The Bog of Lost Scholars

Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, Don’t Look Down. I seem to have liked this book much more than a lot of folks did; whether it’s because I haven’t read as much Crusie to compare it with, or just because I had different expectations, I’m not sure. The writing sucked me in, and I wasn’t able to put it down until I’d finished. I enjoyed the dialog and the characters. And the speed of the romance, oddly, didn’t bother me (and I’m quite loud about my disdain for how West Side Story takes place in a 24-hour period); perhaps it’s because I read the characters as two people who were ready to make big changes and just needed a catalyst.

Isaac Asimov, Casebook of the Black Widowers. This was the only Black Widowers collection that I didn’t own, so I was happy to find a copy at Uncle Edgar’s when I was in Minneapolis. The Black Widowers stories are perfect reading for interrupted times; the stories are short, the mystery solutions usually interesting, and the tone generally light.

Rex Stout, Over My Dead Body. We’ve been watching some dramatizations of the Nero Wolfe mysteries and have found them generally enjoyable. I’d read one of the Wolfe novels several years back but wasn’t really grabbed by it; I decided to read one that I’d since seen the movie of. While this book isn’t making me want to buy the entire output of Mr. Stout, it was a very fun read. Godwin’s voice is great (“alphabet piano”, heh!), and the mystery was much more understandable than it was in the movie version. (Pause for Yet Another Plea For Subtitles/Captions, Damn It!) There were some ethnic and racial issues that bothered me, but overall I enjoyed it.

Dodie Smith, The Starlight Barking. A sequel to 101 Dalmatians, in which our intrepid canines wake up one morning to discover that dogs are the only creatures awake in the world. I liked a lot of things about this story (particularly Cadpig as the Prime Minister’s dog), but I found the message decidedly heavy-handed and Sirius (no, not that Sirius, you silly Harry Potter reader) frankly creepy, and the plot falls rather flat at the end. I’m glad I read it, but I’m also glad I checked it out from the library.

Katherine Kurtz, Lammas Night. British occult practitioners attempt to prevent Hitler from invading England, but the price may be higher than they want to pay. It’s been a while since I reread this one, but I still find it an interesting read. (Though on this reading, Graham’s question to Ellis at the end hits harder than on previous reads; I find myself wondering as well whether the actions were necessary, which I didn’t wonder on earlier reads.)

Patricia Kennealy Morrison, The Silver Branch, The Copper Crown, and The Throne of Scone. A prime example of books with major flaws that I nonetheless love deeply.

Among the flaws: The timeline is confused, especially in Throne: you’ll have scene A, followed by scenes B and C that cover about three weeks, followed by scene D that takes place ten minutes after scene A. The exact speed of the FTL travel also seems confused. Arianeira’s treachery in Crown is supposed to be out of malice and spite, but Silver Branch makes it actually look justified. The minor characters are extremely flat; you almost don’t have to remember their names because most of them are interchangeable anyway. There’s a degree of “the good guys are Good and the bad guys Bad because the author says so”, though not as strongly as in Kennealy’s later books; almost all the characters are defined by their relationship to Aeron (does Duvessa in Branch have any life outside hating Aeron for being her rival, for example?).

So why do I love the books? The world, for one; Keltia is a fictional world that I could see living happily in if I were born there. The mythic tone; the black-and-white ethics are much more tolerable when the story is supposed to be larger and grander than life.

And the story is grand. A really cool place gets unjustly and treacherously invaded! Our heroes fight so bravely that even their foes honor their courage and strength! The Good Guys triumph in the end! Magic! Mystery! A world where amazing things are right around the corner!

Some days, that’s exactly what I need.

Home File: A Realistic Decorating Guide. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to its title; it really should be called “How to Decorate in a Cheapo Urban Style If You Live in NYC and Like to Make Stuff from Random Scrap Materials”. I wasn’t impressed.

Granted, no book is going to be what I really want to read: “How to Make Your Home Look Really Neat Even If You Live in a Boring 1959 Ranch House With No Architectural Interest Whatsoever, You Have a Lot of Stuff and a Young Child, and You Can’t Afford a Major Renovation and Refurnishing”. But I found Mary Gilliatt’s Shortcuts to Great Decorating a much more inspirational read than Home File. The tips made more sense (and sounded like the results would be much classier), and I even found a couple photos that gave me genuinely feasible ideas to try in my house someday.

Deborah Raleigh, Some Like It Brazen. A nice mindless Regency romance. I can’t remember the characters’ names a week after turning the book back in to the library, but I had fun while reading it.

Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen of Attolia. I greatly enjoyed this book, even more than I’d enjoyed The Thief (though I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much if I hadn’t gotten an idea from rec.arts.sf.composition of what to look for — this book definitely does a lot with subtle hints that turn out to mean something later). Turner makes me buy the emotional trajectory of the characters, where a less skilled author would have me saying “no, I don’t buy that Attolia would feel X now when she did Y at the beginning”. The only minor bump in an otherwise great read, which isn’t Turner’s fault at all, is that when I learned Attolia’s first name I couldn’t help singing a song that’s way too light-hearted for this book.

Alas, I have not yet read The Sharing Knife Vol. 2: Legacy, but my copy is even now nudging its way out of the large stack of packages in the Amazon.com warehouse, preparing to board a postal vehicle heading my direction.