of young men coming on the morrow to leave posies (or movie tickets) at your door. And, often enough, they do.
The lesson I took away was "Some people might be mean behind your back and overtly cruel to your face, but you do NOT have to care about them. There are other, nicer people in this world too, and they will like you if given the chance."
Heyer's social lessons and high-quality escapism kept my head high and my confidence propped up through university, job interviews, a divorce, a re-marriage and integration with a new family.... and helped me re-establish my social circle following several subsequent moves. If I had spent those years retreating to 'Twilight' instead, would my takeaway lessons have had the same carryover practicality? (I don't know and can't guess because the writing in that series makes me gag every time I try it)
I have never been back to that town, and probably never will now because, like all mill towns, it was shrinking in the face of globalization even before the current economic slowdown. And the three young women who read Heyer with me all left town around the same time I did. I'm not sure any of them have been back either. When I think of the place now, the boarded-up homes and weed-grown parks are overlaid with the golden afternoons in Shari's grandmother's bedroom, reading our way through a world far removed in time and space from the angry girls and ugly boys who jostled us in the corridors of our over-crowded high school. A world of social order and nice clothes and graceful dancers.... and women who thought for themselves and were not afraid to say so, politely.
Over at Austenprose, that last describes pretty much every woman writing the reviews, and the comment trails. That place, right now, is closer to home than anywhere I've been since before high school.
Heyer was my favourite author even before I discovered Jane Austen. Her books have been read to tatters multiple times. My oldest daughter shares my conviction that the best possible escape from this irksome workaday world is a retreat to the Regency... but only in the very highest-quality genuine Heyer and Austen varietals. Beware cheap knock-offs!
Discovering Heyer helped me survive more than the usual teen angst. At the start of high school, I was abruptly transplanted from West Germany to a small mill town in Northern Ontario. Even though I shared a common language and heritage (English Canadian) with my high-school peers, my clothing and attitudes and taste in music marked me as definitely different. 'Different' is not a boon in high school.
My family was dissolving around me under the doubled stress of culture shock and over-crowding: 2.5 distressed teenagers and their shaken parents, isolated in a small apartment in a town where 80% had never gone out of 'The North', where teen pregnancy, early marriage, and a life of hockey and beer were the overwhelming and accepted lot of the neighbours. We did not fit in, and knew no-one. And yet I was FROM Canada, supposedly coming 'home'. I have a lot of sympathy for immigrants, who add language difficulties on top of the rest. Moving cultures is HARD.
Finding a fictional world where heroines - bright, intelligent, creative, thoughtful heroines - faced up to such troubles and more, and found ways around them that did not often include being saved by the guy on the white horse - gave me a respite from worldly cares and some ideas for alternate behaviors in the face of scornful peers. In Heyer's world, if you are being whispered about behind the other girls' fans, you hold up your head higher, smile a little brighter, flirt a little stronger, and look as if you are having the best time in the world. Soon enough it becomes, if not completely true, at least not as much of a lie. And you don't go home from the Assembly/school dance to weep into your pillow. You go home with visions of young men coming on the morrow to leave posies (or movie tickets) at your door. And, often enough, they do.
The lesson I took away was "Some people might be mean behind your back and overtly cruel to your face, but you do NOT have to care about them. There are other, nicer people in this world too, and they will like you if given the chance."
Heyer's social lessons and high-quality escapism kept my head high and my confidence propped up through university, job interviews, a divorce, a re-marriage and integration with a new family.... and helped me re-establish my social circle following several subsequent moves. If I had spent those years retreating to 'Twilight' instead, would my takeaway lessons have had the same carryover practicality? (I don't know and can't guess because the writing in that series makes me gag every time I try it)
I have never been back to that town, and probably never will now because, like all mill towns, it was shrinking in the face of globalization even before the current economic slowdown. And the three young women who read Heyer with me all left town around the same time I did. I'm not sure any of them have been back either. When I think of the place now, the boarded-up homes and weed-grown parks are overlaid with the golden afternoons in Shari's grandmother's bedroom, reading our way through a world far removed in time and space from the angry girls and ugly boys who jostled us in the corridors of our over-crowded high school. A world of social order and nice clothes and graceful dancers.... and women who thought for themselves and were not afraid to say so, politely.
Over at Austenprose, that last describes pretty much every woman writing the reviews, and the comment trails. That place, right now, is closer to home than anywhere I've been since before high school.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)