Reading list for December

 The best suggestion I've seen for a post-Twitter landscape is that everybody should go back to blogging, and preferably own their own site. I haven't paid for a domain, but I still have a languishing blog...so here we go.

In November my older brother's cancer got to the point that he had to go into hospice care, and he died a couple of weeks later. I went down to see him and help with things like breaking his lease and packing up his apartment, and I read pretty much nothing the whole month. 

December was a little better; I read six books, which is about my normal amount.

The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Can't say how close this hews to The Thin Man; it's been a long time since I saw that movie, and even longer since I read the book. But William Powell and Myrna Loy live in my head rent-free, dog and all, and the boozy banter felt just right. 

The Murder of Mr. Wickham, by Claudia Gray
Wonderful, wonderful book. Jane Austen pastiche is a whole cottage industry and has been for years, and I've read enough of it to know when I've found one of the good ones. Austen's characters who appear here speak and act in accord with the way Austen wrote them, and the new characters introduced fit right in and never feel too modern or out of place, even the one who is clearly presented, in 19th century terms, as what 21st century readers will recognize as neurodivergent. Plus the mystery was clever, and the solution was satisfying. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel coming out later this year.

Our America: A Photographic History, by Ken Burns
Most of the photos were new to me, which was pretty cool. But I have to say that the presentation of the photos with only a title, with notes for context at the back of the book, didn't appeal to me the way it was supposed to; I like to know what I'm looking at.

How Am I Doing? 40 Conversation to Have with Yourself, by Dr. Corey Yeager
I will not be having these conversations with myself or a therapist any time soon; I found it hard to find the applicability to my life.

Nothing Lasts Forever, by Roderick Thorp
So there's a local independent bookstore in my town that has partnered with the art house cinema around the corner to do a monthly book-to-film event: buy the book from the bookshop at the beginning of the month, and it comes with a ticket to see the movie on the last Tuesday of the month. I'd never read this one, so I signed up for a book and a ticket, and was somewhat startled to find that the book is even darker and more violent than the movie, given that the movie they made of it was Die Hard. I'm glad I read it once, probably won't ever read it again, and I won't go one to look up the first book in the series or the movie they made of that with Frank Sinatra.

Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree
Every bit as charming as everybody says it is. I love the whole idea of high fantasy with low stakes.

Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

by James Goss

The Doctor (the fourth incarnation), with Romana (the second) and K-9 (Mark II) in tow, heads for the end of the world again. Romana is somewhat miffed to discover this involves attending a cricket match at Lord's Cricket Ground--one of the more spectacular examples of humanity's collective bad taste, made even more distressing by the fact that the humans have no idea. But when the Doctor attempts to confiscate the trophy for the good of the universe, only to see it stolen by killer robots no one has seen in several millennia, he and Romana have to set out on another quest to collect the pieces of a key, this time one that could be used to release the most murderous xenophobes in all of galactic history to continue their ancient mission to wipe out the rest of the physical universe.

In this quest, the Doctor and Romana fail. But they do start to realize that some of the recorded details of galactic history, and even the memory Matrix of the Time Lords, don't quite add up. Why was the planet Krikkit so very isolated in the first place? Where did the wrecked spaceship that shattered their isolation come from? How did they achieve the capacity to travel in space and wage interstellar war so quickly? Who could be behind it all--and could there be someone behind them?

Sounds familiar, I know. We thought we knew about Krikkit: It was the failed pitch for a Doctor Who story that Douglas Adams, a lifelong inveterate repurposer of his own ideas, reworked into Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third Hitchhikers novel, the first one not based directly on the radio series, and the one that (I now think) holds up best as a coherent novel (for some definitions of coherent, anyway). Little did we know that before that happened, Adams had spent four years working on the idea as a script for a proposed Doctor Who movie, and he left enough material in his papers for James Goss's novelization of that version to hold up pretty well too.

The two novels start and end in more or less the same place (at Lord's, naturally), but they take very different paths to get from one end to the other. As they would have to, considering that Ford Prefect was originally conceived as the Anti-Doctor--the hyper-knowledgeable alien character who, given the choice between saving the universe and sloping off to a party, will choose the party every time--and Arthur Dent, while well-meaning and (as a later Doctor would observe) a nice man, is rarely depicted as competent at much of anything--though in this novel he does at least manage to learn to fly, and figures out exactly how to get rid of an angry Thunder God. The Doctor and Romana are much more active protagonists than Ford and Arthur ever manage to be; indeed, the Doctor's role in Krikkitmen is mostly assigned to Slartibartfast and Trillian in LtU&E, with Arthur and Ford tagging along in varying degrees of reluctance and haplessness--though Arthur does get his moment on the pitch at the end.

So even if you think you've read this story and you know where the plot is going, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen is still well worth a read. Only a few scenes are essentially the same, the whole central quest narrative is completely different, and even the ending had a surprise in store.

Children of Earth and Sky

by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Danica Gradek lost half her family at a young age, when their village was destroyed by allies of the Osmanli Empire, and now all she wants is to join the famous Senjan raiders to kill Osmanlis, even if that means sometimes raiding the ships of the republic of Seressa instead. Leonora Valeri was her father's favored child until she became pregnant out of wedlock, and now all she wants is to escape from the holy retreat he consigned her to, even if that means becoming a Seressan spy in the rival republic of Dubrava. Pero Villani, son of a famous painter and a struggling artist himself, wants to make a name for himself with his art, even if that means accepting a dangerous commission to travel to the Osmanli capital to paint a Western-style portrait of the khalif. Their lives become entangled with one another's when the ship carrying Pero and Leonora from Seressa to Dubrava is boarded by Senjan pirates, Danica among them. Meanwhile, the younger son of the merchant family that owns the ship is ambivalent about the path laid down for him by his family; and far to the east, a young man taken captive as a child when his village was destroyed by allies of the Osmanli Empire is raised to be a soldier for the Osmanlis, destined to march to war against the people he was stolen from.

A bare plot summary rarely does justice to a novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. His greatest strengths, I feel, are his use of language and his brilliant characterization; I always run across passages that are just so beautifully written I want to read them out loud to somebody, and I care about his characters to the extent that I generally find myself sitting up until two or three in the morning to find out what happens to them. I nearly always hit at least one scene that makes me cry.

It's particularly fascinating to me the way Kay will take a real historical setting and turn it just a little bit sideways; some of his history-based fantasies are almost like straight historical novels, without the weirdness of co-opting real historical figures to serve a fictional plot. Children of Earth and Sky has more mystical elements than some of the others set in this same universe, but the Renaissance intrigue plot doesn't depend on magic. It depends on the characters--their background, their motivations, their personalities, and their individual reactions to their circumstances--and the characters are so beautifully drawn and so true to life that I sat up until two in the morning to find out what happened to them. 

Many thanks to NetGalley and the Berkley Publishing Group for providing an advance copy! The book will be out May 10, 2016.

Deryni Rising

by Katherine Kurtz

When King Brion of Gwynedd is murdered by a sorceress with pretensions to his throne, his young heir Prince Kelson must rely on Duke Alaric Morgan, a member of the same race of sorcerers, to help him access his own kind of hereditary powers in time to face the pretender Charissa's inevitable magical challenge. However, the widowed Queen Jehana devoutly believes that all occult powers are intrinsically evil, and that to save his soul, her son must rule without magic--even if that puts his life at risk. And Jehana is well aware that to save Kelson from the taint of magic, she must first remove General Morgan.

Over at the Tor.com blog that I like so much, Judith Tarr is doing a detailed reread of Katherine Kurtz, and I jumped at the excuse to pick these up again. I first got hold of Deryni Rising when I was fourteen (the same age as Kelson, which did not escape my notice), and I fell hard for Kelson and Morgan, not to mention Morgan's aide Lord Derry. I read the books over and over as a teenager, and I'm so steeped in the history and mythology of them that it was really hard to write a short paragraph of summary without going into the whole saga of the Deryni Interregnum, Haldane Restoration, religious persecution of the Deryni, the family tree of the Festillic Pretenders, and the hagiography of Camber of Culdi, patron saint of Deryni magic.

However, before the current reread began I hadn't picked the books up in at least ten or fifteen years, and reading the first one again after that long is a little odd. I still remember the plot and the characters, and even some of the dialogue, really well, so on one level it has no surprises for me. But maybe because of the length of the hiatus since my last reread, or maybe because I'm now older than nearly all the named characters (and considerably older than the author was when she wrote it), I have been able to read it with a more critical eye.

I can tell, now, that it's clearly the first novel of a fairly young writer. And it's a damn fine first novel, but there are some clunky bits--repetitious sections, a main character who inconsistently acts far younger than his actual age and life experience should warrant, another main character who consistently acts far older than his age. My favorite rookie move is that several times the action stops dead for a detailed physical description of a person or a place when the viewpoint character logically should be too familiar with both the faces and the floor plans to pause for an inventory at that moment. One such passage comes right out and says something like, "Morgan allowed himself to take in the familiar surroundings," just as if Morgan wasn't really stressed, exhausted, and pressed for time just then!

And I can't really argue with LeGuin's point that the prose could just as well have been lifted from a modern political thriller; she's right, it doesn't sound like Elfland. But here's the thing: as Tarr points out in her own remarks, these books aren't aiming for that. The Chronicles of the Deryni are historical fantasy (and have a good claim to be progenitors of that whole genre). We're not in Elfland here! The Eleven Kingdoms, of which Kelson's Gwynedd is one, are human kingdoms populated by thoroughly realistic human beings, even if some of them are quasi-humans with innate magical abilities. Homo sum, as Terence said (and it's a book in this series that introduced me to that quotation): humani nil a me alienum puto. There is nothing alien about the hearts and minds of the Deryni.

So yes, I still love this book. Even knowing the story as well as I do, I fell right into it again (and leaped ahead of the pace of the reread to finish it and go on to the next one). It's still my benchmark for high fantasy taking place in anything like a historical setting.

Over Sea, Under Stone

by Susan Cooper

Simon, Jane, and Barnabas Drew come to Cornwall on a summer holiday with their parents and their great-uncle Merry, a noted historian. While exploring their rented house on a rainy day, they find a hidden door leading to a neglected attic, and under a floorboard in the attic Barney comes across a mysterious manuscript, written partly in faded and obscure Latin, and partly in a language none of them can read. They don't want to tell their parents about it, as that would probably mean it would be taken away from them on the ground that it belongs to the owner of the house and they shouldn't disturb it; Barney in particular, having recognized the names of King Arthur and King Mark amongst the Latin, is adamant not only that the manuscript represents a quest but that the quest is theirs and no one else's. Fortunately Great-Uncle Merry is in a different class of grown-up, and not only supports their right to follow the map, but translates the instructions for them and watches over them when other parties start to show too much interest. Then Merry is decoyed away, and the children are left to follow the clues and avoid the competition on their own.

Of course the one I really wanted to read over the Christmas holiday was the second in the series; the summer vacation described in the first book was thoroughly unseasonable, and it was hard to feel too bad about Barney's sunburn. I seem to remember that this was another series where as a kid I read the second book first, and I don't think it matters much until you get to book three or four, but I'm not sorry to have started with the first in the sequence this time.

It strikes me that although both are thoroughly worthy of their beautiful Folio editions, this is probably a better book than The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. That one is a perfectly good and entertaining children's book, but I was aware the whole time I was reading it that as an adult, I was not the intended audience. I had the same feeling reading The Box of Delights, by John Masefield, a few weeks earlier; I never got hold of that one when I was a kid, and I couldn't help feeling that I'd have liked it a lot better if I had. Now, I have nothing against children's books on principle; I hold that a good story is a good story no matter where in the library it happens to be shelved, but there are books kids love that don't necessarily hold up well for adults.

And there are children's books that don't condescend, that adults can also read again and again and get more out of them every time because you bring more to them.  Over Sea, Under Stone and the rest of its series are like that.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

I can already tell that 2016 is going to be a year of rereading. I used to do a lot more of that than I have done recently; when I was a kid I would read favorite books over and over, but somehow in recent years I came around to the idea that I have less time to read now, so any time spent on a book I've already read is just time taken away from all the fabulous new books that I claim I've been looking forward to.

I suspect it's closer to the truth to say that the time I spend on video games is just time taken away from rereading the books that I love, and that reading those books again would make me happier than getting a new campaign high score in Kingdoms of Middle-Earth.

I'm putting it to the test this year. In the first two weeks of January I've already reread four books. Granted, one was because I'd simply forgotten I already read that one, so it might as well have been new to me, but the other three I loved as a kid.

On New Year's Day I reread The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken.

I actually stumbled across the second book in that series first, at the library where my mom took me to stock up on books every Saturday. I forget now why I picked up Black Hearts in Battersea; probably something to do with the Edward Gorey cover. Looking back on it I think this may have been my first introduction to the concept of alternative history, though at the time I wasn't familiar enough with the history of England to notice what was different about the Hanoverian pretenders.

When I realized that there was an earlier book in the series, I thought that because the library didn't own that one I would never get to read it. I had never heard of the concept of interlibrary loan back then, and in any case, I was the kind of library patron who makes me really sad now that I work in a library: if I couldn't find something on my own, I gave up instead of asking the librarian for help. I'm not sure what I thought the librarians were there for, but I didn't want to bother them.

Imagine my shock when I subsequently stumbled across a copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase on a bookshelf in my own house. Apparently it had belonged to one of my older siblings, and though I had cheerfully read their copies of Winnie the Pooh and Black Beauty and The Adventures of Robin Hood, I had overlooked this book year after year. Probably because it didn't have an Edward Gorey cover.

It's a simple enough story: the orphaned Sylvia comes to stay at Willoughby Chase with her rich cousin Bonnie just as Bonnie's parents, Lord and Lady Willoughby, depart for sunny foreign climes for the sake of Lady Willoughby's health, leaving a distant relation, Miss Slighcarp, as Bonnie and Sylvia's governess. However, Miss Slighcarp has nefarious plans to take over the estate; she promptly dismisses the servants, sells off the furniture, and ships the girls off to the kind of boarding school that makes Jane Eyre's school look like a holiday in the south of France. With the help of Simon, a boy who raises geese at Willoughby Chase, Bonnie and Sylvia run away from their school and make their way to London, where they hope their aunt Jane and Lord Willoughby's lawyer can sort everything out.

I wasn't as thrilled by it all as I remember being as a kid, but it was still a thoroughly enjoyable story, especially Bonnie's frequent displays of temper. There's not much alternative history in this one, aside from the fact that in the early 1800s there's already a Channel Tunnel, and wolves from northern Europe have used it to recolonize the island of Britain. The actual starving wolves are a constant lurking presence in the first half of the novel, but it's the metaphorical wolves that pose the real threat.

What I read this year (December)

I've been keeping a book diary since mid-1998, and in all that time I have never finished a book on December 6. Not this year either.

59. American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare; The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee, by Karen Abbott (finished December 1). In which we follow the development of burlesque as a theatrical form, with special attention to the contributions of the Minsky brothers, and also the life and career of Rose Louise Hovick, better known as Gypsy Rose Lee. I knew the basic outline of the story from the musical Gypsy, based on her memoir--I first saw the TV version with Bette Midler as Mama Rose, who is such a larger than life character that she generally completely overshadows whoever's unfortunate enough to be playing Gypsy. Turns out she was toned down a lot from real life.

60. The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann (December 11). In which Sir Maurice Newbury, investigator for the Crown, and his new assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, are assigned by Queen Victoria to look into the crash of an airship on which, it turns out, all the passengers were tied to their seats. Revenants and automata are also involved: great fun.

61. Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, by Gary Krist (December 15). In which the author pulls together the birth of jazz, the short but colorful existence of the semi-legal vice district of Storyville, and the still-unsolved murders committed by the Axman. Fascinating, especially the parts about jazz.

62. Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas, by Stephanie Barron (December 21). In which Jane Austen, visiting friends at Christmas, gets involved in solving the murder of a naval courier and the theft of the treaty he was carrying. I love these mysteries, and I still think they capture the spirit of Jane Austen's own novels a good deal better than 98% of the unofficial sequels that keep coming out. 

63. The King's Deryni, by Katherine Kurtz (December 29). In which Alaric Morgan manages to avoid all the pitfalls inherent in being publicly known as a member of a feared and oppressed race of sorcerers, and grows up enough to be useful to his king. I've been waiting a long, long time for this one, and there's no way it could ever have been good enough to support the weight of expectation, but I enjoyed it well enough.

64. Astro City: Through Open Doors, by Kurt Busiek (December 30). In which we continue to explore what the existence of superheros might mean for the rest of us. I'm a big fan of Astro City, and glad to see it returning.

And that's it for this year! Shelfari says I read five more books than this, but I think those are probably graphic novels that I skipped over in my book journal, so I'll stop here.