Low Density Much? March Reading

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Late, they say, is better than never. This has only been sitting in my "trim loose ends and post" queue for ten days now.

Wizard's Holiday (Diane Duane): A wizardly exchange sends Nita and Kit halfway across the galaxy to bask on a planet so peaceful there's only one wizard to care for everything. Back home, Dairine and her father ride herd on three extraplanetary wizards involved in the same program. Unfortunately, wizards' holidays tend to be about as restful as busmen's, and both groups of wizards must confront unforseen crises.

I'm very fond of Duane's "young wizard" series, but I can definitely see why a lot of people think it peaked around "Deep Wizardry." Wizard's Holiday feels very light to me; it introduces interesting concepts (the Lone Power as an ambiguous, not-totally-evil figure, how entropy may equate to change and why this might be good) but fails to develop them much. Duane didn't really communicate to me what exactly the culture in stasis was missing, besides an adventurous spirit; I never wanted to cry, "hey! People! You need to fix this right now." It's nice that Kit and Nita got a nice, leisurely break, but the plot took its sweet time kicking into action and never totally caught me.

(Pre-emptive rebuttal to herewiss13: yes, I did see the paragraph about the species coming out of the sea. It's a very logical progression which resolves some of my "but why?" complaint. It needs more support. The culture in stasis still would've benefitted from more development of what they're lacking.)

Dairine's plot had some similar problems. Her clashes with Pretty Sun-Guy were a standard "culture/personality clash" plot, which annoyed me from a plotting/Doylist PoV. From a Watsonian perspective, I was deeply peeved that Dairine was apparently having these problems because she failed to read the required background material sent before the wizards arrived, which would have explained a lot of the quirks she was irritated by. Silly girl.

(I may also have some personal issues with academic-style exchanges. My family hosted someone from Spain when my sister was in middle school, and the school somehow didn't notify my parents until the eleventh hour; I felt really uncomfortrable the entire week our hostee was there. I didn't know what to do. How do you communicate with someone who speaks about as little English as you do Spanish?)

The number of guns sitting on the mantlepiece at this point is kind of frustrating. Duane opened up the possibility of some romantic developments in High Wizardry (briefly) and A Wizard Abroad, but hasn't done much with them since; Ponch the Wonder Dog is obviously a plot-mover in development; one could make an argument that Nita still owes the Powers for her intensive kernel study time in A Wizard Alone. (And then there's the "rights of cancer" question, raised obliquely and probably unintentially in the same book. It's a ridiculous argument in real life, but a valid question in the YW universe, where everything is a little alive. The answer probably involves cancer as some sort of Lone Power metaphor, with special attention to "certain point of view" arguments and questions of modifying its destructive aspects without making it not-cancer, which has applications as a metaphor for assimilation without loss of identity, but I really doubt Duane's going to go that route.) I feel like there's a lot of relatively sophisticated stuff Duane could do, but isn't really interesting in writing about, which drives me mad. Ah well; that's what fic is for, even if most YW fic out there revolves around the eternal question of Nita/Kit v. Nita/Ronan.

Also, I'd love to see if Kit's family sprouts any more wizards.

Anyway. Back to what's already been written.

The most engaging part of the book, for me, was the vanishment of all adult wizards at a plot-critical moment, in association with Spot's "uh-oh!" that ended the novel. The implications are relatively sinister, especially when you consider that Duane's announced the title of the next YW novel will be Wizards at War.

Tam Lin (Diana Wynne Jones): Reread. The plot of "Tam Lin" is a favorite of mine, which is mostly why I'm fond of this book; on the whole I'm not much of a DWJ fan. The closing pages still are kind of incomprehensible, but not as badly as the first time around. The development of the "Thomas the Rhymer" aspect of the novel is a little shaky - the revelation about whats-her-name the Fairy Queen's cursed gift to Thomas Lynn, at the end of the novel, didn't make a bit of sense to me on the first reading, but was more comprehensible the second time around, when I knew what was coming and could pick out the "proofs", so to speak. Probably wouldn't have bothered with the reread for the plot without the Tam Lin hook; it'll probably be a long time before I pick this up again.

Fudoki (Kij Johnson): Second novel in a medieval Heian era Japan-with-magic world. Princess Harueme is dying after a life spent in her brother, nephew and great-nephew's court, and intends to retire to a monastery for her last months. She finds a blank notebook while sorting and discarding the detritus of a lifetime spent in one set of royal apartments, and starts filling it with the tale of a tortiseshell cat born in the city. The cat's tale is interspersed with Harueme's musings about her own life.

kijjohnson is one of pegkerr's close friends and is sometimes mentioned in her livejournal, which is why I picked up Fudoki (for some reason I thought it was her first novel, and The Fox Woman her second; the reverse is true). It's probably the only reason I would've read this; the setting and style would probably appeal to miriel's reading taste more than they did mine.One of the amazon.com reviews praises Johnson's prose styling, and we all know that I'm fairly tone deaf to style. Hand me a book of breathtaking structure, where every line is constructed in an elegant and heartbreakingly beautiful fashion, and I'll probably return it to you with a, "pretty prose, no plot" comment. So overall, a nice book, but one that had me occasionally checking to see how many pages until the end. C'est la vie; I'll rec this to M. if she ever needs something to read and see what she thinks of it.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J. K. Rowling): Reread. The Boy Who Lived acts like the fifteen year old he is. I burned through a loaned copy last summer and didn't remember much after a month; a reread suggests this isn't an accident. It's very long, and kind of sprawling, but sticks to the conventions of fantasy and boarding school fiction. The notable parts of the book for me are Umbridge's takeover and Harry's interactions with Snape and Cho. The Harry/Cho relationship is a beautiful example of teenage idiocy; I want to hit the poor boy over the head with some clue-by-fours about how to date ("I'm going to see another girl this afternoon..." really, Harry, explain why). The Harry-Snape stuff is another beautiful example of how not to interact, though a significant amount of responsibility for that falls on Snape. Umbridge's actions just annoy me, because her "don't expose the students to anything dangerous" attitude is so the stupid mindset you see in some educational administration. Other than that, she's a pretty run-of-the mill tyrant; someone should've spoken out about her detentions early in the year. Hogwarts is pretty lenient about what students can be subjected to during detention, but I suspect that Umbridge's version of petty corporal punishment would've raised some ugly parental outcry fast, if anyone had known about it.

So: long, conventional, looking forward to book six. I hope six is shorter, though; by the time I got to Sirius' death sheer page count had reduced my emotional attachment to anything happening in those pages.

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers (Tom Standage): Popularized narrative of the rise and fall of telegraphic technology, with a few grace notes comparing the telegraph network to the internet. A fast, easy read - I started this on a sunday night before my museum day, fell asleep ten pages from the end monday night, and finished the book tuesday afternoon. Very little to say about this one; it's a gentle, upbeat introduction to the history of the telegraph, sprinkled with some nice anecdotes. Worth reading if you'd like to cultivate a reputation as a tech history buff.

The King's Name (Jo Walton): Sequel to The King's Peace, and wraps up the duology. Very good, in a quiet way. I need to keep an eye out for Walton's books.

Lost in a Good Book (Jasper Fforde):

"The Cindy problem," I said as the head of a ling-dead carcass exploded in response to Spike's shotgun. "Did you do as I suggested?"

"Sure did," replied Spike, letting fly at another walking corpse. "Stakes and crucifixes in the garage and all my back issues of Van Helsing's Gazette in the living room."

"Did she get the message?" I asked, surprising another walking corpse who had been trying to stay outside of the action behind a tombstone."

"She didn't say anything," he replied, decapitating two dried cadavers, "but the funny thing is, I now find copies of Sniper magazine in the toilet - and a copy of Great Underworld Hitmen has appeared in the kitchen."

"Perhaps she's trying to tell you something?"

"Yes," agreed Spike, "but what?"

Second book in Fforde's "Thursday Next" mystery/sf/Bridget Jones with more lit references series. Thursday, happily married, must deal with fallout from the Jane Eyre incident: fame, public image junkets for SpecOps, the Goliath company's unmitigating antipathy for her (something to do with locking flunky Jack Schitt in The Raven). However, all is not marital bliss and witty character names: the discovery of a "lost" Shakespeare play has the media in a ferment, Thursday's time-jumping dad is caught up in an effort to avert the impending end of the world, someone is trying to kill Thursday with coincidences, and Goliath rewrites history so that husband Landen dies at the age of two. (Eradication of husbands from history is apparently a Next tradition; Thursday, mother Wednesday, and Grandma Next have all at least sort-of lost their husands to it.)

And then, of course, there is Jurisfiction. The librarian is the Cheshire Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat. If that doesn't sum up the organization in two five words, I don't know what does.

I'm kind of annoyed about the novel leaving Landen in limbo, but Fforde's having such a ball with genre conventions and sheer wordplay I can forgive him. However, rumors that the next book failing to resolve the Landen thing annoy me. Or possibly Landen's going to live in Thursday's head for the duration of the series; still annoying, but if that's what Fforde wants to do it's his universe(s).

Speaking of wordplay - Aornis Hades is, like, evil!Death or something. Amoral, nifty powers, suave metropolitan type - essentially, the hallmarks of a nifty villain. Cool.

As mentioned earlier this month, there is a crying need for crossover fic. Rowling/Fforde is obvious. A librarian's convention involving a certain Cat and a particular orangutang are nearly obligatory. And there's no telling what would happen if you threw the One Ring into this sheaf of universes.

Crown Duel and Court Duel (Sherwood Smith): Fantasy Lite, YA style. Countess Meliana Astiare, with brother Bran, raise the Tlanath hills against a corrupt king in the first novel. The second deals with life after the revolution: Mel's integration into Court life and in-Court politics. The duology is broadly framed as Meliana's retrospective on these two tumultuous years in her life, a structure that works fairly well with the first-person narrative style. You still want to shake Mel for being a little wilfully blind, though, especially in the first novel. The blindness in the second novel stems from Mel's unfamiliarity with How Things Are Done At Court, where she's willing to pick up a few clues.

Both books suffer from some fairly vague worldbuilding. There's magic, mostly offstage, a capital city, a bunch of bland "mix up some latters for the imaginary name" provinces that mostly serve as places for characters at court to be from. The romance is developed fairly well, if you can resign yourself to guessing who the Unknown Admirer is as much as 100 pages before Mel clues in, and the court intruige is fluffy, but plausible. Overall, the duology is very lightweight: a weakness from my point of view, but good for escapist reading if you're having a bad week, or for the 10-15 girls' crowd.