100 Books #53 - J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS

It's the secondary and incidental characters that are really selling me on these books as I finish with the second of seven, especially the Weasley family, and especially the Weasley Twins. Intended, from what I can gather, as a sort of faded gentry in the wizard world -- "too little money and too little children" as the uni-dimensionally awful aristocrat brat Draco Malfoy mocks them -- the family is loving, clever and charming and the twins, the twins are more fun than any one boy ever could be alone, smart, resourceful, full of mischief and pranks, and utterly, utterly lovable. Meeting the rest of the family is easily the best part of this second Harry Potter novel, but there are lots of contenders for second best.

Such as the fact that Hermione spends a good chunk of the second half of the story turned to stone. I'm sorry, but she annoys the hell out of me. Such as Dobby the House Elf, who reminds me of Michael Palin's maniacally self-flagellating waiter in Monty Python's Indian Restaurant Sketch and whose attempts to save Harry Potter's life always wind up getting Harry into big trouble. Such as poor Moaning Myrtle. Such as Professor McGonnagle, whom Rowling simply has to have been picturing as Maggie Smith from the start, which makes her wonderful.

But then there's Professor Lockhart, the most cardboard yet of Rowling's nuisance characters. I'm sure I'm meant to cheer his fate at the end but I couldn't be arsed; I think this would have been a better book without him. And yes, I'm aware he's meant to be a warning of the dangers of Harry's maybe buying into his own celebrity too much, but Harry is just so very, very good that perils such as those are onionskin tigers at best. He's such a paragon, our Harry. I'd maybe seek to frame him for some malefaction or other myself.

I did enjoy the mystery plot, and all the behind-the-scenes wrangling and jockeying for power that it caused, though it's quite possible that George R.R. Martin has spoiled this kind of clash between capital G Good and capital E Evil characters for me, for good. I understand that these are young adult books and thus are supposed to be rather black and white affairs, but so far I'm not 100% sold on the idea that they're as enjoyable for adults as for children.

I bet I'd have loved them unreservedly as a teenybopper, had they existed then. Nonetheless, I will read on, out of curiosity and out of love for the second-tier cast. What are Fred and George going to scheme up next?

100 Books #52 - J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCEROR'S STONE

Quibble time first. Why, oh why, did the powers that be insist on publishing this book with different titles in the U.K. and the U.S.? Are British children taught the finer points of alchemy at such an earlier age than American ones, that the former should be expected to know what the Philosopher's Stone was but the latter needed that patronizing little pat on the head about it.

Oh, and Quidditch. Foolish game. I can see where one needed to create a kind of Wizard Cricket for a tale of Wizard Boarding School, but did it have to be so grossly bizarre in its scoring? Anyway.

I can certainly see why certain fifth graders of my acquaintance, back in my substitute teaching/newslady days, were so very taken with this book that they played at being Harry and Ron and Hermione on the playground the way my own contemporaries (dating myself, of course) played at being Luke and Leia and Han. It's lovely to imagine that a child whose actual life is as neglected and deprived and dismal as every child who's ever not gotten his/her way always imagines his/her own life to be, is suddenly revealed to be the Most Important Kid, Like Ever and whisked away to become a great hero. Maybe that can be true for me, too. And I've decided to start calling that girl Hermione and chase her around the jungle gym and try to get her to kiss me.

I hurried to show said fifth graders where there was better stuff to be found in the library. And while there were not shelves and shelves of ready-made Halloween costumes and toys and companion picture books and other dreck to go with them (unless one wanted to hit eBay), these discerning kids mostly came to agree with me that those older books were pretty all right, too.

Is Harry Potter's world as charming as L. Frank Baum's Oz books, as gently edifying as C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, as erudite and overwhelming as J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth Madness, as dark and portentous as Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books? It is none of these. It is modern and a tad bland and predictable compared to its ancestors, obviously written with an eye toward screenplay adaptation, but enjoyable nonetheless. I'm told the books get more challenging as they pile up, the idea having been that the series' original readers would grow up right alongside the Hogwarthians, and so I'll keep on reading for a while.

Because, why not?

I've now popped my Harry Cherry, and an amusing experience it was. Alas that I had already seen the film version of this first book, so never got the chance to cast the characters in my own imagination, but I'm not good at that anyway, and Hollywood and its partners did a fine, fine job. Any book in which I get to imagine Alan Rickman skulking around my head for a few hours is fine with me. Skulk on, Snape.

100 Books #51 - Anne Lyle's ALCHEMIST OF SOULS

Some books are just made for readers like me, ticking off so many boxes on one's personal checklist that one sits there screaming "hey you book, why aren't you already published and in my hot little hands!" when one hears about them.

Alchemist of Souls is one of those, for me. Tudor/Elizabethan England? Check. Alternate history*? Check. Alien species coexisting with humans? Check. Theatrical politics? Check. Shakespearean cross-dressers, onstage and off? Check.

The world of the novel is one in which Elizabeth I not only married but had children; England's Crown Prince is her son Arthur (by, of course, Robert Dudley. Aww!). That's all just background, though, because this book isn't about Elizabeth or her children except in a distant way; our heroes and heroines are more or less ordinary Londoners dealing with the consequences of an extraordinary event: for the first time ever, a tribe of Skraylings (the aforementioned alien species, the conceit of them being that the New World contained not only the people we know as First Nations/Native Americans, but also a magical, sort-of-elfin race who became trading partners and allies of Britain) are sending a formal ambassador to Elizabeth's court. So of course, intrigue on every level follows, because France and Spain are still Britain's enemies and seek to break up that alliance, by whatever means they might. By which I mean spies, assassins, saboteurs, the usual rabble of mischief-makers.

Enter Maliverny Catlyn (loosely based on an actual historical figure), mysterious swordsman with an intriguing past of which we're only given hints, who is singled out by the powers that be to serve as this ambassador's bodyguard. He has theatrical connections through a sometime love affair with a copyist and forger and thereby winds up coming into the orbit of our other protagonist, Coby, sort of a young majordomo for a theater company who happens to be fluent in TradeTalk, the Skrayling/English pidgeon Mal will have to learn in order to do his new job. Coby, of course, being a "real life" Shakespearean girl in disguise**, half Viola, half Rosalind, falls in love with Mal, though she would have wound up sucked into these intrigues anyway, since her theater company is one of many competing in a special theater contest which the ambassador shall judge, Skraylings being wild about the theater.

Got all that? Good, because there's even more. I have proclaimed on this blog and elsewhere that I would love to read a version of A Song of Ice and Fire that's all about the little people instead of the unpleasant, immoral bigshots jockeying for power. I seem to have gotten my wish. There is a dizzying array of plots and counter-plots, both in the meta, literary sense and in the sense of espionage and political struggle. Coby's is not the only secret identity. The Skraylings have lots of secrets, and not just that of how they make light out of puddles of mystery liquid. There is, of course, magic, and while a major plot point does hinge on this magic, it's otherwise pretty unobtrusive, a mere and minor fact of the world, because Anne Lyle is interested in people, not fantasy tropes. To which I say hooray!

A sequel, set in the Venice of this alternate world, is planned for later this year, and shall land on my ebook reader as a matter of course due to my Angry Robot ebooks subscription, which I shall be renewing immediately this month. I think of all my purchases over the last twelve months, that subscription has given me the most return on investment in terms of sheer pleasure. I am now never without something to read; indeed, I have an overabundance yet, including many books that came out before Alchemist of Souls but didn't promise to capture my imagination and anticipation quite the way this book did. And yes, that promise I count quite fulfilled. Whot larks!

I'm still puzzled at the title, though. No alchemists were harmed in the making of this book. No alchemists appeared at all. The title is pretty much just a rather deep metaphor for plot points I shan't reveal here. Shh!

*Very, very alternate. This Elizabethan England is way more accepting of, e.g., homosexuality, than the real period was, for instance, to say nothing of a whole 'nother sentient race. There are mentions of sectarian Catholic/Protestant tensions but they're just that -- mentions. Much of this can be forgiven (if forgiveness is needed) because of the subculture in which so much of the story takes place; theater/arts circles are always a bit more progressive than the rest of society. Still, I sometimes found this a little hard to swallow.

**This is just one of many Shakespearean motifs, overt and subtle, appearing in the novel. I think Lyle is probably a good old Shakespeare nerd. Funny the Bard himself never appears. That's rather a huge absence, especially since it's not explained. Perhaps in the sequel?

100 Books #50 - Alastair Reynolds' BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH

I'm the punchline... I'm the period, the full stop at the end of an immensely long and convoluted argument, a rambling chain of happenstance and contingency stretching from the discovery of fire down in the Olduvai Gorge, through the invention so language and paper and the wheel, through all the unremembered centuries to... this. This condition. Being brought out of hibernation aboard a spaceship orbiting another planet. Being alive in the twenty-second century. Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being. - Sunday Akinya in Alastair Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth

I, too, feel like a punchline a lot of the time, though nowhere near so cosmic a one as Sunday Akinya. Where I feel like a punchline is this: I have a fundamental problem with novel-reading, I'm discovering, one that became acutely noticeable while reading Alastair Reynolds' latest novel. And make no mistake -- the problem is most certainly mine and not Mr. Reynolds'. He remains one of my favorite authors, as I've observed before on this blog, and this book is one of his best. Possibly his best. I haven't been able to decide on that as yet.

 But one of the things I like best about him is where I have the most trouble with fiction as we know it.

You see, a story, at least in Western literature, starts by setting the scene and introducing the characters, showing us the baseline, the norm. Once that's all established, things must happen to upset this balance, threaten the norm, pull the characters out of their comfort zones and make them do stuff, achieve a goal, change and develop, fight the enemy, solve the problem, and finally establish a new norm, better or worse, it does not matter as long as its different. That's how fiction works.

I must, though, have some kind of serious emotional conservatism when it comes to reading stories, though, because I'm always sad to see the plot take over the milieu. I'm delighted to plunge into a writer's world, meet his imaginary friends, learn how their lives work when they're being ordinary. And I'd be happy to stay there. Why has there always got to be someone messing it up, just when I'm getting to know it, I always internally wail when the villain blows things up or the natural disaster strikes or whatever the first plot coupon may be.

Rarely have I fallen so completely in love with that established norm as I did in this novel, not because it's so idyllic or perfect or beautiful (though in lots of ways it is those things) as because it's just so interesting. Africa is the center of world power in a neural utopia* chock full of space elevators and sophisticated telepresence technology; humans have colonized not only the Moon and Mars but are well on their way towards exploiting the rest of the Solar system, but in a very responsible way. And the biggest debate going on is whether a human-and-intelligent-machine society like Iain M. Banks' Culture gets to go to the stars along with whatever organisms we happen to find useful to us, or whether it should be humans and every other variety of organic life that has evolved on Earth alongside us and just what machines are needed to keep the living things that shall inherit the galaxy alive. What's not to love?

And there's more, for this world, or set of worlds, is brought to us from the perspective of a fascinating young man, one of Reynolds' most satisfying characterizations to date, Geoffrey Akinya, grandson of the female explorer-entrepreneur who made most of this civilization possible and thus a member of one of its most powerful families, but one who has chosen to drop out of that family as much as possible in favor of studying elephants. Really studying elephants. As in taking baby steps toward establishing, via neuro-machinery, what amounts to a Mind Meld with one of them.

And then there's his sister, Sunday, who lives on the Moon in a drop-out society of her own, a "Descrutinized Zone" in which much of the neural machinery that controls anti-social behavior on earth, and thus a lot of the constant contact and data access that goes with that machinery, is dampened or just non-existent. She and hers firmly believe that suppressing that urge to bend or break the rules also suppresses innovation and creativity.

So each lives a rich, vivid and fascinating life that I would enjoy just sort of wandering through, picaresque-style, for hundreds and hundreds of pages. But that's not how novels work. Sigh.

Fortunately, the plot, part thriller, part treasure-hunt through the human-settled Solar System, and yes, part giant sprawling hunk of (nascent) space operatics, is quite satisfying and exciting and all the stuff that everyone else reads a novel for. Reynolds gets better and better at this with each book, and I don't think he's plateaued yet or will anytime soon. As I intimated above, his characters get better with each book, too, richer and lovelier and more believably human**. This is the first of a new series, Poseidon's Children (which pretty obviously refers to the fact that the Green Efflorescence, which is how the people-and-organisms faction refers to their goal of spreading all Earth life through the stars, had its birth among the United Aquatic Nations of Earth [which, get ready for THAT; quite possibly Reynolds' most ravishingly seductive bit of world-building to date]*** -- thus the reader has a pretty good idea of to which side of the Big Argument the balance is likely to tip right away), and I hope that Mr. Reynolds, lovely chap that he is, hurries up with the next one already.

I'm ready for the next punchline. Aren't you?

*Utopia might not be quite the word for it, but neither is dystopia. There is no crime or struggle over resources, which is pretty idyllic, but this is achieved at a scary cost: a central Mechanism catches anti-social or otherwise bad impulses almost before people have them and shuts them down. Neural subjugation to this Mechanism is mandatory from early childhood. Shudder.

**So it's interesting that of all of Reynolds' fiction to date, this is set in the nearest of futures, just a hundred or so years from the present, instead of many hundreds or thousands (millions?) of years as he most often chooses. Are his characters in Blue Remembered Earth simply more enjoyable because less alien? Or is it simply that he's still growing in his craft? It's not to say he hasn't created amazing and memorable characters before -- Volyova, anyone? Remontoire? Galliana? Wendell Floyd? The Gentians? Curtana? But did you like reading about these characters, or did you fall in love with them? I fell in love with Geoffrey and Sunday, and Chama and Gleb too, for that matter. And most of all with Eunice, or rather sim-Eunice, the pioneering grandmother, who has a wonderfully crusty, uphill-both-ways, get-off-my lawn attitude toward what's become of human space travel and settlement. I want to read a prequel novel all about her adventures. Way more fun than Calvin Sylveste!

***It's his amazing talent for science fiction world-building that first sold me on Reynolds. He knocks it out of the park, book after book. I can't think of anyone else who can touch him on his main theme of showing how human minds and technology have run away together toward the end of ratcheting up our species' adaptability to any environment up to eleven. And this book he's applying it to every species, not just ours! Hello, Denizens! Please don't eat me.

Summer Middle Earth Read-Along: You Can Do It, Too!

My wonderful, wacky friend EssJay, aka Popqueenie, the blogger behind Snobbery, has come up with a beautiful humdinger of an idea.

As my readers know, I spent a good chunk of last spring and summer in Westeros; in that spirit (and since I'm comfortably ahead on my 100 Books in 2012 progress) this year I'm joining EssJay and many of our friends in spending a good chunk of this summer back in good old Middle Earth. We're having a Hobbit/Lord of the Rings Read-Along.

Join us!

Here's the schedule she has kindly cobbled together for us. This will be my I've-lost-counth time reading this, so I don't know how much I'll have to say on each section, but I do like to talk about stuff, so who knows:

The Hobbit
 June 23 – June 27 Chapters 1-5
 June 27 – June 30 Chapters 6-12
 June 30 – July 4/5 Chapters 13-19

 Fellowship of the Ring
 July 4/5 – July 7 Chapters 1-6 of Book One
 July 7 – July 11 Chapters 7-12 of Book One
 July 11 – July 14 Chapters 1-5 of Book Two
 July 14 – July 18 Chapters 6-10 of Book Two

 Two Towers
 July 18 – July 21 Chapters 1-5 of Book Three
 July 21 – July 25 Chapters 6-11 of Book Three
 July 25 – July 28 Chapters 1-5 of Book Four
 July 28 – August 1 Chapters 6-10 of Book Four

 Return of the King
 August 1 – August 4 Chapters 1-5 of Book Five
 August 4 – August 8 Chapters 5-10 of Book Five
 August 8 – August 11 Chapters 1-4 of Book Six
 August 11 – August 15 Chapters 5-9 of Book Six

We're especially curious to have participation from people who have never read these before! To participate, grab the icons she provided here and post on your own blog, or comment on her entries or mine as we go!

Party like Hobbits, people!

100 Books #49 - John Urbancik's DARKWALKER

As I observed last year, John Urbancik is one Romantic, poetic motherfolklore.* He likes his gore on the picturesque side, frequents atmospheric locations like glorious old cathedrals and elegant old-fashioned theaters, and tends to feature seriously star-crossed love stories in his fiction. Horace "Castle of Otranto" Walpole had nothing on this guy!

He stays in that romantic vein for this new novel, but that exquisite sense of place Urbancik always achieves is this time gone for seedier locales: disused warehouses, back alleys, dive bars, abandoned houses. His hero this time around, Jack Harlow, is a guy who can perceive what most people cannot: he can see ghosts and spirits, penetrates the shoddy disguises of vampires and ogres, catches them in the act, often smells them before he sees them** -- but cannot interfere. Anytime he tries, things go horribly, horribly wrong. So he watches and records, collating his findings on a laptop (because memory plays tricks, and is faulty) he keeps in the car that is also his home.

When he meets the beautiful Lisa Sparrow in a heart-stopping scene of love-at-first-sight, though, and she gets attacked by some kind of horrifying beastie, he begins to want, very much, to be able to interfere. But can he? And what would be the consequences if he did?

One of those consequences is Nick Hunter, a man whose vocation is killing monsters, who comes to the aid of this ill-starred pair in the midst of that first attack on Lisa, and then begins to take a very strong interest in Jack's very comprehensive database. A monster hunter could do a lot with a tool like that. Meanwhile, as third wheels go, he's pretty much the best a couple could possibly ask for...

What sells me on this book most of all is that, though it's a very romantic book, it's not one of those irritating wish-fulfillment paranormal romances, all sexy vampires and werewolves in heat. No, the monsters are very much the bad guys, a threat, what needs killing. No one (willingly) sleeps with one or falls in love with one or anguishes over its future  as the meat on a really big shish kebab. They're deadly, vicious and scary.

Too, Jack Harlow winds up with a very unusual problem -- unusual both within and without the confines of this novel and this genre -- that I don't think I've seen before, which makes this a much more interesting read than I was expecting! And even better are the turns taken by his lovely Lisa, who embraces Jack's weird existence and runs with it, becoming an active partner in the struggle to find out what the hell is going on into the bargain. "The future stretched before her like a blank canvas, wiped clear of the mundane."

I like that.

Darkwalker thus has a great deal to offer -- horrifying imagery, a sweet love story, danger, inner turmoil, high stakes (very high!), very occasional humor -- and is very obviously something over which its author and editors have taken very great care. Every scene is minutely crafted, polished, and displayed in its best possible light. Sometimes the prose might feel a little overwhelming, but it's always revealed as exactly what was needed to convey the appearance of Jack's foes, the turbulence of Jack's, Lisa's or Nick's emotions, the almost unbearable tension through which they struggle to establish a new normal after the cataclysm of Jack's and Lisa's falling in love.

Really, the novel's only flaw is that it's not really my thing. I'm pretty over vampires and zombies and werewolves and whatnot, I'm sorry to say. Maybe if there were altogether fewer of them in the stories that keep crying for my attention, I'd still have an appreciation for them.

Or maybe if it was only writers like John Urbancik who got to play with them. Because despite this not being my thing, he ripped my heart right out my rib cage with his bare hands and then threw it on the floor and stomped on it 'til I died. Unh!

*I cannot take credit for that awesome neologism. That comes from my friend Jessie, aka @Xutraa.

**Lots of smells in this book. Very few of them good. "Jasmine, vanilla, cinnamon -- then decay... Rot like cabbage unatteded, dead rats, congealed blood." Haunted Orlando is a very stinky place.

'Tis the season...

...For H.P. Lovecraft-inspired cocktails. Because the stars are right. And my friend William Donohue told me about the Kickstarter to make these sweet "Horror in Clay" tiki mugs, and one needs a drink worthy of them.

My good friend, the GravyBhtch, came up with this recipeafter some discussion with us about what a Cthulhu-themed cocktail ought to be like -- i.e. appealing and delicious but also kind of wrong. Voila:

To a cocktail shaker, add:

- crushed ice - 2 jiggers amaretto - 2 jiggers Absolut pear vodka - about 1 tablespoon dry vermouth

Shake it up well, chanting all the while, "ia, ia, Cthulhu ftaghn" to keep the rhythm.

Strain liquid into a martini glass (mine are stainless steel, the way Nyarlathotep intended, kept in the freezer for extra brrr!). Add two maraschino cherries that have been blotted on a paper towel (don't want too much maraschino cherry juice overpowering the other ingredients).

Stare deeply into the drink and note the color. If it is amber, realize your mind is not yet properly attuned to the eldritch vibrations of the Great Old Ones, i.e., it's probably your first. Concentrate a spell and remind yourself that the beverage is actually green. Focus on the green.*

Repeat as necessary until you see for yourself that this is, indeed, a green beverage.

*These green tiki mugs may make that a little easier.