Wednesday Books: A symphony of the unfinished

by Doctor Science

I started a lot of books this week, but finished only a couple. Coincidentally, both are fantasies set in the 1920's.

Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge succeeds admirably as creepy-fantasy, less as historical fiction. The past tense of "weave" was "wove", dammit, not "weaved". By which I mean that, in general, it was hard to hear the 3rd-person-limited narrative voice as that of a 13-y.o. English girl in the 20s -- or even that of an older person of the period.

Nonetheless, it's an novel (and creepy!) take on the changeling story, and on Faerie-Fields We Know relations.

Barbara Hambly's Castle of Horror is a novelette, a sequel to "Bride of the Rat God". I have to find and re-read Bride to see how smoothly this follows it. It's in here somewhere ...

"Castle of Horror" involves two silent movie crews filming at the same site: one with many of the characters from "Bride", and one a race film by and for African-Americans. My problem was that I couldn't always remember which character names were which (I read it late at night), and the voices of the white & black characters weren't distinctive. I'm not saying Hambly should have tried writing in "dialect" (that never ends well), but that there should have been more of a distinction in rhythm and word choice. Or even failure of comprehension: Norah (the POV character) is English, and in the late 70s I was a TA for a professor from England, who explained that one of our TA duties was to translate between her and the African-American students in the lecture, because their language was often not mutually comprehensible. To be fair, she had one of the most rapid and stereotypical Oxbridge accents I've ever heard.

Commenters at File770 said that her Benjamin January novels, about a free man of color before the Civil War, have a very carefully developed voice, so perhaps she just didn't want to put the time in for this novelette.

Mr Dr Science finished The Cold Between by Elizabeth Bonesteel, but only because he's stubborn that way. "I never imagined that a book with a smokin'-hot sex scene in the first chapter could be so boring," he reports. Earlier, he finished Medusa's Web by Tim Powers, which he thinks is OK for him but more to my taste (see below). After he was done with the Bonesteel, he felt like a binge re-read of aaalllll the Dresden Files books, so he'll do that until he gets bloated (like when you eat a whole box of donuts by yourself).

And our In-House Offspring read "Borderline" (my review was last week) & loved it.

---

Books I read some of, and quit (that's what libraries are for!):

Patricia McKillip's Kingfisher, because I've never met an incarnation of Parsifal I didn't want to kick in the pants.

All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders: I saw too much bullying and possibly animal harm coming, I don't have the starch for that right now.

Medusa's Web, Tim Powers: Mr Dr Science was right, the density of description is really thick, you know what *everything* looks like, whether it's important or not. The characters and the situation didn't grab me hard enough to make me want to do the work of the prose.

Every Anxious Wave, Mo Daviau. Magic realism, i.e. sff with no world-building. I bailed when the past had cell-phone reception. This is Daviau's first novel, and I might be interested in giving her a try when she stops writing for men -- I could get interested in her heroine's POV.

Arcadia by Iain Pears: very Oxford, very lyrical, very fantasy. I might give it a try some other time, when I'm not jonesing as hard for SPACE.

But lo! Windswept by Adam Rakunas and Linesman by S.K. Dunstall have just been delivered, so I'll tell you about them next week.

Comments

[Morat20]

I've always been a bit of a Hambly fan. She's got a bit of a love for "younger woman/much older man" romances, but she's generally got a strong style, excellent vocabulary, and strong imagery.

The magic system she uses in a number of her books (or variants there of) is rather good. It strikes an excellent balance between explainable (and limitable), fantastical, and evocative.

Given when a lot of her work was published, she was a bit ahead of her time in a lot of ways.

[Morat20]

Just to add: Wouldn't call her award winning (although some of her books are very good), but she was definitely forging her own path and writing some solid stuff.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

Patricia McKillip's Kingfisher, because I've never met an incarnation of Parsifal I didn't want to kick in the pants.

Given that I'll normally mindlessly consume anything with McKillip's name on it, this warning is appreciated.

[russell]

creepy baby doll heads (see the book cover image for cuckoo song) always make me think of the Brothers Quay.

Their stuff is like some kind of echt German Expressionist nightmare, set in Miss Havisham's parlor or maybe some broken-down Appalachian shack that nobody has lived in for 100 years, as acted by broken toys and bits of hardware whose original purpose you don't, and probably don't want to, know.

Safe for work, probably not safe for kids.

[Mooseking]

I'm interested in hearing how you like Linesman; I enjoyed it.

I enjoy Hamby, but her classic Dark trilogy the most. Even her return to the world a decade ago wasn't as bright for me. I really should try out her Benjamin January novels; I've been reading and enjoying more mysteries after avoiding them for so long.

I'm more like Mr Dr, in that I often stick with books rather than abandon them, though I'm better about bailing out if it's 100 pages of slow now.

I've been enjoying the Unfogged Tooze book; the introduction's a little stiff, but the chapters are zippy. (It's not at all science fiction--it's a look at WWI and the interwar period--it's meeting my occasional craving to study.)

[Michael Cain]

I've started a binge reread of the complete Malazan Book of the Fallen series, this time in order. Wikipedia says that's something just over 3.3M words.

On a tangent, my ongoing project to replace the massive collection of paperbacks accumulated over most of 50 years with epubs is approaching the 300-title mark. The wife and I are getting to the point where we are at least entertaining the notion of downsizing the house, and if that's to happen a lot of the physical books will have to go.

[Yama]

Michael, do you know if the Malazan ebook is the way to go here? I would love to sink into a montrous tome like that.

[Michael Cain]

I'm doing my reread by individual ebooks, if just for no other reason than I can stick the current one in my back pocket on the way out the door, etc. The big question about any ebook is how good a job the publisher did producing it, and I haven't looked at Tor's big omnibus version to see if they were careful.